This paper offers a rhetorical analysis of Audre Lorde's personal narrative essay "The Fourth of July," in which Lorde recounts her first trip to Washington, D.C., as a young girl in 1947 and her awakening to the reality of racial segregation. The analysis traces three escalating revelations — on the train, regarding her sister's exclusion from a class trip, and at an ice cream counter — to show how Lorde deploys a child's innocent perspective to disarm the reader and build toward a powerful expression of righteous indignation. The paper argues that this experiential, first-person rhetoric is central to Lorde's critique of Jim Crow America and the hypocrisy embedded in American symbols of equality and freedom.
Audre Lorde's personal narrative essay The Fourth of July recounts her experiences as a young girl traveling by train to Washington, D.C. — a city laden with the symbols of American freedom — and her first shattering realization of racism and segregation in the Jim Crow era. Lorde sets up the essay by establishing her innocence as a child and placing the reader in the shoes of the girl she was in 1947, opening with the line: "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." By indirectly indicating her age — she tells the reader she had just graduated from the eighth grade — Lorde establishes the perspective from which the essay will be told.
This choice has the effect of disarming the reader of prejudices or preconceived notions, for children have none of these: their eyes and ears are open with curiosity and wonder. They want to know the world. The trouble for Lorde was that, at that age — having been protected from racism by attending a Catholic school in which she was the only non-white student — she had no idea that segregation existed in the wider society. Her trip to D.C., the nation's capital, on the nation's day of birth, opened her eyes to the reality of Jim Crow.
As a result, the essay is filled with a righteous kind of anger that only a child could express. Yet Lorde does not shout her anger outright. She reveals frustrations first — the incremental revelations of racism and the ways her parents tried to protect her from it — and, finally, when that protection is stripped away and the fact of racism is fully exposed to both Lorde and the reader, the righteous indignation directed at all the "white" emblems of bigotry in American society feels entirely justified. This type of experiential rhetoric makes the reader feel the message directly (Sowell, Bundy).
The first revelation comes on the train ride when Lorde states that she wants to eat in the dining car because it is something she has never done before. Her mother runs through a list of reasons for why she does not want to do that — none of which have anything to do with the fact that Black passengers were not permitted to sit and eat in the dining car under the segregation laws of the time. Lorde depicts her mother discussing the uncleanliness of the hands of the people handling the food. In a sense, this is symbolically true: those hands are not clean because on them rests the stain of racism. But Lorde rejects her mother's excuses as only half-true; her mother never refers to the racist laws that prevent them from eating as equals in the car.
The second revelation is that the family is traveling to D.C. in order to compensate for Lorde's older sister having been told she could not join her class trip, because the class would be staying in a hotel where Black guests were not permitted. This rouses the anger of the father, who promises to take the whole family to D.C. himself — yet even then, the underlying issue goes undiscussed. Lorde emphasizes the necessity of confronting racism directly by showing how stifling life becomes when it is kept silent.
The third revelation blows the lid off the little girl's world: she and her family tour D.C. and stop to get ice cream, only to be told they may not sit at the counter and eat. Her parents are upset, feeling they should have known better, and respond with embarrassment. Lorde herself, however, is angry. She finally understands what her parents have been trying to hide from her — that she lives in a racist society that grants one set of privileges to white Americans while denying them to Black Americans. She is angry about the ignorance that has been imposed on her, and angry at the country she spent so much time applauding in school for its ideals of equality, when in reality no such equality exists.
"Refused service forces Lorde to confront racism"
Sowell, Thomas, and James Bundy. Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? New York, NY: Quill, 1984.
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