The Lesson

Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1972

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Literary Devices

Use of Slang and Dialect

This story is written in the first person, and the narrator speaks to us as if she is speaking out loud. Words such as “nuthin” are written as she would say them, and many of the sentences in the story break one grammatical rule or another. However, they are faithful to the narrator’s speech, the speed of her thoughts, and the sureness and oddity of her perceptions. They convey the narrator’s native intelligence and give the story the intimacy of a confession.

The opening sentence of the story seems casual but also does several things at once: “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 on our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup” (87). To begin with, this sentence introduces both Sugar and Miss Moore, two central characters in the story, one an ally of the narrator’s (Sugar) and the other an antagonist (Miss Moore). We know straightaway that Miss Moore is an outsider and that the narrator views her with suspicion; we also gather that the narrator is looking back on a time when she and Sugar were close—almost to the exclusion of everyone else around them—and that they are no longer as close. We can also deduce that while the narrator is looking back on the events of the story from a distance, it is not quite an adult distance: more like a distance of a few years, perhaps. We can deduce this from the narrator’s voice, which remains the voice of a young adult, in its irreverence and breathlessness (“this lady”).

In Medias Res Narration

“In medias res” is a Latin term that means literally “in the center of things” and refers to a style of narration that puts the reader right in the center of the action, without introduction or preamble. We see this style of narration often in this story, for instance when the narrator mentions the other children on her block, who are also going along on Miss Moore’s expedition: “So me and Sugar leaning on the mailbox being surly, which is a Miss Moore word. And Flyboy checking out what everybody bought for lunch. And Fat Butt already wasting his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich like the pig he is […]” (88). The narrator never bothers to give us the backgrounds of these other children, or to explain exactly what their relation to her is; instead, she simply puts them on the page and lets the reader make of them what they will. Such a lack of formality gives the story a swirling immediacy—as if the reader were just set down in a crowd of noisy strangers—and also echoes the bluntness and informality of the narrator’s city neighborhood.

Understatement and Indirection

The tone of this story is generally blunt and brash, and the narrator describes herself as a person who has “never been shy about doing nothing or going nowhere” (93). This brashness serves to make the silences and evasions in the story more striking. For instance, while the narrator spends a lot of time describing Miss Moore and the many ways that she is strange and irritating, she is relatively circumspect when describing her own family situation. We learn only that she does not live with her own mother but with her long-suffering Aunt Gretchen, who has also taken over the care of her cousin Sugar. The narrator is also taciturn about describing the effect that the outing to the toy store has had on her, in part because she does not fully understand it herself. She says only that it has given her a funny feeling, and that she intends to go off by herself to “think this day through” (96). Elisions like these, occasional and subtle as they are, serve to give the story its underlying drama.