Textual Analysis Essay

In the short essay The Fourth of July, author Audre Lorde tells the coming-of-age story of her first trip to Washington, D.C. as a young black teen in pre-Civil Rights movement America. The year was 1947. This family vacation exposes Lorde to racism, something her parents choose to ignore in an effort to protect their children, and ultimately leads to a fall from innocence as she must come to terms with her place as a “colored”(Lorde,568) in the white world. Throughout the work, Lorde uses imagery and symbolism to convey her newly discovered awareness of her incompatibility with her surroundings.

Banned from the dining car, her mother packs a bountiful lunch for their train ride to the city: “slices of brown bread and butter and green pepper and carrot sticks…little violently yellow iced cakes…a spice bun and rock-cakes…iced tea in a wrapped mayonnaise jar…sweet pickles…dill pickles…and peaches with the fuzz still on them.”(Lorde,567.568) The food detailed is sustaining and brilliantly colored, much like her own family. They encompass a variegated rainbow of blacks and browns. Her mother is light-skinned while Lorde and her father are of a much darker complexion. And her two sisters are depicted as “somewhere in-between.”(Lorde,568) This rich, intensely hued world that Lorde resides in is in stark contrast to the “whiteness”(Lorde,569) she encounters that summer in D.C.

As the colorful quintet traverse the streets of Washington, Lorde squints up at the monuments as their whiteness is reflected onto her “dilated and vulnerable eyes.”(Lorde,569) She notices too that “even the pavement on the streets [is] a shade lighter in color than back home.”(Lorde,569) At the close of the day the family heads to a Breyer’s ice cream shop where they sit at a “white mottled marble counter”(Lorde,569) and order vanilla ice-cream from the Caucasian waitress who politely informs them that she cannot serve them. Lorde realizes then that she and her multi-colored family do not belong in the sterile, hard whiteness of the achromatic city. They rise and march out.

This “dazzling [white]”(Lorde,569) summer reveals the “new and crushing reality”(Lorde,568) that American racism imposes onto her and her family that she had yet to experience in her hometown of New York City. Lorde’s rich imagery and symbolism help express the deep contrast between her full-toned world and the concrete, dull actuality that she has become wise to.