Writing assignment unit 3

The Fourth of July

Audre Lorde

The first time I went to Washington, D.C., was on the edge of the summer when I was supposed

to stop being a child. At least that's what they said to us all at graduation from the eighth

grade. My sister Phyllis graduated at the same time from high school. I don't know what she

was supposed to stop being. But as graduation presents for us both, the whole family took a

Fourth of July trip to Washington, D.C., the fabled and famous capital of our country.

It was the first time I'd ever been on a railroad train during the day. When I was little, and we

used to go to the Connecticut shore, we always went at night on the milk train, because it was

cheaper.

Preparations were in the air around our house before school was even over. We packed for a

week. There were two very large suitcases that my father carried, and a box filled with food. In

fact, my first trip to Washington was a mobile feast; I started eating as soon as we were

comfortably ensconced in our seats, and did not stop until somewhere after Philadelphia. I

remember it was Philadelphia because I was disappointed not to have passed by the Liberty Bell.

My mother had roasted two chickens and cut them up into dainty bite-size pieces. She packed

slices of brown bread and butter and green pepper and carrot sticks. There were little violently

yellow iced cakes with scalloped edges called "marigolds," that came from Cushman's

Bakery. There was a spice bun and rock cakes from Newton's, the West Indian bakery across

Lenox Avenue from St. Mark's School, and iced tea in a wrapped mayonnaise jar. There were

sweet pickles for us and dill pickles for my father, and peaches with the fuzz still on them,

individually wrapped to keep them from bruising. And, for neatness, there were piles of napkins

and a little tin box with a washcloth dampened with rosewater and glycerine for wiping sticky

mouths.

I wanted to eat in the dining car because I had read all about them, but my mother reminded me

for the umpteenth time that dining car food always cost too much money and besides, you never

could tell whose hands had been playing all over that food, nor where those same hands had been

just before. My mother never mentioned that black people were not allowed into railroad dining

cars headed south in 1947. As usual, whatever my mother did not like and could not change, she

ignored. Perhaps it would go away, deprived of her attention.

I learned later that Phyllis's high school senior class trip had been to Washington, but the nuns

had given her back her deposit in private, explaining to her that the class, all of whom were

white, except Phyllis, would be staying in a hotel where Phyllis "would not be happy," meaning,

Daddy explained to her, also in private, that they did not rent rooms to Negroes. "We will take

you to Washington, ourselves," my father had avowed, "and not just for an overnight in some

measly fleabag hotel."

American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of

their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as a private woe. My mother and

father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in America

and the fact of American racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their

nature. We were told we must never trust white people, but why was never explained, nor the

nature of their ill will. Like so many other vital pieces of information in my childhood, I was

supposed to know without being told. It always seemed like a very strange injunction coming

from my mother, who looked so much like one of those people we were never supposed to

trust. But something always warned me not to ask my mother why she wasn't white, and why

Auntie Lillah and Auntie Etta weren't, even though they were all that same problematic color so

different from my father and me, even from my sisters, who were somewhere in between.

In Washington, D.C., we had one large room with two double beds and an extra cot for me. It

was a back-street hotel that belonged to a friend of my father's who was in real estate, and I spent

the whole next day after Mass squinting up at the Lincoln Memorial where Marian Anderson had

sung after the D.A.R. refused to allow her to sing in their auditorium because she was black. Or

because she was "Colored," my father said as he told us the story. Except that what he probably

said was "Negro," because for his times, my father was quite progressive.

I was squinting because I was in that silent agony that characterized all of my childhood

summers, from the time school let out in June to the end of July, brought about by my dilated

and vulnerable eyes exposed to the summer brightness.

I viewed Julys through an agonizing corolla of dazzling whiteness and I always hated the Fourth

of July, even before I came to realize the travesty such a celebration was for black people in this

country.

My parents did not approve of sunglasses, nor of their expense.

I spent the afternoon squinting up at monuments to freedom and past presidencies and

democracy, and wondering why the light and heat were both so much stronger in Washington,

D.C., than back home in New York City. Even the pavement on the streets was a shade lighter

in color than back home.

Late that Washington afternoon my family and I walked back down Pennsylvania Avenue. We

were a proper caravan, mother bright and father brown, the three of us girls step-standards in

between. Moved by our historical surroundings and the heat of early evening, my father decreed

yet another treat. He had a great sense of history, a flair for the quietly dramatic and the sense of

specialness of an occasion and a trip.

"Shall we stop and have a little something to cool off, Lin?"

Two blocks away from our hotel, the family stopped for a dish of vanilla ice cream at a Breyer's

ice cream and soda fountain. Indoors, the soda fountain was dim and fan-cooled, deliciously

relieving to my scorched eyes.

Corded and crisp and pinafored, the five of us seated ourselves one by one at the counter. There

was I between my mother and father, and my two sisters on the other side of my mother. We

settled ourselves along the white mottled marble counter, and when the waitress spoke at first no

one understood what she was saying, and so the five of us just sat there.

The waitress moved along the line of us closer to my father and spoke again. "I said I kin give

you to take out, but you can't eat here. Sorry." Then she dropped her eyes looking very

embarrassed, and suddenly we heard what it was she was saying all at the same time, loud and

clear.

Straight-backed and indignant, one by one, my family and I got down from the counter stools

and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged, as if we had never been

black before. No one would answer my emphatic questions with anything other than a guilty

silence. "But we hadn't done anything!" This wasn't right or fair! Hadn't I written poems about

Bataan and freedom and democracy for all?

My parents wouldn't speak of this injustice, not because they had contributed to it, but because

they felt they should have anticipated it and avoided it. This made me even angrier. My fury was

not going to be acknowledged by a like fury. Even my two sisters copied my parents' pretense

that nothing unusual and anti-American had occurred. I was left to write my angry letter to the

president of the United States all by myself, although my father did promise I could type it out

on the office typewriter next week, after I showed it to him in my copybook diary.

The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington,

D.C., that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the

white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the

whole rest of that trip and it wasn't much of a graduation present after all.

Meet the Author

Poet, essayist, and novelist, Audre Lorde was born in New York City in 1934 to Caribbean

immigrant parents. Raised in Harlem, she was nearsighted to the point of being legally blind and

struggled with speech until the age of four. She attended Roman Catholic schools, received her

bachelor's degree from Hunter College and a master's degree from Columbia University. She

went on to become a writer and lecturer; she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant

for poetry and was New York State's Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992. Lorde died in 1992 at the

age of 58. In an African naming ceremony before her death, she took the name Gambda Adisa,

which means "she who makes her meaning clear."

The Fourth of July

The Fourth of July is included in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, a chronicle of Lorde's

childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s. Set in Washington, D.C.,

in 1947, The Fourth of July is a narrative seen through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Audre as

she travels with her family to celebrate both her graduation from eighth grade and America's

independence. Lorde's fury grows and her innocence is lost as she experiences the injustices of

racism all the while enduring her family's silent complicity. Themes of both racism and the

coming of age are powerfully delivered through the use of tone, irony, and symbolism.

The Fourth of July from Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – published by Crossing Press

Copyright © 1981, 2006 by Audre Lorde

Used herewith by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency

Copyright ©2021 The NROC Project