The story out of the creative writing packet that I found to be the straightest forward is Sunday by Henry Gates Jr. The first sentence in this story really caught my attention, “White people couldn’t cook; everybody knew that.” This immediately made me realize that this was from the era of the Civil rights movement. The tone and assertiveness in the sentence shows that there are hard feelings between races at the time this story is taking place in. I also found the first paragraph to be very intriguing in the sense that they were puzzled that the civil rights movement was focusing on integrating restaurants. To me, this shows how much our government knew and cared about integration and the feelings of African Americans at the time. I can hear and feel the disgust in this paragraph. The rest of the story goes on to describe cooking and a typical Sunday meal at the Coleman’s house. It’s described as a very happy and relaxing time. They eat from the time church is out on Sunday, all through the day, and into the night. I felt like the author really nailed the ending, and brought it all back together by saying, “White people just can’t cook good, Aunt Marguerite used to say; that’s why they need to hire us.”

The other story that really stood out to me, but I found less straight forward is Red: an Invocation by: Lia Purpura. Through-out the story, she went back and forth describing a Fox, and a hawk. This story definitely has an underlying meaning, but I have no idea what it is. I notice that she uses other words to describe red through-out the story, but says that they are not good enough to describe what she is seeing. The lines that really stood out to me were at the very end, “By red I mean the last thing I could see as the hawk disappeared. As the fox slipped away. And yes, I led my child into that day.” The last part about her child really threw me off. But I just can’t seem to pin point the underlying meaning of it.