The Lesson

“The Lesson” is the title of this short story, and it seems ironic in its simplicity and directness. While Miss Moore does intend to teach the children in the story a lesson—in taking them to a fancy toy store in a neighborhood where they are social outsiders—the aim of this lesson is unclear. It moreover seems unclear even to Miss Moore herself, who seems to be looking to the children to interpret the meaning of the excursion and to translate this meaning into decisive action.

The narrator registers Miss Moore’s adult indecisiveness and hypocrisy, and is angrier with her than she is with the rich white denizens of Fifth Avenue, by whom she is merely bemused: “One lady in a fur coat, hot as it is. White folks crazy” (89). Rich white people are simply alien to the narrator, and while she is amazed by their level of privilege and entitlement, she also cannot conceive of living in the way that they do. Miss Moore, on the other hand, is a part of the narrator’s community, even while she sets herself apart from it and implicitly tells the narrator that their community is disadvantaged and inferior, something to be transcended and left behind. Miss Moore does not count on the narrator’s pride and stubbornness, or on people’s general instinctive dislike of being pitied and lectured.

The narrator intuits the abstract and poorly defined nature of Miss Moore’s mission and challenges her on it: “Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointin out. But it don’t necessarily have to be that way, she always adds then waits for somebody to say that poor people have to wake up and demand their share of the pie and don’t none of us know what kind of pie she talkin about in the first damn place” (94-95). Miss Moore is asking the narrator and the other children to get angry about a social abstraction: the unequal division of wealth in the United States. However, most children do not think abstractly, even while they often see the world more clearly than adults do. The narrator is already aware, in a concrete way, that other people have more money than she does; at the same time, she has not exactly been accustomed to thinking of herself as poor. She finds herself coveting the items in the toy store, while also being made to feel out of place there; yet the excursion has also served to make her own neighborhood suddenly alien to her, and to make her see her daily surroundings through Miss Moore’s disapproving eyes. 

This is why the narrator demands of Miss Moore, while they are still in the toy store, “Watcha bring us here for, Miss Moore?” (94). Miss Moore then turns the question back on the narrator: a classic teacher’s technique, which allows her to evade the fact that she cannot really answer the question. She has wanted the children to respond to the toys in the toy store as symbols of wealth and social inequality, rather than simply as toys; she has had a vague expectation that the outing will open up the children’s eyes to their underprivileged status, but it has only made them feel stranded and inadequate instead. As children, in any case, they are still dependent on the adults around them and are unable to realize whatever revolutionary impulses the outing might have given them. Also as children, they tend to live in the moment, rather than in the future.

In the story’s final paragraph, the narrator, disappointed in her cousin Sugar for telling Miss Moore exactly what she wants to hear—a typical child’s survival instinct that Miss Moore has failed to credit—takes her revenge on both of them by taking off on her own, with Miss Moore’s $4 still in her pocket. She does not follow Sugar to their usual neighborhood haunts; nor does she go back to the world of Fifth Avenue. Instead, she takes off in her own direction, a lonely in-between place where she hopes to get back her bearings: “I’m goin to the West End and then over to the Drive to think this day through […] ain’t nobody gonna beat me at nuthin” (96).