Toni Cade Bambara The Lesson Essay

Young Sylvia, feelings for Miss Moore, the neighborhood teacher, seems to be the most realistic versus the other children in the neighborhood. Sylvia describes Miss Moore to be “black as hell” with her feet being the whitest part of her body describing it as fish-white and spooky. She seems to be upset with the idea that Miss Moore has of gathering all the neighborhood kids around the mail box to give them some lesson in which she wants no part in. The short story The Lesson written by Toni Cade Bambara was written in the time of 1972, and seems to have taken place during the summer time in one of New York City’s Harlem “ghetto” neighborhoods. With Sylvia as one of the main characters and also the narrator of the story, Bambara uses some satire and humor through Sylvia to set the theme and tone of the story. The …show more content…
Bambara was a writer, teacher, and publisher and also was an activist in the civil rights and women movement in the 1960s. (Approaching Literature, pg. 1373). During her career, Bambara used fiction writing to teach people about living better lives and how to get more out of it. She had a collection of short stories called the Gorilla, My Love where critics said they saw a realistic voice. Which then drew the attention of the African-American community, teaching what they could get out of life. In her short story The Lesson she definitely teaches a lesson but without taking away from her art and morals but enhancing them. The Lesson, reaches deep into the realness of the economics in the 1960s, through the eyes of a young girl named Sylvia. Bambara made her a proud yet sensitive girl who appears to be tough and too smart to not notice what’s really going on around her, even when it’s probably best to ignore them. Of course Bambara creates other characters that surround Sylvia to allow her to explore and illustrate the real issues the minorities in the lower class had to deal