Summary
Still dragging Roger, Mrs. Jones asks if she was bothering him when she turned the corner. Roger says no. Mrs. Jones says that he put himself in contact with her, and if he thinks that contact will not last, then he has another thought coming. She says that when she is done with him, he is going to remember Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones.
Beads of sweat pop out on Roger’s face and he struggles. In response, Mrs. Jones stops walking, pulls him in front of her, and holds his neck in a half-nelson wrestling hold. She continues to drag him up the street.
At her door, Mrs. Jones drags Roger inside. They go down a hallway and into a large furnished room with a kitchen at the rear of the house. Mrs. Jones switches the light on. She leaves the door open. Roger can hear other people who live in the large house laughing and talking. Some of their doors are open, so Roger knows they are not alone.
Mrs. Jones still has Roger by the neck as they stand in the middle of her kitchenette. She asks his name and he answers. She addresses him as Roger and tells him to go to the sink to wash his face. Having said this, she finally lets him go. Roger looks at the open door. He looks at Mrs. Jones. He looks again at the door. But he goes to the sink.
Mrs. Jones tells Roger to let the water run until it gets warm. She gives him a clean towel. Roger bends over the sink, washing his face. He asks if she is going to take him to jail. Mrs. Jones says, “Not with that face, I would not take you nowhere.”
She says that she was just trying to cook herself a meal and he snatched her purse. She assumes he hasn’t had dinner either, as it is quite late. She asks if he has eaten. Roger says there is nobody home at his house. Mrs. Jones says they will eat together: she believes he must have been hungry to try to snatch her purse.
Roger says he wanted to buy a pair of blue suede shoes. Mrs. Jones says he didn’t have to try to rob her if he wanted to get some suede shoes: he could have asked her. Roger looks at Mrs. Jones with water dripping from his face. There is a very long pause.
He dries his face and isn’t sure what to do. He dries it again. He turns around, wondering what to do next. He sees the door is still open. He knows he could dash down the hall, and “run, run, run, run, run!”
Meanwhile, Mrs. Jones is sitting on the daybed. Eventually she says that she was young once and also wanted things she could not get. Her statement is followed by another long pause. Roger’s mouth opens. He frowns, unaware that he is frowning.
Mrs. Jones suggests that he thought she was going to say “but.” He thought she was going to say “but I didn’t snatch people’s pocketbooks.” Mrs. Jones says that she wasn’t going to say that.
Analysis
Despite having just asked Roger if he is hungry, Mrs. Jones switches back to a sterner register, warning the boy that his decision to put himself in “contact” with her is going to “last a while.” Roger assumes that she is threatening him with punitive consequences for his crime. However, the cryptic threat will prove to be accurate in a way Roger doesn’t expect. By the end of the evening, the lesson about trust, generosity, and dignity Mrs. Jones imparts will stay with Roger as a positive consequence of having come into contact with the woman.
Having failed to struggle free from Mrs. Jones’s wrestling neck hold, Roger finds himself as a hostage in her home. Although his mind was likely full of all sorts of unpleasant potential punishments, to his surprise Roger finds that she has brought him home to teach him to wash his face. Speaking sternly, she directs the boy to run the tap until it is warm and gives him a clean washcloth. Finally free to run away once Mrs. Jones lets Roger go, Roger is torn between obeying her command to wash his face and running out the open door. After considering his options, he chooses to go to the sink, implicitly trusting that Mrs. Jones has his best interests in mind.
The theme of trust continues when Roger asks if she is going to take him to jail, a verbalization of the panic he felt while she held him captive. She answers flippantly, implying that with his dirty face he is too undignified even to be taken to jail. Although she is insulting him, her teasing answer eases some more of the tension between them, establishing further the dynamic of parent and child.
The theme of generosity builds with Mrs. Jones’s offer to feed Roger supper. In the same exchange, Hughes introduces the theme of poverty by having Roger admit to Mrs. Jones that there is nobody at home to feed him—or to remind him to wash his face. Without saying it explicitly, Mrs. Jones reveals that she assumed he had come from such a desperate, impoverished situation; otherwise he wouldn’t have tried to steal her purse. However, Roger confesses that he actually wanted her purse so that he could buy himself a pair of fashionable blue suede shoes. In an instance of situational irony, Mrs. Jones says if that was the case, he could have asked her for the money rather than try to steal it.
Dumbfounded by Mrs. Jones’s seemingly ironic comment, Roger considers again the potential to flee through the open door. However, he overrides the impulse that tells him to run away, knowing instinctively that he can trust Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones continues to empathize with Roger’s poverty, confessing that she was once like him and also wanted things she couldn’t afford. She guesses that Roger assumes she is about to qualify her statement by adding a clause about the immorality of stealing purses. However, she defies the boy’s expectations by leaving her statement open to interpretation, a decision that implies she too was once so desperate that she turned to theft.
