SOURCE: "Youth in Toni Cade Bambara's Gorilla, My Love" in The Southern Quarterly, Vol. XXII, No. 1, Fall, 1983, pp. 81-99.

In the following essay, Hargrove lauds Bambara's portrayal of young characters in her first short fiction collection, maintaining that one of her "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 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" (14). What Twain's narrator...