Johnson’s body symbolizes everything that is natural and internal to him, and it is worth noting that from the beginning of the story, Johnson feels a profound sense of discomfort in his body due to the long hours he works (“Even now just starting his workday his legs ached”). This can be read as a kind of symbolic representation of the external world inflicting pain and unease on Johnson’s person. But more importantly, the way in which Johnson loses control of his hands over the course of the story is hugely evocative of an internal crisis of identity. Hands are a particularly important body part in literature—they often metonymically represent agency, since they are the tools with which most of a person’s actions are carried out. As the narrative unfolds, Johnson’s hands begin to feel like they’re no longer connected to his body and instead have a mind of their own, for example when he chooses not to beat the forewoman but nonetheless finds his hands primed for the action: “He felt a curious tingling in his fingers and he looked down at his hands. They were clenched tight, hard, ready to smash some of those small purple veins in her face. […] he had the queer feeling that his hands were not exactly a part of him anymore—they had developed a separate life of their own over which he had no control.” Johnson is becoming alienated from his own body and his own sense of agency, due to the powerlessness of his position as an African American man in this society. His hands, representing his agency, no longer feel like his own by the end of the story: “He had lost all control over his hands.” It’s at this point that his hands turn on him completely, viciously beating his wife Mae in a way that Johnson once swore he could never do.
Johnson’s Hands Quotes in Like a Winding Sheet
He had to talk persuasively, urging her gently, and it took time. But he 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.
And he thought he should have hit her anyway, smacked her hard in the face, felt the soft flesh of her face give under the hardness of his hands. He tried to make his hands relax by offering them a description of what it would have been like to strike her because he had the queer feeling that his hands were not exactly a part of him anymore—they had developed a separate life of their own over which he had no control.
He felt his hands begin to tingle and the tingling went all the way down to his finger tips so that he glanced down at them. They were clenched tight, hard, into fists. Then he looked at the girl again. What he wanted to do was hit her so hard that the scarlet lipstick on her mouth would smear and spread over her nose, her chin, out toward her cheeks, so hard that she would never toss her head again and refuse a man a cup of coffee because he was black.
There was the smacking sound of soft flesh being struck by a hard object and it wasn’t until she screamed that he realized he had hit her in the mouth—so hard that the dark red lipstick had blurred and spread over her full lips, reaching up toward the tip of her nose, down toward her chin, out toward her cheeks.
Johnson’s Hands Symbol Timeline in Like a Winding Sheet
