Black Girls' Feistiness as Everyday Resistance in Toni Cade Bambara's: Gorilla, My Love

Black women's literature positions resistance as one of the most important aspects of a Black^a woman's experience.¹ Writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde illuminate the connections between identity formation and resistance, especially in relation to patriarchal and heteronormative attitudes towards relationships and gender norms. For Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, resistance within mother/daughter relationships, as well as resistance to ancestral and community expectations, are at the center of Black female characters' experiences. Although included in Black literary constellations alongside Morrison and Walker, Toni Cade Bambara's shorter works have been anthologized without much criticism dedicated to her depictions of young Black women and resistance within the Black community. This article, then, focuses on Toni Cade Bambara's use of young Black girl protagonists as resistive characters who critique societal and intraracial issues in her short stories.

Primarily, I feature Scout and Squeaky, two Black girl protagonists in Toni Cade Bambara's short stories "Gorilla, My Love" and "Raymond's Run." As girls who are assertive, willing to fight, and outspoken, Scout and Squeaky illustrate how communities and families infuse their girls with strategies to resist. Utilizing a Black feminist interpretation of James Scott's "everyday forms of resistance," I argue that Scout and Squeaky's feistiness is rooted in resistive families and communities who reject normative aged, gendered, and racialized performances of girlhood.² In doing so, I highlight how Bambara resituates feistiness as a necessary attribute created and secured in communities in the civil rights cultural moment of the 1960s and 1970s.³

This article contextualizes Black girls against traditional tropes of girls, challenging how Black girls have been made invisible because of their particular racialized experiences. I then turn to Bambara's characterizations of Squeaky and Scout to illustrate how "bad" Black girls cultivate feistiness as a survival skill. Lastly, I explore how feistiness could underlie "strong Black woman" stereotypes proliferated in popular culture that Black women confront daily. Despite their mischaracterizations, strength for Black girls is rooted in resistive communities and is necessary to promote the creativity, self-determination, and feistiness required of a world that constantly criminalizes and demonizes Black women and girls.

Is She Really Bad? Racializing Bad Girl Tropes

Previous scholarly work on Toni Cade Bambara has focused on her longer works, such as The Salt Eaters or three stories featured in the 1970 collection Gorilla, My Love: "The Lesson," "The Hammer Man," and "My Man Bovanne."⁴ Although Bambara has been anthologized as an author who centers African American culture and vernacular expression in her narratives, Nancy Hargrove implies that she is less often recognized as a young adult fiction writer like Twain, Joyce, and Salinger.⁵ Likewise, I have found that Bambara's writing has rarely been explored for her attention to Black girlhood. I contend, however, that Bambara positions girls as prominent actors in their communities.

Set in the urban North, Gorilla, My Love contains fifteen short stories that explore Black families and love relationships. Many of Bambara's stories use a young girl protagonist or a representative character named Hazel. Although different in each narrative, Hazel, as a recurring character throughout the collection, provides literary continuity to feistiness as an important motif for Bambara. Moreover, Bambara's depictions of Black girlhood feistiness restructure normative conceptions of childhood because she resists simple characterizations of children as innocent or invisible.

In traditional girlhood studies scholarship, the bad girl trope positions a girl who is angry, aggressive, and sexually active at the outskirts of society and community.⁶ Her isolation further fuels her anger, which incites her bad behavior. Marion Brown explains that white girls in literature who are considered aggressive or nonconformist are representatives of the bad girl trope—in addition to the sad girl who has low self-esteem and strained relationships with women and the mad girl who adopts punk rock aesthetics and performativity to rebel—and are demonized for their "masculine" behaviors.⁷ However, these characterizations privilege narrow...