In Toni Cade Bambara’s short story,"The Lesson" (1972), the narrator, Sylvia, speaks in African American Vernacular English(AAVE).
“And I'm ready to speak on that, but she steps out in the street and hails two cabs just like that.”
This is an appropriate dialect for Sylvia because she is a working class black child who lives in a New York ghetto; AAVE is a dialect which Bambara would have learned growing up during the 1940s and 1950s in New York City’s Harlem and Bedford- Stuyvesant communities. AAVE adds realism to Sylvia’s narrative by portraying the theme of lessons; black children's’ need to learn about the world outside their ghetto and the unequal distribution of wealth in American Society.
FIGURE 3
More specifically the use of “like” as a filler word, marks the characters as children. By using “like”, Bambara reinforces the childlike characteristics of Sylvia. For example, the word ‘like’ is used 28 times (FIG. 3) in "The Lesson", but less than half of those ‘likes’ are used in conjunction with a simile, while the other ‘likes’ are used as filler words. The improper "use of ‘like’ seems to appear most commonly among natively English-speaking children and adolescents”. Sylvia’s constant repetition of “like” as a filler word instead of as a simile, emphasizes their immaturity.