The author explores the theme of freedom as Delia finally reaches a place where she can be released from the oppressive Sykes. The burdens placed on Delia through her work and white society are heavy enough without having to endure the abuse inflicted on her by her husband. Delia is a religious woman and could never bring herself to inflict intentional harm, but she has been pushed to a place of no return when her last vestige of hope, her little house, is threatened.

The author does not want the reader to pass judgment on Delia's act of letting her husband die but instead to understand the grief and desperation which drive this woman to this point. At the time the story was written in 1926, African Americans still had not begun to realize any civil rights, and black women had an especially difficult life, subservient...