28 pages • 56-minute read
One Friday Morning
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Symbols & Motifs
The Scholarship to the Art School
For Nancy Lee, the scholarship to the city’s only art academy symbolizes the validation of her talent. Encouraged by her art teacher, she feels in her heart that what she creates expresses her soul, but the scholarship symbolizes that she has reason to aspire to becoming an artist.
The scholarship symbolizes her gateway to the art world. The prestigious academy is beyond the resources of her family. Her parents value education—both attended Black colleges back home, and her mother, a social worker, earned a master’s degree in the city. Her father moved their family North specifically to secure his precocious daughter the education she could not have received in the South as a Black student. Thus, the scholarship symbolizes not only personal achievement but hope not available to her without the money.
The scholarship is the result of a blind judging process—the committee does not know who they select until after they have made their choice. That choice is based solely on talent. When the committee discovers Nancy Lee’s racial identity and revokes the award, the scholarship symbolizes the bigotry and hypocrisy of white America.
The American Flag
“One Friday Morning” was the lead article in Crisis magazine’s 1941 Fourth of July special edition. The story looks at the dynamics of patriotism in a nation that espouses the ideal of liberty and justice for all but struggles with its own racism, bigotry, and discrimination.
Nancy Lee’s award-winning painting revolves around the flag, which she depicts as “proud in the spring breeze.” Later when Nancy Lee prepares her acceptance speech for the scholarship, she references the flag in her remarks that center her pride in America. For her, the flag symbolizes an ideal America suggested by the “bright stars in our flag” (3). Indeed, the word “our” reflects Nancy Lee’s faith that the ideal promise of America includes her. The “[w]hite stars on the blue field” symbolize for Nancy Lee the promise of America itself, how a middle-class American kid with dreams of being an artist can realize those aspirations (3).
In the end, the flag symbolizes not this idealized America but rather how the real America is always evolving. In the auditorium, Nancy Lee stands with her dream deferred, adjusting to the reality that the American Dream does not yet include Black Americans, and focuses on the huge flag hanging on the wall. As she joins the 3,000 other students in reciting the Pledge, she sees, through her tears, that the flag represents America as a work-in-progress. The flag now symbolizes her courageous commitment to helping America live up to its own ideals.
Nancy Lee’s Painting
At the center of Nancy Lee’s education is her sudden awareness of the disparity between the ideal world and the world as it is. America, she learns, is not what its ideals claim it to be, and her painting symbolizes this tension.
Nancy Lee fears she may not win the competition because her watercolor does not indulge trendy Modernist experiments in abstract non-representational art. She paints the world she sees unlike the previous year’s winner, Joe Williams, whose “funny modernistic painting” (1) of a bridge was deliberately obscure. “You had to look at the painting a long time” just to “make out there was a bridge” (1).
Nancy Lee’s painting of the park in spring symbolizes her hope to find refuge and escape in her art. In her art, she creates rather than engages the world and makes from its imperfections gorgeously beautiful and simple designs. The issue, as Nancy Lee herself will learn, is that her painting captures an idealized city park, each line carefully measured, each shape carefully balanced, each color carefully chosen. It was “clean, sharp, beautiful, individual (2).
Her painting reflects not the world-as-it-is but the world-as-it-ought-to-be: harmonious, finished, proportional. “Its charm,” Nancy Lee points out, “was that everything is light and airy, happy like spring” (2). Her naivete is shattered by the scholarship committee. The artist, Nancy Lee sees in her epiphany in Miss O’Shay’s office, cannot live within created worlds despite their intoxicating beauty. In the closing moments, Nancy Lee commits herself to engaging the messy, contradictory, anything-but-harmonious real-time world. “That is the land we must make” together (9), Black people and whites, rather than the solitary artist making beautiful little worlds of their own.
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