Youth and Innocence

In the short story, “Gorilla, My Love”, author Toni cade Bambara tells a story about the way children scrutinize little white lies. Bambara tells the story as if a child was talking in first-point of view. At the beginning of the story one might found it difficult to believe that the end of the Hazel will reduce to tears. While unquestionably easily frightened, Hazel seems to be quite self-assured and confident. The following will reveal the fear, rebellion and love as portrayed in “Gorilla, My love”

“Gorilla, My love” provides a humorous, yet touching, look at a younger girl’s first experience with unreciprocated love. In order to master this story effectively, the author uses a series of seemingly unconnected and random incidents, similar to the way in which a child would speak, to embellish Hazel’s reaction to the news that her uncle is planning to marry. Thunder burns, as her friends call her, appears in the interpose story Hazel tells to show how adults betray children. Thunder burns are not actually the agent betrayal here, but rather the plugged of racially charged capitalist of treachery. Hazel and her brothers, Big Brood and baby Jason, have paid their money to see a film called Gorilla, My Love, only to be shown a raggedy old brown print of Jesus movie: “And I am ready to kill, not cause I got anything against Jesus. Just that when you fixed to watch a gorilla picture you don’t wanna get messed around with Sunday school stuff” (Bambara 15). Hazel is briefly silenced by the weight of thunder burn’s derived power, but not for long with fighter like her brothers refusing the call she storms the manager’s office and demand her money back. She sees his pasty-complexioned superiority, and, in comic diversion, she informs...

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...ted to see and most of all she find out that her family whom taught her to hold people to their words was in fact like the rest of them.

“Gorilla, My Love,” ends with mock catastrophic with Hazel crying in the back seat. She is losing her postures because she can’t see the map through her crying. Her Granddaddy steps on the gas because what else is there for a grown up to when an injustice has been done, and no amount of comfort or explanation is going to help. He knows that things are going to be okay, but Hazel cannot know that because she is in that forceful liminal place if childhood where it is just not possible to read the maps anymore. The maps that work for childhood do not apply to the adult world that she is scrutinize upon. Nothing makes sense, she’s afraid and furious, and those she loves can betray her without malice and she just has to live with.