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| $1000 for toy sailboats? Hell nah. |
Toni Cade Bambara has such a knack for writing in the voices of Black children. These voices feel authentic, funny, sharp, and delightfully irreverent. The Lesson is a perfect example. The narrator, a young Black girl with plenty of attitude and zero patience for adult nonsense, is wildly entertaining. Her witty side comments and no-filter observations are hilarious but they are also Bambara’s way of using humor as resistance. The jokes and lively narration push back against the dehumanizing weight of racism, showing how laughter can become a small but powerful form of dissent. Through this voice, Bambara reminds us that even though Black life is shaped by inequality, it still remains vibrant, complex, full of joy and bite.
Race, humor, and subjectivity collide in this story that’s funny and profound all at once. The plot itself is simple: a group of neighborhood kids is whisked off to an upscale toy store by Miss Moore, the educated, socially conscious woman who has appointed herself responsible for teaching them, well, a lesson that will become important for their survival as they get older. Essentially, she wants them to see the economic gap they have been shielded from by childhood innocence and sheer lack of context. There is a huge disparity between black wealth and white wealth. Oh, don't forget that no matter how hard you work, you likely won't have any social mobility due to systematic racism. Heavy stuff to to teach a kid, for sure. But by filtering everything through the narrator’s hilarious commentary and her friends’ chaotic energy, Bambara keeps the tone lively while still landing the deeper message.
Telling the story through the eyes of this sharp-tongued, skeptical kid allows humor to expose the structures of inequality without flattening or moralizing them. The comedy doesn’t undercut the seriousness; rather it highlights black oppression, making the lesson Miss Moore wants to teach resonate even more.
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