Creative Writing: In Their Eyes Were Watching God

PE class. Fourth grade. The sun shone brightly over the asphalt court and beads of sweat began drip down my back. My hair hung down above my shoulders and created a blanket of heat around my neck. We were instructed to run warm up laps around the playground then come back to play some basketball. “Girls, you may want to tie your hair up so that it doesn’t get in your face as you run”, the coach told us. If it were a month prior, I would have ignored his remark and begun my run. But instead, my friend handed me a hair tie from her wrist and I put up my hair with a trial and error. Normally, I never tied my hair up. Not in PE class. Not during soccer games. Never. My hair was never long enough for it to bother me. But, this one time, I put my

The burden of putting her hair up is represented when the narrator says, “This business of the head-rag irked her endlessly. But Jody was set on it. Her hair was NOT going to show in the store” (Hurston, 55). While outside forces oppressed Janie into putting up her hair and revoking part of her identity, so did the girls in my class silently pressure me into having hair like theirs. Before I came to school, even before pre-school, I had short, soft hair in a pixie cut. My mom also had short hair and was probably the one who influenced me to get my haircut like her. She told me about how I loved having short hair like her. However, the notion of long hair popped into my head when I started kindergarten. All of the girls in my class had varying lengths of long hair and I felt as though I was missing out. The desire for hair which fell past my shoulders crept into my mind faster than my hair could catch up. I had never put my hair up before. I couldn’t. My short blond strands couldn’t reach far beyond my brows, but when I entered kindergarten, I reached for the dream of stroking long, luscious hair and letting it cascade over my shoulders. However, the dream was not my dream at all. I wanted to be like the other girls with their long luscious locks. My kindergarten peers cast upon my head a limited ideal femininity. I had a desire to

I had a tight grip on his hand as we crossed the street over to the gas station and skipped alongside him. “Dad, I think I’m going to grow my hair out,” I said with certainty. “Yeah?” my dad said, “Why do you want to have longer hair?” “I don’t know, I think it would be cool to have long hair. I can grow it out really long like the other girls in my class.” “If you have long hair you’re going to have to take care of it and brush it every day. Are you sure you want to?’ “Yes. I can do that.” It was a done