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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  In fact, much more typical were white women who experienced the communal work and higher status of a Native culture, and chose it over their own. For instance, Cynthia Ann Parker was an adopted Comanche who gave birth to the last free Comanche chief, was captured by Texas Rangers, and spent the last ten years of her life trying to return to the culture she loved. As Benedict Anderson wrote in Imagined Communities, a witty and lethal exposé of fictions that justify nationalism, “All profound changes in consciousness…bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions…spring narratives.” Even graffiti above a tunnel can begin a journey that never ends. —LOOKING BACK AT THAT National Women’s Conference in Houston, I realize how much I learned, not only there, but in the two years of travel and state conferences leading up to it. LaDonna Harris, a much-loved Comanche activist, was the only woman from what she called Tribal America among our commissioners, and she was also a rare link to Washington.8 She had married Fred Harris, her high school sweetheart, who, with her help, became a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. Some people joked that she was the state’s third senator because she was so active in organizing and educating on Native issues. To create pride in Native young people and bring knowledge to the rest of the country, LaDonna also had founded Americans for Indian Opportunity, with an Ambassadors Program that trained young women and men to talk about their history and culture. This created more understanding in the mainstream plus confidence in new generations of emerging leaders, and this idea would be adapted by First Peoples in other countries. Still, as she told me, their first task was often to start from ground zero by explaining, “We’re still here.” LaDonna herself reminded me of people I’d met in India who also came from cultures older than anything in my history books. Like them, she had double-consciousness, a term invented by W. E. B. Du Bois to describe the African American experience of being one’s unique self on the inside, yet generalized by the racist gaze of outsiders. Somehow, LaDonna had turned this on its head. She lived fully in the modern world, yet included her Native consciousness within it and became a bridge for both. Being around LaDonna meant sensing a much longer span of history; also linking rather than dividing humans and nature; also valuing such timeless qualities as spirituality and humor. That last seemed so common to LaDonna and others in Indian Country that I wondered where the stoic and expressionless cigar store Indian had come from. In our many endless meetings with other commissioners, she, like so many of the Native people I’d met over the years, had a rare ability to find irony and humor in the midst of seriousness—and vice versa.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Rayna Green made our lively board meetings even more so. As a Cherokee writer, folklorist, and anthropologist for the American Indian Program at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., she enriched our work and extended it to new places. So did her down-home sense of humor. Thanks to her, I began to learn about the Trickster, a common figure in Native mythologies, a boundary crosser who can go anywhere. Unlike the Jester and the Clown, who are at the bottom of a hierarchical pile and survive only by making the king laugh, the Trickster is free, a paradox, a breaker of boundaries who makes us laugh—and laughter lets the sacred in. In Native spiritualities, there is often a belief that we cannot pray unless we’ve laughed. Because the Trickster is sometimes female and is the spirit of free space and the road, I began to feel I’d found a totem of my own.14 For instance, whenever I or others at our board meetings explained some injustice at too great a length, or otherwise stated the obvious with an air of discovery, Rayna’s humor restored proportion. When she cycled off the board after five years, she left behind a saying that I would only understand later: Feminism is memory. With the help of Paula Gunn Allen, I finally did understand. “Feminists too often believe,” she wrote, “that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of rules and civilization. The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware…is necessary confusion, division and much lost time.”15 Her conclusion was simple and mind-blowing: “The root of oppression is the loss of memory.” —NEXT ARRIVED WILMA MANKILLER, someone I admired but had never met. She was the first woman to be elected deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation and soon would be appointed to serve out the term of principal chief. Two years later, in 1987, she would go on to become the first woman ever elected principal chief in modern times. Wilma’s gift for helping people find confidence in themselves—for creating independence, not dependence—was exactly the wisdom that the Ms. Foundation needed. If she could work this miracle in Indian Country despite centuries of loss of life, land, and respect, she could help diverse women and girls find their strengths, too. I’d heard about Wilma’s hard and pioneering work before she and I had lunch to talk about her joining the Ms. board, so I was surprised to find myself in the presence of a quiet, warm, listening woman. It was hard to believe she was eleven years younger than I; her wisdom was so much older. I felt as if I were being sheltered by a strong and timeless tree. Just being with her made it hard not to be as authentic and shit free as she was. Her humor didn’t come along often, but when it did, it was as natural as the weather.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Yes, yes, this is a woman!” Levin thought, forgetting himself and staring persistently at her lovely, mobile face, which at that moment was all at once completely transformed. Levin did not hear what she was talking of as she leaned over to her brother, but he was struck by the change of her expression. Her face—so handsome a moment before in its repose—suddenly wore a look of strange curiosity, anger, and pride. But this lasted only an instant. She dropped her eyelids, as though recollecting something. “Oh, well, but that’s of no interest to anyone,” she said, and she turned to the English girl. “Please order the tea in the drawing-room,” she said in English. The girl got up and went out. “Well, how did she get through her examination?” asked Stepan Arkadyevitch. “Splendidly! She’s a very gifted child and a sweet character.” “It will end in your loving her more than your own.” “There a man speaks. In love there’s no more nor less. I love my daughter with one love, and her with another.” “I was just telling Anna Arkadyevna,” said Vorkuev, “that if she were to put a hundredth part of the energy she devotes to this English girl to the public question of the education of Russian children, she would be doing a great and useful work.” “Yes, but I can’t help it; I couldn’t do it. Count Alexey Kirillovitch urged me very much” (as she uttered the words _Count Alexey Kirillovitch_ she glanced with appealing timidity at Levin, and he unconsciously responded with a respectful and reassuring look); “he urged me to take up the school in the village. I visited it several times. The children were very nice, but I could not feel drawn to the work. You speak of energy. Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it. I took to this child—I could not myself say why.” And she glanced again at Levin. And her smile and her glance—all told him that it was to him only she was addressing her words, valuing his good opinion, and at the same time sure beforehand that they understood each other. “I quite understand that,” Levin answered. “It’s impossible to give one’s heart to a school or such institutions in general, and I believe that’s just why philanthropic institutions always give such poor results.” She was silent for a while, then she smiled.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  I wondered how Tom had managed to open these doors and wallets. It only took meeting Tom to understand. He was Instant Trust, the sort of young man any parent would want for a son and any client in trouble would want for a lawyer. He was good at leading street demonstrations and arguing fiercely in court or in Congress, yet he also listened to each individual person with such concentration and caring that he seemed to be leaning gently forward, like a friendly tree. Soon we were seeing each other often as part of an HIV/AIDS commission that served New York and New Jersey. Each morning we would arrive with our takeout coffee, sit down with other board members, and face the most fearsome questions: What policies should employers in New York follow when an employee says he or she has HIV/AIDS? Can we assure people working in a New Jersey hospital that they are in no danger if they follow an HIV/AIDS protocol? How can people dying at home keep beloved animal companions when they are too weak to care for them? Given the growing reality of HIV/AIDS among poor women, how can we persuade the makers of, say, Pampers and Tampax—two products that enter most women’s homes—to include HIV/AIDS information in English and Spanish? To each question, Tom brought patience—but not too much. When I thanked him for always including women as actual and potential subjects—at a time when HIV/AIDS was still assumed to be a gay man’s disease—he explained that he valued his gayness not only as a gift, like any other part of the human condition, but also as a path out of his otherwise white, male, and privileged life. Being an outsider allowed him to know what other outsiders were made to feel. One morning, an official from the Catholic archdiocese came to warn our commission that we must not give out condoms or HIV/AIDS information in public schools. What angered us wasn’t only what he said, but the way he said it—as if he were addressing a lesser species. Someone who didn’t know Tom might have mistaken his anger for verbal precision—his words of rebuttal were as accurate as missiles—but I knew he was just as angry as I was. Instead of remaining quiet out of fear of crying with anger, as I sometimes did, I thought: If Tom can stay calm and argue, so can I. And so I did. This is how Tom led—by example. Now in 1993, in downtown Manhattan, he is leading this way again as we march in our odd parade behind armed soldiers and a small military band. I can’t imagine Tom picking up a gun, yet he knows that the army is a way out and up for many people.

• From Querelle (1953)

  159 I QUERELLE breath on his eyes excited him as much as if he had been kissed on cheek or mouth. He said: "See you tomorrow then." Roger opened the street door with the same prudence as before. Gil went out. On the doorstep he held on to Roger and after a second's hesitation asked: "He croaked?" "I'll tell you all about it tomorrow." Their hands separated in the dark, and Gil slunk back to the penitentiary, all the while chewing on the chunk of bread. Roger came to see him every day, in the evening, at the time the fog was at its thickest. He always managed to bring along a little food, and after a while he even stole some money from his mother in order to buy some bread. He hid the loaf under his shirt and made his way to the old prison, across the fortifica tions. Gil expected him around six o'clock. Roger told him the news. The newspapers had already discontinued th eir coverage of _the double murder and the murderer who, it was assumed, had left the city. Gil ate, alone. Then he had a cigarette. "And Paulette, what's happening with her?" "Nothing. She still hasn't found another job. Stays at home." "You ever talk with her about me?" "But I can't do that. You've got no idea . The times they've asked me where you are and threaten to follow me around!" He was happy to have a pretext to remove his sister from th e fabul ous relationship he was now having with Gil. Next to his friend in the granite cell, with its smell of tar, he felt amazingly calm. He hunkered down at his side on the cotton dust sheet he had appropriated from the attic, sat there and watched his idol smoking a cigarette. He gazed at his face, its smooth bones, the long growth of beard. He admired him. At the beginning of their encounters in the penitentiary Gil had not stopped talk-

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Well, what are these buildings? How many there are of them!” After a moment’s silence she repeated her question. “These are the servants’ houses, barns, and stables,” answered Anna. “And there the park begins. It had all gone to ruin, but Alexey had everything renewed. He is very fond of this place, and, what I never expected, he has become intensely interested in looking after it. But his is such a rich nature! Whatever he takes up, he does splendidly. So far from being bored by it, he works with passionate interest. He—with his temperament as I know it—he has become careful and businesslike, a first-rate manager, he positively reckons every penny in his management of the land. But only in that. When it’s a question of tens of thousands, he doesn’t think of money.” She spoke with that gleefully sly smile with which women often talk of the secret characteristics only known to them—of those they love. “Do you see that big building? that’s the new hospital. I believe it will cost over a hundred thousand; that’s his hobby just now. And do you know how it all came about? The peasants asked him for some meadowland, I think it was, at a cheaper rate, and he refused, and I accused him of being miserly. Of course it was not really because of that, but everything together, he began this hospital to prove, do you see, that he was not miserly about money. _C’est une petitesse_, if you like, but I love him all the more for it. And now you’ll see the house in a moment. It was his grandfather’s house, and he has had nothing changed outside.” “How beautiful!” said Dolly, looking with involuntary admiration at the handsome house with columns, standing out among the different-colored greens of the old trees in the garden. “Isn’t it fine? And from the house, from the top, the view is wonderful.” They drove into a courtyard strewn with gravel and bright with flowers, in which two laborers were at work putting an edging of stones round the light mould of a flower bed, and drew up in a covered entry. “Ah, they’re here already!” said Anna, looking at the saddle horses, which were just being led away from the steps. “It is a nice horse, isn’t it? It’s my cob; my favorite. Lead him here and bring me some sugar. Where is the count?” she inquired of two smart footmen who darted out. “Ah, there he is!” she said, seeing Vronsky coming to meet her with Veslovsky. “Where are you going to put the princess?” said Vronsky in French, addressing Anna, and without waiting for a reply, he once more greeted Darya Alexandrovna, and this time he kissed her hand. “I think the big balcony room.”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “This is the reception room,” said Vronsky. “Here there will be a desk, tables, and benches, and nothing more.” “This way; let us go in here. Don’t go near the window,” said Anna, trying the paint to see if it were dry. “Alexey, the paint’s dry already,” she added. From the reception room they went into the corridor. Here Vronsky showed them the mechanism for ventilation on a novel system. Then he showed them marble baths, and beds with extraordinary springs. Then he showed them the wards one after another, the storeroom, the linen room, then the heating stove of a new pattern, then the trolleys, which would make no noise as they carried everything needed along the corridors, and many other things. Sviazhsky, as a connoisseur in the latest mechanical improvements, appreciated everything fully. Dolly simply wondered at all she had not seen before, and, anxious to understand it all, made minute inquiries about everything, which gave Vronsky great satisfaction. “Yes, I imagine that this will be the solitary example of a properly fitted hospital in Russia,” said Sviazhsky. “And won’t you have a lying-in ward?” asked Dolly. “That’s so much needed in the country. I have often....” In spite of his usual courtesy, Vronsky interrupted her. “This is not a lying-in home, but a hospital for the sick, and is intended for all diseases, except infectious complaints,” he said. “Ah! look at this,” and he rolled up to Darya Alexandrovna an invalid chair that had just been ordered for the convalescents. “Look.” He sat down in the chair and began moving it. “The patient can’t walk—still too weak, perhaps, or something wrong with his legs, but he must have air, and he moves, rolls himself along....” Darya Alexandrovna was interested by everything. She liked everything very much, but most of all she liked Vronsky himself with his natural, simple-hearted eagerness. “Yes, he’s a very nice, good man,” she thought several times, not hearing what he said, but looking at him and penetrating into his expression, while she mentally put herself in Anna’s place. She liked him so much just now with his eager interest that she saw how Anna could be in love with him. Chapter 21 “No, I think the princess is tired, and horses don’t interest her,” Vronsky said to Anna, who wanted to go on to the stables, where Sviazhsky wished to see the new stallion. “You go on, while I escort the princess home, and we’ll have a little talk,” he said, “if you would like that?” he added, turning to her. “I know nothing about horses, and I shall be delighted,” answered Darya Alexandrovna, rather astonished. She saw by Vronsky’s face that he wanted something from her. She was not mistaken. As soon as they had passed through the little gate back into the garden, he looked in the direction Anna had taken, and having made sure that she could neither hear nor see them, he began:

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  When corporate raider Carl Icahn took over TWA, he expected flight attendants to both take a pay cut and accept a work increase—unlike the (almost totally male) machinists and pilots. In 1986, flight attendant Vicki Frankovich led a strike of unprecedented length and unity—and campaigned for a public boycott of TWA because of its discrimination. Ms. magazine named her one of our Women of the Year. Icahn had the support of the pilots and machinists and more or less won, but he was forced to admit that the striking flight attendants had cost him $100 million.3 When I met him quite accidentally, I discovered he was furious about the Ms. article supporting Frankovich. He told me he didn’t discriminate against women. As proof, he said that if he needed one of his top male executives on a national holiday—and that executive spent the holiday with his family instead—he would fire him, too. I could see what flight attendants were up against. By then, I’d been flying so much and listening to so many that I had to resist saying we when I talked about job problems. I also began to get the other end of women’s stories whose first chapters I had seen on earlier flights. In the 1970s, on a flight to Milwaukee, for instance, a stewardess told me she resented feminists for saying that men could do her job, and that women could be pilots. “That isn’t the way the world works,” she said with energy. “You’re telling people to fight what’s in our nature and biology. You’re only making women discontent by telling them to do the impossible.” At the end of the 1980s, I ran into her again on a flight to Albuquerque. She was now the mother of two little girls, and giving out flight attendant’s pins and pilot’s wings to children on board—as airlines often do to welcome families—and offering either one to both boys and girls. She had discovered there were boys who liked her job of taking care of passengers, and girls who wanted to pilot the plane. What had changed her mind? Two things, she said. Because her airline finally had been forced to democratize its hiring, she worked with male flight attendants and realized they could do the job because “people are people.” Second, she had read that Whitney Young, the late civil rights leader, confessed to boarding a plane in Africa and feeling an involuntary moment of fear when he saw that the pilot was black. He realized how much self-hatred had been bred into him by a racist culture. “I also mistrusted myself and other women,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I learned that from my mother—but I’m not going to pass it on to my daughters.” When I last saw her, she was standing at the front of the plane, giving out pilot’s wings to two little girls. Some women were novels in themselves.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  He stayed in the hotel suite of actor and activist Ossie Davis, who spoke at the march, and made sure Dr. King knew he was there in support. But as his daughter explained, “He also knew his presence would have disrupted or split the focus—and he was a supporter of the big picture.” Somehow I found this little-known fact very moving. These two men seemed to be growing toward each other. Dr. King was becoming more radical by speaking out on issues like the Vietnam War, and Malcolm X was beginning to talk about a bloodless revolution. Some tragedies become more tragic. They might have become part of the same talking circle. III.Thanks to Mrs. Greene—and many others brave enough to stand up for themselves and other women—I began to understand that females were an out-group, too. That realization solved such mysteries as why the face of Congress was male but the face of welfare was female; why homemakers were called women who “don’t work,” though they worked longer, harder, and for less pay than any other class of worker; why women did 70 percent of the productive labor in the world, paid and unpaid, yet owned only 1 percent of the property; why masculinity meant leading and femininity meant following in the odd dance of daily life. More than ever, I found myself wanting to report on this new view of the world as if everyone mattered. But it was still the 1960s, and even my most open-minded editor explained that if he published an article saying women were equal, he would have to publish one next to it saying women were not—in order to be objective. I had retreated into writing profiles of Margot Fonteyn, the dancer I couldn’t be, or Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, and other authors I admired—which seemed as close as I would ever get to being an author myself. Then two women from a lecture bureau wrote to ask if I would speak to groups who had expressed curiosity about this new thing called women’s liberation. I’d recently written a piece for my column in New York magazine, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” It had been triggered by my own click of consciousness—namely, that I had been silent and silenced about an abortion I’d had years before. Like many women, I’d been made to feel at fault, not realizing there were political reasons why female humans were not supposed to make decisions about our own bodies. I was intrigued by the offer, but I had a big problem: I was terrified of public speaking. I’d so often canceled at the last minute when magazines booked me on television to publicize this or that article—as writers were often expected to do—that some shows had blacklisted me. Fortunately, I had a friend named Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a pioneer of nonsexist, multiracial child care in New York, a fearless speaker, a mother, and a member of an extended black family in rural Georgia—all things I was not.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  At the very end of our stay, Wilma said to us quietly, “This is the first time in my life that I’ve been with people who didn’t need anything from me.” It gave me a glimpse of the price Wilma had paid for leadership among a people who had been so long prevented from leading themselves. In 1987 she ran to be elected principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, a very controversial thing to do. There had never been an elected female Cherokee chief in modern times, and many Cherokees had come to assume that male leadership was as inevitable as Christianity and store-bought food. In the long past, the Cherokee Nation’s council of female elders had chosen leaders and even decided if wars should be fought. Treaties with Washington had to be signed by female as well as male elders, something officials there mercilessly ridiculed as “Petticoat Government.” Some modern Cherokees still feared this ridicule, or thought a woman couldn’t represent the Nation in Washington, or both. Her election campaign had all the complexities of any statewide campaign, plus the necessity of reaching enrolled Cherokee voters in states outside Oklahoma and in foreign countries. I found myself in the familiar role of helping with fund-raisers and even a television commercial. But in the end, Wilma won because of her record of helping people to help themselves, as she had in Bell, and also because Cherokee traditionalists, who had rarely voted before, saw her leadership as a return to the balance and reciprocity of the past. After that, I watched as she quietly, person by person, one rural community at a time, one Washington lobbying battle at a time, helped people build their own water systems, youth programs, and a health care delivery system that was a model for other rural areas. Gradually she brought the Cherokee Nation from being mostly dependent on government allotments to being mostly independent through communally run businesses. In order to honor other Native women leaders, she interviewed many for her book, Every Day Is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women. 18 In 1991 she was reelected with an unprecedented 82 percent of the vote. In 1994 President Bill Clinton invited leaders from all the Native nations to meet in Washington, a first in history. This almost totally male group elected Wilma as one of its two spokespeople. Six years after that, I went to the White House with Wilma and watched as President Clinton and Hillary Clinton presented her with a Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. As she stood there, strong, kind, and not at all intimidated by another chief of state, I was not the only one in the audience who thought, She could be president. I also thought, In a just country, she would be. —IN WILMA’S LAST YEAR on the board, she overlapped with Rebecca Adamson, a shy, slender, magnetic woman who was a self-educated expert on grassroots economics.

• From Querelle (1953)

  141 I QUERELLE 0 0 0 What ·glorious workmanship it all is, each curl of his hair, each muscle, the eyes, the ears. From the smallest line in his skin, the smallest shadowy corner of his body spring rays that touch me to the quick; the bend in a finger-joint, the intersection of lines in arm or neck, these plunge me into an affect that makes me fire my cannon, in order to delve ever deeper into the sweetness of his belly, soft and smooth like a forest Boor covered with pine needles. Docs he know the beauty of all that he consists of? And does he know its power? Through ports and arsenals, throughout the day he carries these loads of shadows, this cargo of darkness, on which a thousand regards come to rest and refresh them selves; at night, his shoulders support a yoke of light, his victori ous thighs parting the waves of his native sea, �nd the ocean cringes, lies down at his feet, and his chest is mere space filled \v ith scents, great scented waves. On this ship, his presence is as astonishing-and as useful, and normal, as well-as would be the presence of a coachman's whip, of a squirrel, of a clump of grass. This morning, passing by me-I don't know if he saw me-hold ing a lighted cigarette between two fingers, he raised them to push his beret back from his forehead and said, who knows to whom or what, straight out into the sunny air: ''Well that's how it is, when you're hard to please." His gleaming curls, so perfect in their texture and in the way they fall, light brown and blond, peeped out from under the edge of the beret. I looked at him with disdain. No doubt he was, at that moment, still savoring the grapes grown in sunshine and night stolen from the maritime vineyards tended by the mocking daughters of the sea. Why am I not a plain sailor! I stand here, in the wind. The cold, and a headache, clamp my forehead in a vise, crown me with a tiara of metal. I grow, yet I shrink.

• From Querelle (1953)

  Returning home, Roger looked at his sister with a feeling compounded of resp�ct and irony. Knowing that it was she whom Gil wanted to find again in him, he tried, maliciously yet naively, to imitate her manners, her girlish habits-even gestures like sweeping her hair back over her shoulders, or the way she smoothed her dress when she sat down. He regarded her with irony because he felt happy to intercept Gil's homage to her with his own body, but with respect because she was the repository of those secrets that stirred Gil's soul. In the eyes of his mother, Roger had suddenly grown up, by the mere fact of having been so intimately and directly involved with a crime that had a ·vice motivation. She was afraid to question him, in case she might hear, from her son's lips, some fantastic story in which he had been acting the part of "first lover." She wasn't sure that Roger hadn't, at the age of fifteen, already explored the mysteries of love, perhaps even those of forbidden Jove, of which she herself was ignorant. Madame Lysiane was too opulent a lady for Quere11e to consider her as his sister-in-law. His imagination rejected the idea of his brother sleeping with such a grand lady. In his eyes Robert was sti11 a smart little kid with a talent for finding soft spots for himself. That part of it didn't surprise Quere11e. As for Madame Lysiane, she tried her best to deal with him in a straightforward manner. She was gentle and polite. She knew that he was having an affair with Norbert. Caught in the enchantment of her strange jealousy she gave in to her overriding preoccupation with the essential differences between Quere11e and Robert. One evening she was deeply moved by one of Querelle's bursts of laughter: it sounded so fresh and boyish, quite unlike anything Robert could ever utter. Her gaze attached itself to the comer of Quere11e's mouth, open wide, disclosing his bri11iant teeth, and watched the play of the lines 21s I QUERELLE

• From Querelle (1953)

  262 I JEAN GENET 0 0 0 A galley crew used to call their captain "Our Man.:' His gen tleness and his toughness. But I know that he could not be other wise, pe had to be both cruel and gentle; that is to say, he did not have men tortured with just a little smile on his lips, but only with an in terior smile, something to soothe his hidden organs (the liver, the lungs, the stomach, the heart). That peacefulness became manifest even in his voice, giving the orders to torture gently, with a gentle gesture, a gentle look in his eye. Undoubt edly I am drawing an idealized and overly perfect picture of this captain, illustrating my own desire-yet its origin, in me, does not make it an arbitrary one. It corresponds to the reality of the captain as seen by the ga lley convicts. This image of gentleness, superimposed on the atrocious features of a commonplace man, is in the eye of the beholder, the galley slave-it comes from farther still, from his heart. When he ordered those notorious punishmen ts, the captain was cruel. He inflicted profound dam age on their bodies, lacerating them, putting out eyes, tearing out fingernails (or ordered all these things to be done, to be exact), thus obeying his own instructions and maintaining the fear, the terror without which he could not have remained cap tain. With the authority invested in him by his rank (which is al so mine!), he ordered men to be tortured, but he did so with out feeling any hatred for them-how could he help loving, in a distorted fashion, the element to which he owed his very 'exis tence? True enough, he worked cruelly and hard on that flesh, delivered to him by the Royal Courts, but he did it with a kind of grave, smiling, yet sad joy. Once again: the galley slaves saw a captain who was both cruel and kind. " I llustrating my own desire," I wrote. If it js my desire to pos sess such authority, such admirable form, to evoke the loving fear that the historical figure of the captain is able to attract-and

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As one United executive famously said, “If a flight attendant was still on the job after three years…I’d know we were getting the wrong kind of girl. She’s not getting married.”2 Back in the galley, stewardesses were only too glad to tell me about the indignities, from ad campaigns with slogans like “I’m Sandy, Fly Me,” and “She’ll Serve You—All the Way,” to an “Air Strip” in which they were required to walk up and down the aisles while stripping to hot pants. Passengers were influenced by this image of stewardesses, and made them second only to farmers’ daughters as objects of sex jokes. This image was publicized by such X-rated pornographic movies as Come Fly with Me and The Swinging Stewardesses. Some pilots expected to be serviced sexually on layovers, and though the answer from stewardesses was overwhelmingly no, passengers assumed they must be saying yes. Airlines fended off sex discrimination lawsuits for refusing to hire male stewards by maintaining that the care and feeding of passengers was so peculiarly “feminine” that it amounted to a “BFOQ”—a bona-fide occupational qualification—otherwise reserved for wet nurses and sperm donors. Stewardesses could be “written up” for any infraction of the rules, including talking back to an obnoxious drunk passenger or refusing to sell more drinks to an already inebriated one. They were made to share rooms on layovers while male crew had private rooms, and they were definitely not on a job ladder to the executive suite. But pilots, on whose physical condition much more depended, got away with many fewer physical requirements and weigh-ins, a fact visible in red faces and potbellies. They also earned an average of 400 percent more than flight attendants, and had a lock on piloting because the air force, which paid and trained almost all of them, hadn’t trained a woman pilot since World War II. Then, WASPs ferried planes across the United States and even one across the Atlantic, but after the war, no Amelia Earharts needed apply. The more I listened to all this, the more I admired the degree to which this group of women maintained their humanity, despite being regulated right down to getting demerits if they didn’t smile constantly. As one said to me, “Even my face is not my own.” Of course, punished people sometimes pass punishment downward, especially to members of their own devalued group. Flying to Kansas for a campus speech with my speaking partner Dorothy Pitman Hughes and her newborn baby, a stewardess ordered Dorothy, who was nursing her daughter, into the lavatory, as if nursing were an obscene act. Only Dorothy’s fierce objection, my threat to write about it, and the anger of a nearby white woman passenger dissuaded her. When I was traveling with Flo Kennedy, a stewardess insisted that the plane couldn’t take off until Flo’s purse was stashed in the overhead bin.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  African American women and men who had supported Hillary also worried that some would punish them for working across racial lines. Oprah Winfrey and other women in public life who had supported Obama paid a price, too. Some criticized them for not supporting Hillary Clinton, since women were their main supporters and constituency. This was also true for Karen Mulhauser, a white woman and an important and longtime feminist leader, who supported Obama. I had written and spoken in support of their right to choose Obama, and now they, too, helped to heal the wounds of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. As my last campaign effort, I made hundreds of buttons that said: HILLARY SUPPORTS OBAMA SO DO I Then I got on the plane to Washington, went to join the crowd at her historic and generous concession speech—in which she pledged her wholehearted support to Obama—and distributed the buttons to the audience. They were in great demand. IV.All my years of campaigning have given me one clear message: Voting isn’t the most we can do, but it is the least. To have a democracy, you have to want one. Still, I realize this fully only by looking back. At the beginning of the 1980s, I went to Missouri to campaign for Harriett Woods in her U.S. Senate race. She was a great candidate, and I empathized with the difficult time she’d had as a woman journalist. Her path into politics was so improbable that no one could have made it up. As a mother of two young children, she complained about a noisy manhole cover that awakened them every time a car rolled over it in her otherwise quiet street. When she got nowhere with the city council, she circulated a neighborhood petition to close the street to cars. It worked. This success led her to run for the city council. She won, served eight years, got appointed to the state highway commission, ran a successful race for the state legislature, and was reelected there, too. She also became the producer of a much-loved local television show. All this made her a viable statewide candidate. Still, this was not enough for the state Democratic Party. When it came time to choose a primary candidate in a U.S. Senate race, it backed a well-to-do banker who had never run for anything, just written checks. To be fair, Woods might have seemed like a lost cause in Missouri, where no woman had ever won a statewide office. She also wasn’t rich like the banker. But she turned out to have something more important than her party’s blessing: community support and volunteers. She beat the rich guy two to one. Suddenly, Harriett Woods was in a race with Republican Senator John Danforth. He was not only the incumbent but a former attorney general of Missouri, an ordained Episcopal priest, and the rich grandson of the founder of Ralston Purina. It was as if she were running against the entire patriarchy.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  For instance, when anyone asked about her name with honest curiosity, she would explain that Mankiller was a hereditary title for someone who protected the village. But you knew one too many people had asked her about it in a condescending way when she just deadpanned, “I earned it.” After many board meetings and over dinners, I learned that she was the sixth of eleven children born to a Dutch and Irish mother and a full-blooded Cherokee father. Her maternal grandparents had disapproved of this marriage, but her mother fell in love—and never looked back. Wilma spent her first ten years on her paternal grandfather’s land, called Mankiller Flats, in rural Oklahoma. This was his allotment at the end place of the Trail of Tears, the infamous forced march of the 1830s that deprived Cherokees of their Georgia homeland. More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold. Mankiller Flats had no electricity or running water, but there was a creek with medicinal herbs growing along its banks, acres of woods to explore, a garden with enough fruits and vegetables to preserve for the winter, and games to play by lantern light with her brothers and sisters. Only when the white church ladies came to distribute donated clothing did Wilma understand that her family was seen as needy. She acquired a lifetime aversion to the phrases bless your heart and poor dears. Then in one of Washington’s many attempts to “mainstream” Native Americans through relocation and assimilation—and also to get them off valuable land—her parents were persuaded to move to San Francisco for “a better life.” At ten years old, Wilma suddenly found herself in the rough life of an urban housing project—a particular surprise for a girl who had never seen a phone or indoor plumbing or that many people in one place. It was, as she remembered, “like landing on Mars.” Despite being given a hard time at school for being different, and despite her family’s need to survive on her father’s minimum-wage job, they found community and support in an Indian center with other relocated families. When her father became a longshoreman, Wilma began to learn about union organizing at the kitchen table. Such jobs were not for girls, so she went to a local college with the hope of becoming a social worker. Then, just before her eighteenth birthday, she fell in love with a young man from Ecuador who had come here to study. By twenty-one, she was a married woman with two daughters and a husband who expected her to be a stay-at-home wife.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  On our last morning, I enter the lodge alone for an early breakfast, trying to remain both inconspicuous and open-minded. Still, I’m hyperconscious of a room full of knife sheaths, jackboots, and very few women. In the booth next to me, a man with chains around his muscles and a woman in leather pants and an improbable hairdo are taking note of my presence. Finally, the woman comes over to talk. “I just want to tell you,” she says cheerfully, “how much Ms. magazine has meant to me over the years—and my husband, too. He reads some now that he’s retired. But what I wanted to ask—isn’t one of the women you’re traveling with Alice Walker? I love her poetry.” It turns out that she and her husband have been coming to this motorcycle rally every year since they were first married. She loves the freedom of the road and also the mysterious moonscape of the Badlands. She urges me to walk there, but to follow the paths marked by ropes. During the war over the sacred Black Hills, she explains, Lakota warriors found refuge there because the cavalry got lost every time. Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot. “See that purple Harley out there—the big gorgeous one? That’s mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn’t have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attack and totaling us both. I even put ‘Ms.’ on my license plate—and you should see my grandkids’ faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Not only did many Yellow cabs bypass black people on the street—or say, “Sorry, I don’t go to Brooklyn”—but black women close to giving birth couldn’t count on a taxi to take them to the hospital, and had to find a car service in advance. Then an African American man named Calvin Williams returned to Brooklyn after serving in the Korean War and invented Black Pearl. It became so popular that voters elected him to the New York State Assembly, where he served two terms. Within Black Pearl, every driver has a story. After getting the same one on a couple of trips, I asked why he had the only venetian blinds I’d ever seen in a car. “Around here,” he says, gesturing to the streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, “money is easier to come by than privacy. You can borrow or steal money, but you can’t find a private place. When I was coming up with seven brothers and sisters, I met my girlfriend under the stairs, dodging rats and winos, or I froze my ass off on street corners with my buddies. Even when I went to the Brooklyn Fox to see Little Stevie Wonder—he was a little kid then—security guards would shine flashlights up and down the aisles. All I wanted was to be cool in summer, warm in winter, and listen to music—to have just a little private space for happiness. “So when I retired from my city job and started driving for Black Pearl, I thought, This is it! I’m a rescuer! I’m a Black Knight in Silver Armor! I always make sure nobody has guns, drugs, or alcohol in my car. Then I turn up the music, turn down the blinds, and drive around for as long as my customers want.” Among his regulars were girls from a local Catholic school who rode around with the boyfriends they weren’t supposed to have, a Black Muslim father of five whose wife wouldn’t let him listen to sinful music, two male firefighters who rode home together after work in the most famously homophobic agency in the city, a single mother who needed time away from her job and kids, and an elderly unmarried couple who held hands where their children and grandchildren couldn’t see them. “Only food and water are more important than music and privacy,” he says seriously. “I’m a rescuer.” III.Taxi drivers are entrepreneurs of the road. Like my father, they drive and dream. But flight attendants experience work as a group. When I first began flying a lot in the early 1970s, planes meant only mindlessness, escape from phones, maybe a movie, and most of all, sleep. Even if I took work on board, I nodded off as soon as we were aloft. Like a flying version of Pavlov’s dog, just being carried through space made me feel I needed to make no further effort.

• From Querelle (1953)

  To feel more comfortable while jacking off I roll up the sleeves of my pajama top. This simple expedient turns me into a fighter, a tough guy. Thus I then confront the image of Querelle, in front of whom (or which ) I brandish my rod like a lion tamer. But then it's all over again, get the towel, wipe it oH my belly. It is not our design to disengage two or several characters-or heroes, as they have been extracted from a fabulous domain, that is to say, they have their origin in fable, fable and limbo-and . describe them, methodically, as odious. One should rather consider it to be ourselves, pursuing an adventure unfolding in ourselves, in the deepest, most asocial region of our soul; it is, indeed, because he breathes life into his creatures-and voluntarily assumes the burden of sin of this world he has given birth to-that the creator delivers and saves his creature, and at the same time places himself -beyond or above sin. May the reader, too, escape from sin, while he, reading our words, discovers in himself these heroes, who have been in hiding until this time . . . 95 I QUERELLE Querelle! All the Querelles of the Fighting Navy! Beautiful sailors, you taste sweet, like wild oats. A reception on board. The deck is decorated with green plants, red carpet. Crewmen, aU in white, come and go. QuereJle looks indifferent. I observe him without his seeing me. He stands there, hands in pockets, leaning back a little, his neck thrust fonvard like that of the bull (or is it a tiger? a lion?) on the Assyrian bas relief, its Bank pierced by an arrow. The festivities mean nothing to him. He's whistling, smiling. Querelle hauling a heavy launch to the quayside; four crewmen are pulling on the rope, expanding their chests with the effort, the rope passed over their left shoulders, but Quereile faces the other way. He pulls walking backwards. I'm sure he does it to avoid looking like a dray-beast. He noticed that I was looking at him. I had to take my eyes off his. Beauty of Querelle's feet. His bare feet. He plants them furn1y on the deck. His strides are wide and long. Despite his smile, Querelle's face is sad. It makes me think of the sadness of a handsome boy, very strong, very manly, who has been caught like a kid but on a grave charge, and who now sits in the prisoner's booth, crushed by the severity of his sentence. In spite of his smile, his good looks, his insolence, the radiant vigor of his body, his boldness, Querelle seems to be branded with the indescribable brand of some profound humiliation. This morning he appeared quite washed out. His eyes looked tired. Quere11e lay sleeping on the deck in the sun. Stood and looked down at him. My face, it dove down and submerged in his; and 96 I JEAN GENET

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  As usual, I tell her I’m glad to have a woman driver. She says not a word. Only at the end of the ride does she ask: “Do you remember a young man who drove you long ago and wanted advice about lingerie?” I say yes, I definitely do. “Well, I was that miserable man,” she says. “Now I’ve had tops and bottoms done, and I’m a happy woman.” I congratulate her on what has become a choice. A growing number of people have been able to match their inner sense of self with a place on the continuum of gender that wasn’t assigned to them at birth. And over time, the question I have to ask myself is this: What would I have felt had I known I was talking to a woman, not a man? Such is the divisive power of a binary called gender. • As I get into a taxi to Friendship Airport, not far from Annapolis, the driver puts a textbook back on the stack next to him. Clearly, he’s been using every moment to study. He’s moonlighting from his food service job at the Naval Academy, as he explains, and is studying to be an engineer. For me, this is a big déjà vu. Long ago, in 1972, one of my first lectures with my speaking partner, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, was to the more than four thousand cadets at the Naval Academy. We were the only women in a lecture series that otherwise included a quarterback from the Dallas Cowboys, the novelist Herman Wouk, and a deputy secretary of defense. The cadets themselves were all male, and only about eighty of the four thousand were other than white. We did our best to introduce the women’s movement to this huge crowd seated far away from us in regimented rows, but we couldn’t tell whether the roar of response was approval or disapproval. Some cadets carried oranges from dinner and tossed them at the stage. We weren’t sure whether this was the equivalent of roses or rotten eggs. Just before that lecture, there had been a seated dinner at the home of Admiral James Calvert, the Naval Academy superintendent. Dorothy and I were surprised that only Filipino men were serving us. For many years, assigning this domestic role to male Filipinos had been the navy’s way of getting women’s work done without women, yet I thought the 1960s and the civil rights movement would have changed all that. When we asked, Admiral Calvert assured us that Filipinos were happy to get these jobs. Dorothy replied, “Like my folks in Georgia were happy to be picking cotton?” I could see the admiral was relieved when we returned to arguing about Vietnam. During dessert, the naval cadet sitting next to me whispered that one of the Filipino servers must not be all that happy. He had asked to borrow that cadet’s engineering books. Now I tell my Annapolis driver about my memory.