Amalia Tabet Discussion 4

Mercedes and Sylvia were chosen as their responses for Miss Moore’s “lesson” are in contrast the most.
For full understanding, it is necessary to define what kind of characters they are before visiting the toy store.
Silvia, the protagonist and the 1st person narrator, is a teenage girl who lives in the ghetto with a poor family. She has a willful personality. It is clear from her way of talking and behaviour. “Go to the Sunset and terrorize the West Indian kids and take their hair ribbons and their money too” (2). Her name can foreshadow it too (Sylvia means spirit of the wood in Latin). At the same time, she is a low-educated and ill-mannered girl, what is can also be disclosed from her speech and deeds. The author uses AAVE in Sylvia’s lines.
Sylvia feels very comfortable in a ghetto environment, she is a part of its every-day life.Mercedes is from a richer family. In spite of other characters, her parents can afford more studying stuff and pay more attention to her education. Her name also foreshadows her higher position in society. In spite of the other children in this story, she uses the standard English that shows her better education.

Getting to the shop, Sylvia sees the toys that she has never seen before and feels that she really wants them. However, when she sees the price of the toy boat she is stunned. Getting out of her ghetto, she starts to understand that there is another life which is absolutely different. She can’t understand that somebody spends more than a thousand dollars on a toy.
Before coming to the shop, Sylvia feels confused and shy, not related to that kind of society, feels like a stranger.
At the shop, Sylvia experiences like in the church there. She doesn’t believe that somebody can buy all this stuff. At that moment, she starts to inquire who are the people who go shopping here, what kind of job they have. And feels it is unfair that somebody buys a toy clown which costs like two beds for her brothers or a toy boat for one thousand, which equals the total expenses of the whole her family for one year. She is punched out of her comfort zone. Now she knows that the world is really unfair but still doesn’t want to accept it, and when Sugar voices the feelings that Sylvia already has but is not ready for, she feels like she was betrayed, but betrayed by the unfair society she lives in. It looks like the lesson triggered the five stages of “grief” in a very accelerated way, she is depressed, however she has to accept it, her life will never be the same any more, even if she doesn’t understand it now.

Mercedes vice versa doesn’t see nothing strange in it, she tries to justify the high price of toys. She enters the shop really easily she likes that place, she likes all these attributes of rich life “smoothing out her jumper and walking right down the aisle” (5). Mercedes doesn’t feel like a stranger “I’d like to go there again when I get my birthday money” (6). Being a member of a richer family, she can’t sense this unfairness, and can’t learn that lesson. So she doesn’t see something wrong in this society she wants to join it.