Negritude

 Negritude (properly  ne´gritude  in the original French, but Hughes preferred a more common spelling leaving off the acute accent) was a movement during the 1920s and 1930s among black intellectuals throughout the world: in Africa, the Caribbean, and in the expatriate community of Paris where many blacks from the French colonial empire gathered. Its central idea was that blacks ought to make their own culture for themselves, without reference to the white communities that simultaneously surrounded and rejected them. This motivated the name of the movement, which means ‘‘blackness.’’ It did not reject Western culture, since its adherents realized it was neither possible nor desirable to break out of the matrix of Western civilization in which their own education and aesthetic taste were embedded. They believed they should nevertheless create their own black version of that civilization that, if it had to be separate, would not be inherently inferior. Hughes himself coined the slogan ‘‘The negro is beautiful’’ (which became the basis for the 1960s slogan ‘‘Black is beautiful’’), to express this idea. Hughes developed the aesthetic goals of the movement more fully in a manifesto he published in the 1920s and recalled in his later essay, ‘‘The Twenties: Harlem and its Negritude,’’ ‘‘We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.’’ In France, the political dimension of the movement called for French colonies in Africa and the West Indies to become integrated into metropolitan France, so that their inhabitants would be ordinary French citizens (much like the relationship Hawaii bears to the rest of the United States). Although black intellectuals in France looked to the Harlem Renaissance as one of their models, Hughes was the chief bearer of international negritude back to the United States because of his extensive travels and contacts in France. He certainly felt that blacks should have the same rights and status as other Americans, but beyond that, he felt that the black American community should be introspective in many respects. This underlies the ideas of self-help, the building up of internal cohesion within the black community exhibited in ‘‘Thank You, Ma’m.’’ It is probably not coincidental that no white character makes even the briefest appearance in the story. Hughes was politically naive, and for a time held a favorable view of the Soviet Union, where he spent most of 1932 on an extended goodwill tour. He was attracted to the claimed lack of racism that played a large role in Soviet propaganda, as were many Western intellectuals, white and black, until Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939.

 Crime

 The action that begins ‘‘Thank You, Ma’m’’ is the petty crime of an attempted purse snatching. The plot of the story develops from the surprising consequences of its failure. Street crime like this was increasingly a fact of life in the Harlem where Hughes lived and set the story as the social cohesion of the community broke down during the 1950s. ‘‘Thank You, Ma’m,’’ then, illustrates what is going wrong in the black community, of which crime is at best a symptom or symbol, and suggests how it ought to be corrected. The reaction in the story is not to punish the criminal (Roger), since it would not have served the interests of justice to punish an individual for a social problem. It is instead necessary to repair the broken community structure that seemed to leave the criminal no choice. Hughes is not concerned with crime per se but with the loss of community that makes crime possible. If Harlem had still been acting like a large extended family, as Hughes idealized its past, then this kind of social transgression would not have been an issue. The victim of the crime (Mrs. Jones) therefore responds by nearly adopting the criminal, reintegrating him into the community from which he had become lost.

Source:

Sara Constantakis – Short Stories for Students – Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, vol. 29, Published by Gale Group, 2001.