Analysis Of Toni Cade Bambara's The Lesson

In “The Lesson” Toni Cade Bambara presents us with a group of angsty preadolescents who live in New York in the 1920s; this time period was a trying time for African Americans who constantly battled with the socio-economic tensions that resulted from their rival social class of privileged white people. Children like Sylvia grew up in broken family situations where it was more than common for parents to spend their days wasted away in the world of drugs and prostitution. Fortunately, Sylvia and her friends are taken under the wing of Miss Moore; they have little tolerance for her because they relate her presence with school due to the life lessons she attempts to teach the group. On the particular day that Miss Moore accompanies Sylvia and her friends to the FAO Schwarz toy store for another one of her lessons, Sylvia has a revelation about the growing tensions between African Americans and white people that causes her to deeply analyze some of the growing racial issues in her own community, state, and country as a whole. Although Sylvia’s exposure to the clashing cultural communities would eventually reach her, Miss Moore’s action as a catalyst sparks interest in a problem that is significantly larger than the everyday obstacles she normally faces. Cade Bambara foreshadows early on in story that Sylvia has little

She begins the story as an angry child and ends the same way, but the root of the anger changes drastically. At the beginning, her family situation encourages her to come across as hot-headed. Sylvia evolves throughout the story and undergoes initiation because the initial anger she has transforms into motivation to change her future; her current community would write her future for her based on the actions of the adults around her, but Miss Moore shows her that she doesn’t have to follow the pre-written