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Allusions
Dialect
Explanation and Analysis—AAVE:
“The Lesson” is written in dialect, meaning that Bambara changes the spelling, grammar, and general style of her writing in order to capture the colloquial speaking style of her narrator Sylvia, a young Black girl growing up in Harlem in the 1960s. The particular dialect that Sylvia narrates the story in—and that most of the characters use when speaking to each other in the dialogue sections of the story—can be categorized as African American Vernacular English, or AAVE.
The following passage—which comes as Sylvia is setting the scene of the story—captures the AAVE dialect in which Bambara writes:
So this one day Miss Moore rounds us all up at the mailbox and it’s puredee hot and she’s knockin herself out about arithmetic. And school suppose to let up in summer I heard, but she don’t never let up. And the starch in my pinafore scratching the shit outta me and I’m really hating this nappy-head bitch and her goddamn college degree.
Here Bambara changes the way some words are spelled in order to capture the sounds of Sylvia’s speech, such as writing “puredee hot” instead of “pretty hot” and “outta me” instead of “out of me.” Bambara also uses informal grammar, as seen in the way she writes “suppose to” instead of “supposed to” and “she don’t never let up” rather than “she never lets up.” Also notable is the way that Bambara weaves curse words into the writing, like in Sylvia’s description of her dress “scratching the shit outta [her]” and her description of Miss Moore as “this nappy-head bitch.”
Throughout the story, Bambara uses AAVE to make the story more true-to-life—as a Black woman who grew up in Harlem, she knows how a young Black girl would speak. She also highlights through Sylvia’s informal language that Black Americans have less access to formal education, which stems directly from racism and wealth inequality.
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