One Friday Morning by Langston Hughes - EXCERPT

"The thrilling news did not come directly to Nancy Lee, but it came in little indirections that finally added themselves up to one tremendous fact: she had won the prize! But being a calm and quiet young lady, she did not say anything, although the whole high school buzzed with rumors, guesses, reportedly authentic announcements
on the part of students who had no right to be making announcements at all—since no student really knew yet who had won this year’s art scholarship.
But Nancy Lee’s drawing was so good, her lines so sure, her colors so bright and harmonious, that certainly no other student in the senior art class at George Washington High was thought to have very much of a chance. Yet
you never could tell. Last year nobody had expected Joe Williams to win the Artist Club scholarship with that funny modernistic water color he had done of the high-level bridge. In fact, it was hard to make out there was a bridge until you had looked at the picture a long time. Still, Joe Williams got the prize, was feted by the
community’s leading painters, club women, and society folks at a big banquet at the Park-Rose Hotel, and was now an award student at the Art School—the city’s only art school. Nancy Lee Johnson was a colored girl, a few years out of the South. But seldom did her high-school classmates think of her as colored. She was smart, pretty and brown, and fitted in well with the life of the school. She stood
high in scholarship, played a swell game of basketball, had taken part in the senior musical in a soft, velvety voice, and had never seemed to intrude or stand out, except in pleasant ways so it was seldom even mentioned— her color.
Nancy Lee sometimes forgot she was colored herself. She liked her classmates and her school. Particularly she like her art teacher, Miss Dietrich, the tall red-haired woman who taught her law and order in doing things; and the beauty of working step by step until a job is done; a picture finished; a design created; or a block print carved
out of nothing but an idea and a smooth square of linoleum, inked, proofs made, and finally put down on paper —clean, sharp, beautiful, individual, unlike any other in the world, thus making the paper have a meaning
nobody else could give it except Nancy Lee. That was the wonderful thing about true creation. You made something nobody else on earth could make—but you.
Miss Dietrich was the kind of teacher who brought out the best in her students—but their own best, not anybody else’s copied best. For anybody else’s best, great though it might be, even Michelangelo’s, wasn’t enough to please Miss Dietrich, dealing with the creative impulses of young men and women living in an American city in
the Middle West, and being American.Nancy Lee was proud of being American, a Negro American with blood out of Africa a long time ago, too many
generations back to count. But her parents had taught her the beauties of Africa, its strength, its song, its mighty rivers, its early smelting of iron, its building of the pyramids, and its ancient and important civilizations. And Miss Dietrich had discovered for her the sharp and humorous lines of African sculpture, Benin, Congo,
Makonde. Nancy Lee’s father was a mail carrier, her mother a social worker in a city settlement house. Both parents had been to Negro colleges in the South. And her mother had gotten a further degree in social work from
a Northern university. Her parents were, like most Americans, simple, ordinary people who had worked hard and steadily for their education. Now they were trying to make it easier for Nancy Lee to achieve learning than it had been for them. They would be very happy when they heard of the award to their daughter—yet Nancy did not
tell them. To surprise them would be better. Besides, there had been a promise.
Casually one day, Miss Dietrich asked Nancy Lee what color frame she thought would be best on her picture.
That had been the first inkling.
“Blue,” Nancy Lee said. Although the picture had been entered in the Artist Club contest a month ago, Nancy Lee did not hesitate in her choice of color for the possible frame, since she could still see her picture clearly in
her mind’s eye—for that picture waiting for the blue frame had come out of her soul, her own life, and had bloomed into miraculous being with Miss Dietrich’s help. It was, she knew, the best water color she had painted in her four years as a high-school art student, and she was glad she had made something Miss Dietrich liked well
enough to permit her to enter in the contest before she graduated.
It was not a modernistic picture in the sense that you had to look at it a long time to understand what it meant. It was just a simple scene in the city park on a spring day with the trees still leaflessly lacy against the sky, the new
grass fresh and green, a flag on a tall pole in the center, children playing, and an old Negro woman sitting on a bench with her head turned. A lot for one picture, to be sure, but it was not there in heavy and final detail like a calendar. Its charm was that everything was light and airy, happy like spring, with a lot of blue sky, paper-white
clouds, and air showing through. You could tell that the old Negro woman was looking at the flag, and that the flag was proud in the spring breeze, and that the breeze helped to make the children’s dresses billow as they
played.
Miss Dietrich had taught Nancy Lee how to paint spring, people, and a breeze on what was only a plain white piece of paper from the supply closet. But Miss Dietrich had not said make it like any other spring-people-breeze
ever seen before. She let it remain Nancy Lee’s own. That is how the old Negro woman happened to be there looking at the flag—for in her mind the flag, the spring, and the woman formed a kind of triangle holding a
dream Nancy Lee wanted to express. White stars on a blue field, spring, children, ever-growing life, and an old woman. Would the judges at the Artist Club like it?
One wet, rainy April afternoon Miss O’Shay, the girls’ vice principal, sent for Nancy Lee to stop by her office as
school closed. Pupils without umbrellas or raincoats were clustered in doorways hoping to make it home
between showers. Outside the skies were gray. Nancy Lee’s thoughts were suddenly gray, too..”

Continuity - analyzing the excerpt so as to write a meaningful continuation

Use the Twinboards underneath to analyze ONE of the following features of the short story:

A.) Characters: Are they flat or round characters? What do they believe in?

B.) What is the narrative perspective? Is the narrator outside the story? Is the narrator inside the story? Is the narrator outside the story, but still sees events through the eyes of one character (e.g. is there a focalizer?)

C.) Short stories typically follow a certain pattern. At the beginning there is a balance of sorts, until a problem arises and a crisis eventually reaches a climax, and ideally is resolved. Where exactly are we in the story? 

D.) Very often, major themes of the plot are encapsulated in symbols, e.g. "things" which are charged with meaning, which reoccur several times. Can you identify such a symbol here? 

E) IB students - to which course theme can you link the story (Identities, Experiences, Human Ingenuity, Social Organization, Sharing the planet)?