Lying to Children to Understand Racism

In Toni Cade Bambara’s “Gorilla, My Love,” the narrator, a young black girl, suffers great sadness after repeatedly being deceived by the adults she encounters her life. These disappointments the narrator experiences can be interpreted as parallel to the experiences of blacks in the post-Civil War era. Due to the framing of the story from a child’s perspective, a universal understanding of the emotions the narrator feels in the story is established and readers can connect those feelings with the injustice of the Jim Crow era. Using this direction, the relevancy of the narrator’s race becomes obvious and the instances of the narrator not being taken seriously and being looked down upon are emphasized.