Thank you Ma’am... So, what does it mean to care?
- Christopher Smith
- Aug 3
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 23
A reflection on 'caring' prompted by Langston Hughes' masterpiece of economic storytelling 'Thank you Ma'am'...
At just over a thousand words, Thank you Ma’am by Langston Hughes is a masterpiece of economic storytelling. He makes us care so much about the two characters that we cannot help but flesh them out. This is the essence of storytelling, to make the reader care. If they care, they’re engaged, they read on.
Interestingly, caring is the theme of this particular story, how people care for one another, and how situations develop in which people start to care.
So, what does it mean to care?
To invest in something external to oneself, to have a preference, or a desire for a particular outcome, or set of circumstances, to open one’s heart to the God’s and say, ‘here, please take care of this thing, it’s precious to me.’ It is to rend oneself vulnerable, to know that if this thing is deprived to me, or taken from me, I shall experience loss.
Caring about others means that we do not have to go through life alone. It binds us to each other. In his beautiful, timeless book ‘The Little Prince’ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry uses the idea of taming something to denote caring about it. “Whatever we tame” he writes “we are responsible for forever.”
In The Little Prince, the Prince is taught how to tame a fox, by the fox. This creates a relationship that becomes special to both, adding meaning to both their lives. But, it also creates the conditions for grief at their inevitable parting.
To care about something or someone is a courageous act in this world. Most of us are aware, if not completely comfortable with the fact, that everything must go, or to use Suzuki Roshi’s eloquent phrase that sums up Buddhist thought: ‘not always so.’ Caring about something, or someone in the face of the impermanence of everything is brave.
When we’ve felt loss, we can put up emotional barriers against experiencing it again in the future. We’re often most cautious when we’re cognisant of the risks. We know that to care makes us vulnerable to further loss and then to pain, and avoiding pain is a sensible strategy.
But this can have a devastating impact on our lives. If we are to enjoy a life that is rich in meaning, we must risk caring. A life, in which we care about nothing, also means very little. If we want to feel ourselves as something more than a simple biological accident, or lumps of flesh that have somehow come alive, then the things we care about truly matter. A life devoid of care is unbearably sad to witness. Sometimes, when we have no outlet for our care, nothing to give our love to, we feel the fundamental ache of loneliness; that there is no receptacle for the love that we have.
Luella Bates Washington Jones in Langston Hughes story is a character living such a life. We find her living alone and get glimpses of her loss and regret. Group participants often recognise her inarticulate pain. One woman in a particular group said, “I am her.” The scrapes we get into on the meandering path of life leave us all with the same scars.
We meet her when a troubled young boy attempts to snatch her purse. The boy sees what he thinks is a vulnerable old woman walking down the road. He doesn’t care about her at all, he sees her as a means to acquire quick money. Luella is shocked, but not shaken. She acts decisively and with shocking violence of her own.
We think Mrs Jones should be afraid. We expect her to be submissive and cowed, or else to be hard and bitter. What she does though is astonishing and essentially transformative for both characters.
She recognises the need behind the boy’s behaviour. She does not condescend, despite how he acted towards her. She does not think, "If the world doesn’t care for me then I’ll not care for the world". She seems to recognise that a world that has forgotten how to care is a world in most desperate need of it.
How often do we see that a lack of love and care leads someone to disdain love and care? Because we don’t receive it we resent it and harden ourselves against it. Resentment is closely related to envy. It is an emotion we feel when we see others receiving something essential to us that we feel we’re being denied.
What so often happens in the world is that someone else’s lack of care is misread and responded to with our own lack of care. The boy snatches the older woman’s purse. We believe that his carelessness, or active wrongdoing deserves punishment. We would put him in prison, or isolate him from us.
Luella catches everyone off guard. Her earthiness makes her relatable and human, but her generosity and refusal to judge makes her almost divine. She shows us simply that not only is love and care available to us in every moment, but it is also that most effective strategy in dealing with callousness.
Her care for the boy transforms his care for her. She goes first. She leads him forward into an uncertain, risky, but ultimately more meaningful world. She shows him it’s ok to care. She reminds us that this is the case too.
Softly she represents to us that extra second we take to listen rather than respond in our own relationships, that pause before we act or speak, that infinitesimal inch that we can give when under pressure that can make all the difference to us and other people.
She represents the beginning of a chain of love and care that could have far reaching consequences down the line. She cares for the boy and the boy now has a model for how to care for another.
Moment by moment, this is how the world changes.
The meaning of life then, is within it, not outside of it.
Many spiritual teachers also teach non-attachment. If we are looking for ways not to be stirred up, or not to have our equilibrium messed with, we look to these figures. “Be not attached to worldly things” they say. This can seem like they’re advocating for non-caring, as if they are saying that the highest state of consciousness would be a generalised indifference to the world. The world of self-help is replete with these sentiments ‘the subtle art of not giving a f#$%”, endless books about how not to care what people think.
How often have we thought ‘my problem is I care too much’?
But caring is never bad. Caring is pro-life. It leads us into “the whole catastrophe” as Zorba the Greek would say. To not care is to remain in emptiness, which you can do, but my question would be why.
Non-attachment is not the same as, not caring. Non-attachment is the recognition that all things must pass. It is an allowing of the process of life. This involves caring about all sorts of things, it involves taming, creating ties that enhance the meaning of our lives.
In fact, to not care can be an example of too much attachment. Think about it. If we have decided that something or someone is too painful to care about because it might hurt, then we have in fact given that thing or person an inordinate amount of power over us. We are saying that we are not able to cope with loss, so we’re not going to even care.
The boy sees her as a means to get money that he needs for some shoes. He cares not about her, nor seemingly about much. His life is difficult; we can read that into his situation. The lack of care he had received in his life has made him hardened to the idea of caring.
How often do we see this in our own lives? A lack of love and care leads someone to disdain love and care. It’s as if, because we have never experienced it, we lack the grace to see it in the world without resentment. Resentment is closely related to envy. It is an emotion we feel when we see others receiving something essential to us that we feel we’re being denied.
What so often happens in the world is that someone else’s lack of care is misread and responded to with our own lack of care. The boy snatches the older woman’s purse. We believe that his carelessness, or active wrongdoing deserves punishment. We would put him in prison, or isolate him from us.
Do we believe that the boy will learn warmth out in the cold?
Do we believe that he will learn to care whilst not being cared for?
This is not what Luella Bates Washington Jones believes. She interprets his actions generously. She uses all of the experiences she has had in her life, and concentrates them on the boy, not to judge him, but to redeem him in love.
On reading this story many people reflect on their own sense of wrongdoing, and the chances they have been given, sometimes by the people they have hurt. They recognise the impact that these moments of understanding have had on the trajectory of their lives. They recognise moments where they were cared for, where someone cared enough to offer them something that turned them around.
It is an important reflection because if we feel that the world doesn’t care we are more likely not to care ourselves, or to believe that the world does not deserve our caring about it. Then we’re on the slide to emptiness again.
Can we still care in the face of impositions and betrayals done to us? Luella Bates Washington Jones manages this, and she is no saint, she has not the grace of Christ, nor the equanimity of Buddha, She is one of us:
“I’ve done things I would not tell you about son, nor God if he didn’t already know”
Life has had its way with her. We can tell that from her demeanour, and the sense of loss that hangs around her. But she uses these experiences to recognise and interpret the struggle in another being. She does not condemn or judge; she sees the pain and the need in another. She cares, in a world that doesn’t.
I think we can all take something hopeful from that.
You can read 'Thank you Ma'am' by Langston Hughes as a PDF here...
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