Toni Cade Bambara's story "The Lesson" is one of my favorites to teach. I use it in my fiction writing class to talk about voice, the particular quality of language inherent to identity and community. In "The Lesson," a girl named Sylvia is taken, along with a group of her friends, from Harlem to F. A. O. Schwarz, where the neighborhood busybody Miss Moore shows them the expensive sailboats and paperweights that rich people can buy for the cost of what their own parents make in a year. "The lesson" Miss Moore teaches is about social class, a hierarchy on which Sylvia and her friends are toward the bottom, but there is another, more implicit lesson she's teaching: that to transcend social class, one must act right, even talk right, like the college-educated Miss Moore. Sylvia feels betrayed when her friend Sugar parrots Miss Moore's words back to her: "This is not much of a democracy if you ask me." For her part, Sylvia refuses to trade in the voice of her narration, which is feisty, slangy, and recognizably black.
I find Sylvia's resolve admirable. And I think what is amazing about "The Lesson" is that it shares that resolve. Bambara mines the language of her own Harlem upbringing, and refuses to dull the edges to make it more respectable, or even publishable. When it was published in 1972, the dominant voice of the literary short story was still that of Updike and O'Hara, and though it's easier to imagine a book written in a voice like this one today, I can't think of any. "The Lesson," along with many of the other stories in Bambara's collection Gorilla, My Love, stands alone, a testament to believing in one's own voice--and the voice of one's community and place--despite the pressures of a dominant literary culture.
But as many times as I'd taught "The Lesson," I'd never read the whole collection all the way through. I was really delighted to read "Sweet Town," another masterpiece of voice, but a different voice entirely. Kit, the narrator of "Sweet Town," is one of those teenagers who uses a vocabulary beyond their capability. I know this kind of teen well. Some of them do it to impress, but many of them do it for the same reason that Kit does: because they are entranced by the world of words, and believe that elevated words can create an elevated life. But Kit, like the teenagers I know, often misuse such words, and the resulting voice is touching and comic: "And then one day, having romped my soul through the spectrum of sunny colors, I dashed up to her apartment to escape the heat and found a letter from her which eternally elated my to the heart of bursture and generally endeared her to me forever." One can easily imagine the English teacher coming along with their red pen, crossing through words like "bursture," writing question marks next to "eternally," and ripping out the heart of that fantastic sentence.
Like "The Lesson," "Sweet Town" is a story that doesn't just use voice, but is about voice. When B. J., Kit's quasi-boyfriend, tells her that he is leaving town with a friend that Kit hates, she loses control of that voice:
I would have liked to have said, "Apollo, we are the only beautiful people in the world. And because our genes are so great, our kid can't help but burst through the skin into cosmic significance." I wanted to say, "You will bear in mind that I am great, brilliant, talented, good-looking, and am going to college at fifteen. I have the most interesting complexes ever, and despite Freud and Darwin I have made a healthy adjustment as an earthworm." But I didn't tell him this. Instead, I revealed that petty, small, mean side of me by saying "Eddie is a shithead."
Gorilla, My Love contains a small handful of such masterpieces, bristling with sharp characters, and most of all, powerful voices. In addition to "Sweet Town" and my old favorite "The Lesson," I really loved "Mississippi Ham Rider," about a black woman helping a white Alan Lomax-like record producer trying to convince aging southern bluesmen to record their music for posterity. The power of that story comes from the gray area the narrator occupies between the bluesman "Rider" and the producer, a space of identity between them that seems to expand and contract, as if to squeeze her out of it, at will. Many of the best stories are from the perspective of children, like the bitter sexual awakening of "The Basement" or the terrific title story, about a young girl dead set on making the adults of the world keep even their idlest of promises. Stories from children's perspectives are common, but I think it's rare to see a storyteller who can find the inherent nobility and dignity in childhood, especially in a way that doesn't veer into cutesiness.
The one misstep in the collection, I thought, was "The Survivor," a story about a pregnant actress, traveling to the home of her doula mother to give birth, still struggling with the car crash death of her abusive husband, who had been her director. "The Survivor" is the story most like Bambara's lovely but messy novel The Salt-Eaters, with its erratic time jumps, italicized sections, and slippages between reality and dreams. The Salt-Eaters works because it lets you jump in and ride the flow of it, but there's no space in a story like "The Survivor" to let such tricks run their course. Similar themes are explored much better in a story like "The Johnson Girls," about a large family of sisters who quibble over what exactly is owed to one of their boyfriends, and how to bring him to heel.
Gorilla, My Love convinced me that Bambara is something of an unsung master of the short story. I'd go so far as to say the stories in this collection are like an uptown version of Grace Paley's downtown masterpieces. Not everything in Gorilla, My Love stands out as strongly as "Sweet Town," "The Lesson," or "Gorilla, My Love," but even the mid-tier stories are powerful character portraits, stories that speak from a deep and authentic place.
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