Berry by Langston Hughes (American)

MAIN CHARACTERS
Millbury Jones (Berry)

A Black male, approximately 20 years old.

Described as good-natured and strong.
Poor and uneducated.
Very observant and intuitive about people and places.
Very good with children due to his gentleness.

Mrs. Osborn

The housekeeper at the children’s home.

Rumoured to be in love with Dr. Renfield.
Very high-handed with her staff, but docile with Dr. Renfield.
Displays racist characteristics in subtle forms.

Dr. Renfield

 Rumoured to have romantic affairs with his female staff. Cheater in love.

 Berry observes that the Home is ‘Doc Renfield’s own private gyp game’ (Hughes, p.
162), meaning that he runs his establishment for his own profit, instead of a desire to
take genuine care of the children. He is a cheater.
 He is blatantly racist.
Other Characters:

Martha Renfield

Miss Baxter (the nurse)

Mrs. Hill (the nurse)

The handyman gardener - chauffeur

S ETTINGS

Place: America, New Jersey coast, Dr. Renfield’s Summer Home for Crippled Children
The kitchen, The beach

Historical Time

1920’s – 1960’s: the pre-Civil Rights era, time of segregation

SYMBOLS

Metaphor of the berry

Berry

Literally it is a shortened form of the name Milberry.

Metaphorically, Berry’s personality is as soft and sweet and vulnerable as a berry. Note that
he is like a berry in many ways.

i) He is dark – he is a black man – and a berry is dark.

ii) He is ‘soft’ as he feels deep sympathy for the children and also, he allows others
to ‘offload’ their tasks onto him. The story says he is good-natured.
iii) Berry is also ‘sweet” in the sense that he is truly loving, kind and gentle in his
interactions with the children. The story says he is good-natured.
iv) A literal berry is vulnerable; it hangs on the berry bush where it can be easily
picked and eaten AND Berry is vulnerable as he is easily ‘eaten’ (exploited) by
the whites who exploit him to do their work and unfairly blame him for the child’s
fall.
v) Picking and eating a berry stains the mouth and hands and the whites’ unjust
treatment of Berry was a stain on their characters.

The wheelchair is another symbol

The wheelchair

TONE one of gentle criricism – criticism of prejudice, deception, unkindness, exploiting

others

SUMMARY OF THE STORY

The story of Milberry is one that begins with the head housekeeper in Dr. Renfield’s summer
home at the train station waiting for the new kitchen boy to arrive. The third person narrator
reveals Mrs. Osborn’s racist mentality to use as the first thing she noticed about Milberry was
that he was black. She decides to take the young man home although she is uncertain as to his
future as a servant in the home. She leaves Milberry washing dishes in the kitchen and goes
to speak with Dr. Renfield about Milberry’s fate at the home. The racist nature of the doctor
is also revealed as he decides to keep Milberry, but to pay him eight dollars instead of the ten
dollars that was paid to the pervious kitchen boy (who was white). Milberry was placed in the
attic to sleep and although he was employed as the kitchen boy he was made to do the work
of the other employees.
He got up early in the morning, made the fire for the cook, peel potatoes, onions and apples,
wash the dishes, scour pots and pans, scrub the floor, carry wood for the fire place, polish the
waitresses silver and ice their water, as well as other jobs that Mrs. Osborn would assign to
him.

Milberry knew that he was being overworked and under paid, however; as he was black and
uneducated there were few opportunities for him and he needed work and food. Milberry also
developed a relationship with the children at the home and this also influenced his decision to
stay. Berry, as he was affectionately called by the children was the only one at the home that
genuinely care for them. Berry would sing songs, tell them stories and jokes and take them to
the beach when the weather was sunny. He would observe the way the workers at the home
would complain about everything and how they only treated the children well when a family
was visiting. The story makes mention of the two types of cans that were opened at the home,
good cans and the cheap cans. The good cans were opened when a family would visit and the
cheap cans were what the students ate on a regular basis.

One day while pushing a child in his wheelchair to the beach an accident occurred. The child
was so excited that he leaned forwards and fell from his chair. The nurses blamed Berry for
the accident and Dr. Renfield did the same. The ‘good’ doctor was not truly concerned about
the wellness of the child but the lawsuit that might be field against the home and the money
he would have to pay the family.

Berry was fired and his last week’s pay withheld.

CONFLICT
Man against Society

Berry was a black man in a white setting; this resulted in him having a hard life in Georgia as
“they don’t have many schools for Negroes” and he was uneducated when he moved north to
New Jersey he had been there for weeks without food. When he got to Dr. Renfield’s
Summer Home for Crippled Children he was treated unfairly by the white adults at the home.

RESOLUTION
Berry is fired without pay after a child falls from his wheelchair. He leaves the home for
Jersey City without any arguments are questions (the same way he did his work at the home).

THEMES
Racism, Prejudice and Discrimination, Poverty, Man versus Society, Friendship

Racism

This theme is apparent when Berry was being considered for employment at the Home. Mrs.
Osborn was concerned about where Berry would sleep, implying that he could not sleep with
the white servants because he was considered to be beneath them. His salary was also cut due
to his race, and he was overworked, with no discussions of days off. Additionally, ‘everybody
was imposing on him in that taken-for-granted way white folks do with Negro help.’
(Hughes, 162). Even more importantly, when the unfortunate accident occurred with the
child, there was no attempt at discerning what led to the incident, but blame was laid on the
obvious person – Berry. As a result, he was relieved of his job in a hail of racist slurs.

Oppression

The theme of oppression is expressed repetitively throughout this story. White workers and
superiors keep expecting Milberry to do more and more. Milberry’s response to these
requests is a quiet acceptance without bitterness because he is happy and thankful to have this
job and food. In the story Milberry finds happiness in helping the crippled children at play
during his brief rest period. At first the nurses are hesitant whether they should allow it or
not. Near the end of the story the nurses have changed their minds about Berry and come
looking for him and demanding his immediate help.

In his typical nature in responding to and accepting their demand he unknowingly causes his
own demise. While Berry was helping a boy in a wheelchair down the stairs, due to no fault
of his, the boy fell out of the chair onto the grass and the wheelchair fell onto the walk. In the
fall the boy was not hurt but the wheelchair’s back was snapped off. In this scene Langston
Hughes uses the wheelchair as a symbol of Milberry’s undoing. The wheelchair’s falling
represents Berry’s falling from the grace of the white people’s acceptance. The snapped back
of the wheelchair foreshadows Berry’s immediate termination of employment. Even though it
was the white nurses’ responsibility and job, they quickly and unjustly placed all the blame
for the accident upon Berry. This truly exemplifies the use of oppression of white people over
blacks.

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