THE WINDING SHEET // ANN PETRY

This story is about a black man called Mr Johnson who lives with his wife Mae, and they both work the night shift in a labour plant. One Friday, Johnson goes to work and is yelled at by his boss for consistently being late. Then Johnson gets rejected at an all night restuarant by the coffee lady because he is black. He continues to be rejected or treated with disdain at other places, and looks at each of these situations as a racial insult and gets extremely mad. The only way to let out his anger is to physically abuse his wife, even though he reflects on his family's values when he does this.

This story explores domestic violence and extreme racism in the 1940’s in America, through the lives of two married African American factory workers. Petry's story suggests that racial discrimination both in the workplace and in society at large is a significant cause of the breakdown in African American family life and marital relationships. The story explores the hatred experienced by African Americans about society’s oppression, which can lead to acts of domestic violence within married couples. The story is written in a subtle tone about the overwhelming anger that discrimination against African Americans can cause. Interestingly, Petry’s exploration of how the African American woman fits into this deadly cycle of abuse is quite prominent, evident in the line “the knowledge that he had struck her seeped through him slowly and he was appalled but he couldn’t drag his hands away from her face.” The close dialogue between the characters changes over the course of the story, and ultimately ends in a brutal act of domestic violence. This use of language is most obviously used through the phrase ‘the winding sheet’, which begins as a humorous statement and finishes the story as a terrifying concept through which the protagonist identifies himself. Before going to work, the protagonist smiles as he sees his 'black arms silhouetted against the white of the sheets' and tries to shake off the negative connotations of a winding sheet, a shroud, but by the end, knows this is exactly what he thinks of it. The racially charged dialogue between a woman and the male protagonist at his work place intensifies his hatred of racial vilification, and the discourse used to describe the women of the story, and the fact that they can’t ‘hit back the same way a man can’, brings forth his misogyny. This in particular draws attention to the treatment of women in the 1940’s, especially in work place environments and the belief that they were incapable of acts committed by men.