Authors Note: I am writing this to explain how the woman treated Roger and how the boy reacted.
Have you ever helped someone that didn’t deserve your help? Have you ever wanted a stranger to have the utmost trust in you even though you really don’t know them? In the story of Thank You Ma’am by Langston Hughes, both happened.
The story starts off with an older woman walking down a street at around 11 o’clock when she gets an unexpected surprise. A teenage boy came out of nowhere and tried to take her purse. However the purse strap broke and he had nowhere to go. The woman grabs him and starts to scold him about what he was doing. He was absolutely terrified of her. In the moment she was actually treating him better than most people probably would have just because she didn’t call the police on him like most people would. She notices his face is really dirty so she insists on brining him to her house to get cleaned up, although him being in a chokehold he did not have much of a choice.
In this point of the story you can tell that the woman has some compassion for this kid and wants to help him. She acts very different than a crazy old lady that was your first impression in the beginning. I believe that the author put some symbolism in her wanting to clean his face. I believe her trying to clean his face of the dirt is her trying to change him as a person and “clean” him. When they got to her house there were people in other rooms with their doors open. She tried to show compassion towards this kid. She let him cleaned his face. Not only that but she also offered him food. He accepted. During this event the door to the woman’s house was wide open. The boy could have run if he wanted to but instead he stayed. The woman acted really nice to him, not asking any embarrassing questions and nothing that would make him uncomfortable. They find out each other’s names. The boys name is Roger, and the woman’s name is Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones. The woman asks him why Roger tried to take money from her, and his response was that he wanted to buy a new pair of shoes. This is where you can understand how nice this woman was and how much she wanted to help this boy.
She gave Roger ten dollars to buy a new pair of shoes. Roger was just shocked but he accepted the money. By now the woman has almost if not have changed Roger to be a completely different person. At the end she showed him to the door and told him to be good and said goodnight. The boy could barely say thank you before the door closed. The woman changed Roger completely by the end of the story, and because of her I believe he is walking on a new path.
