Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

African American author, Toni Cade Bambara, was born on March 25th 1939 and lived the first ten years of her life in Harlem. Plagued by the fact that she was African American and living in a time of such racism, Bambara’s works contain both a capacity for laughter as well as a capacity for rage. She spent her entire life writing about both. “Her ability to laugh and imbue laughter into her stories came from her strong conviction and belief in family and community. Her rage came from the injustices she saw in the treatment of children, elderly, and the oppressed Black community” (bedfordstmartins.com). Bambara believed that her mother had a great respect for the life of the mind and always encouraged the author to go with her heart. In one of her anthologies Bambara remembers her mother by saying “Mama, who in 1948, having come upon me daydreaming in the middle of the kitchen floor, mopped around me” (georgetown.edu). Her mother was her true source of inspiration. In her short story, The Lesson, many of her personal beliefs and attitudes are apparent. First off, the story is about a poor family of African American children who take a trip into the city with an old woman named Miss Moore. While on their little t