Hargrove is a professor of English at Mississippi State University and author of Language as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot.In the following excerpt, she offers her interpretation of the characters Hazel and Raymond in Bambara's "Raymond's Run," particularly with regard to the theme of childhood and initiation.

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...