Thank You, M’am Summary & Analysis

At 11:00 in the evening, “a large woman” is walking alone “with a large purse” slung across her shoulder. A young boy runs up and attempts to snatch the bag, only for its strap to break; the momentum from his tug causes the boy, who’d been hoping to flee, to instead fall over. The woman kicks him “in the blue jean sitter” before yanking him up by the shirt so roughly that “his teeth rattl[e].”

Still gripping the boy’s shirtfront, the woman tells him to pick up her now-broken purse and hand it back to her. She scolds the boy and asks why he’d tried to rob her, to which he responds, “I didn’t aim to.” Quickly rejecting this as a lie, the woman asks whether the boy will run if she lets go of him. He responds in the affirmative. The woman then points out the boy’s dirty face and confirms that he doesn’t have anybody at home telling him to wash it. She declares that she will wash it herself and begins dragging the “frightened boy” to her own house.

The boy, who looks “as if he were fourteen or fifteen,” is “frail and willow-wild, in tennis shoes and blue jeans.” The woman declares that if he were her “son” she’d teach him “right from wrong” and asks if he’s hungry. The boy only wants her to let him go, but she reminds him that his actions first put them together. “When I get through with you, sir,” she says, “you are going to remember Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones.”

The young boy continues to struggle uselessly as Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones physically restrains him. She takes him to her room in a boarding house--a small, one-bedroom space equipped with a kitchenette. She leaves the door open, which allows the boy to hear the laughter and talking of the other “roomers” who live elsewhere in the house. Finally, she asks the boy for his name: Roger. Wheedling him to clean up his face, she provides him with warm water and a towel. When Roger asks if Mrs. Jones will take him to jail, she quips back: “Not with that face, I would not take you nowhere.” Then, she abruptly switches the conversation to dinner.

Talking about food leads Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones to suggest that Roger wanted money from her purse for food. Quickly, Roger corrects her mistake: he wanted a pair of blue suede shoes. With a face still dripping from washing, Roger contemplates escape through the open door. Sitting on her daybed, Mrs. Jones interrupts his runaway thoughts: “I were young once and I wanted things I could not get.” Roger is silent. Mrs. Jones continues, “You thought I was going to say, but, didn’t you?” After admitting she, too, has done disreputable things, she instructs Roger to comb his hair.

The story shifts its attention to the divisions of Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones’s room, which incorporates some basic kitchen supplies behind a screen. For the first time, Mrs. Jones leaves Roger and the purse out of her sight. Roger takes care to remain in a spot where she can see him with her peripheral vision, however, not wanting to be “mistrusted.”

While Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones makes dinner, Roger asks if she needs him to run to the store. She checks if he wants “sweet milk” rather than “canned” for cocoa. Hearing no, her pantry is ample for their purposes. She makes him dinner, and leads him through a conversation about her life, without prying into his. She shares the food she has—including giving him half of the “ten-cent cake.”

Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones surprises Roger with the ten dollars he had originally wanted to steal. With this gift, she offers a warning and an encouragement to “behave” himself in the future. Roger attempts to express his gratitude to Mrs. Jones, but though “his lips moved” he cannot even manage to say that before Mrs. Jones shuts her door.