49 pages • 1-hour read
The Ways of White Folks
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 14 Summary: “Father and Son”
Colonel Thomas Norwood, a rich White Southerner, waits for his illegitimate son, Bert, to come home. For 30 years, the Colonel has had a secret relationship with Coralee Lewis, a Black woman who helps him run his estate. Bert, the youngest of their biracial children, is handsome and quick witted and has always challenged authority. After six years at boarding school and college, Bert comes home for the summer, and the Colonel is conflicted about his arrival: “Colonel Norwood never would have admitted, even to himself, that he was standing in his doorway waiting for his half-Negro son to come home” (207). The Colonel goes in his study, where he plans to stay for hours to show everyone Bert’s arrival doesn’t mean anything to him. Soon after, he hears commotion. Bert is home. The Colonel remembers beating Bert as a child for calling him “papa” when White guests were over. When the Colonel finally says hello to Bert, he refuses to shake his son’s hand.
Coralee reflects on her relationship with the Colonel. Their affair started when the Colonel was married to a White woman. The Colonel and his wife never had children, and his wife died young. Coralee recognizes she could be in a far worse situation, especially living in the South. Still, she doesn’t approve of the Colonel’s hostility toward his children when they break his rules. All Coralee’s other children have accepted their place in society, of appreciating a few extra privileges from the Colonel while always being illegitimate biracial children. Bert, however, refuses to be treated differently: “I’m the old man’s son, ain’t I? Got white blood in me, too” (225). Coralee and the rest of the family recognize that Bert won’t change—that his passion will provoke the racist behavior in their town.
The Colonel tries to force Bert to help work the cotton fields while he’s home for the summer. Bert refuses and routinely tells others to stop listening to White people. In town, Bert corrects a White clerk for giving him the incorrect amount of change. His behavior infuriates the town more, and the storeowner warns the Colonel to take care of the problem. The Colonel, furious, grabs his pistol. When Bert comes home, the two have a bitter argument. The Colonel demands respect and for Bert to learn his place. Bert refuses to be treated as a lesser person. The Colonel threatens to kill Bert and demands Bert leave out the back door. Bert, however, plans to go out the front. The Colonel points the pistol at his son. Bert tells his father to shoot him, then strangles the Colonel to death before he can fire. Coralee rushes in. She tells Bert to run before the town finds out.
Bert flees but gets boxed in by a growing mob. He rushes back into the house, the mob hot on his trail, bullets flying. Bert has one bullet left. He hugs his mother. Before the mob can break in and seize him, Bert goes upstairs and shoots himself. The mob still hangs Bert, but they feel unsatisfied because they found him dead. They decide to hang Willie, Bert’s innocent older brother, and the newspapers run a headline about a double lynching.
Story 14 Analysis
Hughes ends the collection with his longest and most violent story. Once again, he uses the story to depict the horrors of racism. Bert’s being biracial in a Southern town serves as the driving force for the conflict. Seeking acceptance and justice, Bert is denied what he wants because of the color of his skin. Before coming home, Bert intuits he won’t be happy there: “Bert didn’t want to come home. He felt he had no home” (220). Even though Bert is the son of a respected member of the community and is half White himself, he doesn’t feel accepted by his own hometown.
Headstrong, Bert chooses to fight the normalized racism he’s subjected to, and the fight takes everything out of him. Before he kills himself, Bert tells his mother: “I’m awful tired running, Ma. I couldn’t get to the swamp. Seems like they been chasing me for hours. Crawling through the cotton a long time, I got to rest now” (253). Bert’s exhaustion relates to the scene at hand, but also to his entire life; he’s always been chased, by the Colonel and others like him. With Bert’s struggles as a biracial person, Hughes shows the reader that in societies with deep-seated racist beliefs, an intermingling of different colored people can be met with violence and hatred, rather than break down the color divide. The lynching of Willie further enforces Hughes’s message about how hard ending racist systems can be.
“Father and Son” utilizes other established themes and motifs: class and leaving. As summer progresses, and the Colonel’s workers farm, Hughes comments on the Colonel’s wealth, recognizing it wouldn’t be possible without an exploited labor force. Hughes writes: “Sweat dampened the black bodies of the Negroes in the cotton fields, too, the hard black bodies that had built the Colonel’s fortune out of earth and sun and barehanded labor” (232). The Colonel behaves like the king of a castle, but it’s a castle that wouldn’t exist without the work of others. Additionally, Bert’s access to educational resources helps strengthen his resilience to fight for more equality. The Colonel and other powerful members of the community are aware of the importance of educational resources. Regarding the Black residents of the town, they seek to create barriers to those resources: “For the Colonel and Mr. Higgins, being political powers in the county, were in charge of education, and their policy was to let Negroes remain unlettered. They worked better” (224-225). Bert’s fight for liberation shows the power of an education and critical thinking. Conversely, the Colonel’s withholding of educational resources shows that those in power might want to limit access to education for those exact reasons.
At the end of the story, Bert is asked to leave, like many of the characters throughout The Ways of White Folks. The Colonel, being a controlling man, tells Bert to leave through the back. Bert, being his father’s son, refuses: “‘I’ll go,’ the boy said, starting toward the front door, ‘but not out the back—from my own father’s house’ (241). In the end, Bert doesn’t leave. He stays, and the ensuing conflict leads to his father’s death. Only then does Bert try to leave, but he soon returns to the estate to escape the mob. In previous stories, some characters managed to leave, their fates unknown. In the final story, Hughes shows that not being able to leave the present situation can have fatal consequences.
Hughes utilizes strong imagery and sensory details to craft the dramatic final story. Repeatedly, he associates the Colonel and Bert to steel. The tension between the father and son is described as “like steel nearing steel” (212). Later, the Colonel senses Bert nearby: “The old white man felt the steel of him standing there, like the steel of himself forty years ago” (238). The choice of steel is appropriate, as both men are strong-willed and stubborn. The Colonel and Bert both being likened to steel also reinforces that they are father and son. Later, Hughes writes of the boiling tensions in the South, fueled by the stubborn Bert. He describes the collision of White men and Black men as “like steel meeting steel!” (228). At their final conflict, the steel of the Colonel’s pistol draws father and son together “like a magnet” (241). Repeatedly, Hughes uses steel to help represent the toughness of both men and to create more dramatic tension for their climactic fight.
Heat further enhances the drama of the story: “The sun rose burning and blazing, flooding the earth with the heat of early autumn, making even the morning oppressive” (231). Hughes reinforces this sensory detail regularly throughout “Father and Son.” A section shortly afterward opens, “The day grew hotter and hotter” (232). Repeatedly reinforcing the oppressive weather contributes to the story’s slow build to its violent ending.
Unlock all 49 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs