I had cardboard in the soles of my shoes; I’d had that before, but, as I told you, mother always kept me very well dressed. Always very well dressed. It was just for a day or so sometimes when things were hard. But everything was so mixed up that last day with packing the trunks that I forgot to cut out a new piece of cardboard. I was just like any other child that age—you know, careless and forgetful.
But when mother took my hand on the street and said we had to hurry I began to be sorry I had been so careless. My old cardboard was worn through; the sidewalk was just a stove lid, and mother was dragging me along in the way older people do in a hurry, in a kind of shuffle that isn’t either a walk or a run. I remember passing some colored boys barefoot and thinking that if I could take off
