30 pages • 1 hour read
Ray BradburyThe Other Foot
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Hattie Johnson
Hattie is the thoughtful protagonist. At the beginning of the story, she is relatively passive, even reactive, but seizes her own agency by the end. She runs around trying to find things out, then allows her husband to order her about and goes along with his revenge plan despite her clear objections to it. Only when she is confronted with Willie’s continued hatred in the face of the white man’s plea for help does she head off the impending violence.
Hattie is the point-of-view character from the moment she appears in “The Other Foot” until Paragraph 204, when the reader is suddenly moved into Willie’s mind. Hattie resumes being the point-of-view character more when Willie drops the rope, and her perspective colors much of the story. It is Hattie who characterizes Willie as revenge-seeking; she views Willie’s expression as “a wide, mean smile, and his eyes were mad” (Paragraph 59). Hattie heightens the tension and the ominousness of Willie’s impending revenge; she describes the rope as a “long thick hairy rope coil” and notes that Willie watches the sky while making the noose without looking down at his hands, as if hatred comes so naturally to him that he doesn’t need to see what he’s doing (Paragraph 71). Hattie uses language that characterizes the white visitor as harmless and vulnerable; she sees the arriving rocket as “very high and beautiful” and the elderly white man as “as thin as a winter bush” (Paragraphs 121, 124). Hattie’s empathy for him and growing disquiet at the Martians’ hateful behavior are the moral center of the story.
Willie Johnson
Hattie’s husband, Willie, is Hattie’s foil, or a character that illuminates a character through contrasting traits. While Hattie is empathic, Willie is frequently described with monstrous, violent, even inhuman language. His first action in the story is to shout angrily at Hattie about her supposed failure to keep their children safe (Paragraph 45); he grips the steering wheel and “savagely” tells Hattie he’s “not feeling Christian” (Paragraph 53); his face is “stern and heavy and folded in upon the gnawing bitterness there” (Paragraph 63). When Hattie tells him he doesn’t sound human, he replies, “‘You’ll have to get used to it,’” (Paragraph 61), implying that he sees his monstrousness as a permanent feature of his personality.
Willie’s actions are a reflection of existing racist violence and institutions. Willie represents The Impact of Racism, trauma, and abuse. The pain of his parents’ deaths has trapped him at the emotional age of 16. He has received no apology for his parents’ murder. Moreover, institutional racism is pervasive; the Civil Rights Act was only passed 100 years after the Civil War, and Jim Crow and state-sanctioned violence and murder against Black people were commonplace for nearly 100 years.
The Old/White Man
The man who arrives in the rocket is never given a name. His descriptor changes from “the old man” (Paragraph 121) to “the white man” (Paragraph 124). The two terms are used more or less interchangeably from Hattie’s perspective, suggesting that his racial identity and age are equally important to her view of him.
The old man is a relatively flat or unchanging character. He steps out of the rocket, gives a speech taking full responsibility for the sins of Earth and the destruction that followed them, and begs for help. The narrative implies that he was a significant figure wherever he comes from; when he speaks, he does so “very quietly and slowly, expecting no interruptions, and receiving none,” like a politician or other professional public speaker (Paragraph 127). When introducing himself, he says: “It doesn’t matter who I am […] I’d be just a name to you, anyhow” (Paragraph 128). The phrasing of this introduction implies that he would be more than “just a name” to people from Earth, and that he recognizes the humility necessary for his current position.
The old man’s role in the story is to deliver exposition and present the Martians with their moral dilemma. By making the old man physically fragile and utterly lacking in personal pride or detectable bigotry, Bradbury gives Willie no choice but to either forgive a white man or destroy an apparent innocent.
The Martians
The Black residents of Mars are referred to as “Martians” in “The Other Foot,” a play on the sci-fi trope of extraterrestrials as the ultimate outsiders. Bradbury writes the Martians as profoundly human and easily recognizable to midcentury American readers; he gives them common surnames like “Johnson” and “Brown” and a fairly accurate (if slightly stereotypical) dialect. Much of the dialogue in the story could have been copied from movies and television shows of Bradbury’s day. Characters use “ain’t” and constructions like “slowing-up time” to suggest African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and identify themselves with Black population centers of the time from Fourth Street in Memphis, Tennessee, to the Harlem region of New York City. They quickly recognize signs of segregation, from the streetcar conductor’s smile at Willie painting the sign on the bench to men in town roping off less desirable seats in a theater while their wives and children watch in fear and bafflement. They are, in nearly every way that matters, Black Americans of the 1940s and 1950s.
However, as their schadenfreude at the idea of persecuting a white man turns to grief and horror at the news that their places of origin have been destroyed, the Martians reveal themselves to be driven by universally human motivations. If anything, they are more human than the people of Earth; they are appalled at the idea of destroying the planet while those who remained on Earth actually accomplished the destruction. They choose to forgive and accept the newcomers despite their histories of trauma and abuse. For them, unlike their former tormentors, the balancing of the scales is enough.
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