Roy Neil Graves article

AUTHOR: ROY NEIL GRAVES TITLE: Bambara's THE LESSON

SOURCE: The Explicator 66 no4 214-17 Summ 2008 COPYRIGHT: The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is

reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.heldref.org/

In Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson," a frequently anthologized short story from her collection Gorilla, My Love (1972), the likeable, foul-mouthed narrator, Sylvia, recounts a childhood incident that underscores "how money ain't divided up right in this country" (457). This is Sylvia's paraphrase of a point made by Miss Moore, a self-appointed mentor to ghetto youth. Miss Moore apparently operates on the premise that, because knowledge is power, showing poor children the inequities of American capitalism might spur them to constructive action. Miss Moore's view, however, does not reflect the full complexity of Bambara's angry, pessimistic investigation into the flawed social and economic system. Classroom discussions of "The Lesson" suggest to me that, whereas thoughtful college-age readers may take the story as a liberal condemnation of the inequities and false values of capitalism, most students read it as an argument for economic self-improvement through purposeful self-reformation. Students who believe in capitalism -- and most students do -- will find it comfortable to assume that Sylvia means she will strive for material success when she vows "to think this day through" and says, finally, "[A]in't nobody gonna beat me at nuthin" (462). The facile reading of Bambara's ending is that Sylvia, having learned "the lesson," is determined to improve herself by working hard. Bambara's subtle ambiguities and ironic manipulations of materials complicate both these readings, leaving two important matters open: First, the story asks what an individual response should be to the economic inequities in America. Is it enough for "poor people [...] to wake up and demand their share of the pie" (461), to use Sylvia's sarcastic phrasing? Second, despite its closing line, the story is ambiguous about how Miss Moore's charges actually respond. Notably, the puerile speech patterns and bitter tone revealed in Sylvia's retrospective narrative suggest that Miss Moore's "lesson" may not have had its intended effect. In Sylvia's narrative, Miss Moore, a black, college-educated neighbor, takes some ghetto kids from Harlem on a day trip by taxi to downtown Manhattan to broaden their understanding of money and economics and to show them how deprived they are. Along on this jaunt are eight children of unspecified ages, ciphers except for Sylvia: Sugar (possibly Sylvia's female cousin), Junebug, Flyboy (whom Sylvia calls "a faggot"), Big Butt (Ronald), "Rosie Giraffe," Mercedes, and "Little Q. T." Led by Miss Moore, this indecorous band visits FAO Schwarz (Sylvia calls it "F. A. O. Schwartz"), where they see a $480 paperweight and a toy sailboat priced at $1,195. In schoolmarm fashion, Miss Moore quizzes the kids to make her point: "Imagine for a minute what kind of society it is in which some people can spend on a toy what it would cost to feed a family of six or seven. What do you think?" (462). Sugar responds, "[T]his is not much of a democracy if you ask me. Equal chance to pursue happiness means an equal crack at the dough, don't it?" (462). Sylvia refuses Miss Moore's rhetorical bait but does sense "somethin weird" (462). We read Bambara's story naively if we forget that her foul-mouthed narrator is a mature woman, not a child. Thus, it is crucial in parsing the story to sort out two time frames: past and

present. All the economic details fit into the era of the excursion, when Sylvia was perhaps ten or twelve; But Sylvia's eventual condition in adult life, and thus her eventual response to "the lesson," must be extrapolated from clues about her nature at the time she is telling the story, perhaps around 1970. The spell of Sylvia's voice makes it easy for us to forget that the events in her story happened in her remote past: She says, "Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved on our block [...]" (456, emphasis added). Sylvia also stresses this time lapse when she pictures Little Q. T. "years later" as aggressively retaliatory (460). The time of the past action is left vague but is in a bygone era of 850 cab rides, $35-a-month rent in Harlem, 100 glue, and "a ball of string for eight cents" (458-59, 461). Since Bambara was born in 1939, one might well place the excursion around 1950, when the author was about Sylvia's age. In this wholly realistic story, Bambara's decision to have the adult Sylvia speak in petulant ebonics is surely not just an incidental aspect of local color. Nor does Sylvia's speech seem likely to be the conscious regression that a successful, essentially bilingual black woman might indulge herself in to engage some audience. Sylvia's unmodified language habits as an adult indicate that Miss Moore's "lesson" delivered in precise standard English, did not take. Sylvia's crude, sarcastic, present-tense vernacular is still the unmollified diction of a prideful, undereducated preteen. Strewn among her uninflected verbs are her recollections of how she was "really hating this nappy-head bitch and her goddamn college degree" and of her disdain for Aunt Gretchen's "ole dumb shit foolishness" (457). One detects no glimmer of gratitude for Miss Moore's efforts, no maturity of perspective, no amelioration in vocabulary, and no hint of a socioeconomic rise. If Sylvia remains unchanged, then what "lesson" does her embittered monologue teach? Essentially, it lets readers decide what lessons to draw. Clearly, the story indicts capitalism's disparities, but should young blacks armed with economic awareness undertake vigorous self- reformation aimed at gleaning the benefits of wealth? Should one work hard, master English, and get a good education to afford $1,000 toy sailboats and $400 paperweights? In dramatizing a radically flawed capitalism bound by race and class, the microcosm of the story hinges on ironies, incidental and substantive. "Schwarz," for example, means "black" in German. People in a nonliterate caste have little use for paperweights. And sailboats, symbols of leisure and escape, stay exorbitantly out of reach. Further, Bambara's over-the-top examples of what wealth can buy hint that the main benefit of financial success is an expanded capacity for pointless materialism. Meanwhile, Miss Moore's paradigm shows that discipline plus education do not necessarily yield economic mobility. Given these perverse realities and especially the absence of viable role models among Sylvia's family, Miss Moore, or America's privileged spenders, Sylvia's skepticism toward Miss Moore's argument "that poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie" (461) seems logical, maybe even principled. Careful readers sense the double bind she is in. Bambara puts us in Sylvia's position, feeling the chest pounding and needing "to think this day through." An easy reading of Sylvia's story is that she will eventually strive to better herself. The narrator's language and tone show her to be still disaffected, and her story betrays no markers of socioeconomic movement. Although her sarcastic wit makes her likable, her bleak story hints at a nihilistic end. Her closing statement, "[A]in't nobody gonna beat me at nuthin" (462), may be a literally accurate double negative, an authorized instance of tragic irony. Technically, however, the statement is a triple negative that asserts "I'll beat everybody else." Bambara's meanings here would be cryptic even if "winning" were not such a hard-to-pinpoint target.

How does Sylvia respond to "the lesson"? What "lessons" should readers draw from her story? Bambara's narrative takes readers into the dark heart of America and raises hard-to-answer questions about race, class, human equity, social values, and personal fulfillment. ADDED MATERIAL ROY NEIL GRAVES, The University of Tennessee at Martin Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications

KEYWOKDS Toni Cade Bambara, capitalism, "The Lesson," race, social values

WORK CITED Bambara, Toni Cade. "The Lesson." Responding to Literature: Stories, Poems, Plays, and Essays. Ed. Judith A. Stanford. 5th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006.456-62.

Source: Explicator, Summer2008, Vol. 66 Issue 4, p214, 4p Item: 34871158