DOI: 10.7763/IPEDR. 2012. V51. 23

An African American Study of “The Lesson”, Toni Cade Bambara’s Short Story

+ Naderi, Leila Islamic Azad University, Marivan Branch

Abstract. An outstanding feature of African American literature has been proved to be a distinctive variety of English language used prevalently among black communities in the United States of America. Toni Cade Bambara is one of the African American Authors for whom language goes beyond a mere tool of communication. The present article deals with the concept of African American vernacular English in her short story ‘The Lesson’. The first part of the article considers the linguistic features which make the language of the text distinctively black and the second part of the article is an attempt to read the text through Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey to uncover some layers of African American texts. Keywords: Black English, African American Heritage, Criticism, The Signifyin(g) Monkey.

Who are these people that spend that much for performing clowns and $1000 for toy sailboats? What kinda work they do and how they live and how come we ain't in on it? Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointin out. But it don't necessarily have to be that way, she always adds then waits for somebody to say that poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie and don't none of us know what kind of pie she talking about in the first damn place. But she ain't so smart cause I still got her four dollars from the taxi and she sure ain't gettin it Messin up my day with this shit. Sugar nudges me in my pocket and winks. Toni Cade Bambara “The Lesson” [1] 1. Introduction Kendra Hamilton in his “Dialect Dilemma” believes that the conventional wisdom regarding English speech communities is simply that “dialects are bad Standard English” [2] which seems to be true about each nation as a reflection of hegemonic mainstream of marginalizing of minorities and all that related to them. This basic institutional principle will be intensified if other factors such as race, class and sex are added to it. However, he proclaims that sociolinguistics is based on the fact that all dialects are created equal and standardization of a language is not founded on an acceptable standard but rather on an arbitrary standard. Nevertheless, cultural and political forces construct two drastically different views toward English dialects (spoken by such minorities as ) and Standard English. The 1970s has been considered the golden era of African American literature in the way that the appropriateness of white critical theories for evaluation of black arts were called into question by the and as a result the marginalized black authors who were excluded from the American canon attracted the universal attention. They championed the validity of African American literature as works that are distinctly black and self-determined. An outstanding feature of African American literature has been proved to be a distinctive variety of English language used prevalently among black communities in the United States. Even though the use of African American vernacular English (AAVE) by black writers might at least partially be a reflection of a natural and inevitable process of linguistic transformation, the black writers devote it to overtly political and social issues. “I believe that black writers both explicitly and implicitly turn to the vernacular in various formal ways to inform their creation of writing fiction” [3], argues Henry Louis Gate Jr. in his Introduction to The Signifying Monkey. Indeed for an outstanding number of black authors language goes beyond a mere tool of communication.

+ Corresponding author. Tel: 008615623521445 – 00989183803105. E-mail address: [email protected]. 102 2. African American Voices 2.1. Black English At least until recently AAVE has rarely been tolerated by American culture which is dominated by Standard English language. In fact, on one hand AAVE has been regarded as a failed version of Standard English spoken by black people, hence an inferior to the language spoken by whites; on the other hand, as a result of white hegemonic dictations, the black communities internalized the superiorities of standard English and the inferiority of AAVE as a deviated version of the former. Consequently, African American critics were among the first to level a charge against the early African American writers who used dialect in their work. Referring to this concept Raymond Hicky in his book, Varieties of English in Writing: the Written Words as Linguistic Evidence, mentions that African American writers of the early twentieth century “avoided dialect and themes of folk culture in their work precisely to avoid invoking such negative stereotypes, and those who did notably Paul Dunbar and Zora Neale Hurston came in for censor by other African American authors and critics of their era” [4] Nevertheless, from mid-twentieth century onward African American authors has influentially used black dialect as a tool for new artistic and linguistic purposes which contributed to uncovering more layers of African American culture and they have received more recognition as they were subsumed under the category of black in the racial critique. At the same time, many experts studied, investigated and reinterpreted it as a “dynamic and colorful dialect”, as Geneva Smitherman calls it, which carries the plurality of history, culture, identity and heritage of its speakers. Toni Cade Bambara is among many black authors who skillfully developed AAVE to decode the “unspeakable things unspoken” to use ’s term.

2.2. Bambara’s Use of Black Dialect Bambara who like most of other black writers could not escape from political issues in her writing and this is an indisputable fact which Bernard Alger Drew argues that she “could not fathom prose without politics” [5], is also a master of employing AAVE in her fiction. Furthermore, she fortified it in her interview with Beverly Guy-Sheftall by telling that writing for her was “an act of language first and foremost” [6]. In her artistic hand language became a tool which represents innovative truth of black voices. An exploration of her use of dialect in her short story “The Lesson”, which was among her first set of short stories published in 1972 and is the most anthologized one, through an African American view uncovers an alternative layer of language which calls into question the social and ideological norms which form the warp and woof of the language. The conflict between AAVE and Standard English is as outstanding as the economic inequalities between Whites and Blacks in the short story. In fact, Bambara uses AAVE which does not have the inadequacies of Standard English to represent her intention and meaning. Significantly, the mere usage of AAVE in black texts in general and Bambara’s work specifically is not an end in itself; rather it plays the role of a tool for social and political reforms. Hence, the present article tries to highlight those distinct linguistic features which have the potentiality to reproduce black culture and black social and individual identity. The black dialect which used to be an instrument for denigrating African American speakers, or even has been the topic of jokes and derogatory remarks and a subject for comedians, in the artistic hand of the author became a device to reinterpret the truth of black lives.

2.3. Features of Black Dialect in “The Lesson” Bambara is using AAVE to reflect the thought patterns of the adolescent narrator and to signify the difference on values held by the narrator and the teacher. She gives a voice to the young intelligent black female protagonist to speak in her own language. The narrator of the story, a young working class girl like the author, has grown up during the 1940s and 1950s in ’s and Bedford-Stuyvesant communities. Janet Ruth Heller in her article, “Toni Cade Bambara’s Use of AAVE in The Lesson”, believes that it is AAVE that “adds realism and humor to Sylvia’s narrative” both of which concern black issues [7]. To put it another way, Sylvia’s outstanding reaction to her environment is her very use of AAVE. The opening paragraph of the story reveals the struggling relation between AAVE and Standard English through Sylvia’s critical introducing of “this lady” who “has nappy hair and proper speech” and has “been to 103 college” all of which might be enough for the black children to “laughed at” and even “hated her”. Miss Moore is the only one in the neighborhood “with no first name”; her state of being called “lady”, her educational background, her “proper speech” make the kids to associate her to the white bourgeois class which emphasizes the children’s distance from her. Hence the narrator and other children feel alienated from her which indeed is the consequence of their awareness of their being marginalized by the dominant culture. The narrator ironically at the same time continues introducing Miss Moore criticizing that “she was black as hell” which illustrate that the narrator is actually aware of all stereotypical significances of black as whatever which is “wicked, evil, gloomy, calamitous and dishonorable”. However this attitude toward Miss Moore and her “boring-ass” lesson is at least partially unraveled and she is understood by narrator because their short but deep trip that seems to be about arithmetic turns to be a revolutionary experience. She makes them question the fairness of social and economic class stratification in a country which appears to be the representative of Democracy. Miss Moore is accepted by the kids on the fact that she does not try to implement the prescribed theories she might have learned at established educational institutes; rather she attempts to help them to apprehend the significant of the fact that “poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie”. However, the young kids particularly the narrator at least partially express their reactions linguistically. A short linguistic survey of the story reveals different layers of black culture intended by the author. The author fills the text with taboo words, AAVE vocabulary and syntax and sentence fragments which are common in AAVE. “Phonologically the differences between AAVE and SE are most noticeable in the consonant system” [8] claims Gunnel Tottie in her An Introduction to American English. She continues that reduction of word-final clusters are frequent in AAVE and consequently words like ‘build’ and ‘bill’ or ‘coal’ and ‘cold’ tend to become homophones. Moreover, Janet Ruth Heller associates Sylvia’s use of AAVE phonological rules to her ethnicity. Both Heller and Katy M. Wright in their articles assert that Sylvia’s breaking down of consonant clusters and shortening of words are features of AAVE. Omitting one of the consonants or adding extra vowels in “ole” for old, for instance, is Sylvia’s technique for breaking down the consonant clusters. Some common shortening for Bambara’s characters are “fore” for before, “shamed” for ashamed and “cause” for because. John Baugh in his Black Street Speech asserts that these sorts of shortenings are very common for African American speakers [9]. Sylvia’s widespread changing of the velar nasal, [ŋ], to alveolar nasal, [n], throughout the text can also be observed as the author’s emphasis on the dialect. “knockin, punchin, hangin, screamin, somthinorother, plannin, lyin, watchin and goin” are among other verbs used according to this rule throughout the story. More significant is Sylvia’s syntax which reveals to carry AA heritage. Sylvia does not make a distinct between adjective and adverb in different situations; she explains that her family members “moved North the same time and to the same apartment then spread out gradual to breathe”, she later on asserts the kid’s attitude toward the taxi driver “so we talked about his mama something ferocious”, these two examples are among several other cases of using adjective in an adverbial position. The narrator of the story like speakers of AAVE uses article ‘a’ before vowel sound; “then the whole thing put into a oven”. She repetitively uses objective pronoun in subjective position which is also common to AAVE, “So right away me and Sugar curtsy to each other and then…”. “ The absence of copula and auxiliary for contractible forms of ‘is’ and ‘are’ has been one of the most often described structure of AAVE” [10] claims Walt Wolfram. Introducing Miss Moore, Sylvia asserts: “She not even related by marriage or blood”. 3. Layers of Social Meanings within Black Dialect In her article “The Rule of Dialect Representation in Speaking from the Margins: the Lesson of Toni Cade Bambara” [11] Katy M. Wright claims that deviation and the omissions of standard rules such as prepositions or conjunctions do not leave the meaning unclear. She admires black dialect’s omission of unnecessary items and continues that the phrase “just to get- all broke up” is not incomplete since the context makes it clear that the speaker means “it” or “the toy sail boat” hence there is no ambiguity and the story is free of obscurity. However there are other evidences that not only the author but also the black dialect welcomes ambiguity. Considering the tenses of the story, the absence of tense-indicative morphemes in the text as in “I mean real money, she say”, “So we ready” or in “And she know damn well” among many others, 104 temporally makes the text plural and dynamic. The plurality of the tense penetrates additional levels of meaning. An obvious notion which may be a frequent theme in African American fiction is the idea that past is not a finished action and present cannot be cut off from the future and past. Neither culturally nor linguistically can the black be separated from African heritage. This presence of past in the present emphasizes on unfinalized aspect of black issues. Lack of linear temporality brings indeterminacy and a sort of continuity of black’s troubles. Hence, today is not the past generations’ tomorrow: it is not the hopeful future of the emancipated slaves. The suppression is not over. In this view the black issues is a current problem; always present. One seminal explanation for the plurality and multi-layered aspects of AAVE is Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifin(g) Monkey. The black (the Africans) who were transported across the ocean were deprived of their native language and were handed the language which defined them less than human. The crossroad of the white language and the black vernacular evokes the black consciousness. According to Gates, the signifin(g) stands as the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discourse. He compares the black concept of signifin(g) to “stumbling unaware into a hall of mirrors”[12]. For Gates the same sign means different things to different communities within America. Thus, the very ordinary Standard English “demand one’s share of the pie” or the everyday term “naked eye” seems queer for the young black community in the story. “By supplanting the received term’s associated concept, the black vernacular tradition created a homonymic pun of the profoundest sort, thereby marking its sense of difference from the rest of the English community of speakers” argues Gates. Therefore, Sylvia’s language stands in contrast with Miss Moore’s which reflects the language of middle-class white people. Roger D. Abrahams in his several significant studies on Gate’s The Signifying Monkey made it more understandable. Signifyin(g), he argues, “is the language of trickery, it can mean to talk about a subject without mentioning it, to cajole, to lie, to make fun of a person or a situation” [13] hence, it connote implying a range of meanings and in this view Gates proclaims the superiority of AAVE to Standard English. The signifying Monkey is far from the center in which language is mono-voiced, fixed and singular; in contrast, Signifying Monkey is in margin in which language is indeterminate, plural and multi-accentuality. This is, according to Gates, the characteristics of black language which stands in opposite to uniformity of Standard English. Sylvia’s silence, her playful use of language, her sense of humor and indeed the Black connotative meanings she uses associate with Gate’s Signifying Monkey which roots in African American culture. Sylvia’s silence is the long-time ignorance of blacks by whites. In other words blacks are invisible citizens and it makes them devoiced. Readers know definitely that Sylvia understands and is more conscious about her concerns as a black girl. She is mute; this silence partly comes out of whites hegemony which has had devoiced a variety of minorities and partly as a sort of resisting English as the language of imperialism. Thus, she penetrates her black issues into the language through signs whenever she needs to illustrate her differences. There are many other black authors beside Bambara who believe that American Standard English is incomplete and ineffective to express the truth about African Americans. In other words the problems of blacks are uncommunicative through American Standard English. Hence they choose a version of their own which mainly roots in African American culture; a grammatically and structurally distorted English with numerous gaps and silences and with significant wits and humors and even with a distinctive rhythm derived from jazz and blues. Sylvia’s language is full of deviations of norm; however her language is effective and quite adequate. Her language which is a part of her identity gives her a sort of confidence. Her language has the same difficulty of dealing with the visual redoubling in Gates’ “hall of mirror”. Thus the very African American Vernacular English is a tool of self-expression and a way to connect Sylvia to her community as a young black girl. It is an opening to black issues and develops the themes of social inequalities. It also gives the speaker both as an author and a character a sense of self confidence and power. 4. References [1] T. C. Bambara. The Lesson. Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound and Sense. 9th (eds.) T. Wadsworth. KSU, 2005. [2] K. Hamilton. “The Dialect Dilemma” Black Issues in Higher Education. Vol. 22, No. 2005, pp. 34-36 105 [3] H. L. Gates. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford UP, 1989. [4] R. Hicky. Varieties of English in Writing: the Written Words as Linguistic Evidence. The Netherland: John Benjamines B.V., 2010. [5] B. R. Drew. 100 Most Popular African American Authors: Biography, Sketches and Bibliographies. Greenwood PG, 2007. [6] B. Guy-Sheftall. Commitment: Toni Cade Bambara Speaks Sturdy Black Bridges. (eds.), Anchor Press, Doubleday. 1979, 230-49. [7] J. R. Heller. Toni Cade Bambara’s Use of African American Vernacular English in The Lesson. Style: Vol. 32, No. 3, Fall 2003: 279-293. [8] G. Tottie. An Introduction to American English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. [9] J. Baugh. African-American English: Structure, History and Use. London: Routledge, 1998. [10] W. Wolfram. Variation in Language: overview. In Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics II. Oxford: Elsevier, 333-40 [11] K. M. Wright. The Rule of Dialect Representation in Speaking from the Margins: The Lesson of Toni Cade Bambara. Style: Vol. 42, No.1, Spring 2008: 74- 75.

106