The role of dialect representation in speaking from the margins: "The Lesson" of Toni Cade Bambara.

"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."

--Toni Cade Bambara, "The Lesson"

African American philosopher George Yancy, exuberantly sensitive to the power of language in texts, asserts that in representing "the complexity of Black experiences," not just "any form of discursivity will do": the narrative content cannot be divorced from the narrative form; the narrative voice must speak in harmony with the reality it describes (275). "What other linguistic medium," asks Yancy, "could I use to articulate the rhythm, the fluidity, the angst.... and the beauty involved in traversing" the "ghetto streets" of youth than the dialect of African American English (273)? Within literature, African American authors confront this reality continually, weighing the value of speaking in the so-called "Standard" American English dialect against speaking in the languages of what Yancy calls their "nurture," those languages "which helped to capture the mood and texture of what it was like for [each] to live" (Yancy 273). Toni Cade Bambara, a Harlem-born author of the mid-twentieth century, chose to embrace the language of her culture and community, and in her hands that language became a powerful tool for describing a complex and distinct reality. An exploration of her use of dialect representation in the short story "The Lesson" enables a focused analysis of the usage of alternative dialects in art, for through dialect, Bambara discloses and explores empowerment, disapproval, and celebration, and successfully challenges how those listening hear the voice of the marginalized.

African American English (AAE, also called African American Vernacular English, AAVE) constitutes a major dialect of English spoken in the United States. Internally diverse like all dialects, AAE has a unique and potent history that reflects the ubiquitous tensions between so-called Standard American English (SAE) and variant dialects (Zeigler 588). Zeigler and Osinubi assess the tension between SAE and AAE in terms of the "larger postcolonial struggles of its speakers," who have long lived in an oppressive, utilitarian relationship in which European and American whites achieved domination through the dehumanization of Africans and African Americans (588). Because of this colonial relationship, the dialect that emerged among African American speakers was and is still heard in American culture, largely by SAE speakers, as an incorrect imitation of standard English (594). The years of "postcolonial denigration and stigmatization" of AAE following the abolition of slavery in the 1860s entrenched the dialect in a swamp of social prejudice and politically motivated rejection (595). African Americans seeking integration into mainstream America, as they "negotiate[d] and respond[ed] to the ... superstructures of power that determine[d] their" socio-cultural participation, were compelled to speak in the language of the educated white majority (589). For Yancy, it is still invaluable for African Americans engaged in dialogue with mainstream America to compose texts using SAE, despite the perpetuation of historical power structures through such consent (276). Though the embrace of SAE on the part of many African American activists and advocates demanded the broad acceptance of the full humanity of African Americans, there was a simultaneous abandonment of a significant and legitimate cultural heritage that originated in the rejection of African American language (Zeigler 592).

To counter this effect, marginalized, postcolonial African Americans chose and choose still "to reclaim their cultural identity" by reclaiming language (592). The reappropriation of African American English parallels the multivalent reimagining and recreation of black culture and community in all fields of African American experience. (1) For centuries, the opposed forces drawing AAE speakers into and away from mainstream culture and society, what Smitherman calls the "push-pull syndrome," has characterized African American discourse and art (Zeigler 600). The "tendency toward recreolization," the reintegration of nonstandard linguistic aspects into a dialect, is a powerful style of "reaction to the politics of oppression" (603). Yancy asserts that in performative or literary environments, the language actually becomes "a space of agency, contestation, self-definition, poiesis, and hermeneutic combat," of genuine self-assertion where an individual or collective self has been denied existence (277). When an author uses an alternative language such as AAE in English discourse, that language compels a text "into a space of established norms of linguistic propriety, calling into question and perhaps rupturing the authority" of the standard dialect (Yancy 276). A main site of this convergence and divergence within African American language and discourse is African American literature.

The literature African Americans produced in the twentieth century is laden with the languages of African American cultures and communities, reflecting the recognition in that era of language's power to describe plural and diverse realities (Heller 279). Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995) is a fitting representative of those authors, and her literature explores African American experience in the tumultuous mid-century decades with enthusiastic rigor ("Toni" 3). Bambara was raised in the Harlem community of New York City in the 1940s and '50s; she attended college in Queens and worked in the community throughout the 1960s (5). This experience centered Bambara's fiction, which deals extensively and almost exclusively with the lived experience of blacks in mid-century urban America (6). The author, eager to effect social change through the pairing of storytelling and activism, celebrated the lives of urban African Americans in her first set of short stories, published in 1972 (4). These stories specifically and exuberantly celebrate black English in the midst of that urban life as a means of communicating lived experiences inadequately described in other voices ("Toni" 4; Heller 279). As Yancy notes of AAE texts generally, Bambara's stories become "demonstrative enactments of the historical, stylistic, political, communicative, cognitive, and social ontological power of African American language" because she chooses to use AAE almost exclusively and always consciously (278). This use of "counter language," of a distinct, non-standard dialect, is of central importance to Bambara's fiction, which embraces the African American's struggle between convergence and divergence with the standard culture (Zeigler 603).

A linguistically representative tale drawn from this set of short stories is "The Lesson." "The Lesson" recounts a summer afternoon's events, narrated by an African American girl named Sylvia. It is unclear how much time has passed since that afternoon, on which a group of adolescents from an impoverished and unnamed African American district of New York venture uptown with Miss Moore, a college-educated black woman. Sylvia narrates in a distinct idiolect of AAE, and she and her friends also converse in AAE; a dialect nearer to SAE is represented by a clearly more economically privileged girl named Mercedes, and Miss Moore, the educated teacher, approximates SAE (Heller 279, 283). (2) A closer analysis of Bambara's employment of AAE is extremely useful in examining the complex functions of dialect representation in the literature of the historically marginalized and colonized.