"Thank You, M'am," by Langston Hughes

It was about eleven o'clock at night, and she was walking alone, when a boy ran up behind her and tried to snatch her purse.

But she bent down enough to permit him to stoop and pick up her purse.

He looked as if he were fourteen or fifteen, frail and willow-wild, in tennis shoes and blue jeans.

"Was I bothering you when I turned that corner?" asked the woman.

If you think that that contact is not going to last awhile, you got another thought coming.

When she got to her door, she dragged the boy inside, down a hall, and into a large kitchenette-furnished room at the rear of the house.

“Here I am trying to get home to cook me a bite to eat and you snatch my pocketbook!”

"Well, you didn't have to snatch my pocketbook to get some suede shoes," said Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones. "You could of asked me."

There was a long pause. A very long pause.

Then he frowned, but not knowing he frowned.

You might run that comb through your hair so you will look presentable.

He did not trust the woman not to trust him. And he did not want to be mistrusted now.

And next time, do not make the mistake of latching onto my pocketbook nor nobody else's--because shoes come by devilish like that will burn your feet.

The boy wanted to say something else other than "Thank you, ma'am" to Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones, but he couldn't do so as he turned at the barren stoop and looked back at the large woman in the door.

He barely managed to say "Thank you" before she shut the door.