Though the setting of Toni Cade Bambara's "Blues Ain't No Mockin Bird" is not fully identified, we can tell the story takes place in the U.S. South due to the two dialects found in the story. One dialect found in the story was named Ebonics by African-American linguists in 1973 and is also often called African American Vernacular English (AAVE) by other scholars today ("What is Ebonics (African American English)?," Linguistic Society of America). The second dialect is Southern American English. There are a lot of distinguishing characteristics of both dialects, such as dropped letters and changes in grammar.
In the short story, the Ebonics dialect is clearly depicted in the narrator's drop of the letter g in words with -ing endings, as we see in the following:
Similin man was smilin up a storm.
The dialect is also depicted when the narrator and the characters use nonstandard grammar. For example, Grannny uses the word ain't for the verb phrase are not in the following:
Go tell that man we ain't a bunch of trees.
The two obviously white men in the story use their own dialect, and it actually sounds very similar to the Cains' dialect, as the story is set in the South. Just like the Cains, the two white men, whom the narrator calls "smilin man" and "camera man," also drop the letter g from words with -ing endings:
We're filmin for the county, see.
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