The Lesson

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.