The Other Foot

It is impossible to read “The Other Foot” without reckoning with the historical impact of racism in the United States. It is woven into the fabric of Martian society. Hattie tells her children that “We just up and walked away” from Earth (Paragraph 26), and that no white people have come to Mars in the time since the exodus. Even though Mars is described as having abundant, rich farmland, it remains populated exclusively by Black people from Earth and their children. This isn’t a common historical colonization pattern; oppressed underclasses are more likely to be deported to a new place than they are to emigrate without a single one of their oppressors coming along to exploit the new territory. Thus, it is likely either that the settlers of Mars fled Earth to escape horrific racial violence (not unlike the Great Migration of the early 20th century) or that they were somehow exiled by a society that could no longer tolerate their difference. Either way, the marks of racial oppression are everywhere on Mars.

Characters have American names, indicating that some or all of them are descended from enslaved people who were kidnapped from Africa and had their names and histories erased. The only religion referenced in the story is Christianity, further tying the Martian community to the largely Christian American South and the religion enslavers once enforced. Every Martian above a certain age has ties to a location on Earth, and the ones mentioned by the crowd are all within the United States, most of them south of the Mason-Dixon line. Even the old man, when he describes the destruction of Greenwater, describes it in terms of cotton fields and factories—two places Black Americans were forced to work, first under slavery and then under Jim Crow-era convict leasing.

It is no surprise, then, that some Martians take the arrival of the old man as an opportunity to invert the old racial caste system and inflict some of their pain on the newcomers.  By decontextualizing commonplace racist violence and swapping the perpetrators and victims, Bradbury highlights the brutality of racist violence in the United States. The story’s conclusion offers some hope; in Bradbury’s view, racism can be overcome if people can be made to see one another as they truly are rather than as bigotry makes them seem. When asked if he has seen the white man, Willie replies: “Seems like for the first time today I really seen the white man—I really seen him clear.”

Bradbury explores the influence of group identity and the struggle for individuation. As a relatively young democracy, American literature has often focused on the tension between individuality and group identity. In classic works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), mob behavior is presented as the lowest point of democracy; the ugliest face of popular rule is mob rule. However, unlike works that present large, passionate groups as faceless monsters, “The Other Foot” presents a developing mob from the inside, through the eyes of a character struggling to keep herself emotionally and psychologically separate from her community as it seeks to violate her deeply held values. The face of the mob here is Willie, and the face of dissent is Hattie—and the two of them are married.

In the early stages of the story, characters present wildly different attitudes toward the arrival of the rocket. The children are curious; Hattie is worried; the Brown family is excited; Willie is angry. The characters are relatively distinct from one another and display highly individual responses. However, as the story goes on and Hattie and Willie drive toward the airport, Hattie begins to see people outside the car acting in concert, carrying out parallel actions and calling out to Willie as a leader. She watches her neighbors subsume their individual identities into a group identity—that of a vengeful mob. By the time Willie is standing on a literal box (alluding to a soapbox) and giving orders, he has supplanted civic authority in the form of the mayor, who tells him bluntly that he’s forming exactly the kind of mob he hated and feared as a child. When the rocket lands, the crowd’s heads move as one, suggesting they have become a single entity.

In contrast, the old man is presented as a singular individual. Although he interacts with at least one person inside the rocket (who retrieves information but is not visible to Hattie), he is marked out from the Martians by his age, his race, his fragility, and his humble pleas for help. The white man cannot be a part of the group; a mob bent on racial vengeance would never permit it. Sympathy for this isolated individual is what finally drives Hattie to distinguish herself from the group, to look for the “keystone” that will break apart the stone wall if it’s removed.

In his examination of group and individual identity, Bradbury seems to come down on the side of individualism, which was not an uncommon choice in science fiction written at the height of the anti-communist Red Scare. He urges his readers to see people on the other side of the racial divide as individuals and to deal with them on that basis.