Thank You, Ma'am: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

Roger, a teenage boy, attempts to snatch the purse of Mrs Luella Bates Washington Jones. She is a large woman and does not let the strap go; when Roger pulls, she kicks him and then picks him up by the shirt and shakes him. She asks if he is ashamed of himself. He says yes ma'am. She asks if he is hungry. He says no ma'am. She drags him along the street, telling him she is going to wash his face and feed him, and that she has things to do with him.

Rising action

She takes him to her room in a rooming house — a small room, but with everything she needs. She tells him to go wash his face at the sink; he goes, and she notices that he does not try to run while her back is turned, even though he could. She heats up beans and ham, makes cocoa. She asks him why he tried to steal her purse. He says he wanted to buy blue suede shoes. She says there are ways you can get things you want without stealing. She does not lecture or moralize further. She mentions, briefly, that she has done things she would not tell God about — which is her way of telling him she knows what wanting can do to people.

Ending

She puts ten dollars in his hand and tells him to buy the shoes and not steal again. She opens the door for him to go. He stands there, wanting to say something more than 'thank you, ma'am' — but the door closes before he can find the words. The story ends there.

Mrs Luella Bates Washington Jones

Mrs Jones is one of the most memorable characters in American short fiction. She is large, strong, and not frightened by a teenage boy attempting robbery. Her response — to bring Roger home rather than turn him in — is neither naive nor sentimental. She sees in him something she recognises: the desire for things that are out of reach, the way that desire can push people toward wrong. Her confession that she has done things she would not tell God about establishes her as someone who understands this not abstractly but personally. She offers him dignity and food and money, in that order, and asks nothing in return except that he not steal.

Roger

Roger's inner life is rendered in small, precise details. He does not run when he has the chance. He looks at the woman's purse when she sets it on the table — Hughes lets the reader see him weighing his options — and he does not touch it. He wants to say something at the end and cannot. His silence is the story's final beat: he has received something he does not have words for.

Trust and dignity as pedagogy

Mrs Jones does not call the police. She does not lecture Roger on right and wrong. She treats him as someone who has made a mistake rather than someone who is a mistake — a distinction the story's opening scenario makes look unwarranted and the rest of the story justifies. By giving him food, by turning her back and trusting him not to steal from her room, by giving him the money for the shoes, she treats him as someone capable of better behaviour. The story suggests that being treated as trustworthy is more effective pedagogy than punishment.

Poverty and wanting

The story does not romanticise poverty or excuse theft. But it does acknowledge that wanting — real material wanting for things you cannot afford — is a force, and that understanding it is different from condoning it. Mrs Jones has 'done things' herself; she recognises Roger's want without approving his method of addressing it, and she provides an alternative: the ten dollars. Hughes does not suggest this scales to a social solution. He is writing about one woman and one boy on one night in Harlem.

What is left unsaid

The story's final image — Roger wanting to say more than 'thank you, ma'am' and the door closing before he can — is its emotional centre. What Roger wants to say but cannot is the measure of what Mrs Jones has given him: something that exceeds the money, something he has no language for yet. Hughes trusts the reader to understand what that is without being told.