In the short story “The Lesson” by Toni Cade Bambara, Miss Moore is moving into an apartment in the same block as Sylvia. Miss Moore is unlike any other African American in the neighborhood because she always dresses so formal. She is volunteering to take Sylvia and her cousin Sugar to educational events for their benefit. A few days before Christmas, Miss Moore takes the children on a field trip and she starts off by talking about how much things cost, what their parents could earn, and the unequal division of wealth in the United States. The children see so many expensive, yet valuable items outside of F.A.O such as: an expensive paperweight, a microscope, and a sailboat that costs a lot of money. They begin to wonder why the sailboat costs way more then their own homes, but Sylvia feels uncomfortable in the store. Her uncomfortable feeling reminds her of the time when she made a noise in the Catholic …show more content…
She is around 10 years old and lives in Harlem in the 1960’s. She’s black and angry but does not fully understand why she is angry, or it’s connection to being black. Although, that is not to say she is not intelligent, on the contrary, she is rather sharp as shown throughout the short story. As the first-person narrator, Sylvia tells the story from her point of view – Sylvia has attitude; she sets the tone with the first sentence in the story with her conversational tone in Harlem dialect. She hates Miss Moore, “this lade moved on our block with nappy hair and proper speech and no makeup.” Sylvia makes disparaging remarks about the other children too, for example, she nicknames one of the other kids “Big Butt”. Sylvia is a bit of a bully and sometimes tries to control the other kids. When Miss Moore asks Sylvia’s cousin Sugar a question, Sylvia stands on Sugar’s foot to keep her from answering the question. She makes fun of the characteristics of the other throughout the story it means of creating their characters