Like a Winding Sheet

The winding-sheet is a key motif within the story. It appears in the title as a simile, “Like a Winding Sheet,” and at the beginning and the end of the story. Its purpose changes slightly between each appearance.

Firstly, the sheet carries symbolic importance. At the beginning of the story, Mae describes Johnson as being “like a huckleberry in a winding sheet,” a quote that illustrates Johnson’s dark skin-tone, and the way in which it is “silhouetted against the white of the sheets” (Paragraph 8). The juxtaposition here, between Johnson’s skin and the backdrop of the winding white sheet, symbolizes the racial backdrop of the story: Even when he is in the privacy of his home, Johnson is surrounded by the white structures of society, in the same way he is entwined in the white bedsheet. This symbolism is heightened by the doomed nature of the term “winding sheet,” which is used to wrap corpses and therefore portends death or dying.

Later, Johnson himself describes his entrapment within a winding sheet, in the key moment at which he violently beats his wife. He describes the winding-sheet as an all-powerful force that “enmeshes him,” dooming him to continue the beating despite his own awareness of the horrible behavior. In this sense, the winding-sheet symbolizes how the fabric of a white-centric, racist society has entrapped Johnson to the point of no escape. Further, it is critical that Johnson describes himself as particularly entrapped within a “winding-sheet”—again portending death or dying in the violent domestic abuse scene. This comparison implies that something within Johnson has died, as it is wrapped within a winding sheet like a corpse. This represents the metaphorical death of Johnson’s principle to never hit a woman, which is overrun by his strong emotions and, in a sense, wrapped in the white sheet of death.