SOURCE: "Youth in Toni Cade Bambara's Gorilla, My Love," in Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, University Press of Mississippi, 1984, pp. 215-32.

Hargrove is an American educator and the author of works on T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath. In the following essay, first published in 1983 in Southern Quarterly, she examines Bambara's focus on adolescence and youth in Gorilla, My Love.

In reading Toni Cade Bambara's collection of short stories, Gorilla, My Love (1972), one is immediately struck by her portrayal of black life and by her faithful reproduction of black dialect. Her first-person narrators speak conversationally and authentically: "So Hunca Bubba in the back with the pecans and Baby Jason, and he in love…. there's a movie house … which I ax about. Cause I am a movie freak from way back, even though it do get me in trouble sometime." What Twain's narrator...