I arrived in New Orleans in the rain at 5 o’clock in the morning. I sat around the bus station for a while but the people depressed me so I took my suitcase and went out in the rain and began walking. I didn’t know where the roaming houses were, where the poor section was. I had a cardboard suitcase that was falling apart. It had once been black but the black coating had peeled off and yellow cardboard was exposed. I had tried to solve that by putting black shoepolish over the exposed cardboard. As I walked along in the rain the shoepolish on the suitcase ran and unwittingly I rubbed black streaks on both legs of my pants as I switched the suitcase from hand to hand.