Literature > "The Lesson" by Toni Cade Bambara

The Lesson by Toni Cade Bambara examines the realization of economic inequity in 1960s America through the eyes of a young girl. In Sylvia, Bambara creates a proud, sensitive, tough girl who is far too smart to ignore the realities around her, even though she knows it might be easier to do so. At the same time, Bambara creates a host of characters, all of whom help Sylvia explore and demonstrate the issues that face poor people and minorities in the United States.

how Sylvia learns to adapt to the high-class society that Miss Moore has placed her in, she must learn to understand class divisions between ghetto life and Fifth Avenue. In this manner, we can see a stubborn poor girl slowly begin to realize that she can too attain wealth in America. In Toni Cade Bambara's short story, "The Lesson" (1972), the narrator, Sylvia, speaks and narrates in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This is an appropriate dialect for Sylvia, who lives in a New York ghetto, is a working-class black child about twelve years old, and has a strong feminist attitude. AAVE is also a dialect that Bambara herself would have learned growing up during the 1940s and 1950s in New York City's Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant communities. AAVE adds realism and humor to Sylvia's narrative. The dialect also reflects Bambara's pride in her ethnic heritage. Finally, AAVE fits the story's themes, one of which is that the black children in the story need to learn about the world outside their ghetto and another that wealth is unequally and unfairly distributed in American society. In "The Lesson," most of the have-not children in need of education speak AAVE. This dialect emphasizes the children's distance from mainstream white bourgeois culture and economic power. However, Bambara also celebrates AAVE as a vehicle for conveying black experience: Sylvia uses AAVE to express her self-confidence, assertiveness, and creativity as a young black woman.

Sylvia describes Miss Moore as an adult with "nappy hair" (87). The word nappy, of course, originated in AAVE, though it has passed into standard usage (see nappy, Major 315; Smitherman 64; and nappy, the first lexical definition, The American Heritage College Dictionary, 3d ed., 1993). Sylvia also notices that Miss Moore has "proper speech" (87). In contrast to the children in the story, Miss Moore is college-educated and speaks Standard American English. According to Sylvia, the other blacks in the neighborhood tended to "laugh" at Miss Moore, made fun of her behind her back, and even "kinda hated her" because she seemed to them to be putting on airs. However, the black adults respect Miss Moore's education and allow her to teach their children in an informal summer school session. At first, Sylvia and the other kids view Miss Moore's lessons as "boring-ass," but by the end of the story, they have greater respect for her because a field trip that originally seems to be about arithmetic turns out to be quite revolutionary: by showing them the pricey toy store F. A. O. Schwarz, Miss Moore has made them question the fairness of social and economic class stratification in America. Sylvia comment on the shade of Miss Moore's skin ("And she was black as hell"), and Sylvia refers to her own family members' having "all moved North the same time" (87). These comments also give clues about the characters' race and their recent move to New York from the South. "black street speechMiss Moore comments that a microscope enables people to see what is "invisible to the naked eye." Even the names of the children in the story mark their socioeconomic class and their cultural difference from the white community. The unique AAVE monikers also foreground and celebrate the children's black heritage. She is the only young person in "The Lesson" who uses Standard American English consistently (91,92, 95). Her family seems to have more money to spend than the other children's families do, and they tend to harass Mercedes for this reasonshe curses and uses other taboo expressions to convey her annoyance with Miss Moore and other nuisances in her life.