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)

  When Wilma and I began to spend more time together as friends, she talked about looking over at her young husband and wishing with all her heart that she could be the traditional wife he wanted. But she also longed to be part of the political activism exploding all around her in San Francisco in the 1960s. She kept studying for a degree and took part in the nineteen-month-long occupation of Alcatraz, an abandoned prison on a federally owned island that was supposed to revert to Indian ownership. This experience of activism and community made her feel reconnected to her own life at last. In 1974 Wilma and her husband went their separate ways. She continued college and found support among other single mothers, but still felt far from her own land. In the summer of 1976, she left her comfortable home, bought a red car with the last of her money, and set off with her two teenage daughters for Oklahoma and Mankiller Flats. The family house had burned down years before, but they camped in their car by a lake near the ancestral land that her father had refused to sell, no matter how broke he was. Wilma and her daughters swam, caught fish, and harvested wild foods as she had done as a child. They learned to tell time by the sun, played Scrabble by lantern light, and listened to music from a portable radio by the campfire. Far from feeling insecure with no money and no home, Wilma said she felt free for the first time since she had left there. It made me realize how deep her connection to the land was. Later, she found an abandoned house nearby, made it into a makeshift home, and applied for an entry-level job at the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah. Several rejections later, she was hired as a writer of funding proposals. She not only worked harder than anyone else but began to prove her unique gift as an organizer. By respecting and expecting self-authority in others, she drew people out of passivity and despair. It was the beginning of her long and rocky path to leadership. Three years later Wilma was driving on a deserted country road and suffered a head-on collision with another car. Her body was crushed, and she barely survived. She wasn’t told until later that the driver of the other car was a woman friend—who had died instantly. Wilma was in a wheelchair for what was supposed to be the rest of her life. Only after seventeen surgeries—plus a bout with myasthenia gravis, a weakening neuromuscular disease—did she walk again. Even then, she had to wear a metal brace from knee to ankle on one leg, suffered swelling and pain, and needed specially constructed shoes. All this had happened long before we met. Her flowing skirts concealed the brace, and her calm concealed the pain. I never would have guessed any of it.

• 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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  “I’ve been clean for eight months,” he says seriously. “I’m just beginning to believe I exist.” Finally, I ask about that drawing of a huge eye. “My girlfriend made that,” he says, “to remind me to see with my own eyes.” I learned from him. I’m trying to see with my own eyes, too. • In Kyle, Texas, driving is a way of life. Taxis are mostly for people too drunk or too old to drive, on welfare with no car, or visitors like me going to the Austin airport. I see that my Chicana driver has turned her taxi into a world. She has a baby in a laundry basket on the seat next to her and a mobile toy secured by the glove compartment. When I remark on this inventiveness, she explains that this way, she makes a living without being separated from her baby daughter. Since it’s six a.m. on what is going to be a very hot day, I ask if this is hard. “No,” she says firmly. “What’s hard is worrying about my older daughter coming home from school by herself. Driving with each of my girls has been the happiest part of my life.” • I notice that a tough-looking, youngish white driver in Detroit is dressed in a shirt, bow tie, and suit jacket, like a Mormon missionary. He says it’s his wife’s birthday, and asks my advice about buying her a gift of lingerie. Gradually, his questions about panties grow ever more detailed. I begin to realize there is no wife. Even his pronouns switch from she to I. Then he’s off on the relative merits of string bikinis, and trying to get me to talk about my own underwear. It’s like a dirty phone call on wheels. Not only that, but he seems to be enjoying my escalating discomfort. I bet I’m not the first female passenger who’s been left with the choice of getting out or letting him reach what is clearly his climactic destination. Since we’re speeding along a highway with no place to find another taxi, I try for a third option. With all the stern authority I can muster, I tell him that if he doesn’t stop laying his fantasies on me and passengers, I’ll report his name and taxi number to his boss and to the cops. He apologizes frantically, swears he’ll never do it again, and even promises to go into therapy. Then all is quiet. Too quiet. We’re at our destination and I’m almost out the door when he says with suspicious calm and an air of release, “I’m so glad you were severe with me. Thank you for punishing me.” I’m on the sidewalk before I realize: I’ve done exactly what he had in mind. Years pass, and I forget this weird guy. Then I’m in Detroit again and I get a rare woman driver in her forties, overly made up and drenched in perfume.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss. By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance. —FAITH SMITH, AN OJIBWA educator from Chicago, followed Rebecca onto the board. Quiet, intense, and classically beautiful, Faith represented the half of Native people who live in cities and have a multitribe experience. To give urban Native students a college that included their own history, she helped to found the Native American Educational Services College, a small, private, Indian-controlled, degree-granting institution where students ranged in age from seventeen to seventy. She told me that only 10 percent of Native students who enter mainstream institutions stay long enough to get a degree, partly because they are in an academic version of the world that doesn’t include their experience or even their existence. However, this college was graduating 70 percent of those who entered and sending 20 to 30 percent on to graduate schools. When I went to see Faith at the college in Chicago, we had lunch with students who told me that, in other schools, they felt forced to choose between an education that excluded them and a community that included them. Here, they could have both. Lunch was a lesson in itself. The students explained that food was a generational marker. Their grandparents and others born before World War II had lived in the country and eaten traditional Native foods, the kind that had caused colonists to write home about how much taller, stronger, and healthier Indians were. Then came generations of people living on reservations, dependent on government rations of refined sugar, lard, and white flour, and also with trading posts that dealt in alcohol. Health declined, and alcoholism and diabetes went up. Every student now eating healthy food in that sunny multipurpose classroom had at least one friend or family member who was on dialysis. Taking relatives to hospitals and clinics had become a family ritual. I could see Faith was an example in many ways. For instance, she was president of this college, yet she paid herself the same as the teachers and the janitor whenever cash flow became an issue. Her physical self was important, too. Overworked but healthy and slender, she was a living, breathing example of the possible.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  Become accustomed to him so that you do not see him but rather the example he sets for you," the Prince said. And roughly he turned Prince Alexi about so that Beauty could see the red marks on his buttocks. Prince Alexi had received far worse punishment than Beauty. He was bruised and there were many white and pink welts on his thighs and on his calves. The Prince inspected all this almost indifferently. "You will not look away again," the Prince said to Beauty, "do you understand me?" "Yes, my Prince," Beauty said at once, only too eager to show her obedience, and in the very midst of her painful distress, an odd feeling of resignation came over her. She must look at Prince Alexi's exquisitely muscled young body; she must look at his taut and beautifully molded buttocks. If only she could hide her fascination, feign only submission. But the Prince was no longer looking at her. He had taken both Prince Alexi's wrists in his left hand, and had taken from Squire Felix not the golden paddle, but rather a long flat leather-sheathed stick which appeared heavy and with which he struck Alexi several loud blows on his calves rapidly. He pulled his captive to the center of the room. He placed his foot on the wrung of the stool as he had done earlier, and pushed Prince Alexi over his knee just as he had done to Beauty. Prince Alexi's back was to Beauty and she could see not only his buttocks but also the scrotum between his legs, and she saw the flat leather stick and its blows in red crisscrossed marks over Prince Alexi. Prince Alexi did not struggle. He made hardly a sound. His feet were planted on the floor, and nothing in his form suggested any attempt to escape the aim of the stick as Beauty might. Yet even as she watched, amazed, wondering at his control and his endurance, she could see the sighs of strain in him. He moved ever so slightly, his buttocks rising and falling, his legs quivering and then she could hear the slightest sound from him, a whispered moan which he was obviously concealing behind his closed lips. The Prince flailed at him, the skin growing a darker red with each broad stripe from the stick, and then, when his desire seemed to have reached a crest, he ordered Prince Alexi down on his hands and knees before him. Beauty could see Prince Alexi's face. It was stained with tears, but the composure had not broken. He knelt before the Prince, waiting. The Prince lifted his pointed boot and thrust it under Prince Alexi, touching the tip of Prince Alexi's penis.

• 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 The Divine Comedy (1950)

  As such, he was very naturally “caviare to the general”; and the lines in which Dante deals with the popular preference for Guiraut de Bornelh [he of Limoges; ca. 1175-ca. 1220; called by his contemporaries “master of the troubadours”] are easier for us to understand than his own evident bias in favour of Arnaut. For the best modern criticism not only places Guiraut well above Arnaut (whose fame is at a very low ebb), but is almost unanimous in setting him at the head of all the troubadours; his only rival, if rival he have, being Bernart de Ventadorn (whom Dante never mentions).—The meaning here is, not that Arnaut wrote better love songs and better prose romances than anyone else (for it is practically certain that he wrote no prose at all), but that he surpassed every writer in France, not only the troubadours of the South, but also the authors of the prose romances in the north [in De Vulg. El. i. 10, Dante speaks of prose works as the special province of the langue d’oïl, or Northern French].—For Arnaut, cf. De Vulg. El. ii; and for Guiraut, ib. i and ii.C A N T O X X V I INight had already fallen on the foot of the mountain when the angel of the circle greeted the Poets and pronounced the blessing on the pure in heart. When summoned to cross the flame Dante recalls with horror the sight he had ere now witnessed of men burned to death; and remains deaf to all Virgil’s appeals, till the utterance of Beatrice’s name at last overcomes his reluctance; whereat Virgil, for reasons of his own, smiles as we smile at a child that knows not what he seeks. Then Virgil, Dante and Statius enter the awful burning, Dante comforted by Virgil’s discourse of Beatrice and by the welcome and blessing of the angel at the further side. Meanwhile the shadow of night has been creeping up the mountain, and before they have ascended many of the steps which they are now climbing, it swallows the Poet’s shadow, and he is bereft of power further to ascend. Each of the pilgrims makes a stair his couch, and Dante, like a goat between two shepherds, sees the great stars shine brighter than their wont, as he drops into such a sleep as sees the things that are to be. Towards daybreak he has a vision of Leah, the type of the active life, singing of herself and her sister Rachel, the type of the contemplative life. Now nigh to his immediate goal, he awakes with the morning, and Virgil tells him that he is at last to gather that fruit of liberty which he has so long been seeking; and when he has mounted eagerly to the summit of the stair his guide informs him that his function is now discharged, for they have reached the goal of Purgatory.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Lvov was at home, and Levin went in to him unannounced. Lvov, in a house coat with a belt and in chamois leather shoes, was sitting in an armchair, and with a pince-nez with blue glasses he was reading a book that stood on a reading desk, while in his beautiful hand he held a half-burned cigarette daintily away from him. His handsome, delicate, and still youthful-looking face, to which his curly, glistening silvery hair gave a still more aristocratic air, lighted up with a smile when he saw Levin. “Capital! I was meaning to send to you. How’s Kitty? Sit here, it’s more comfortable.” He got up and pushed up a rocking chair. “Have you read the last circular in the _Journal de St. Pétersbourg?_ I think it’s excellent,” he said, with a slight French accent. Levin told him what he had heard from Katavasov was being said in Petersburg, and after talking a little about politics, he told him of his interview with Metrov, and the learned society’s meeting. To Lvov it was very interesting. “That’s what I envy you, that you are able to mix in these interesting scientific circles,” he said. And as he talked, he passed as usual into French, which was easier to him. “It’s true I haven’t the time for it. My official work and the children leave me no time; and then I’m not ashamed to own that my education has been too defective.” “That I don’t believe,” said Levin with a smile, feeling, as he always did, touched at Lvov’s low opinion of himself, which was not in the least put on from a desire to seem or to be modest, but was absolutely sincere. “Oh, yes, indeed! I feel now how badly educated I am. To educate my children I positively have to look up a great deal, and in fact simply to study myself. For it’s not enough to have teachers, there must be someone to look after them, just as on your land you want laborers and an overseer. See what I’m reading”—he pointed to Buslaev’s _Grammar_ on the desk—“it’s expected of Misha, and it’s so difficult.... Come, explain to me.... Here he says....” Levin tried to explain to him that it couldn’t be understood, but that it had to be taught; but Lvov would not agree with him. “Oh, you’re laughing at it!” “On the contrary, you can’t imagine how, when I look at you, I’m always learning the task that lies before me, that is the education of one’s children.” “Well, there’s nothing for you to learn,” said Lvov. “All I know,” said Levin, “is that I have never seen better brought-up children than yours, and I wouldn’t wish for children better than yours.” Lvov visibly tried to restrain the expression of his delight, but he was positively radiant with smiles.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Thus we went onwards to the light, speaking things which it is well to pass in silence, as it was well to speak there where I was.3 We came to the foot of a Noble Castle,4 seven times circled with lofty Walls, defended round by a fair Rivulet. This we passed as solid land; through seven gates I entered with those sages; we reached a meadow of fresh verdure. On it were people with eyes slow and grave, of great authority in their appearance; they spoke seldom, with mild voices. Thus we retired on one of the sides, into a place open, luminous, and high, so that they could all be seen. There direct, upon the green enamel, were shown to me the great spirits, so that I glory within myself for having seen them. I saw Electra with many companions: amongst whom I knew both Hector and Éneas; Cæsar armed, with the falcon eyes.5 I saw Camilla and Penthesilea on the other hand, and saw the Latian King, sitting with Lavinia his daughter. I saw that Brutus who expelled the Tarquin; Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia;6 and by himself apart, I saw the Saladin.7 When I raised my eyelids a little higher, I saw the Master of those that know,8 sitting amid a philosophic family. All regard him; all do him honour; here I saw Socrates and Plato, who before the rest stand nearest to him;9 Democritus, who ascribes the world to chance: Diogenes, Anaxagoras, and Thales; Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Zeno;10 and I saw the good collector of the qualities, Discorides I mean; and saw Orpheus, Tully, Linus, and Seneca the moralist; Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemæus; Hippocrates, Avicenna, and Galen; Averroës,11 who made the great comment. I may not paint them all in full: for the long theme so chases me, that many times the word comes short of the reality. The company of six diminishes to two; by another road the sage guide leads me, out of the quiet, into the trembling air; and I come to a part where there is naught that shines.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The fame which honours your house proclaims abroad its lords and proclaims the country, so that he knows of it who there hath never been. And I swear to you, so may I go on high, that your honoured race strips not itself of the glory of the purse and of the sword. Custom and nature so do privilege it, that for all that. the guilty head sets the world awry, it alone goeth straight and scorns the path of evil.” And he: “Now depart, for the sun goeth not to rest seven times in the bed which the Ram covers and bestrides with all four feet. ere this courteous opinion shall be nailed in the midst of thy head, with bigger nails than other men’s swords, if course of judgment be not stayed.”

• 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 Querelle (1953)

  118 I JEAN GENET Your faces are cymbals that never strike each other, but glide in silence over each other's waters. Querelle's murders multiplied his personality, each one cre ating a new one that did not forget its predecessors. The last mu rderer born of the last murder lived -in the company of his noblest friends, those who had preceded him and whom he now surpassed. And so he convened them in that ceremony the bandits of yore called blood marriage: all the participants stuck their knives into the same victim, a ceremony essentially similar to the one of which we have this description: "Rosa said to Nucor: " 'This is a real man. You may take off your socks and serve the kirsch.' " N uc or obeyed. He put the socks on the table and slipped into one of them a lump of sugar, handed to him by Rosa; then, after pouring some kirsch into the bottom of a bowl, he picked up the two socks, held them above the bowl and dipped them into it, taking care not to let the kirsch moisten anything but the ti ps, and then offered them to Dirbel, saying: " 'Take your pick, suck either one, with suga, or without. Don't act disgusted. This is the way one joins, to eat and drink at the same trough. There must be honor among thieves.' " And the latest Querelle, born in one piece at the age of twenty-five, arisen, defenseless; from a shadowy region within our selves, strong, solid, swung his shoulders round gladly to greet his self-chosen, smiling, happy brothers, each one of them both younger and older than himself. And each Querelle re garded him with sympathy. In his dark moments Querelle was

• 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 My Life on the Road (2015)

  King once said, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” If Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer and others had been heard fifty years ago—if women had been half the speakers in 1963—we might have heard that the civil rights movement was partly a protest against the ritualistic rape and terrorizing of black women by white men.4 We might have known that Rosa Parks had been assigned by the NAACP to investigate the gang rape of a black woman by white men—who had left her for dead near a Montgomery bus stop—before that famous boycott. We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.5 Mrs. Greene knew that. She also knew it was all about keeping women from controlling their own bodies. It has been part of the history of this country ever since Columbus captured Native women as sex slaves for his crew, and expressed surprise when they fought back.6 I knew Mrs. Greene couldn’t possibly be alive to see women speaking a half-century later, but I hoped her daughter was watching. Back then, she had been impatient with her mother’s complaints, but I bet now she would be proud. After these fiftieth anniversary speeches, I found myself standing with a group of young African American women, some wearing Smith College T-shirts. Yolanda King, Martin and Coretta King’s daughter, had gone there, and these women knew I had, too. We took photos with our cell phones. I told them that my class of 1956 included not one African American student—or Negro girl, as everyone then would have said—and when I asked a man in the Smith admissions office why, he said, “We have to be very careful about educating Negro girls because there aren’t enough educated Negro men to go around.” The young women laughed at this sexist/racist double whammy—and hugged me with sympathy, as if I had been the wronged one—and in a way, they were partly right. White people should have sued for being culturally deprived in a white ghetto. When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses. These young women were not looking to Washington, as Malcolm X might have feared, nor were they waiting to be asked to speak. They were complete unto themselves, as in the line from one of Alice Walker’s poems in Revolutionary Petunias: Blooming Gloriously For its Self Malcolm X would have been proud of them, too. I knew the oldest of his six daughters, Attallah Shabazz, an elegant and experienced version of those self-possessed young women. She was a writer, speaker, activist, and, by then, a grandmother herself. Getting to know her had been a gift of the road. When we talked again, she told me something I’d never heard or read. Malcolm X had been in Washington for that historic 1963 march.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  by my Master, and he said to me, “Have no fear of speaking, but speak, and tell him that which he asketh with so great desire.” Wherefore I: “Perchance thou dost marvel, O ancient spirit, at the laugh I gave, but I desire that yet greater wonder seize thee. He who guideth mine eyes on high, is that Virgil from whom thou drewest power to sing of men and gods. If thou didst believe other cause for my laughter, set it aside as untrue, and believe it was those words which thou spakest of him.” Already was he stooping to embrace my Teacher’s feet; but he said: “Brother, do not so, for thou art a shade and a shade thou seest.” And he, rising: “Now canst thou comprehend the measure of the love which warms me toward thee, when I forget our nothingness, and treat shades as a solid thing,” 1. Dante begins his Convito by quoting Aristotle’s words (Metaphysics, i), thai “all men naturally desire knowledge.”2. See John iv. 7-15: “Whosover drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; … The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not.…”3. Luke xxiv. 13-15: “And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs. And they talked together of all these things which had happened. And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.”4. This is the poet Statius, who remains with Dante till the end of the Cantica (see Canto xxxiii). He was born at Naples about the year 50, and died there ca. 96. In making Statius a native of Toulouse, Dante follows a common medieval error, probably due to a confusion with the poet’s contemporary. Lucius Statius, the rheotorician, who really was born at Toulouse. The poet lived mostly at Rome during the reign of Vespasian (69-79), whose son, Titus, captured Jerusalem in the year 70 (cf. Par. vi and vii). The name is, of course, that of poet. Statius was author of the Thebaid and of the fragmentary Achilleid, which deal with the expedition of the Seven against Thebes and the Trojan war, respectively, and with which Dante was well acquainted. [The MS of the Silva was not discovered till the beginning of the 15th century.]5. The early commentators, who probably knew best, say that the regular “countersign” consisted of the words—“And with thy spirit.” 6. Clotho prepared the thread of life, which was spun by Lachesis and cut by Atropos (cf. Inf. xxxiii; Purg. xxv).

• From Querelle (1953)

  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 fortifications. Gil expected him around six o'clock. Roger told him the news. The newspapers had already discontinued their 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 the fabulous 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- 160 I JEAN GENET ing, talking for hours; to anyone but this child who was determined to see him as a monumental figure, such babble would have been a sure indication of a state of abject, almost pathological fear. Roger regarded it as merely the sublime expression of a tempest raging in Gil's breast. That was how he had to be, this hero brimming with outcries, crimes and turmoil. The three years he had on Roger made Gil appear a man. The hardness of his pale face where you could see all the muscles working under the skin ( muscles that mentally floored Roger every time he looked at them, as promptly as any prize fighter's punch ) made him think of the muscles of his limbs and body, so strong, "able to do a man's work on a building site. Roger himself was still wearing short pants, and although his thighs were strong, they did not yet have the definitive firmness of Gil's legs. Stretching out by his side, as close as possible, leaning on one elbow Roger watched the beloved face, pallid and twisted by a hatred of this kind of life. He rested his head on Gil's legs. , "Gatta wait a while, still-or, what d'you think? Guess it's better if I wait a while yet, before taking off." ''I should think so. The gendarmes are still looking for you. They have your picture." "What about you, they haven't been talking to you any more?''

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Once when I stayed awake long enough to admire the olive twill pants of a flight attendant’s uniform, she let me order a pair at her discount, thus combining shopping with travel. It was the beginning of a lifetime of finding girlfriends in the sky. I noticed that stewardesses were all young—and all female—but I assumed they wanted a few years of travel before doing something else, or this was an entry-level job and a pipeline for airline executives. I only began to pay attention when I was shuttling constantly between the start-up of Ms. magazine in New York and the organizing of the National Women’s Political Caucus in Washington. Once when exhaustion caused me to fall asleep with my credit card in my hand, a kindhearted stewardess removed the card, ran it through the onboard ticket machine—the way one paid for the shuttle in those days—and put it back in my hand without waking me. Neither she nor others knew who I was or why I was such a frequent-flying oddity among the mostly male passengers going to our nation’s capital, but we seemed to share a sense of being outsiders. On longer trips with various airlines, I began to hang out in the galley, where I could ask questions and listen. I learned that the first stewardesses had been registered nurses hired to make passengers feel safe at a time when flying was new, airsickness was frequent, and passengers were fearful. Some pilots resented this female invasion of their macho air space so much that they quit. Like the first American astronauts who compared sending a Soviet woman into space with sending up a monkey, the presence of any woman devalued a masculine domain. Once male business travelers became the airlines’ bread and butter, everything changed. Stewardesses were hired as decorative waitresses with geishalike instructions. There were even “executive flights” for men only, complete with steaks, brandy, and cigars lit by stewardesses. Though they still had to know first aid, evacuation procedures for as many as seventy-five kinds of planes, underwater rescue, emergency signaling, hijacking precautions, and other skills that took six weeks of schooling—not to mention how to handle passengers and fend off some—their appearance was prescribed down to age, height, weight (which was governed by regular weigh-ins), hairstyle, makeup (including a single shade of lipstick), skirt length, and other physical requirements that excluded such things as “a broad nose”—only one of many racist reasons why stewardesses were overwhelmingly white. They had to be single as well as young, and were fired if they married or aged out at over thirty or so. Altogether the goal of airline executives seemed to be to hire smart and ornamental young women, to use them as advertising come-ons, to work them hard, and to age them out soon. Flight schedules were so merciless that on some airlines, the average stewardess lasted only eighteen months.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Tommie Hutto-Blake was a flight attendant I saw in 1972 in a Manhattan church basement at the first meeting of Stewardesses for Women’s Rights; then again at the National Women’s Conference in Houston in 1977; then as an activist at a 1994 political event in Dallas; then in 2008 when she was campaigning for Hillary Clinton; then on a flight of American Airlines just before she retired after thirty-eight years as a flight attendant, thirty-five of them as a union activist, and took on political activism full time. That last time, she was a revered passenger. I was led back to where she was sitting by two younger women flight attendants, and one was a union vice president who was just finishing law school. It was a long way from lighting cigars and doing Air Strips. In the 1970s, I had read a newspaper report of an African American stewardess who showed up for work with an Afro at a time when the few black flight attendants were expected to look as “white” as possible. She compounded the offense by carrying a copy of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. The pilot of the flight refused to take off until she was put off the plane. When I was back on the same airline, I asked a stewardess if there had been a protest. She said yes, but as far as she knew, the pilot got away with it. Like a captain of a ship at sea, he could do anything he wanted. More than twenty years later, I was in a big-city radio station for a news interview, and a female station manager showed me around. She was a rarity in an industry where 85 percent of managers were males, so I asked how she had come to this position. She explained that after a divorce, she had gone back to school, started in radio at the bottom, loved its ability to create community, and discovered she had a gift for managing people. “Do you happen to remember,” she asked me as we finished our tour, “a news story about an airline pilot who put a black flight attendant off the plane for reading Eldridge Cleaver?” I said I definitely did. I’d always wondered what became of him. “Well, that pilot was my husband,” she said calmly. “So I divorced him. That one true act was my beginning.” Over the years, those stories in the sky would teach me more than I could have imagined: from deregulation, fare wars, and nonunion airlines, to post-Iraq fuel costs, hijacking fears, and bankruptcies that somehow required pay cuts for everybody except executives with golden parachutes.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Despite all their faults, campaigns are based on the fact that every vote counts, and therefore every person counts. As freestanding societies, they are more open than academia, more idealistic than corporations, more unifying than religions, and more accessible than government itself. Campaign season is the only time of public debate about what we want for the future. It can change consciousness even more than who gets elected. In short, campaigns may be the closest thing we have to democracy itself. —LIVING IN INDIA, where people lined up for hours and even days to cast their ballots, confirmed my oddball love of campaigns. So did returning home to find a growing and brave civil rights movement of people willing to risk their lives to register and vote. But as a freelance writer, it was hard to combine what I loved with what I did. If I tried for an assignment covering a major political leader, I would be asked to write about his wife instead. If I worked hard, I could get assignments I was proud of—for instance, a profile of Truman Capote, or a long article about the contraceptive pill—but the world of politics allowed few women into it, even as journalists. Then, in 1968, I joined a group of writers—led by Clay Felker, my editor at Esquire —who were starting New York magazine. I was the only “girl reporter,” but finally I would be able to write about politics. This was the home of the New Journalism as practiced by Tom Wolfe, and also of Jimmy Breslin, an in-the-streets chronicler of New York life. Since Wolfe wrote satirically from outside about subjects he probably disliked, and Breslin wrote from inside about the lives of people he probably loved, they helped establish the right of nonfiction writers to be both personal and political—as long as we got our facts straight.1 When I joined the press corps on campaign planes, I noticed that each one seemed to reflect the candidate’s character. Eugene McCarthy isolated himself, talked philosophy, and told reporters that only the well educated supported him—as if that were a good thing. This set the tone for his staff, who also seemed cool and disengaged. On the other hand, Richard Nixon gave the same speech at every stop, disappeared behind closed doors with local political leaders, and once on every campaign trip walked back in the plane to greet each reporter with a carefully memorized personal fact, almost always out of date. Reporters on his plane seemed to overcompensate for not really liking him by being less critical, and there was none of the usual air of excitement about talking to the candidate. When Bobby Kennedy’s campaign plane was scheduled for a stop at an Indian reservation, his staff objected because there were too few votes to be worth his time. He accused them of not caring and stopped anyway. His was probably the only plane with a folksinger playing guitar in the aisle.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  [image "With Southern Mutual Help Association (SMHA) workers Joyce Alexander, Bessie Bourgeois, Lorna Bourg (organizer), and Bernadette Stewart, Louisiana, May 1980. © Mary Ellen Mark" file=Image00019.jpg] WITH SOUTHERN MUTUAL HELP ASSOCIATION ( SMHA) WORKERS JOYCE ALEXANDER, BESSIE BOURGEOIS, LORNA BOURG (ORGANIZER), AND BERNADETTE STEWART, LOUISIANA, MAY 1980. © MARY ELLEN MARK [image "VII." file=Image00020.jpg] SecretsT his chapter is something of a secret in itself. As I was finishing the original edition of this book, due to deadlines I left out some experiences that hadn’t easily shown up on the road. For reasons positive or negative, they needed secrecy to survive. It was part of their mystery that they went straight from invisible to inevitable. Some secrets were hidden by the vastness and barriers of the land. In Louisiana in the 1970s, for instance, African American sugarcane workers were still cutting cane in the fields as they had during the days of slavery and living in no-plumbing, see-through shacks owned by the same white families that had been there before the Civil War. Outside efforts to help them organize hadn’t made a difference. Even when CBS’s 60 Minutes came to film this secret world for a report called “Behind the Cane Curtain,” the only worker who spoke out met with disapproval from her own coworkers. They feared making matters worse. Then two women, a VISTA rural organizer and a nun from a French order dedicated to serving the poor, understood that these workers, like abused wives, could not rebel as long as they were living in the master’s house. So the women asked for donations of land and helped families build homes, which also meant the workers learned bricklaying, electrical work, and plumbing in the process. By 1980, when I wrote an article for Ms. magazine, many sugarcane workers had found a collective voice and formed the Southern Mutual Help Association (SMHA).1 They even insisted that women, who otherwise did manual jobs that paid the least, should be eligible for mechanized farmwork on harvesting machines and tractors. One woman was so proud of her tractor that she rode it home every night and parked it next to her house, which was only slightly bigger than the tractor. By the time I went back a decade later, SMHA had a small office that was a center for local art, music, and folklore. After the back-to-back Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated much of Louisiana in 2005, this self-help group restored more than a thousand homes, businesses, and churches in the area by listening, learning, keeping paperwork to a minimum, and working cooperatively. By my last visit, in 2015, the group had helped to keep traditional fishers in business, despite hurricane damage along the shore, and had become such a major community developer that rural organizers from other states and even other countries were visiting to learn the art of empowering the powerless from the bottom up. Still other secrets were hidden in plain sight in cities.