Economic Oppression Theme Analysis

The Saunders family is poor—Dave’s mother is worried about saving enough money for winter clothes and shows extreme frugality by asking to use the catalog that Dave borrows from the local store as toilet paper in the outhouse. While Mr. Hawkins, the owner of the plantation where the Saunders family works, is not depicted as a violent or openly cruel man, in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” Wright details the insidious ways that the economically powerful use their money and resources to oppress those with less money.

While Dave’s quest to buy a gun is ostensibly about proving his masculinity, being able to buy the gun is also a way for him to prove his economic independence, and Wright notes how income can affect a person’s self-worth. Within the story, there is a clear hierarchy, where the characters at the top are the ones who control the money. As a Black teenager working on a Southern plantation, Dave is at the very bottom of the hierarchy: he earns a wage from Mr. Hawkins for the work he performs in Hawkins’s fields, but as a teenager that wage doesn’t even go to him: it is given to his mother, who then uses the money for their household. Dave earns money he can’t use, while his mother gets Dave’s money but it is barely enough to get by. When Dave needs to come up with the two dollars to buy a gun, he begs his mother to give it to him, because he knows that even talking to his father about money might result in a beating—it is Dave’s father, then, who really controls the family’s finances. Even Dave’s father, however, must answer to Mr. Hawkins, who doesn’t even appear until late in the story but whose authority is always felt through his ability to pay or withhold wages.

The aftermath of the death of the mule Jenny shows how the control of money and resources naturally results in those in power getting even more power, and those who are economically weak getting ever more oppressed. After Dave accidentally shoots and kills the mule, Mr. Hawkins doesn’t get upset. Though Wright depicts Jenny’s death as gruesome—she is “slopping in blood” and dies with an open mouth and blank, glassy eyes—Hawkins just treats her death as an economic consideration, slapping a value of $50 that Dave needs to repay. On the one hand, placing a value on a life of any sort harkens back to the way that slaves in pre-Civil War South were reduced purely to their economic value. On the other, it also shows how Hawkins now sits atop an economic system that always works to his benefit. Mr. Hawkins may even benefit from the $50 repayment: when Dave is caught after killing the mule, he has no room to negotiate, and Mr. Hawkins has the power to extort more from him than the mule is worth. By saddling Dave with almost two years’ worth of debt for killing the mule, Mr. Hawkins links Dave’s fate to Jenny’s. Wright shows the reader that, to Mr. Hawkins, the value that Dave provides is not so different from the value a mule provides. This realization echoes a conversation earlier in the story in which Dave’s father asks how Dave gets along with Mr. Hawkins and Dave replies that he “plows mo lan than anybody over there.” Dave wants to give an answer that will please his father, and he realizes that the best way to prove he has worth (to Mr. Hawkins, and therefore also to his father) is to prove he’s a good worker, well worth the investment that Mr. Hawkins pays him as wages.

While race clearly plays a role in the power imbalances between the characters in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” Wright’s keen focus on the economics of Mr. Hawkins’ plantation demonstrates that Wright was also thinking more broadly about the relationship between the haves and the have-nots. While at times Wright seems to acknowledge the possibility that violence (i.e., the gun) could improve the economic situation of powerless Black Americans, the tragic and ridiculous outcome of Dave’s experiences with the gun on the plantation seem to indicate that the new economic constraints now set up around Black Americans in the South are more complicated, entrenched, and invisible than any armed revolution could upend. Ultimately, near the end of the story, Dave realizes his oppression when he thinks: “They treat me like a mule.” He sees that in the economic structure of the farm, he is, like Jenny, an asset rather than a person. Moments later, Dave sneaks onto a train and runs away, seeking a place “where he could be a man”—which might be taken as referring to a place that doesn’t operate on an economic situation that makes independence for Black people such as Dave impossible.