One Friday Morning

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.