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The description of Mrs. Jones’s apartment, an important setting in the story, includes details that suggest she lives in tenement housing common in urban areas in the early to mid-twentieth century. These buildings were often older structures divided into more living spaces than their original design intended in order to accommodate increasing numbers of city dwellers. In Black neighborhoods like Harlem—a frequent setting for Hughes’s poems and stories—the crowding was particularly intense because Black people were not allowed to rent apartments in other nearby neighborhoods and were therefore forced to stay in one area, resulting in higher rents for small spaces. Many Black people moved to the north in search of opportunity as they fled the oppressive Jim Crow laws in the South. Mrs. Jones rents a room with a “kitchenette” in a large house that has been subdivided.  In this portion of the story, Roger can hear the other roomers laughing as Mrs. Jones takes him to her room. One characteristic of tenement living was the lack of privacy afforded to residents, yet another freedom taken from Black people constrained by the conditions of systemic racism.

Mrs. Jones prepares dinner behind a screen rather than in a separate room. Her room is a “kitchenette,” a feature of tenement dwelling that includes some capacity to prepare food but not a full kitchen. Instead of a full stove, she has a gas plate, a form of hotplate powered by gas. Rather than an electric refrigerator, she has an icebox. Iceboxes were non-mechanical devices for keeping food cold, essentially metal closets with a separate space for a large block of ice that kept food cold. By the time Hughes wrote this story, iceboxes were largely obsolete in the United States. Mrs. Jones’s rooms having only a gas plate and an icebox indicates that her housing is not up to contemporaneous standards. These details in the story indicate that although Mrs. Jones is generous toward Roger, she herself lives at a lower income level, making her altruism and self-sacrifice all the more potent.

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