28 pages • 56 minutes read
One Friday Morning
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Literary Devices
Irony
Irony refers to the distance between what a character realizes and what the reader understands. As a coming-of-age story, “One Friday Morning” works on the irony between what Nancy Lee Johnson sees about the world and what the reader understands about the world.
The tipping-point moment when Miss O’Shay tells Nancy Lee she is not to receive the scholarship shatters the young girl but not the reader. The reader, after all, is far more aware of the reality of racism in America and suspects Nancy Lee’s euphoria as she dances her way home might be short-lived.
The reader, not Nancy Lee, picks up on the implications of what she notes about her life: how she is one of only a handful of Black students in her school; how the art academy to which she aspires is predominantly white; how easily she feels part of her white school and simply ignores the reality of her skin color; how no other student of color had ever won the scholarship; how proud she is to be an American even as she admits her family left the Deep South because of the racist conditions there. In America, she believes, talent, hard work, and dedication will be enough to secure any dream.
In the assistant-principal’s office, the irony of that perception is revealed to Nancy Lee. How she manages that revelation, her resolution to dedicate her young life to making her country live up to its ideals, is also ironic. Readers might assume the bad news would make the young girl bitter or cynical or even angry. Yet the closing paragraph provides the story its unexpected heroic ending.
Conflict
The central conflict in the story is the racial tension in America itself.
Until Friday morning, there is not much conflict. Nancy Lee feels there is no real competition between her and the other art students for the award. Her family is loving and supportive. She thrives in her school. Her art teacher promises her only big things. Nancy Lee is proud, confident, and directed to a future she knows that, with this scholarship, is hers. She loves her school, her family, her racial identity, and her country.
The committee’s letter introduces conflict. In the office, Nancy Lee is suddenly just “the brown girl” (8). The letter from the judging committee exposes the depth of racism in an America that young Nancy Lee loved. The committee concedes her talent but denies her the scholarship. Gifted with awareness and with the encouragement of Miss O’Shay, Nancy Lee pledges not to let the bigots win. The conflict is suddenly clear to her. She takes a side: She will “stand against ignorance, narrowness, [and] hate” (9).
Point of View: Limited Third Person
First-person narration—the use of “I”—is a literary device used to create sympathy between a reader and a character who tells the story.
Hughes could have told Nancy Lee’s story in the first-person. Hughes, however, opts to tell the story in a limited third person—a narrative point of view that evokes Nancy Lee’s perspective (giving the reader access to only her thoughts and her reactions) but still maintaining the distance of the third-person pronoun: she.
Limited third person allows Hughes to keep Nancy Lee apart from the reader, a reminder that despite her feelings of being accepted in white America she is still marginalized by it.
Mood
Mood refers to the emotional atmosphere created in a work of fiction, how the writer uses word choice, setting, character’s thoughts, as well as narrative events to sustain emotional responses in the reader. Mood, unlike theme, refers less to the intellectual experience of the story than how the story impacts the reader emotionally, how the story makes the reader feel, whether joy or sorrow, hope or despair.
Hughes manipulates the mood by using weather ironically: Nancy Lee gets good news in bad weather and bad news in good weather.
Nancy Lee receives the good news on a rainy morning, yet she is elated and joyful. “Raindrops, smiles, and tears mingled on her brown cheeks” (5). Her joy lights up the dreary April morning. For the reader, Nancy Lee’s giddy joy renders ironic the soggy gray morning. Nancy Lee’s joy is bigger, more powerful than the weather itself.
Three days later, Nancy Lee receives the devastating news about losing scholarship on a beautiful tulip-rich spring morning as beautiful and as joyful as the city park in her prize-winning painting. That glorious spring morning with its promise of vitality and possibility makes more emotionally immediate and painful the news that Nancy Lee struggles to process. Unlike the rainy morning when Nancy Lee seemed towering, now it is as if the world did not care for her tragedy.
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