He wanted to burst into tears. It loomed over him: he was alone, unwanted, unsearched for, hounded by the police, useless, black. But even that didn’t matter; not the blackness. He wasn’t even black, just yellow. That didn’t matter; he could pat flour all over his face—he had done that once as a little kid—and they would still ignore him or laugh at him; it was him, not the blackness; him they didn’t want and let run away and did not care if he ended up in a strange jail and left to rot. With the dreadful clarity of self-pity he saw himself as he really was, a frightened little baby who hadn’t
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