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At the opening of the story, Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones briefly seems to be the story’s victim but quickly proves to be its most powerful and decisive force. While the image of a woman attacked by a mugger while walking alone at night invokes fear and vulnerability, Mrs. Jones’s reaction immediately turns that expectation on its head. By the end of the first paragraph, Roger is on the ground, and Mrs. Jones is firmly in charge. Mrs. Jones retains this control throughout the story, at first by bodily dragging Roger around and later by commanding his respect. As Mrs. Jones gradually relinquishes her physical control over Roger, respect for her strength of character is what causes Roger to refrain from running away or stealing her purse off the bed. In this way, Mrs. Jones moves from controlling Roger to letting him prove that he can indeed rise to her challenge to learn right from wrong. 

Mrs. Jones’s most striking traits are her empathy and compassion. Mrs. Jones’s allusion to her past misdeeds reveals that her maternal treatment of Roger is based on her ability to relate to Roger’s motivations and a desire to prevent him from making similar mistakes. Her past struggles allow her to intuit that Roger's parental figures are not properly caring for him or teaching him right from wrong. Mrs. Jones’s choice to wash Roger’s face and feed him supper is a deliberate display of maternal authority and care. By being firm but kind, Mrs. Jones provides Roger with an example of how caring authority figures ought to behave. In a way, Mrs. Jones’s choice to extend empathy and care to Roger is a metaphor for extending empathy to her younger self, whom she sees in Roger. Even when she learns that his motivation for stealing her purse was not hunger but desire for a pair of blue suede shoes, her response is to show compassion for him and ultimately, to give him money for the shoes. By the end of the story, it is clear that her purpose in taking hold of him was not to protect herself or to punish him but to give him the care he truly needs.

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