The people that we meet are one of the dominating factors in shaping our lives. Though we may not always realize it, it doesn’t take much to create a domino effect in changing us forever. It only takes the right kind of person. In the story “Thank You M’am”, written by Langston Hughes, Roger certainly meets just the kind he needs. By meeting the eclectic woman Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones via attempted theft, Roger learns that just because you’re walking down the “bad” path of life, it doesn’t mean that you yourself are destined to being nothing but miscreant. She shows him compassion, giving him something even though he’d done her nothing but wrong. She taught Roger an important lesson, and gave him a gentle, yet firm nudge down a better …show more content…
Jones treats Roger with inexplicable kindness, sparing him and instead treating him to something he did not deserve. And in doing that, Roger has a bit of an epiphany moment. “‘You thought I was going to say but, didn’t you? You thought I was going to say, but I didn’t snatch people’s pocketbooks. Well, I wasn’t going to say that.’ Pause. Silence. ‘I have done things, too, which I would not tell you, son—neither tell God, if he didn’t already know.’” Found on the second and third pages of the story, these words from Mrs. Jones are easily the most important in the whole story. By her explaining this to Roger, he get’s a look at adults as real people. They aren’t out to get him, they’re just there to help him because they’d made the same mistakes before themselves. Honestly, giving him the ten dollars to buy those shoes didn’t mean much in the end. Perhaps, it helped make the event all that more memorable in the fleeting memory of a young boy, but what she said to him, and the way she treated him as above all the thing that changed him most. She showed the young boy a side to the world and the people that he encounters in a more emotional, investing way, giving him an excellent lesson in sensitivity and empathy that was