84 pages • 2 hours read
The Illustrated Man
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. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Story 3
Story 3 Summary: “The Other Foot”
On Mars, Hattie Johnson and her three sons hear that a rocket is coming. It is piloted by a white man. The children have never seen a white man before; Hattie herself was only a young girl when she lived on Earth in 1965. The children are excited, but Hattie is nervous. She explains how the black community had left Earth for Mars 20 years ago. Afterwards, the white men had destroyed Earth in an atomic war, along with the rocket technology needed to escape it. It had taken them 20 years to rebuild.
Excited, the Martian community is gathering—they claim they just want to see the man. When Hattie is concerned they’ll lynch him, they chide her. Hattie’s husband Willie arrives; he is angry, collecting her and heading home to get his gun. He reminds Hattie that white people had lynched his father on Knockwood Hill and shot his mother. Willie says, “[T]he shoe’s on the other foot now. We’ll see who gets laws passed against him, who gets lynched, who rides the back of streetcars, who gets segregated in shows” (41). He digs in their attic for his guns; “she couldn’t see him at all, he was so dark” (42). Willie obsessively mutters about white people needing to leave them alone.
In the town square, Hattie realizes Willie has been urging the neighbors to bring guns and ropes. The mob paints discriminatory signs relegating white people to the back of the bus. Willie riles up them up, clutching a noose in his hands. The mayor tries to stop him, telling him he is behaving no better than the people he hates (46).
The rocket arrives. The white man steps out; his eyes are “colorless; almost sightless with things he had seen in the passing years” (48). He describes World War III and how white people “ruined it all” with atomic warfare (48). They salvaged just enough metal to build this one rocket to reach out for aid. Deeply apologetic, he begs the Martians for help, even offering for all the remaining people on Earth to work as slaves for them. If the Martians say no, however, they will never bother them again.
Everyone waits to see what Willie will do. Hattie, sensing she may be able to deflate her husband’s anger, asks if Knockwood Hill was among the places destroyed. It was, along with everyone involved with the deaths of Willie’s parents. All of civilization is gone, “nothing was left of it to hate” (53). Hattie watches Willie’s hands open and drop the rope.
On the way home, he tells Hattie that the white men have been as lonely as them, and now “we can start all over again, on the same level” (54). At home, the children ask if Willie saw the white man; he responds that for the first time, he has seen him clearly.
Story 3 Analysis
In the introduction, Bradbury relates how when he first tried to publish “The Other Foot” in the early 1950s, he was unable to sell it. Though some details are offensive now—for example, Bradbury’s use of the word “Negro”—in 1951, the story was ahead of its time for its radically empathetic view of race relations. Considering that Jim Crow laws, legislation that mandated racial segregation in the American South, were in effect until 1965, Bradbury’s opinion is somewhat revolutionary.
The story takes place somewhere around 1985, 20 years after African Americans fled Earth to build their own civilization on Mars. Willie and Hattie’s children are young enough to have no concept of racism. Hearing a white man is coming, their reaction is curiosity; racism, Bradbury makes clear, is a learned behavior. Hattie is driven to first protect their children, then diffuse conflict, which may reflect the gender expectations of Bradbury’s time.
In contrast, Willie is eager to exact revenge. He is motivated by the harm white men did to him and his family on Earth in the past and by the danger they pose to peaceful Martian society in the present. In language that would be considered problematic now, Bradbury links the color of Willie’s skin to the metaphorical darkness of his reaction. As he digs for his guns, Hattie can almost not make him out: “she saw the brutal metal of [the guns] glittering in the black attic, and she couldn’t see him at all, he was so dark” (42).
Willie’s skill as a leader is underlined by his ability to spread this darkness throughout the community. While the townsfolk were initially surprised at Hattie’s worry that they might lynch the white man, at Willie’s encouragement, they crowd together “like one dark body with a thousand arms reaching out to take weapons” (43). Notably, not everyone in the mob wants violence. Some are trapped “like figures in a nightmare in which they wished no participation” (47). In the same way, many white people of Bradbury’s time were likely unwilling (but culpable) participants in the racism of their society.
When the white man arrives, however, the crowd’s anger is dissolved by his sad appearance, humility, and genuine apology. Bradbury is careful to mention that the cotton fields and mills—symbols of slavery in the American South—have been destroyed. The colorlessness of the white man’s eyes symbolizes Bradbury’s message that, in their mutual suffering, the barriers of color between the two groups have broken down. With the poisonous remnants of white society completely burned away, they can rebuild. While loneliness will later prove a divisive and corrosive element in “The Visitor,” here it shows potential as a unifier, breaking down boundaries and allowing empathy to grow. In shared suffering, Willie figuratively sees the white man for the first time.
Unlock all 84 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Ray Bradbury
