Hughes’s story ‘‘Thank You, Ma’m’’ seems straightforward enough on a casual reading and, indeed, its moral message of self-help aimed at the black community could hardly be more blunt. Hughes gives a vivid description of his home in Harlem with its types and characters, lamenting it as a neighborhood in decline. Yet Hughes is a poet and cannot refrain from the figurative use of language that is central to poetry. Some words and phrases in the story that might at first seem prosaic reveal a wealth of symbolic meaning. A trivial example occurs at the very beginning of the story in the physical description of Jones as ‘‘a large woman with a large purse that had everything in it but a hammer and nails.’’ Aside from being literally untrue, this evokes in every reader the image of having known, or at least having seen, such a woman, and communicates the idea Hughes wishes to convey much more fully than a far more detailed description could do. In this way Hughes makes his words draw out the experiences and memory of the reader with a far more powerful effect than mere description could do.
There is no getting around the fact that ‘‘Thank You, Ma’m’’ concerns a crime, the kind of petty street crime that was making Harlem an unsafe place to live even when Hughes wrote the story in the 1950s. There is nothing exceptional about a purse snatching, but there is something unusual about Roger’s motive in committing it. Mrs. Jones suggests to him that he was driven to the criminal act by hunger and the need to get money to buy something to eat. But that is not the case at all. Roger tells her, ‘‘I want a pair of blue suede shoes.’’ Mrs. Jones’s reaction has several significances. In the first place, she seems to have heard him as if he had said he wanted fancy or nice shoes, and when she mentions them she merely says suede shoes, leaving out the blue. She also suggests that Roger would have done better to ask her for the money to buy them, rather than trying to steal it. She would have gladly given it to him, as she indeed does in the course of the story. She finally tells him, as he departs, not to turn to crime again, ‘‘because shoes got by devilish ways will burn your feet.’’ In one sense, Roger’s family ought to have gotten him these shoes, either by buying them for him or by getting him a job so that he could earn the money to buy what he wants, rather than being forced into crime to satisfy his desires. Mrs. Jones indeed steps in and takes the place of Roger’s mother.
If the situation Hughes describes is made a little abstract, then a larger meaning emerges from the text. Roger is the part of the black community that is being neglected by the black establishment. He is not given the help he needs to support himself, and the lesson of black history is that no one can go it alone. Whatever misfortunes Mrs. Jones suffered in the past, she was eventually integrated into the community with a job, a place to live, and a respectable life. Roger’s desire for the shoes is not frivolous: as Mrs. Jones understands it, they stand for his desire for integration into the community and respectability. If he is not granted that, he will try to advance himself by illegitimate means that will result in failure and damnation, as indicated when she says his feet will potentially be burned by ‘‘devilish ways.’’ If the black community failed Roger, or the class of youth that Roger stands for, in the form of his parents, it must, in Hughes’s view, make a second effort to help him in the form of Mrs. Jones, or else that class will be responsible for its own disintegration. This simple social allegory is the purpose and message of the story. The black community should help itself in the same way that a family does, or else it will break apart as a neglected family does. Aside from being the practical advice common within many black movements during the period of segregation in which Hughes lived, one may speculate that it deeply appealed to him because of the broken condition of his own family.
This still leaves the matter of the ‘‘blue suede shoes.’’ This special significance would be easy to dismiss, because Mrs. Jones does not recognize it, speaking merely of suede shoes. But the reader is bound to recognize that ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes’’ is a song title. In fact the song was a top-selling single for months in 1956. It was written in 1955 by Carl Perkins and was recorded in the following year by the composer as well as by Elvis Presley. It was immensely popular and was well known in the black as well as the white community, and is generally considered by experts in that field as the first ‘‘rock’n’roll’’ song, or at least the first by white songwriters and performers. Mrs. Jones does not pick up on the fact that it is a title because the song was marketed to youth culture, and it would have been out of place for her character to know of it. But Roger’s desire for blue suede shoes is undoubtedly meant to be understood by the reader as a reference to the song. By symbolically encoding the song into the story in this way, Hughes gives a much deeper meaning to Roger’s statement of what it is that he wants, what it is that he needs, what it is that he is willing to steal for.
In the first place, it is acknowledged that the very type of music that ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes’’ grows out of depends on the youthful desire for freedom and independence. One of the things that Roger is asking for is the freedom and independence that were historically denied to the black community in the United States. But an interrogation of the song can provide much more meaning for Hughes’s story than that. The song had its genesis when the songwriter Carl Perkins discussed with his friend Johnny Cash the fact that both had independently heard teen-age boys in the audiences they performed for in dance clubs loudly caution their dance partners not to step on their blue suede shoes. Taking this as his inspiration, Perkins elaborated the theme through hyperbole. In the song the singer invites his partner to do anything to him, to steal from him, to physically assault him, to strip him of his patrimony, but only not to step on his shoes. Modern music critics often relate the song to the vanity about physical appearance then being inculcated into youth culture by popular figures in the mass media such as the flamboyantly dressed Elvis Presley. That is certainly superficially present in Roger’s desire for blue suede shoes, but Hughes may have seen a deeper meaning.
Whether called rhythm and blues or rockabilly or the more modern term rock music, ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes’’ was the first such piece of music to gain popularity that was composed and performed by white songwriters and singers. It was, however, an indisputably black form of music in origin. Perkins, for instance, was familiar with the music that was already being produced by his friend the black songwriter and performer Chuck Berry, and, more to the point, as a youth had leaned how to play the guitar from an elderly black neighbor who was a blues musician. To a reflective, poetic mind like Hughes’s, this fact could take on special significance in relation to the song ‘‘Blue Suede Shoes.’’ It would be possible to see this form of music, and most twentieth-century popular music in general, as stolen from the black community, and Roger is asking for it back. At the same time, many of the lyrics of the song could easily describe the relationship between the black and white communities that had existed during the time of slavery and continued in Hughes’s day during the period of segregation. Hughes described his own encounter with the white majority community in America as one of ‘‘power and brutality.’’ This is very well characterized in the physical violence, the destruction of patrimony, and the slander described in the song. In this case, the refusal, after every other loss, to allow anyone to step on the blue suede shoes could be seen as the irreducible pride of the black community in its own identity that has been maintained in the face of every privation the community has suffered.
What Roger wants from Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones is her sense of pride, which she has maintained in the face of her life of adversity. That is what the blue suede shoes ultimately symbolize. Roger cannot, as he imagines, steal this sense of pride from her, but she gives it to him freely when she gives him the money to buy the shoes. She has suffered and been humiliated, has been driven to desperate acts herself, but she has triumphed over the obstacles put in her way. Roger wants help to do the same. The generation of black youth that is facing new and unprecedented difficulties—as well as new opportunities in the civil rights movement—needs the support of being integrated into the traditional black community. Hughes saw that this was not happening in the way that it always had, and he wrote the story as a reminder that it needed to happen. The social disintegration and the rising crime rate that were blighting his beloved Harlem were evidence of that failure.
Source:
Bradley A. Akeen, Sara Constantakis – Short Stories for Students – Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, vol. 29, Published by Gale Group, 2001.