Hazel-May McCall

Hazel-May McCall enters Wagner Books as both a welcome colleague and a deliberate puzzle. Introduced to Nella Rogers as Maisy Glendower’s brilliant new assistant, she appears to offer the Black companionship Nella has rarely found in the office; later, Shani Edmonds identifies the woman Nella knows as Hazel as Eva, and sends the terse warning that her name is not Hazel. The contrast between this apparently generous ally and the concealed identity around her makes Hazel’s story one of connection gradually recast as suspicion.

Introduction and Public Persona

Maisy brings Hazel into Vera Parini’s office while Nella is trying to explain a concern to her boss. Nella recognizes the new arrival as the Black woman she had noticed weeks earlier. Hazel introduces herself by saying her parents were ambitious, then tells the two women they can call her Hazel. Her locs fall freely down the back of a baby-blue blazer, and she rushes forward to greet Vera and pump Nella’s hand with such force that both women’s earrings swing. Nella, conscious of her own wrinkled clothes and dirty Keds, registers Hazel’s height and strikingly assured appearance alongside her own discomfort.

Hazel’s warmth soon becomes personal. When she notices Nella is distracted, she offers to talk about Black literary figures, gossip, or whatever is troubling her. She says she had no Black coworkers in Boston and had not expected to find one at Wagner Books, so Nella’s presence feels especially welcome. Nella responds with an emotional warmth she has not felt toward another neighbor at work since Yang. Hazel’s support arrives at a moment when being the only Black woman in an overwhelmingly white office has made Nella feel isolated, lending their new connection immediate force.

That solidarity is not merely social. Hazel asks Nella about the racial climate at Wagner and listens as Nella describes the tension of criticizing colleagues who might interpret any objection as an accusation of racism. Nella recalls hearing employees speculate resentfully about being forced to hire nonwhite staff and presume that such hires would be unqualified. She also recognizes the contradictory position she occupies: colleagues treat her as an exception whose qualifications supposedly distinguish her from Blackness, while rarely asking her for sensitivity reads or her perspective on Black issues. Hazel gives Nella a listener with whom those pressures can be named, but that intimacy also gives Hazel a way to draw Nella into consequential choices.

Alliance with Nella and the Pressure to Act

As Nella’s relationship with Vera grows strained, Hazel works to keep her afloat. When Nella apologizes after one of Vera’s complaints, Hazel sends her a Steve Urkel GIF; she brings Nella a triple-fudge walnut cookie from the bakery across the street, knowing it is her favorite, and later shares a link to Curl Central, a hair café she had mentioned before. The gestures are specific and attentive, making Hazel seem less like a passing coworker than an ally who notices what Nella needs during a difficult stretch.

Hazel also urges Nella to treat her position as more than a private workplace problem. When Nella hesitates over speaking up, Hazel reminds her of her thesis and points to how hard it is for a Black woman writer to find a Black woman editor in publishing. She frames their own professional presence as a possible opening for those who come after them, and asks Nella to help make that path easier. Nella agrees emphatically. The exchange shows Hazel’s gift for connecting an immediate decision to a larger collective purpose; it also shows how her encouragement can become pressure, as Nella is pushed toward action before she has resolved her apprehension.

Nella’s unease is sharpened by the unequal stakes of her working life. At home, she tells Owen that his reassurance that the trouble will pass is easy for him to offer as a white cis man who does not inhabit her daily experience of publishing. Nella’s colleagues may appear harmless to an outsider, but the accumulated small indignities of the office weigh on her. Hazel’s appeals to solidarity speak directly to that isolation. The narrative’s tension lies in the fact that the same appeal that offers Nella companionship also helps steer her choices.

Activism, YBL, and Wagner Books

Outside the office, Hazel presents a public identity grounded in Black women’s writing and community work. When Nella searches for her online, she first finds numerous people with similar names; adding Hazel’s hyphenated first name brings up one Brooklyn-area profile she recognizes. The photographs show Hazel in a jade-green gown beside her Dominican boyfriend, Manny; surrounded by four teenage Black girls in matching purple shirts; holding a sign that reads “respect black women”; and performing onstage at a Black women’s poetry retreat in Washington, D.C. Together, the images suggest a life extending beyond her new job and an established investment in Black women’s visibility.

Hazel connects that public work to Wagner Books by inviting Richard Wagner to a YBL donor event. She explains that she had first asked him to consider supporting the organization and that he accepted; he is also attending her event that evening. At the gathering, she describes Diana Gordon’s Burning Heart as a bright point amid whiteness and recalls that Gordon and her editor, Kendra Rae Phillips, discovered their passion for writing as teenagers. Hazel says Richard responded enthusiastically to her request and donated ten thousand dollars to support the girls. The amount and the story behind it make her advocacy concrete: she is not only voicing a commitment to young Black writers but using her new professional access to secure material support for them.

Her position at Wagner also makes her a visible sign of change inside an office where employees have remarked on how long it took for another Black assistant to be hired. Nella herself announces Hazel’s arrival to C. J. as major news, and C. J. says he has already met her. In this setting, Hazel’s presence carries significance beyond her job title. The company’s racial homogeneity has made the arrival of another Black woman feel consequential to Nella, while Hazel’s account of her work with YBL supplies a wider purpose for that presence.

The Unsettling of Hazel’s Identity

The first decisive crack in the identity Hazel has presented comes in a text message to Nella: “Her name’s not Hazel.” The message is signed by Shani and dated October 20, 2018. Its brevity does not explain who Hazel is, what name she uses, or how Shani knows; it instead changes the meaning of what Nella has already seen. The friendly colleague and public advocate may also be someone operating under another identity.

Shani’s account supplies a second, unsettling connection. She recalls seeing Eva with Nella at Nico’s in August and later listening to her speak about solidarity and diversity at Curl Central. In the same recollection, Shani says she has to restrain herself from confronting Eva, because the Resistance rules forbid confronting an OBG or potential OBG unless directed. This account links the woman Shani calls Eva to Nella and to the same public setting associated with Hazel. It does not, by itself, disclose the full relationship between the names, but it makes the discrepancy more than a stray anonymous accusation.

A photograph sent to Nella adds another unresolved clue. It shows a young, short-haired Black woman in a Cooper’s Magazine sweatshirt, photographed the previous summer. Nella studies the woman’s face and recognizes a familiar nose and an ambitious expression, despite the absence of Hazel’s long locs or eyebrow piercing. The image intensifies rather than settles Nella’s questions: she wonders what happened to the woman in the photograph, who is looking out for her, and who Hazel-May McCall really is.

Narrative Role and Significance

Hazel’s characterization turns on the widening gap between the intimacy she offers and the uncertainty surrounding her name. Her early acts of care are concrete: attention to Nella’s distress, a favorite cookie, a useful link, and an invitation to speak honestly about race at work. Her public activity likewise has identifiable substance, from the YBL fundraiser to Richard’s ten-thousand-dollar donation. These details make the eventual challenge to her identity consequential; the suspicion does not erase the earlier evidence of connection but forces Nella, and the reader, to reconsider what that connection means.

Her advocacy also exposes the pressures placed on Nella as one of very few Black women in publishing. Hazel argues that their access can help other Black writers and workers, while Nella knows that speaking up may carry professional costs and that white colleagues may hear criticism as a personal charge. Their alliance thus forms around a real structural problem, even as the later revelations make Hazel’s own role uncertain. By ending on the name discrepancy and the photograph rather than a full explanation, the narrative leaves Hazel suspended between apparent ally and concealed figure, making trust itself part of the mystery.