Question

After that the woman said, "Pick up my pocketbook, boy, and give it here." She still held him. But she bent down enough to permit him to stoop and pick up her purse. Then she said, "Now ain't you ashamed of yourself?" Firmly gripped by his shirt front, the boy said, "Yes'm." What does the boy's initial response to Mrs. Jones tell us about him?

Answer 1

Answer:

C. He definitely knows right from wrong.

Explanation:

Langston Hughes' short story "Thank You, Ma'am" shows a boy of "fourteen or fifteen, frail and willow-wild, in tennis shoes and blue jeans" trying to snatch  a purse from a woman. But that didn't succeed as he was thrown back with the weight of the purse. And that allowed the large woman Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones to catch him before he ran off.

Instead of punishing him, she took him home and fed him, cleaned him and then gave him the money to buy the "pair of blue suede shoes" that he had wanted the money for. Mrs. Jones knew how life can be foe she had also done things in her younger days. And so she understood the boy's situation. Rather than punishing him, she acted kind towards him which was a better lesson than any form of violent punishment.

The boy, Roger's manners all through the story and also his initial response to her holding him on the sidewalk shows that he knows what is right and wrong but left with no means of getting any money, he seemed to try stealing it. His responses show he is not a bad person, but made to act according to his situation.