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Gorilla, My Love | Youth in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love

In the following essay excerpt, Hargrove discusses Hazel’s narrative voice 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 firstperson 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 Huck Finn did for the dialect of middle America in the mid-nineteenth century, Bambara’s narrators do for contemporary black dialect. Indeed, in the words of one reviewer, Caren Dybek, Bambara ‘‘possesses one of the finest ears for the nuances of black English’’ (‘‘Black Literature’’ 66). In portraying black life, she presents a wide range of black characters, and she uses as settings Brooklyn, Harlem, or unnamed black sections of New York City, except for three stories which take place in rural areas. Finally, the situations are typical of black urban experience: two policemen confront a black man shooting basketball in a New York park at night; young black activists gather the community members at a Black Power rally; a group of black children from the slums visit F.A.O. Schwartz and are amazed at the prices of toys. Bambara’s stories communicate with shattering force and directness both the grim reality of the black world—its violence, poverty, and harshness—and its strength and beauty—strong family ties, individual determination, and a sense of cultural traditions. Lucille Clifton has said of her work, ‘‘She has captured it all, how we really talk, how we really are,’’ and the Saturday Review has called Gorilla, My Love ‘‘among the best portraits of black life to have appeared in some time.’’

Although her work teems with the life and language of black people, what is equally striking about it, and about this collection particularly, is the universality of its themes. Her fiction reveals the pain and the joy of the human experience in general, of what it means to be human, and most often of what it means to be young and human. One of Bambara’s special gifts as a writer of fiction is her ability to portray with sensitivity and compassion the experiences of children from their point of view. In the fifteen stories that compose Gorilla, My Love, all the main characters are female, thirteen of them are first-person narrators, and ten of them are young, either teenagers or children. They are wonderful creations, especially the young ones, many of whom show similar traits of character; they are intelligent, imaginative, sensitive, proud and arrogant, witty, tough, but also poignantly vulnerable. Through these young central characters, Bambara expresses the fragility, the pain, and occasionally the promise of the experience of growing up, of coming to terms with a world that is hostile, chaotic, violent. Disillusionment, loss, and loneliness, as well as unselfishness, love, and endurance, are elements of that process of maturation which her young protagonists undergo. . . .

With great sensitivity Bambara portrays through Hazel in ‘‘Gorilla, My Love’’ the feelings of pain and betrayal experienced by a child in a situation that adults would generally consider trivial or ridiculous. When Hazel was very young, her favorite uncle, Hunca Bubba, promised to marry her when she grew up, a promise which he gave lightly but which she took seriously. The story, centers on her discovery that he has not only dropped the affectionate name Hunca Bubba, but also intends to marry someone else. For Hazel this bitter betrayal reveals to her that even adults who are ‘‘family’’ cannot be trusted to keep their promises. Her disillusionment is intense and painful; as she says,’’ I ain’t playin. I’m hurtin. . . ., ’’ speaking the words of the original title of the story.

Hazel’s realization and subsequent disillusionment are skillfully prepared for from the opening lines, where the idea of unpleasant changes is introduced through her first-person narration: ‘‘That was the year Hunca Bubba changed his name. Not a change up, but a change back, since Jefferson Winston Vale was the name in the first place. Which was news to me cause he’d been my Hunca Bubba my whole lifetime, since I couldn’t manage Uncle to save my life.’’ Further foreshadowing follows. From Hazel the reader learns that she, her grandfather, Hunca Bubba, and her younger brother are in a car driving to an undisclosed destination when Hunca Bubba begins talking about the woman he loves. Hazel affects boredom with the subject and criticizes a photograph of the woman, responses indicative of her true dismay, although at this point the reader has no clue as to the cause of her antagonism: ‘‘And we got to hear all this stuff about this woman he in love with and all. Which really ain’t enough to keep the mind alive, though Baby Jason got no better sense than to give his undivided attention and keep grabbin at the photograph which is just a picture of some skinny woman in a countrified dress with her hand shot up to her face like she shame fore cameras.’’

There follow five pages (a large section in a story of only seven and a half pages) that appear at first to contain a long and puzzling digression on a memory from the previous Easter. In fact, the episode furnishes the key to our understanding of the enormous, shattering impact that Hunca Bubba’s ‘‘betrayal’’ has on Hazel. The remembered incident seems initially to reveal only an occasion on which Hazel got into trouble as a result of her ‘‘toughness’’; however, as we discover, Hazel is both sensitive and vulnerable beneath her tough exterior.

The episode concerns a movie which Hazel, Baby Jason, and Big Brood went to see. Although the marquee advertised that ‘‘Gorilla, My Love’’ was playing, the actual movie was about Jesus. The three were disappointed and angry: ‘‘I am ready to kill, not cause I got anything gainst Jesus. Just that when you fixed to watch a gorilla picture you don’t wanna get messed around with Sunday School stuff. So I am mad.’’ After ‘‘yellin, booin, stompin, and carrying on’’ to show their displeasure, they watched the feature, hoping that ‘‘Gorilla, My Love’’ would follow. When it did not, as Hazel so bluntly puts it, ‘‘we know we been had. No gorilla no nuthin.’’ She daringly went to complain to the manager and to ask that their money be refunded. Getting no satisfaction from him, she took some matches from his office and set fire to the candy stand. She later explained to her father that she expected people (and marquees) to keep their word: ‘‘Cause 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. . . . I mean even gangsters in the movies say My word is my bond. So don’t nobody get away with nothin far as I’m concerned.’’

Clearly, Hunca Bubba’s breaking his promise to marry her is far more devastating to Hazel than the false advertising of the movie theater. Since a person whom she has every reason to trust has betrayed her, the entire adult world becomes suspect. Indeed, throughout the story, Hazel makes numerous comments on the conflict between children and adults. When her grandfather and Hunca Bubba make a weak attempt to justify what has occurred (‘‘‘Look here, Precious, it was Hunca Bubba what told you them things. This here, Jefferson Winston Vale.’ And Hunca Bubba say, ‘That’s right. That was somebody else. I’m a new somebody’’’), Hazel is not buying and turns to her little brother for solace, bitterly condemning the perfidy of adults: ‘‘I’m crying and crumplin down in the seat. . . . And Baby Jason cryin too. Cause he is my blood brother and understands that we must stick together or be forever lost, what with grownups playin change-up and turnin you round every which way so bad. And don’t even say they sorry.’’

Source: Nancy D. Hargrove, ‘‘Youth in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love,’’ in Southern Quarterly, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Fall 1983, pp. 81–99.