Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Lemonade Screening We offered blessings to young people, received blessings from our elders, laid on hands and called in ancestors, offered love for those struggling through this pain, called in fat and disabled bodies for the next evolution, generated compassion and sisterhood for all of us who have been Beckys, and scream-leapt through a ton of testimonial and ecstatic praise for our own strength, transformation, resilience, and vision as Black women.93 We spoke of orishas and transformative justice and forgiveness and shame and loving ourselves and open relationships and queer love and Black excellence and Prince and complexity and solidarity and intergenerational healing and so much more. 87 If Beyoncé worship is offensive to your system in any way, I just want to remind you that you can skip ahead. Because it’s gonna be a praiseful few pages.88 The Carters, Everything Is Love (Parkwood Entertainment, 2018).89 After Beyoncé dropped her self-titled album, I hosted a conference call to discuss the work. The call was full of other writers, artists, burlesque dancers, mamas, organizers, academics, women, and trans participants. Not everyone spoke up, but those who did were honest and nuanced.90 This essay first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “Beyonce’s Grammy Performance Was a Gilded Afrofuturist Dream,” Motherboard, February 15, 2017, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d758bq/beyonces-grammy-performance-was-a-gilded-afrofuturist-dream.91 Beyoncé, Lemonade (Parkwood Entertainment, 2016) compact disc and DVD.92 Beyoncé, Lemonade. This poem first appeared as adrienne maree brown, “Lemonade. Masterpiece,” April 24, 2016, http://adriennemareebrown.net/2016/04/23/lemonade-masterpiece/.93 Two days after the album dropped, Celeste Faison and I hosted a screening and conversation at Solespace Community Shoe Store in Oakland. These are some excerpts from the reflection.on Fear, Shame, Death, and HumorA Conversation Between the Rocca Family and Zizi [image file=image_rsrc3KX.jpg] The Rocca Family is the name for the top-secret collaborative art-practice work of Ola El-Khaldi and Diala Khasawnih with Rocca the cat as their pussy power. They perform the Zizi Show under the names Taita O and Zizi. Seven years ago, they traveled through space and time from the faraway (some refer to it as Jordan for highly politicized quasi-practical reasons) and landed with their cat Rocca in San Francisco. On November 30, 2016, they locked their San Francisco home for the last time and embarked on their RF USA 2017 Road Trip. Through its practice, in search of home perhaps, the Family uses all its folkloric know-how and food powers, trusting in humor, to make friendships and talk about immigration, family, freedom, and the meaning of life. Along their life journey, the Rocca Family found Zizi, a philosopher without concrete definitions and inclined to mood swings, who is not afraid of discomfort or anger. While she might make references to ideal worlds and imagined realities, she also makes up truths and brings forward lies. Zizi is a playground, a space for the Rocca Family to be silly, a platform to challenge their own fears. Zizi is their uninhibited character, their act of resistance, their voice of anger.

• From The Art of Memoir

  Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot— mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don’t sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer’s best voice will grow from embracing her own “you-ness”—which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which brings me back to that simplest of voice building blocks: diction. Nabokov uses a diction more ornate than would fit most of us. For the vast majority of writers, we’re better off with simpler vocabulary—the shorter, often monosyllabic words you use all the dang time. Unless you’re like my friend, poet Brooks Haxton (who translates Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and German), throwing in three-dollar words will just make you look like a dick. So you’re better off writing fuck than copulate—the first has Germanic origins, the second derives from Latinate language. There are no rules, but Germanic words tend to be thought of as “low.” It’s the vocabulary of the street, of childhood or the underprivileged. The other vocabulary is often seen as “high”—the parlance of science and diplomacy. In France there was an actual academy that screened out words deemed too shitty (Germanic) or scrofulous (Latinate) to join their fancy dictionary. Nabokov’s sentences go on for lines and sometimes pages, and his highfalutin diction sprouts naturally from his polyglot education and rarefied background. His psychological need, stated early in the book, is to be free of time, which will eradicate the past he’s trying to hold on to—he almost can’t believe, we sometimes think, that his mind can’t change the facts. So being untethered by chronology becomes—like his constant trolling for beauty—part of the book’s driving engine, almost working like a plot. He opens with the subject: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. . . . I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Monique. Harm reduction is a social justice movement built on the belief in, and respect for, the rights of people who use drugs. Harm reduction combines two key strategies: 1) public health strategies to reduce harms associated with substance use; and 2) advocacy and drug policy reform to address harms caused to communities by the war on drugs. Our bottom line is that everyone has the right to health and well-being. And everyone has the right to participate in the public policy dialogue. Our mandate is to create the conditions of possibility where both of those things can occur by keeping people safe and making sure they have the tools necessary to advocate for themselves. Fueled by the collision of the HIV/AIDS crisis and the war on drugs thirty years ago, a small group of visionary people made the bold decision to care and advocate for drug users who were dying from AIDS. That decision gave rise to an entire community whose anarchistic vision was to keep ourselves safe while disrupting the prevailing criminal “justice” regime that dominated drug policy. The founders of the harm reduction movement were predominantly people who were active or former drug users, people of color, LGBTQ+ activists, and veterans of social justice movements. And together they changed the world. amb. I have been shaped by the principles of harm reduction—the idea that the users of drugs are the primary agents of any harm reduction, any change, in their own lives … this is still such a radical and foundational aspect of my politics for any change work. Can you share some of the principles that center and guide you? Monique. First and foremost: no one should be punished for what they put in their own body if it doesn’t cause harm to other people. The Foundation for a Drug-Free World estimates that more than 200 million people around the world consume “illegal drugs.” The 2016 National Survey on Drug Use and Health reports nearly 25 million Americans use “illegal drugs.” What happens to those figures when you include “legal” drugs? Perhaps more importantly: what is it about drugs that makes so many people want to use them? Sometimes we just want to feel differently than we do every day. It feels good, causing pleasure and excitement. Sometimes we need to find a way to escape from the harsh realities of our lives. Why is this a criminal act? People who use drugs become “other” based on behaviors that aren’t culturally acceptable. People who use drugs are among the most stigmatized and criminalized groups in society. We cast moral judgment for not saying “no.” We say it’s your own fault for getting HIV or hepatitis C. We’re quick to point out their lack of willpower and selfishness. We stereotype and pathologize people who use drugs. We make them “other.” Stigmatization involves severe social disapproval of a person’s characteristics or their beliefs, which are considered to be unacceptable to dominant cultural norms.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  His hair trimly dressed, clean linen, and, above all, a hale, ruddy, wholesome country look, made him out as pretty a piece of woman’s meat as you could see, and I should have thought any one much out of taste, that could not have made a hearty meal of such a morsel as nature seemed to have designed for the highest diet of pleasure. And why should I here suppress the delight I received from this amiable creature, in remarking each artless look, each motion of pure indissembled nature, betrayed by his wanton eyes; or shewing, transparently, the glow and suffusion of blood through his fresh, clear skin, whilst even his stury rustic pressure wanted not their peculiar charm? Oh! but, say you, this was a young fellow of too low a rank of life to deserve so great a display. May be so: but was my condition, strictly considered, one jot more exalted? or, had I really been much above him, did not his capacity of giving such exquisite pleasure sufficiently raise and enoble him, to me, at least? Let who would, for me cherish, respect, and reward the painter’s, the statuary’s, the musician’s art, in proportion to the delight taken in them: but at my age, and with my taste for pleasure, a taste strongly constitutional to me, the talent of pleasing, with which nature has endowed a handsome person, formed to me the greatest of all merits; compared to which, the vulgar prejudices in favour of titles, dignities, honours, and the like, held a very low rank indeed. Nor perhaps would the beauties of the body be so much affected to be held cheap, were they, in their nature, to be bought and delivered. But for me, whose natural philosophy all resided in the favourite center of sense, and who was ruled by its powerful instinct in taking pleasure by its right handle, I could scarce have made a choice more to my purpose. Mr. H....’s loftier qualifications of birth, fortune and sense, laid me under a sort of subjection and constraint, that were far from making harmony in the concert of love; nor had he, perhaps, thought me worth softening that superiority to; but, with this lad, I was more on the level which love delights in. We may say what we please, but those we can be the easiest and freest with, are ever those we like, not to say love the best.

• From The Art of Memoir

  quotidian. It operates just beyond the bounds of propriety, as poems should. Plus, the minute you laugh at it, you become loosely complicit in the speaker’s offensive speech. This binds you to the narrator. You’ve bought in. (The same kind of buy-in happens in any superfantastic premise—think George Saunders’s story “Fox 8,” where the minute you accept the premise that a fox is writing, you’ve sort of been psychically hijacked by the narrator. He owns your belief system.) That single line also evokes an entirely new world in which cows piss on flat rocks and folks stand around to marvel at it. Metaphors helped to flesh out experiences and texture the language as my father talked. The wind came through boxcar cracks during the Depression “like a straight razor.” He had a talent for physical detail and a bemused attention to the human comedy. Until drink ate him up, he was a keen observer, with a knack for zeroing in on a luminous image. At a random stoplight, he’d laugh like hell just seeing a big fat guy on a moped with its tires squashed down. He liked marbled meat and unfiltered Camels; he ate onions raw. He argued from external evidence—a fully imagined place—and the slapstick and violence of his tales drew you in mostly through the vivid portrayals a carnal person has a knack for. But most of all, Daddy loved his characters. There were buffoons, sure, but affection shone through every tale. Unlike a lot of other barroom show-offs I’ve listened to, he had to be coaxed into talking, and his stories never seemed designed to punk anybody. He frequently made fun of his own lunkheaded antics, as when his brothers convinced him at a fair to get in the boxing ring with a kangaroo, who quite literally kicked his ass. I hoped his attitude of fond humility would underpin my own vision. However much I borrowed from Daddy’s language and attitude, I knew any voice authentic to my youth would have to accommodate the hours I spent pinched and wondering in my head. My inner life sometimes felt bigger than my exterior—it’s just how I’m wired, I guess. So my voice couldn’t just mimic his. I had all manner of stuff to talk about that he’d roll his eyes at. Literary references and

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  If you have visited Whitstable you will know that this was a rather inconvenient passion, for the town has neither music hall nor theatre - only a solitary lamp-post before the Duke of Cumberland Hotel, where minstrel troupes occasionally sing, and the Punch-and-Judy man, in August, sets his booth. But Whitstable is only fifteen minutes away by train from Canterbury; and here there was a music hall - the Canterbury Palace of Varieties - where the shows were three hours long, and the tickets cost sixpence, and the acts were the best to be seen, they said, in all of Kent. The Palace was a small and, I suspect, a rather shabby theatre ; but when I see it in my memories I see it still with my oyster-girl’s eyes - I see the mirror-glass which lined the walls, the crimson plush upon the seats, the plaster cupids, painted gold, which swooped above the curtain. Like our oyster-house, it had its own particular scent - the scent, I know now, of music halls everywhere - the scent of wood and grease-paint and spilling beer, of gas and of tobacco and of hair-oil, all combined. It was a scent which as a girl I loved uncritically; later I heard it described, by theatre managers and artistes, as the smell of laughter, the very odour of applause. Later still I came to know it as the essence not of pleasure, but of grief. That, however, is to get ahead of my story. I was more intimate than most girls with the colours and scents of the Canterbury Palace - in the period, at least, of which I am thinking, that final summer in my father’s house, when I became eighteen - because Alice had a beau who worked there, a boy named Tony Reeves, who got us seats at knock-down prices or for free. Tony was the nephew of the Palace’s manager, the celebrated Tricky Reeves, and therefore something of a catch for our Alice. My parents mistrusted him at first, thinking him ‘rapid’ because he worked in a theatre, and wore cigars behind his ears, and talked glibly of contracts, London, and champagne. But no one could dislike Tony for long, he was so large-hearted and easy and good; and like every other boy who courted her, he adored my sister, and was ready to be kind to us all on her account. Thus it was that Alice and I were so frequently to be found on a Saturday night, tucking our skirts beneath our seats and calling out the choruses to the gayest songs, in the best and most popular shows, at the Canterbury Palace.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  For Toni Cade Bambara, Kai was a student. An Atlanta experiment who rejected the respectability of Spelman but stayed, like Toni Cade, adjacent, compelled by the ideas of the people who would orbit the Atlanta University Center, the Institute of the Black World, Seven Stages Theater, and more. Kai was a found sculpture media-mixing memory. Remembering Toni Cade Bambara’s practice of just bringing people with her to show up for women surviving abuse in Black creative community, turning. Kai remembers being at Toni Cade Bambara’s Atlanta home one night and being recruited into a simple and brave intervention to come to the aid of a woman in their community. Kai turned “Let’s go get her” into the bones of a Harm Free Zone framework. For me, Kai is proof. That someone with big hair and marker ink all over her hands, paint painting her clothes, can live more than one consecutive life in one body. For me, Kai is a material mentor in the principle of revolutionary transformation in practice. Proof that change is actually change. Unafraid of what fire does to oil, like all the other women who turn the fried chicken or banana fritters over with their fingers. Legacies of women who have been shaped and strengthened by burn. Recently, after eleven years of knowing me, Kai told me out of the window of her car that I was aging beautifully. And all I could think was, you would know. In 2006, when we listed what we wanted as women of color survivors in response to a nationally talked-about rape case that happened blocks away, Kai was the person who said, “I want an organization.” And before that, Kai was the person who invited us into her living room to have that conversation in the first place. That was the first day I met her. That organization became UBUNTU. Was she wearing overalls that day? Or just usually ever after? I didn’t know, while we wrote on butcher paper in her living room, that decades earlier Kai had sat in Toni Cade Bambara’s living room with brown paper from the actual butcher practicing visioning, the visual and the visceral. As UBUNTU organized the Day of Truthtelling, Kai was the person who said that the flyers should be neon pink. Not those pastel colors from Kinko’s. The T-shirts should at least be available in one baby-tee variation. The protest route should be danceable in heels. Because of Kai, at the same moment I learned to lean into my survivorship, my worst moments and scariest selves as a source of strength and leadership in community, I also learned a femme audacity of warrior adornment and creative insistence. Let’s call it: you will not move through this room and not know there is a Black femme in here who loves herself at least as diligently as oppression denies her. You will not have to guess. You will not not see her. She is not hiding from herself.

• From My People (2022)

  Part VI: Honoring the Ancestors A Love Affair That Lasted for Fifty-Six Years Black Muslim Temple Renamed for Malcolm X Columbia’s Overdue Apology to Langston Hughes Remembering John Lewis and the Significance of Freedom Rides Mandela’s Birthday and Trayvon Martin’s Loss Postscript: Julian Bond The Death of a Friend Inspires Reflections on Mortality When I Met Dr. King Nelson Mandela, the Father Epilogue: Reasons for Hope amid America’s Racial Unrest Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Charlayne Hunter-Gault Copyright About the Publisher ForewordI first met Charlayne Hunter-Gault in 2016 when I shared the stage with her in New York City during a panel on covering race held for the George Polk Awards. I am not a journalist who has ever cared about how my profession can give access to celebrity, but meeting Charlayne Hunter-Gault for the first time rendered me—for lack of a better word—starstruck. It is seldom that one gets an opportunity to sit in conversation with someone whose life, activism, and career quite literally made it possible for you to live yours as you have, but for me, Ms. Hunter-Gault embodies that rarest of people. I did not feel worthy of sharing the stage with an icon of the civil rights movement, someone who integrated the all-white University of Georgia—and therefore its all-white journalism program that would one day award us both the Peabody—someone who had helped integrate newsrooms, someone who had been cataloguing the beauty and triumphs, struggles and resistance, of Black people across the diaspora for longer than I had been alive. It’s a scary and vulnerable thing to meet your heroes, and yet, Ms. Hunter-Gault treated me with the grace and generosity that she is known for even as I told her repeatedly how honored I was to meet her and talk with her. So when an email from her popped up in my inbox asking me to write the foreword for her new book, I took it as such a tremendous honor. In the aptly named My People , the veteran journalist compiles decades of reporting from the various news organizations lucky enough to have employed her, reports that begin with her own experiences integrating the University of Georgia, stretching throughout the South—the ancestral land of Black Americans—to the urban North, where she established the Harlem Bureau for the New York Times , and crossing the Atlantic to chronicle the freedom struggles of Black people on the African continent. In each story, Ms. Hunter-Gault brings the determination to analyze the fruits of the racial caste system that she was born into while also documenting the humanity, the striving, the joy, and the creativity of her people—our people. As she writes in part 5 , she wanted to focus on reporting she “didn’t see much of in the magazine (or anywhere else) at the time—the experience of ordinary Black people in the segregated South, like my dear grandmother.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  After this period of hermit life he began his labors in behalf of the monastery proper. In that mountainous region he established in succession twelve cloisters, each with twelve monks and a superior, himself holding the oversight of all. The persecution of an unworthy priest caused him, however, to leave Subiaco and retire to a wild but picturesque mountain district in the Neapolitan province, upon the boundaries of Samnium and Campania. There he destroyed the remnants of idolatry, converted many of the pagan inhabitants to Christianity by his preaching and miracles, and in the year 529, under many difficulties, founded upon the ruins of a temple of Apollo the renowned cloister of Monte Cassino,374 the alma mater and capital of his order. Here he labored fourteen years, till his death. Although never ordained to the priesthood, his life there was rather that of a missionary and apostle than of a solitary. He cultivated the soil, fed the poor, healed the sick, preached to the neighboring population, directed the young monks, who in increasing numbers flocked to him, and organized the monastic life upon a fixed method or rule, which he himself conscientiously observed. His power over the hearts, and the veneration in which he was held, is illustrated by the visit of Totila, in 542, the barbarian king, the victor of the Romans and master of Italy, who threw himself on his face before the saint, accepted his reproof and exhortations, asked his blessing, and left a better man, but fell after ten years’ reign, as Benedict had predicted, in a great battle with the Graeco-Roman army under Narses. Benedict died, after partaking of the holy communion, praying, in standing posture, at the foot of the altar, on the 21st of March, 543, and was buried by the side of his sister, Scholastica, who had established, a nunnery near Monte Cassino and died a few weeks before him. They met only once a year, on the side of the mountain, for prayer and pious conversation. On the day of his departure, two monks saw in a vision a shining pathway of stars leading from Monte Cassino to heaven, and heard a voice, that by this road Benedict, the well beloved of God, had ascended to heaven. His credulous biographer, Pope Gregory I., in the second book of his Dialogues, ascribes to him miraculous prophecies and healings, and even a raising of the dead.375 With reference to his want of secular culture and his spiritual knowledge, he calls him a learned ignorant and an unlettered sage.376 At all events he possessed the genius of a lawgiver, and holds the first place among the founders of monastic orders, though his person and life are much less interesting than those of a Bernard of Clairvaux, a Francis of Assisi, and an Ignatius of Loyola.377 § 44. The Rule of St. Benedict.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Azzam did not make up this theory out of whole cloth. He followed al-Shafii, the eighth-century scholar who had ruled that when the Dar al-Islam was invaded by a foreign power, jihad could become fard ayn, the responsibility of every fit Muslim who lived near the frontier. Modern transport now made it possible for all Muslims to reach the border of Afghanistan, so jihad, Azzam reasoned, was “compulsory upon each and every Muslim on earth.” Once they had liberated Afghanistan, the Arab-Afghans should go on to recover all the other lands wrested from the ummah by non-Muslims—Palestine, Lebanon, Bokhara, Chad, Eritrea, Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, South Yemen, Tashkent, and Spain.10 In his lectures and writings, Azzam depicted the Afghans somewhat idealistically as untouched by the brutal mechanization of modern jahiliyyah; they represented pristine humanity. Fighting the Soviet Goliath, they reminded him of David when he was but a shepherd boy. His tales of the Afghans and Arabs who died as martyrs in this war inspired Muslim audiences worldwide. But Azzam’s martyrs were not suicide bombers or terrorists of any kind. They did not cause their own deaths or kill civilians: they were regular soldiers killed in battle by Soviet troops. Azzam was in fact adamantly opposed to terrorism, and on this point he would eventually part company with Bin Laden and the Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri. Azzam insistently maintained the orthodox view that killing noncombatants or fellow Muslims like Sadat violated fundamental Islamic teaching. In fact, he believed that a martyr could be a “witness” to divine truth even if he died peacefully in bed.11 Azzam’s classical jihadism was condemned by some scholars, but it had strong appeal for young Sunnis who were embarrassed by the success of the Shii revolution in Iran. Yet not all the volunteers were devout; some were not even observant, although in Peshawar many would be influenced by such hard-line Islamists as Zawahiri, who had suffered arrest, torture, and imprisonment in Egypt for alleged involvement in the Sadat assassination. And so Afghanistan became a new Islamist hub. Young militants from East Asia and North Africa were sent to the front to increase their commitment, and the government of Saudi Arabia actually encouraged its own young to volunteer.12

• From The Art of Memoir

  he recently told me he cared about nothing so much as veracity. He’d gone half nuts trying to write it, his wife coming home to find him in a chair surrounded by wadded up yellow legal-pad pages, and then, “I finally gave myself a kind of permission that I’d been reluctant to give to write about certain things. Now it sounds so pompous to say it—a truth telling.” While other reporters went out with troops for short stints, then came in to wire stories on deadline, Herr had no deadlines. He’d stay embedded for months, and all that time, he was cramming his notebook, capturing dialogue that still prowls my head—“‘We had this gook, and we was gonna skin him’ (a grunt told me). ‘I mean he was already dead and everything.’” Herr’s talent rests in weaving together conflicting voices, juxtaposing dialogue from all over, the tender and the monstrous side by side. He speaks in rock-and-roll lyrics, hippie aphorisms, hep-cat ebonics, army acronyms, and the pop religion of redneck grunts, and lacing it all together is his own elegiac longing for some solid ground he never really finds. This talent for capturing unforgettable dialogue no doubt grew from a childhood of innocent curiosity about strangers. Playing detective as a kid, he mastered memorizing the spoken word at an age when his peers were fixated on their Little League swings: “I was a voyeur. . . . I trained myself to eavesdrop while looking out the train window and not to miss a word. I used to walk around when I was twelve and follow people home. This would involve even taking bus rides with them. I just wanted to see where and how they lived” (Los Angeles Times, April 15, 1990). The fractured poetry of American idiom naturally enthralled him, and he cultivated an ear for the small majesty of the average human unit speaking. Herr confesses that much of Dispatches was pieced together. But he stands by the quotes that ring so true: “Very few lines were literally invented.” In other words, the voices that transfix us—and for me form the core of his talent—may be the closest to verbatim reportage. Plus his lack of historical method is moot anyway. We read Herr not to nail down external events—the date of this bombing raid or that regimental movement—but to share the journey of the

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When, a little later, another man tried to call for Nibs, he was shushed by his neighbours; and by the time Kitty got round to her ballad and her bit of business with the rose the hall was on her side, attentive and appreciative.From my station at the side of the stage I watched her in wonder. When she stepped into the wing, weary and flushed, and her place was taken by a comic singer, I put my hand upon her arm and pressed it hard. Then Mr Bliss appeared with Mr Ling the manager. They had been watching from the front, and looked very satisfied; the former took Kitty’s hand in both of his and shook it, crying, ‘A triumph, Miss Butler! A triumph, if ever I saw one.’Mr Ling was more restrained. He gave Kitty a nod, then said, ‘Well done, my dear. A difficult crowd, and you handled it admirably. Once the band has grasped the pacing of your business and your strolls - well, you will be splendid.’Kitty only frowned. I had brought a towel with me from the change-room, and this she now caught up, and pressed to her face. Then she took her jacket off, and handed it to me, and unfastened the bow-tie at her throat. ‘It wasn’t so good,’ she said at last, ‘as I might have wished it. There was no — fizz, no sparkle.’Mr Bliss gave a snort, then spread his hands. ‘My dear, your first night in the capital! A theatre larger than you have ever worked before! The crowd will come to know you, word will spread. You must be patient. Soon they will be buying tickets just for you!’ At that I saw the manager glance his way through narrowed eyes; but Kitty, at least, allowed herself to smile. ‘That’s better,’ said Mr Bliss then. ‘And now, if you’ll permit me, ladies, I believe a light little supper would be welcome. A light little supper - and, perhaps, a heavy large glass with some of that fizz in it, Miss Butler, that you seem so keen on.’ The restaurant to which he took us was a theatre people’s one, not very far away, and filled with gentlemen in fancy waistcoats just like himself, and with girls and boys like Kitty, with streaks of greasepaint on their cuffs and crumbs of spit-black in the corners of their eyes. He seemed to have a friend at every table, every one of whom saluted him as he passed by; but he did not pause to chat with them, only waved his hat in general greeting, then led us to an empty booth and called to a waiter for a recitation of the bill of fare. When this was done, and we had made our choices, he beckoned the man a little closer and murmured something to him; the waiter withdrew, and returned a minute later with a champagne bottle, which Mr Bliss proceeded ostentatiously to uncork.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  She’s grown from “Cater to You” to “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” She’s grown from “Speechless” to “Listen” to “Sorry” to “Freedom” to “Boss.” I am fascinated by how culture shapes politics, how culture shapes our daily lives. Beyoncé takes responsibility for culture shaping and shifting. I love that every time she releases something, a thousand people need to write think pieces about what she means by it. I love the grace and precision with which she holds her responsibility in shaping culture and how she has dominated every corner of her field. I love that when I go to her concerts, they are self-love gatherings for the attendees. While the world outside rages, we come to these spaces that are centered on Black women loving themselves, and we find each other and find release. I love loving a Black woman pop star this unapologetically, in public, and still demand that anyone I meet takes me seriously in the work. Claiming Beyoncé opened up a path toward my wholeness. The following few pieces are some excerpts of my Beyoncé love notes. Beyoncé: The Conference Call Maryse.89 I heard some folks talking about burlesque, and, yes, what resonated with me was feeling like, yes, this is what I want to grind to. But also, as a former sex worker, it was so good seeing this woman who doesn’t have to show herself or her body to be successful, to make the choice to show herself in this way, powerful and liberated in her sexuality. She draws on stripper culture but in a way that is also respectful of people who actually do the work. While also at the same time being critical of all the things people have to go through to get to that place to do that work, to be desired. Mahogany. I just want to say this is great you are having this call, to get together as women and process a woman’s success and also have a safe space for talking about all this bottom bitch feminism, pardon my French. I love that she is talking about being sexy and being married women [chorus: Yes]. A lot of times, marriage is not explored as a safe space to be sexy. I get to show you how I love you, and I get be a freak with the person I am committed to. And, yes, there are some contradictions.

• From My People (2022)

  But one suspects that the talk, for years to come, will be of how they went to Washington and, for all practical purposes, “stood on Eastland’s toes.” For the urban-rural types, who were in a transitional position to begin with, the frustrations inherent in the system became only more apparent. Already leaning toward urban-type militancy, their inclinations were reenforced by the treatment that even the nonviolent received when those in control grew weary of them and their cause. The urban people did not learn anything that they hadn’t already known. Except, perhaps, about the differences that exist between them and their Southern brothers. They expected nothing, they gave little, and they got the same in return. Resurrection City was not really supposed to succeed as a city. It was supposed to succeed in dramatizing the plight of the poor in this country. Instead, its greatest success was in dramatizing what the system has done to the black community in this country. And in doing so, it affirmed the view taken by black militants today—that before black people can make any meaningful progress in the United States of America, they have to, as the militants say, “get themselves together.” Part IIMy SistersFrom my earliest years, Black women helped me on my journey into journalism. My first mentor in high school was Elsie Foster Evans, the advisor to the school paper, the Green Light . Being Black, she was forced to leave the South to obtain a degree available in the South only to white educators. She obtained her master’s degree at the University of Michigan but returned to Atlanta and worked for a brief time as a reporter for the local Black newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World , the oldest Black daily in the country. She shaped and molded me during those two years with her gentle guidance. And it was she who helped me along my path to realizing my dream. Part of that dream was finding women like those who had inspired me throughout my life, but who often didn’t get the kind of attention they deserved from the mainstream—that is, white—media. In 1972 this dream led me to persuade my New York Times editors to allow me to fly from New York, where I was based, to Chicago to cover a group of some two hundred Black women who traveled there from all over the country to “have dialogue” over the concerns that they felt distinguished their interests from those of the white women’s liberation movement. I was particularly impressed with their understanding that while Black women had been trailblazers throughout their history, it was more often than not that their opinions were not sought nor their voices heard.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  amb. You’re one of the first people that leapt to mind for this project. I want your voice in here for lots of different reasons. Outside of the Audre Lorde Project (ALP),32 just as a healer, as someone who has been shaping the way people who do change work think about being in their bodies, and being in our collective bodies, for a long time. It feels like, yes, Cara. I literally heard your voice. I was, like, who do I want to read this audiobook? Cara.33 And then Audre Lorde. “Uses of the Erotic” is a seed text for this book. It’s the first thing I read and heard that was like, “Holy shit! You can talk about that?” Just the fact you could talk about it was my first response. And it really stuck with me. That metaphor she talks about, the little golden color pellet inside the margarine, and kneading it, and feeling like, oh, you’ve been spread all through with actual aliveness. You can’t go back to suffering. I just thought, oh, that’s actually what we need to be doing. That’s what our movements should be doing. It’s such a core text, and I’m interested in how her work has echoed through time in your work. Before you came even to the Audre Lorde Project. What are the ways that you feel she’s interacted with you? Cara. In 1991 when I was twenty-one years old, I met Audre Lorde. I was one of the organizers on the Audre Lorde Cele-Conference. We embraced her while she was alive; it was very intentional, to celebrate her while she was living. And that was very powerful, right? And then my senior year, which would have been the following year, I did a series of performances, and one of them (my whole thesis in undergrad) was “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” using political theater and performance to claim body and spirit.34 And it was very much infused with that entire essay, “The Uses of the Erotic,” because it was my medicine. Alongside Toni Cade Bambara, especially The Salt Eaters. I would say Sister Outsider and The Salt Eaters changed my life.35 And around that time I met Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde. I spent a long day in Iowa with Toni Cade Bambara in the airport. And we talked about sex and pleasure! So, going back to Audre Lorde, yes, I became very moved by the relationship to transforming your fear into erotic power. And transforming desire into transformative action.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One day Smith talked to me of Emerson and confessed he had got an introduction to him and had sent it on to the philosopher with a request for an interview. He wished me to accompany him to Concord: I consented, but without any enthusiasm: Emerson was then an unknown name to me; Smith read me some of his poetry and praised it highly though I could get little or nothing out of it. When young men now show me a similar indifference, my own experience makes it easy for me to excuse them. They know not what they do! is the explanation and excuse for all of us. One bright fall day Smith and I went over to Concord and next day visited Emerson. He received us in the most pleasant, courteous way: made us sit and composed himself to listen. Smith went off at score, telling him how greatly he had influenced his life and helped him with brave encouragement: the old man smiled benignantly and nodded his head, ejaculating from time to time: “Yes, yes!” Gradually Smith warmed to his work and wanted to know why Emerson had never expressed his views on sociology or on the relations between Capital and Labor. Once or twice the old gentleman cupped his ear with his hand; but all he said was: “Yes, Yes! or I think so” with the same benevolent smile. I guessed at once that he was deaf; but Smith had no inkling of the fact for he went on probing, probing while Emerson answered pleasant nothings quite irrelevantly. I studied the great man as closely as I could. He looked about five feet nine or ten in height, very thin, attenuated even, and very scrupulously dressed: his head was narrow though long, his face bony; a long, high, somewhat beaked nose was the feature of his countenance:—a good conceit of himself, I concluded, and considerable will-power, for the chin was well-defined and large; but I got nothing more than this and from his clear steadfast gray eyes, an intense impression of kindness and good will, and why shouldn’t I say it? of sweetness even, as of a soul lifted high above earth’s carking cares and stragglings. “A nice old fellow”, I said to myself, “but deaf as a post.” Many years later his deafness became to me the symbol and explanation of his genius. He had always lived “the life removed” and kept himself unspotted from the world: that explains both his narrowness of sympathy and the height to which he grew! His narrow, pleasantly smiling face comes back to me whenever I hear his name mentioned.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Yet the legislation was implemented in only a few regions and in the West, where there were few Christian communities, hardly any at all. It is difficult to know how many people died as a result. Christians were rarely pursued if they failed to show up for the sacrifice; many apostatized, and others found loopholes. 132 Most of those who were put to death had defiantly presented themselves to the authorities as voluntary martyrs, a practice the bishops condemned. 133 When Diocletian abdicated in 305, these edicts expired, though they were renewed for a period of two years (311–13) by Emperor Maximianus Daia. The cult of the martyrs, however, became central to Christian piety because they proved that Jesus had not been unique: the Church had “friends of God” with divine powers in its very midst. The martyrs were “other Christs,” and their imitation of Christ even unto death had brought him into the present. 134 The Acts of the Martyrs claimed that these heroic deaths were miracles that manifested God’s presence because the martyrs seemed impervious to pain. “Let not a day pass when we do not dwell on these tales,” Victricius, the fifth-century bishop of Rouen, urged his congregation. “This martyr did not blench under torturers; this martyr hurried up the slow work of the execution; this one eagerly swallowed the flames; this one was cut about but stood up still.” 135 “They suffered more than is possible for human beings to bear, and did not endure this by their own strength but by the grace of God,” explained Pope Gelasius (r. 492–96). 136 When the Christian slave girl Blandina was executed in Lyons in 177, her companions “looked with their eyes through their sister to the One who was crucified for them.” 137 When the young wife and mother Vibia Perpetua was imprisoned in Carthage in 203, she had a series of remarkable dreams that proved even to her persecutors that she enjoyed special intimacy with the divine. The prison governor himself perceived “that there was a rare power in us,” her biographer recalled. 138 Through these “friends of God,” Christians could claim respect and even superiority over pagan communities. Yet there would always be more than a hint of aggression in the martyr’s “witness” to Christ. On the night before her execution, Perpetua dreamed that she had been turned into a man and wrestled with an Egyptian in the stadium, a man huge and “foul” of aspect, but with an infusion of divine strength, she was able to throw him to the ground.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  During the last years of his life the patriarch of monasticism withdrew as much as possible from the sight of visitors, but allowed two disciples to live with him, and to take care of him in his infirm old age. When he felt his end approaching, he commanded them not to embalm his body, according to the Egyptian custom, but to bury it in the earth, and to keep the spot of his interment secret. One of his two sheepskins he bequeathed to the bishop Serapion, the other, with his underclothing, to Athanasius, who had once given it to him new, and now received it back worn out. What became of the robe woven from palm leaves, which, according to Jerome, he had inherited from Paul of Thebes, and wore at Easter and Pentecost, Athanasius does not tell us. After this disposition of his property, Anthony said to his disciples: "Children, farewell; for Anthony goes away, and will be no more with you." With these words he stretched out his feet and expired with a smiling face, in the year 356, a hundred and five years old. His grave remained for centuries unknown. His last will was thus a protest against the worship of saints and relics, which, however, it nevertheless greatly helped to promote. Under Justinian, in 561, his bones, as the Bollandists and Butler minutely relate, were miraculously discovered, brought to Alexandria, then to Constantinople, and at last to Vienne in South France, and in the eleventh century, during the raging of an epidemic disease, the so-called "holy fire," or "St. Anthony’s fire," they are said to have performed great wonders. Athanasius, the greatest man of the Nicene age, concludes his biography of his friend with this sketch of his character: "From this short narrative you may judge how great a man Anthony was, who persevered in the ascetic life from youth to the highest age. In his advanced age he never allowed himself better food, nor change of raiment, nor did he even wash his feet. Yet he continued healthy in all his parts. His eyesight was clear to the end, and his teeth sound, though by long use worn to mere stumps. He retained also the perfect use of his hands and feet, and was more robust and vigorous than those who are accustomed to change of food and clothing and to washing. His fame spread from his remote dwelling on the lone mountain over the whole Roman empire. What gave him his renown, was not learning nor worldly wisdom, nor human art, but alone his piety toward God .... And let all the brethren know, that the Lord will not only take holy monks to heaven, but give them celebrity in all the earth, however deep they may bury themselves in the wilderness."

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said only, rather primly, that I was waiting for my hair to grow; and she answered, ‘Ah’, and her smile grew a little smaller. Then she said, in a puzzled sort of way: ‘And you’re staying with Florrie and Ralph, are you?’‘They let me sleep last night in the parlour, as a favour; but today I have to move on. In fact - what time have you?’ She showed me her watch: a quarter to five, and much later than I had expected. ‘I really must go very soon.’ I took the pan off the stove - the onions had burned a little browner than I wanted - and began to look about me for a bowl.‘Oh,’ she said, waving her hand at my haste, ‘have a cup of tea with me, at least.’ She put some water on to boil, and I began jabbing at the potatoes with a fork. The dish, as I assembled it, did not look quite like the meal that Mrs Milne had used to make; and when I tasted it, it was not so savoury. I set it on the side, and frowned at it. The girl handed me a cup. Then she leaned against a cupboard, quite at her ease, and sipped at her own tea, and then yawned.‘What a day I have had!’ she said. ‘Do I stink like a rat? I’ve been all afternoon down a drain-pipe.’‘Down a drain-pipe?’‘Down a drain-pipe. I’m an assistant at a sanitary inspector’s. You may not pull such a face; it was quite a triumph, I tell you, my getting the position at all. They think women too delicate for that sort of work.’‘I think I would rather be delicate,’ I said, ‘than do it.’‘Oh, but it’s marvellous work! It’s only now and then I have to peer into sewers, as I did today. Mostly I measure, and talk to workers, and see if they are too hot or too cold, have enough air to breathe, enough lavatories. I have a government order, and do you know what that means? It means I can demand to see an office or a workshop, and if it’s not right, I can demand that it be put right. I can have buildings closed, buildings improved ...’ She waved her hands. ‘Foremen hate me. Greedy masters from Bow to Richmond absolutely loathe the sight of me. I wouldn’t swap my work for anything!’ I smiled at the enthusiasm in her voice; she might be a sanitary inspector, but she was also, I could tell, something of an actress. Now she took another mouthful of tea. ‘So,’ she said, when she had swallowed it, ‘how long have you been a friend of Florrie’s?’‘Well, friend isn’t quite the word for it, really...’‘You don’t know her terribly well?’‘Not at all.’‘That’s a shame,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘She’s not been herself, these past few months.

• From My People (2022)

  It may have been meant as a joke, but when a group of women in the civil rights movement informed Stokely Carmichael, one of the men in charge, that they wanted to present him with a list of their positions, he is alleged to have said that the only position for women in the movement was prone. Even in the Black church, which otherwise fought over the years for Black liberation, women were rarely embraced in leadership positions or supported in the pulpit. Even my father, a man I thought of as a progressive minister, had not allowed women to speak from the pulpit until I came to speak as an adult. Knowing how much my father respected me and my professional life, my stepmother whispered that I should ask him if I could speak from the pulpit, which he obliged. But it was still, even in the 1970s, a rare occurrence. Having been excluded for the most part from the white women’s suffragist movement, and on up to the modern-day liberation movements, Black women have walked alone, and often taken diverse paths among themselves. They’ve had different experiences, and I believed it was important to record this phase of their diverse history. On a more personal note, I was happy to be in a position to focus once more on Constance Baker Motley, who had been the lead attorney (and a tough interrogator) in my court case, with my classmate Hamilton Holmes, that she and her team won and which led to our desegregation of the University of Georgia in 1961. This was now five years later and although in another incarnation, she was still on the case, fighting for her people. While I hadn’t had the same kind of personal connection to Shirley Chisholm, I also saw her as a trailblazer, another committed to helping people who looked like her. And while my first cause was in the segregated South, hers helped reveal that the North was not so different from the South concerning discrimination against Black people. So I made it a priority to get her story told in the New York Times . On another occasion, I was able to make a successful argument to my editors at the Times to allow me to follow a story beyond New York’s borders, all the way to Jackson, Mississippi. It was for an occasion marking the two hundredth birthday of one of the Black women whom I had been introduced to by my Black teachers down South as someone who refused to allow her station in life to get in the way of her God-given talents. That woman was Phillis Wheatley, who was born in Senegal/Gambia, West Africa, and when she was about seven years old was transported to America as a slave. Yet she pursued her dream, which manifested itself in some of the most beautiful poetry that would eventually achieve international acclaim.