Breaking the Rules

"Breaking the Rules" is a story from the Mee St Chronicles: Straight Up Stories of a Black Woman's Life written by Frankie Lennon. The setting takes place in the narrator's high school where a conflict is caused by a social force due to the social customs of that time making her get in trouble with Ms. Fannie Clay due to her appearance.

Everyone has customs that one needs to follow depending on what meaning it has to our families and the society. In this story, the way you dressed and wore your hair showed respect to others and how you would follow the expected tradition, but in the beat culture it was the opposite since it would not matter how you would dress. This custom caused conflict with the narrator due to the fact that she broke the rules by dressing inappropriately at school. The narrator along with her friend Nikki decided to dress like the beatniks as a form of protesting how they were treated unfairly. Beatniks was a new look that was developed by wearing over sized clothes and were known for dressing in all black with sunglasses.

During the 1960s, the counterculture was known to be as a rejection towards the social norms where the beatniks became involved. At this point the narrator becomes quite rebellious by not putting much attention to her dad when he had warned her to not let Nikki get her in trouble but instead she kept listening to what Nikki had in mind. She went along with Nikki's idea not taking in consideration the consequences she would have to face with the dean and with her parents.

The narrator had the understanding that dressing as the beatniks would be for a good cause in order to show others of the injustice that was being made against them for dressing up in a different way. She also had to understand that rules were there for a reason and that they were not meant to be broken.