‘‘Thank You, Ma’m’’ is told in the voice of an impersonal third-person narrator. Hughes begins the story with a description of Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones (although her name is not revealed until later in the text). Hughes emphasizes her large physical size and the enormous size of her purse, as though suggesting she is larger than life. As the story begins, she is walking home alone at eleven o’clock at night through dark city streets. Although the urban location is never given a name, it is patently Hughes’s own neighborhood of Harlem in the northwestern corner of the New York borough of Manhattan. A comparatively slight boy rushes up behind Mrs. Jones and tries to snatch her purse, but in a bit of slapstick, the strap breaks and the boy falls to the ground together with the purse. Rather than playing the role of the victim, Mrs. Jones is physically overwhelming to her attacker: ‘‘She reached down, picked the boy up by his shirt front, and shook him until his teeth rattled.’’ She orders him to pick her purse up off the ground where it had fallen and, not letting go of him, begins to interrogate him in front of a small gathering crowd. The race of the two characters in the story is never mentioned, but it can be inferred that they are black from the matrix of black culture and dialectical speech that they share.
Mrs. Jones sees that the boy’s face is dirty and finds out that it is because he has no one at home to take care of him. This leads her to the surprising decision not to simply release him and go about her business, nor to turn him in to the police, but rather to take him home with her to try to help him. Although it would be against the spareness of Hughes’s style to say so baldly, it seems that Mrs. Jones is acting out of pity for the boy and the unfortunate circumstances that led him to make his criminal attack against her.
Mrs. Jones physically drags the boy to her apartment, putting him in a half-nelson wrestling hold when he struggles to get away. She tells him that he ought to be her son, because then she could have taught him right from wrong. This is a lesson he must not have properly understood or else he would not have attempted to commit a crime. As it is, she points out to the boy that he is the one who initiated the contact between them, but now she will be the one who determines the extent and nature of that contact and it will be neither brief nor trivial. She proudly announces her full name to the boy, as if that is something to overawe him in addition to her strength and size.
Mrs. Jones brings the boy back to her apartment in a rooming house and finds out his name is Roger. She releases him and instructs him to wash his face at the kitchenette sink. The door of the apartment is open and he could make a run for it, but he surprises himself by instead obeying her. Rather than taking Roger to the police as he fears, Mrs. Jones tells him she is going to make dinner for him since there is no one at his house to cook for him and he must have been hungry if he tried to snatch her purse. Roger responds that he wanted to use the money he might have stolen to buy ‘‘blue suede shoes.’’ Mrs. Jones tells him he would have done better to simply ask her for the money to buy ‘‘some suede shoes.’’ She herself, Mrs. Jones goes on, has been young and poor and wanted things she could not afford. She adds that he probably expects her to say that she did not steal to get them, but in fact that is not what she is going to tell him. She confesses further to Roger that when she was young she did terrible things that make her ashamed before God. ‘‘Everybody’s got something in common,’’ she tells Roger, perhaps alluding to the Christian doctrine of original sin.
Mrs. Jones proceeds to cook dinner. Roger again thinks about the possibility of running out the door. But this time it is perfunctory; he has no intention of leaving. He sits where Mrs. Jones can see him and as far as possible from her purse. Roger now wants Mrs. Jones to feel that she can trust him. He even volunteers to help her, though she does not need help. She does trust him. She offers to send him to the store to get milk, trusting that he will return. The shared trust is enough, however, and he does not actually go.
As they eat dinner, Mrs. Jones makes a point of not asking Roger about his home and family. She knows well enough from what he has already said and from the general circumstances of his situation that his answers would do nothing but embarrass him. Instead, she tells him about her job in a hotel beauty shop and all the women who come in and out. When they finish their dinner, Mrs. Jones actually addresses Roger as ‘‘son.’’
When they have finished eating, Mrs. Jones indeed gives Roger ten dollars (comparable to a hundred in today’s money) to buy the blue suede shoes. She finally cautions him not to attempt to steal again and to behave himself as she sends him out the door. The title of the story comes from the last paragraph, in which Roger wants to say something more than ‘‘Thank you, m’am,’’ but cannot manage to say even that, let alone anything else. The depth of his gratitude is too profound. Whatever Roger does in the future, he has been profoundly influenced by Mrs. Jones’s generosity and wisdom.
Source:
Sara Constantakis – Short Stories for Students – Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, vol. 29, Published by Gale Group, 2001.