Identify – In the short story “Gorilla, My Love” by Toni Cade, Cade emphasizes the formal element of deception, saying that “if you say Gorilla, My Love, you suppose to mean it. Just like when you say you goin to give me a party on my birthday, you gotta mean it. And if you say me and Baby Jason can go South pecan haulin with Granddaddy Vale, you better not be comin up with no stuff about the weather look uncertain or did you mop the bathroom or any other trickified business.”
Contextualize – The main character of the story, Hazel, is a young black girl that has lost her trust in adults due to their patronizing and backpedaling nature when dealing with children.
Claim – I believe that Cade’s depiction of the deception that Hazel goes through serves as an analogy for the experience that black Americans have gone through throughout their more recent history in the United States. By shifting the perspective to that of a child, it becomes much more understandable to a broader audience, as everyone has been a child at some point, but not everyone is black.
Explicate – Hazel’s numerous incidents with adults and her resulting lack of trust in any grown-up can be understood as the many injustices that black Americans have faced during the post-Civil War era. Much like how Hazel is promised many things like a specific movie, a birthday party, and marriage, emancipated African-Americans were seemingly promised complete freedom and just treatment; however, the Jim Crow era was the complete opposite of what they expected, violating their trust in the American government, which can be interpreted as adults in the context of the story. The arguably inconclusive ending of the story also symbolizes the continued turmoil of black Americans in the modern age; Hazel’s mistrust of adults is left unresolved and presumably continues into her teen and young adult years, much like how we have seen a resurgence in racial activism among the black community. The final note about Hazel and Baby Jason being blood brothers and sticking together forever can also parallel how black Americans, or any other minority group in general, tend towards others of the same race.