In the paper The Fourth of July” Lorde writes about her a certain vacation in her childhood as a young girl. In her paper she talks about a time that her and her family went to Washington, D.C. The theme of the paper deals with racism and how color in her life made a difference no matter how much it was avoided or oblivious people tried to be about it.
At the beginning of the story you see they are leaving for a family vacation right after graduation. What the writer does not know is going on at the time but later in life finds out is that it was because her sister Phyllis was suppose to go with her class for their senior class trip but ended up getting reimbursed and was not allowed to go because she was black. So her parents decided to take themselves there as a family so she would go on the way there she mentions, “We always went at night on the milk train”, (Lorde, 567) about always having to go at night and on the cheaper one in order to ride the train because that’s how blacks were allowed to travel at this time. You can also see at the beginning of the story that color is important to her because she tells you the colors of almost all the food they brought on the train with them. By bringing this food it is the parents’ way of avoiding what is really going on. They bring the food so that they don’t have to go to the dinning cart, because blacks were not allowed to be in there. Lorde does not know that, however; so she is consistently asking to go in there while her parents avoid the true reason by say it is too expensive and that you can’t trust where the people’s hands have been that touched your food. Her parents felt that if you didn’t talk about it or call it anything about the nature of racism than it wasn’t there and they could control it but as you can see throughout this that is certainly not the case and that’s what happened on this trip. The sad thing is that her parents are racist but on a much smaller scale you see this threw them saying not to trust white people and never giving an explanation as to why. She always wondered why that was the case because the mother’s side of the family all looked white or at least lighter than the rest of them but still they never considered themselves to be white. Her sisters were even lighter than Lorde and her father they were more of somewhere in the middle. The hotel they stayed at was in the back alley that belonged to a friend, it seems to me that they had to stay there because other places even those on main streets would not accept them because the other one the school went didn’t either.
In the middle to the end of the story she talks about her time in Washington. She mentions how they go and see the Lincoln Memorial. She goes to say, “Where Marian Anderson hand sung after the D.A. R. refused to allow her to sing in their auditorium”, (Lorde, 568) racism was not just for normal people too. Marian Anderson got refused because of her skin because she was black. She talks about how she always had to squint and that her parents would not allow sunglasses so she could see. I think this was a metaphor even though the situation was a true case. I think it symbolizes the fact that her parents would always keep her from seeing what was truly going on in the world around her. I think even the fact that she mentions at monuments of freedom is ironic because do you really think the blacks at this time are free. Colored folks were being forced to leave places and be in certain areas of places and not do things that white folks could do. It was as though the freedom was not really there but her parents tried to tell her that it was by keeping her from what was really going on in the world. When she talks about the shade of pavement being lighter than in New York I think it makes it seem like the people in New York are less worried about skin color than the people in Washington who give possibly less freedom because they focus on the white and black concept. She even talks about how they are walking down the street and her mother is “bright” and her father is “brown and they are more of an “in-between” in this sense she just uses descriptive words not the typical white and black because she still sees everything clouded and nothing for what it truly is. When they go into the ice cream shop I feel it is quite interesting on how they sit the father and Aundre Lorde sit next to each other, then the mother and two sisters sit next to each other. They are more of sitting with the parent whom they favor in skin tone more because the mother and two sisters are closer in skin tone than the father and Aundre Lorde. When she talks about entering the ice cream shop she says she is able to see more clearly now and not have to squint with knowing that the squinting eyes are more of a symbol of obliviousness you might be able to make a prediction that now she can see she might be able to identify things more and see things for what they truly are. This is certainly the case because she hears the waitress say shamefully that they have to leave despite how much the waitress doesn’t truly feel the same way about the rules of the ice cream parlor. They goes to say how they walked out “quiet and outraged as if we had never been black before”, by saying this it is as if they finally realized what they were because they could finally see how they are truly treated. No one would say anything but be in silence because they felt so shameful and her parents more of sat their and said nothing not because of shamefulness but because they felt that should they have anticipated and avoided it better. Even her sisters she felt started to act as though nothing had happened and that they were treated in an “Anti-American” way so she ended up being the only one left to write to the president of the United States. As we go back to the beginning it mentions that graduating form the eighth grade was a time to stop being a child Lorde certainly did that she says “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 whit 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 the trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all”(Lorde, 570) by her saying this it is as though her childhood was a childhood of denial and that she lived it as an equal to a white but now as she goes on she has stopped being that child because she finally knows the truth. She has also seen that it is just black and white and no bright or dark or gray that is just the separation now between the two and this is a white world that we live in. when she says that this was not a great graduation gift it is her thoughts that this is the passing on and that she has now finally realized the stopping and growing and the gift of adult hood is knowledge but she does not like what knowledge she has been given.
So as you can see in Lorde’s “The Fourth of July” no matter how oblivious you try to stay you will eventually see the truth. The truth for her was that the world isn’t equal and we do live in a racist world no matter and that no matter what you it is will always be unfair on how things will always be and eventually we will have to come to terms with them. We can’t live in denial because eventually we will be able to see and hear the world and know what the case with everything really is. I feel that is the point that Lorde was trying to get across and that you have to now stop squinting and be that adult and see what really is there.
