I had shame, but we were so poor when I was growing up that I sold it to buy a crust of moldy bread for my mother, who was ill. She took the crust in her loving hands, hands that had worked themselves raw sewing shirts in the sweatshop so that her children might have a better life than she had had, coughed up a little blood (and bits of thread), looked at me, her first-born, through her slowly dimming eyes, and said, "What the hell is this? This is it?"