“One Friday Morning” is a coming-of-age story—a high school senior begins the story with one set of assumptions and ends with a new awareness. At 17, Nancy Lee is still grappling with what it means to be a person of color in America. Overtly confronted with the reality of racism even in a Northern city, Hughes’s protagonist experiences a loss of innocence and must choose how to respond.

At the beginning, Nancy Lee is a precocious and gifted student, excelling in sports, in music, and in the classroom. “She was smart, pretty, and brown” (2), the listing suggests how Nancy Lee begins the story. The reality of her race does not occur to her to even matter. She fits into her white high school. Every now and then she reminds herself that she is “colored.” Yet she is proud of her African culture, raised by parents who introduced her to the “beauties of Africa, its strength, its songs, its mighty rivers…its ancient and important civilizations” (2). But she is proud as well of being an American, “a Negro American” (2). 

Her art teacher encourages her to develop her talent. Nancy Lee is optimistic and idealistic, but she is vulnerable because she is naïve.