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Yeh 1Jonathan YehProfessor Shawn HansenEnglish Writing 3007 February 2009Reading Analysis: Toni Cade Bamabara's “The Lesson”“The Lesson” begins with the narrator and protagonist of the story, Sylvia, detailing theinhabitants of her community, starting with, and focusing on, the organizer of the piece's centralaction, the alien didact Miss Moore, who takes Sylvia and her peers on a kind of educational fieldtrip to F.A.O. Schwartz. This excursion serves as the catalyst for each child's awakening to the broad economic spectrum of the world and their places on that spectrum, and while each onereacts differently to their newly defined awareness of inequality, all are forced to confront their place in the greater world and are pushed further into their adulthood for it. The children'sreactions to the experience are varied-- for some it is merely an introduction to more desirabletoys-- but no one internalizes and reacts to Miss Moore's lesson as strongly as Sylvia, despite her protestations. This chronicle of a sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes banal process of maturation places “The Lesson” firmly in the genre of the bildungsroman.For Sylvia, the field trip downtown is a journey that elevates Sylvia's anger, andambitions, to a new, larger scale, that reveals her fears and helps define her character. She is, atthe story's start, already surly, rebellious, but mostly flippant. She's quick to disparage her friends, admits her hatred of Miss Moore, purports to be eager to get into trouble, but doesn'tthink far beyond the routine of her rather insular life. She doesn't understand the question MissMoore asks the group about “real money” and decides she'd rather go “terrorize the West Indiankids and take their money” (Bambara 39). When Miss Moore tries to provoke the group bytelling them that they live in the slums, Sylvia is immediately defensive. When it's time to enter

Yeh 2the toy store, however, Sylvia begins to wrestle with the more unpleasant realities of her life. Sheadmits that she “[feels] funny, shame”, and loses her earlier bravado, unable to even open thedoor (42) . It's Mercedes, whose family can afford a desk and nice stationary, who is comfortableenough to enter the building first.Sylvia's anger builds and takes shape over the course of events. Miss Moore's lesson, infact, is designed to elicit just that reaction. When the group looks in the window and sees the price of a toy sailboat, “for some reason, [the price] pisses [Sylvia] off,” while Miss Moore standslooking at her and her friends, waiting expectantly for a reaction. In the store, Sugar runs her hand along the boat, and Sylvia finds herself “jealous and want[ing] to hit her” (42).By the story's end, all this anger culminates and morphs in to something potentially positive. Sylvia forgoes racing her best friend Sugar to buy junk food and opts instead to leaveon her own, without fanfare, “to think this day through,” even though on the cab ride down thetoy store it was she who was disappointed when “[nobody wanted to] go for [her] plan, which[was] to jump out at the next light and run off to the first bar-b-que [the kids] could find” (43;39). The extra four dollars that initially seemed to provide an exciting opportunity to indulge areonly a reminder the disparity between her economic status and that of the customers of F.A.O.Schwartz. Sylvia's insistence that though Sugar can run faster than her, no one is going to beather, underlines her earlier anger at Miss Moore's accusation that she and her friends lived in aslum, the anger she felt when she read the price tag of a toy sailboat, and her anger at Miss Moorefor revealing this new facet of life (43).Sylvia is no less surly after the lesson than before, but her perceptions have been broadened, along with her anger, and her ambitions, and her actions reveal newly manifestthoughtfulness and determination.