40 pages • 1 hour read
Langston HughesThank You, M'am
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Alliteration
Hughes is most famous as a poet, and even his prose employs techniques more commonly associated with poetry, such as alliteration, or the repetition of initial consonant sounds in successive words or phrases. Perhaps the best example in “Thank You, M’am” comes in Hughes’s description of Roger as “willow-wild” (Paragraph 16). The phrase conjures an image of a slender and perhaps flighty or fearful boy, one who resembles the slim and drooping branches of a weeping willow. The repetition of the letter W reinforces this characterization, while the breathiness of the sound conveys a sense of airiness and insubstantiality.
Contrast
“Thank You, M’am” features just two characters, and they are opposites in nearly every respect; where Roger is young, male, “frail” (Paragraph 16), and nervous, Mrs. Jones is older, female, “large” (Paragraph 1), and self-assured. Even their names accentuate the differences between them, with Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones’s four names dwarfing Roger’s one.
Initially, this contrast underscores the conflict between the two characters, but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that Mrs. Jones and Roger have more in common than one might suspect. This culminates in Mrs. Jones’s admission that she has “done things, too, which [she] would not tell [Roger]” in her own frustration with her lot in life (Paragraph 37). In this way, the superficial differences between Mrs. Jones and Roger illustrate not the conflict between them but the ability of empathy to bridge divides and connect people on a deeper level.
Dialect
Because Hughes provides relatively little information about the characters’ backgrounds or the story’s setting, one of the only indications that Roger and Mrs. Jones are black comes from their dialogue, which incorporates elements of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a dialect (or possibly distinct language) spoken by many black Americans. Examples include the use of “ain’t,” contractions like “No’m” (i.e., “No, ma’am”), and double negation in sentences like “I would not take you nowhere” (Paragraph 28). The use of AAVE is characteristic of Hughes’s work, which often grounds itself in African American culture and tradition.
Hyperbole
Hyperbole is a form of overstatement or exaggeration, often to comedic effect. In “Thank You, M’am” Hughes uses it primarily to draw attention to Mrs. Jones’s larger-than-life presence; it isn’t literally the case that she shakes Roger “until his teeth rattle” or that her purse “[has] everything in it but hammer and nails” (Paragraph 1), but these exaggerations help characterize her as a woman of outsized strength and resourcefulness. Notably, Hughes’s use of hyperbole falls away as Roger and Mrs. Jones interact with one another, echoing the shift that takes place in Roger’s perspective throughout the story. When Mrs. Jones admits that she understands the feelings that led Roger to try to rob her, she places herself on his level and thus ceases to be an almost superhuman figure doling out judgment or punishment.
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