The Lesson

“Back in the days when everyone was old and stupid or young and foolish and me and Sugar were the only ones just right, this lady moved into our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup.” 

This opening sentence shows the narrator’s conspiratorial closeness to Sugar: a closeness based in part on making fun of everyone else around them. The sentence also implies the rift that will open up between the narrator and Sugar later in the story. 

“She been screwed into the go-along for so long, it’s a blood-deep natural thing with her. Which is how she got saddled with me and Sugar and Junior in the first place while our mothers were in a la-de-da apartment up the block having a good ole time.” 

The narrator’s living situation is unconventional; she lives with her Aunt Gretchen, while her mother lives nearby with another aunt. However, this is the only mention in the story that the narrator makes of her home life. We understand that—apart from her best friend and cousin Sugar—her real community is not so much in her home as in her neighborhood. We also understand that as forthcoming and chatty as the narrator generally is, there are certain topics that she would prefer not to discuss. 

“And then she gets to the part about we all poor and live in slums, which I don’t feature. And I’m ready to speak on that, but she steps out in the street and hails two cabs just like that.” 

The narrator does not think of herself as poor, only of the denizens of Fifth Avenue as weirdly pampered and rich. In other words, she thinks of herself as the normal one, and part of her frustration and resentment around Miss Moore lies in the fact that Miss Moore is constantly pointing her poverty out to her. 

“Then we check out that we on Fifth Avenue and everybody dressed up in stockings. One lady in a fur coat, hot as it is. White folks crazy.” 

The narrator does not exactly envy the rich white people on Fifth Avenue but merely finds them odd; seeing them through her blunt quizzical eyes, the reader finds them odd as well. It is Miss Moore who encourages the narrator to envy them, and to demand a share of what they have.  

“My eyes tell me it’s a chunk of glass cracked with something heavy, and different-color inks dripped into the splits, then the whole thing put into a oven or something. But for 480 dollars it don’t make sense.” 

The narrator has never seen a fancy paperweight before, and its foreignness to her makes her see it more clearly, in a certain way. In trying to figure what its purpose is—let alone why it costs as much as it does—she must study it very closely. The description shows the narrator’s brisk, puzzled relation to the world around her in general, and how she has had to cope with the frequent disorientation and upheaval of her life by being extremely alert. 

“So once again we tumble all over each other to gaze at this magnificent thing in the toy store which is just big enough to sail two kittens across the pond if you strap them to the posts tight.” 

The narrator views the sailboat in the window of the toy store with a mixture of bemusement and awe. On the one hand, she recognizes its beauty as an object; on the other, she sees that it is useless as a toy. She intuitively recognizes that, like many of the other objects in the toy store, it is not really intended for children but rather for status-mongering adults. 

“We look at Miss Moore and she lookin at us, waiting for I dunno what.”

This sentence shows the communication gap between Miss Moore and the children whom she has taken under her wing. She disguises her own confusion with an expectant schoolteacher’s air; the children intuit her confusion nevertheless, and it confuses them.

“If you gonna mess up a perfectly good swim day least you could do is have some answers.” 

The narrator recognizes that Miss Moore does not really have any answers, behind her professorial demeanor. She is instead looking to the children for answers: hoping to rouse them to action and social consciousness in a way that she has not really thought through. She has led them to a place where they feel stranded and confused, and while she physically leads them back to their neighborhood, in a larger sense she does not know how to lead them back home. 

“Not that I’m scared, what’s there to be afraid of, just a toy store. But I feel funny, shame. But what I got to be shamed about?” 

The shame that the narrator feels in the toy store is complex. She feels shame as an obvious outsider in the store, due to her race, her culture and—perhaps most especially—her poverty. In an environment where money is overtly worshipped, poor people like her are demonized. The narrator also feels shame for desiring the items in the store, not only because these items are far too expensive for her, but because her desire is one thing that links her to the store’s wealthy customers whom she so distrusts.  

“And it’s like the time me and Sugar crashed into the Catholic church on a dare. But once we got in there and everything so hushed and holy and the candles and the bow-in and the handkerchiefs on all of the drooping heads, I just couldn’t go through with the plan.” 

The narrator perceives that the store is like a church in its atmosphere of hushed decorum and exclusiveness. It is available only to insiders, who are aware of its rituals and codes. The narrator also perceives the power of this sort of communal ritualized silence, and how her own independent and outspoken nature is no match against it.  

“Then Sugar run a finger over the whole boat. And I’m jealous and want to hit her. Maybe not her, but I sure want to punch somebody in the mouth.” 

The narrator is angry at being put in a situation where she is an outsider, and is furthermore constricted from being able to express herself; it is therefore natural that she would want to hit someone, even or especially someone intimate to her, as Sugar is. The narrator will end up lashing out at Sugar eventually, which this small moment foreshadows. 

“I’m mad, but I won’t give her that satisfaction.”

The narrator senses that Miss Moore expects her and the other children to be righteously angered by their outing to the toy store. Because she feels manipulated by Miss Moore, and also because her anger is complex and subtle—encompassing much more than the difference between her neighborhood and Fifth Avenue—she chooses silence as a means of resistance and of honoring her own conflicted feelings. 

“Thirty-five dollars could buy new bunk beds for Junior and Gretchen’s boy. Thirty-five dollars and the whole household could go visit Granddaddy Nelson in the country. Thirty-five dollars would pay for the rent and the piano bill too.” 

This passage shows the economic chasm that exists between the narrator’s world and the world of the Fifth Avenue toy store, where a clown toy costs more than a month’s rent. It also shows the narrator’s acute (and precocious) awareness of money and what things cost: an awareness that, ironically, links her to the alien wealthy people in the toy store.