Like a Winding Sheet

Although Poverty and Economic Exploitation is a key, overarching theme throughout “Like A Winding Sheet,” much of the story’s conflict is actually internal rather than structural or social. The racism-fueled socioeconomic conditions of Harlem form the backdrop of the lead characters’ behaviors and tensions because Johnson is fatigued, in pain, and furious over the harsh conditions of factory work. These socioeconomic conditions fuel a more central conflict within the story, which is the one between Johnson’s personal moral code and his visceral, heightened emotions. In other words, one of the story’s key conflicts is actually between Johnson and himself—a personal conflict that arises when Johnson struggles between the man he wants to be and the man he becomes under highly stressful and infuriating situations. This personal conflict, then, falls under another of the story’s themes: Intention Versus Emotion.

Throughout the story, the narrator implies that Johnson has good, moral intentions. This is evidenced because the narration is very close to Johnson, and the reader is privy to all of Johnson’s internal thoughts and feelings. At the beginning of the story, Petry portrays Johnson’s opinion of himself compared to other men: “[H]e couldn’t bring himself to talk to her roughly or threaten to strike her like a lot of men might have done. He wasn’t made that way” (Paragraph 21). Initially, Johnson refrains from physical violence toward Mae; his kindness toward women is a fundamental part of his character, though he struggles with violent thoughts that feel out of his control.

Johnson continues to show this restraint as the events unfold. Continually, Johnson is confronted by women who evoke his fury. First, the factory supervisor Mrs. Scott tells Johnson off for his lateness; her subsequent use of a racist slur sparks Johnson’s ferocity, especially as Mrs. Scott is a white woman. This is a critical moment in which another theme, that of Gendered Violence, comes to the fore. Due to the racist and exploitative backdrop of New York City during this time, Johnson must contend with daily, racism-fueled aggressions toward him even as he works a physically exploitative job. It is also critical that the racist figure in the factory scene is a woman because this characteristic once again contributes to Johnson’s perception of himself. Although he wants to hit Mrs. Scott for her use of the racist slur, he reasons with himself in the same way as he did that morning: “The only trouble was he couldn’t hit a woman” (Paragraph 44). This is a key inciting incident that contributes to the story’s rising tension, as it is a trigger for Johnson’s anger and questions his personal resolve and intentions surrounding violence toward women.

The incident with the foreman Mrs. Scott also introduces a key motif that will recur throughout the rest of the story at pivotal moments involving women: lipstick or women’s lips. Just before Johnson attempts to strike Mrs. Scott, he catches a glimpse of her makeup: “He […] turned away from the red lipstick on her mouth that made him remember that the foreman was a woman” (Paragraph 38). Even as Johnson walks away from the conflict, he continues imagining the act of striking Mrs. Scott, with continual fixation on her lips: “[I]t would have been a deeply satisfying thing to have cracked her lips wide open with just one blow” (Paragraph 44). This visceral description, heightened by the onomatopoeia of “cracked,” portrays Johnson’s desire to break through the femininity that prevents him from retaliating violently to racism. The image of this red lipstick appears at two more key instances in which a woman evokes fury in Johnson: after work, when the girl in the restaurant runs out of coffee and he imagines punching her so that the “scarlet lipstick on her mouth would smear” (Paragraph 60) and, at the story’s falling action, when he loses his resolve and punches his wife. Red lips and lipstick appear at repeated intervals throughout the story, which is an example of a motif that contributes to the theme of Gendered Violence. Petry also focuses on the scarlet, bright-red coloring of women’s lips in the story to represent the women’s blood as a result of this violence.

The themes of Gendered Violence and Intention Versus Emotion are closely intertwined throughout the story. As Johnson’s emotions continue to override his intentions, his interactions with three key women—Mrs. Scott, the girl serving coffee, and Mae—lead to his abandonment of the moral code that he had previously tried to maintain. The presence of these thoughts in response to women in particular emphasizes a connection Petry draws between issues of race and gender. Needing to right the power imbalance Johnson feels in his everyday life, his urge to lash out against those he perceives as weaker escalates throughout the story.  

The symbol of the “winding sheet” represents this internal turmoil regarding Johnson’s violence toward women. At the beginning of the story, Mae is in good humor as she describes Johnson as looking “like a huckleberry—in a winding sheet” while he lays in bed procrastinating the night shift. Mae’s dialogue uses a simile, or a form of comparison using “like” or “as” (“like a huckleberry”), to compare Johnson to a figure wrapped in a winding sheet, which is the sheet used to wrap corpses for a burial. Mae giggles and teases her husband as she makes this comparison, which is in stark juxtaposition to the grim, bleak nature of the term “winding sheet.” The symbol of the winding sheet appears once more at the end of the story, but this time it is used in Johnson’s consciousness rather than Mae’s: “He thought it was like being enmeshed in a winding sheet” (Paragraph 85). In this iteration of the winding sheet symbol, Johnson is yet again the figure that is trapped by the sheet. This time, however, the foreboding, death-like nature of the sheet is evoked more fully as Johnson violently beats his wife. The winding sheet appears at the beginning and the end of the story, and both times within an interaction between Johnson and Mae, and so it also foreshadows the dark turn that will occur within the relationship. Mae’s juxtaposing dialogue at the beginning of the story, which places the winding sheet in a lighthearted context, is replaced by the image of the winding sheet as a mechanism of violence.

Petry uses foreshadowing elsewhere in the story. Before Mae and Johnson leave for their night shift, Mae notices that it is Friday the 13th. She feels anxious about going to work because of the ominous implications of that date. This instance foreshadows the bleak end to the story, suggesting that, in some way, Mae was right about the day bringing tragedy. This scene also establishes a sense of irony early in the story because Johnson must convince his wife to ignore the date and leave for work. As he does so, he speaks gently but persuasively—which, as the narrative points out, is in contrast to the violence that some men might have shown in their frustration. As the story carries on and Johnson begins to lose sight of his intentions to never hit a woman, the irony of the foreshadowed evil on Friday the 13th is augmented by the dissonance in Johnson’s intentions versus his actual behavior. This combination of foreshadowing and irony emphasizes Johnson and Mae’s disenfranchisement in their society. The foreshadowing suggests that a bleak ending is predestined, while the irony of Johnson speaking gently and then resorting to violence reinforces the more macro sense that his intentions and expectations do not influence outcomes.