Freedom for All: The Great American Lie

The Fourth of July, intended as holiday full of freedom, representing the American’s escape from the oppression of autocratic England, was nothing more than travesty of a celebration to writer Audre Lorde, a woman of mixed races. The summer after eighth grade, the summer she was supposed to mature from a child into an adult, Audre Lorde was changed by the experience of segregation on a scorching day, inside a Breyer’s ice cream and soda fountain. Audre Lorde’s transition from child to adult, demonstrated through her shift in tone throughout the story, is effective in conveying the lack of equality geared towards people of color in a supposedly egalitarian society.

            Recounting her experiences as an adolescent, Lorde begins her story with short and abrupt sentences, speaking in a childlike, hurried and excited manner describing all the food she filled herself with on the train ride to Washington D.C. Her shift from excited and hurried, to serious and heated begins after asking her mother to let her eat at the dining cart. Though her mother’s excuse for not letting her go was the cost of dining cart food, Lorde later found out that in 1947 black people were not allowed in railroad dining carts when heading south. Because Lorde was not privileged to the information of the “no blacks allowed on the dining car”, the sting to her ego is shown through her satirical description of her mother as a woman who chose to ignore that which she did not like, and then adding that “perhaps [the problem] would go away deprived of her attention”(240), depicting her mother as somewhat ignorant. This sardonic tone is suppressed and shifted to one of anger once Lorde begins to talk about her shielded life of American racism. A resentment toward her parents is clearly shown when mentioning that she was told to “never trust white people, but why was never explained…like so many other vital pieces of information in [her] childhood” that were missing. This resentment subdued once the story shifts to Washington D.C., seeming as though more calm but slightly bothered by the heat and sun. Then, through her father’s idea to get ice cream, Audre Lorde realizes the realities of discrimination and segregation. Denied seats inside the Breyer’s, the Lorde family got up and walked away without argument, causing her deep-rooted resentment to turn to anger, not only for her parents, who blamed themselves for not avoiding the situation, but the false freedom her country supposedly stood for. This change in tone throughout Lorde’s story demonstrates the shift from being a child, ignorant to the deep-rooted problems of segregation, to an adult, angered by the “anti-American” (242) feelings towards blacks.

            From that fateful day at the nation’s capital, in a Breyer’s ice cream and soda fountain, Audre Lorde experienced the most shocking of realizations not just about herself, but about her family and about our nation’s society. Through her shift in tone, Lorde effectively shows her anger towards the lack of equality for all in an allegedly egalitarian society, consequently demonstrating her change from child to adult.