Hair Products

Throughout The Other Black Girl, hair products are a symbol of the cultural literacy and understanding that exists between Black women. Because the hair products they use are different from the hair products that their white coworkers use, Nella and Hazel instantly bond over their discussion of hair products. When hair products turn out to be the locus of Hazel's abominable interference with Black women's psychologies, the subversion is significant in that she uses the vessel of a hair product—a symbol of safety and solidarity in the first half of the novel—in order to achieve her goals.

Zora Neale Hurston

The image of Zora Neale Hurston engraved on both Nella's and Hazel's coffee mugs is a symbol both of their solidarity as Black women and of the threat that Nella perceives to her identity once Hazel joins the office. Zora Neale Hurston, a...