Anger

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 Collected Essays (1998)

  What to do in the face of this deep and dangerous estrangement? It seemed to me-l would say, sipping coffee and trying to be calm-that the principle of what had to be done was extremely simple; but before anything could be done, the principle had to be grasped. The principle on which one had to operate was that the government which can force me to pay my taxes and force me to fight in its defense anywhere in the world docs not haJJc the attth01'it_v to say that it cannot protect my right to vote or my right to earn a living or my right to live anywhere I choose. Furthermore, no nation, wishing to call itself free, can possibly survive so massive a defection. What to do? \Veil, there is a real estate lobby in Albany, for example, and this lobby, which was able to rebuild all of New York, downtown, and for money, in less than twenty years, is also responsible for Har lem and the condition of the people there, and the condition of the schools there, and the future of the children there. What to do? Why is it not possible to attack the power of this lobby? Are their profits more important than the health of our children? What to do? Are textbooks printed in order to teach children, or are the contents of these textbooks to be con trolled by the Southern oligarchy and the commercial health of publishing houses? What to do? Why are Negroes and Puerto Ricans virtually the only people pushing trucks in the garment center, and what union has the right to trap and victimize Negroes and Puerto Ricans in this way? None of these things (I would say) could possibly be done without the consent, in fact, of the government, and we in Harlem know this even if some of you profess not to know how such a hideous state of affairs came about. If some of these things are not begun-I would say-then, of course, we will be sit ting on a powder keg all summer. Of course, the powder keg may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn't. 73+ OTHER ESSAYS They thanked me. They didn't believe me, as I conclude, since nothing was ever done. The summer was always violent. And in the spring, the phone began to ring again. Now, what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco-is true of every Northern city with a large Ne gro population.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  EIGHTEENThe StepfamilyBilly was almost fifteen when I drove to Petaluma to meet him for our five-year follow-up. Billy, his mom, and stepfather Tom were now living in a Victorian home in an old section of the city with Tom’s son Dave. Billy also had a new half brother, Mark, who was two years old. We timed it right, for Billy arrived in a friend’s car just as I drove up. Still small for his age, he looked wiry rather than scrawny. I knew from my preliminary phone call to his mother setting up this round of interviews that Billy’s health was still precarious. Any physical exertion could bring on palpitations and shortness of breath. He carried his heart medication with him. In high school, as in previous school years, he had study hall when other students had physical education, and he had special permission to rest in the nurse’s office when he was fatigued. His mother was worried because his few friends tended to be loners and troublemakers rather than kids in the “in” crowd, which revolved around sports. Nevertheless Billy looked better than I had expected. His scowl and sullen attitude were replaced by a teenage awkwardness and tentative smile. Sitting in the large, sunny kitchen before the other family members arrived home, he was articulate for the first time about the divorce and his mother’s remarriage. “All divorces are bad for kids,” he told me. “They make kids do things that they normally wouldn’t do.” “Like what, Billy?” And then Billy told me with shame in his face how he had gotten into trouble in the year and a half since the family moved to Petaluma. “I ripped off some stores. I got caught smoking dope. I had a bad attitude toward my teachers. I fought a lot with my mother.” He looked at me as if to say, “You want to hear more? I’ll give you more.” Instead I asked, “How is this connected with your parents’ divorce?” “I was really angry,” Billy said quickly. “I remember thinking over and over, ‘If you won’t do for me, I’ll make life miserable for everyone.’” “Are you still angry?” Billy shrugged. “Sometimes I am. Sometimes I’m sad. I wish my parents would have tried harder and maybe they could have worked it out.” “Do you think they might still get back together?” Billy looked startled by my question. He waited a long minute before responding. “Yes,” he said solemnly. “I do think about that, sometimes a lot.” This response didn’t surprise me. After their parents’ divorce, many youngsters have powerful fantasies that can last well into adulthood that their parents will reconcile. “How are you and Dave getting along?” I asked, remembering the earlier incompatibility with his stepbrother.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Nothing in the savage experience could have prepared them for such an idea, any more than they could conceive of the land as some thing to be bought and sold. (As I cannot believe that people are actually buying and selling air space above the towers of Manhattan.) Nevertheless, all of this happened, and is happening. Out of this incredible brutality, we get the myth of the happy darky and Gone With the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are attacked, as is happening now-all over a globe which has never been and never will be White- 812 OTHER ESSAYS my countrymen become childishly vindictive and unutterably dangerous. The unadmitted panic of which I spoke above is created by the terror that the Savage can, now, describe the Civilized: the only way to prevent this is to obliterate humanity. This panic proves that neither a person nor a people can do any thing without knowing what they are doing. Neither can any one avoid paying for the choices he or she has made. It is savagely, if one may say so, ironical that the only proof the world-mankind-has ever had of White supremacy is in the Black face and voice: that face never scrutinized, that voice never heard. The eyes in that face prove the unforgivable and unimaginable horror of being a captive in the promised land, but also prove that trouble don't last always: and the voice, once filled with a rage and pain that corroborated the reality of the jailer, is addressing another reality, in other tongues. The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant. Or-as they arc, indeed, already, in all but actual fact: ob solete. For, if trouble don't last always, as the Preacher tells us, neither docs Power, and it is on the fact or the hope or the myth of Power that that identity which calls itself White has always seemed to depend. I had just turned thirty-one when this book was first pub lished, and, by the time you read this, I will be sixty. I think that quite remarkable, but I do not mention it, now, as an occasion for celebrations or lamentations. I don't feel that I have any reason to complain: emphatically, the contrary, to leave it at that, and no matter what tomorrow brings.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  He took them to the playground. When this bombed, he took them to the movies. But with a limited selection of G-rated films in Santa Rosa, he finally resorted to the video store. As time wore on, the girls spent their weekends watching television or videos or tagging along with their father while he did routine errands. Occasionally, he would take them to an amusement park, especially if he had a girlfriend along. Sometimes he helped with homework. He tried his best to be a good father and there was no question that he loved them and looked forward to their visits. But he was at sea. The four-year absence plus the sullen resentment of the children at the disruption of their social lives were very hard for him to overcome. The hardest was when he went out on dates in the evening and Paula and Joan were left alone in the apartment complex. There were few other children to play with. Neither girl liked to venture out alone. Once they tiptoed down to the small swimming pool near their apartment, only to be set upon by a group of older boys who teased and frightened them. They never went back. At first, Paula and Joan were allowed to call their friends in Marin from Santa Rosa, but when their mom refused to share in the long-distance bills, telephone calls were barred. When play invitations and friends’ birthday parties fell on a Santa Rosa weekend, they could not go. Joan, now in junior high school, had many weekend projects that involved working with an assigned group. She was told that she could only work with her group after six o’clock on Sunday evenings, after she got back from Santa Rosa. When other parents offered to have Joan or Paula stay with them so that school projects could be facilitated, their dad refused. This was, he claimed, his only time for seeing his daughters. Having regular time with them was important to him in that it helped him stabilize his life and develop his sense of being a responsible person and father. But he really didn’t know them as individuals. He didn’t ask and no one helped him catch up with the important years of growth that he had missed. Having little experience in the daily life of children, he was not aware of their interests or needs and fully expected that they would conform to his life. He was content with the arrangement and only vaguely aware that they were not. Joan’s perspective on the visiting was entirely different from that of her father. She felt increasingly distressed at losing out on school and friends and was intensely angry at her father and at the court for intervening in her life without warrant. When I spoke with her on her fourteenth birthday, she asked me with great urgency, “How old do I have to be before I can refuse to visit my father?”

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Yet I am disposed to grant him that degree of genius which must always be present in one who rises so fast and so high in human affairs; such ascendancy is not gained without at least some crude skill. The Jews of the moderate party were the first to accuse this supposed Son of the Star of deceit and imposture; I believe rather that his untrained mind was of the type which is taken in by its own lies, and that guile in his case went hand in hand with fanaticism. He paraded as the hero whom the Jewish people had awaited for centuries in order to gratify their ambitions and their hate; this demagogue proclaimed himself Messiah and King of Israel. The aged Akiba, in a foolish state of exaltation, led the adventurer through the streets of Jerusalem, holding his horse by the bridle; the high priest Eleazar rededicated the temple, said to be denied from the time that uncircumcised visitors had crossed its threshold. Stacks of arms hidden underground for nearly twenty years were distributed to the rebels by agents of the Son of the Star; they also had recourse to weapons formerly rejected for our ordnance as defective (and purposely constructed thus by Jewish workers in our arsenals over a period of years). Zealot groups attacked isolated Roman garrisons and massacred our soldiers with refinements of cruelty which recalled the worst memories of the Jewish revolt under Trajan; Jerusalem finally fell wholly into the hands of the insurgents, and the new quarters of Aelia Capitolina were set burning like a torch. The first detachments of the Twenty-Second Legion Deiotariana, sent from Egypt with utmost speed under the command of the legate of Syria, Publius Marcellus, were routed by bands ten times their number. The revolt had become war, and war to the bitter end. Two legions, the Twelfth Fulminata and the Sixth Ferrata, came immediately to reinforce the troops already stationed in Judaea; some months later, Julius Severus took charge of the military operations. He had formerly pacified the mountainous regions of Northern Britain, and brought with him some small contingents of British auxiliaries accustomed to fighting on difficult terrain. Our heavily equipped troops and our officers trained to the square or the phalanx formation of pitched battles were hard put to it to adapt themselves to that war of skirmishes and surprise attacks which, even in open country, retained the techniques of street fighting. Simon, a great man in his way, had divided his followers into hundreds of squadrons [Hadrian 236a.jpg] Hadrian in Military Dress Bust from Crete, Paris, Louvre [Hadrian 236bc.jpg] Trophies from the Temple of the Divine Hadrian, Rome Rome, Museum of the Palace of the Conservators [Hadrian 236d.jpg] Letter of Simon Bar-Kochba Dead Sea Manuscript, Palestine Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem posted on mountain ridges or placed in ambush in caverns and abandoned quarries, or even hidden in houses of the teeming suburbs of the cities.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  How to perceive, define, a line nearly too thin for the naked eye, so mercurial, and so mighty. Only a really shattered, scotch- or martini-guzzling, upward mobility-struck house nigger could possibly deny the relent less tension of the black condition. Being black affected one's lite span, msurance rates, blood pressure, lovers, children, EVERY GOOD-BYE AIN ' T GONE 775 every dangerous hour of every dangerous day. There was ab solutely no way not to be black without ceasing to exist. But it fr equently seemed that there was no way to be black, either, without ceasing to exist. For one of the ways of being black is to accept what the world tells you about your mother and your father, your brother and your sister; and what that world tells you-in many ways, fr om the language of the lawgiver to the language of the liberal-is that "your" people deserve, in etlcct, their fate . Your fate-"your" people's fate-involves being, forever, a little lower than these particular angels, angels who, never theless, are always ready to give you a helping hand. Well, this is, after all, but another way of observing that it is exceedingly difficult for most of us to discard the assump tions of the society in which we were born, in which we live, to which we owe our identities; very difficult to defeat the trap of circumstance, which is, also, the web of safety; virtually impossible, if not completely impossible, to envision the fu ture, except in those terms which we think we already know. Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. Including this writer, of course, who was far, however, years ago, from being able to forgive himself for being so irretriev ably human. The power of the social definition is that it be comes, fatally, one's own-but it took time, and much deep water, to make me see this. Rage and misery can be a source of comfort, simply because one has lived with rage and misery for so long. But to accept this rage and misery as a source of comfort is to enter one of the vicious circles of hell. One does not, after all, forgive the world for this horror, nor can one forgive one self. Because one cannot forgive oneself, one cannot forgive others, or, even, really, see others-one is always striking out at the wrong person, for only some other, poor, doomed in nocent, obviously, is likely to be in striking range. One's self esteem begins to shrivel, one's hope for the future begins to crack.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  The next morning I called up all the butches from the plant so we could go to the meeting Tuesday night as a group. When I called Grant, she had big news. “The steel plant has to hire fifty women,” she told me. ““They’re accepting applications Wednesday morning. I don’t know about you, but I'll be camping out on the line Tuesday night. By late that night the line will stretch from Lackawanna to Tonawanda.” It was a slight exaggeration, but her point was well taken. I called Jan. “I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think we should do?” “T was kind of hoping you'd tell me what we should do,” I told her. I called Duffy on Tuesday afternoon. I told him all the butches wanted the chance to get into the steel plant. There was a long silence on the line. “It’s a mistake,” he said. “You don’t understand,” I shouted. “You don’t Stone Butch Blues 107 know what it means to us to get into a big plant like that.” He tried to argue with me. “If the vote passes, at least punch in Wednesday morning or else you'll be automatically fired.” He didn’t seem to realize I was already gone. “You don’t understand what it would mean to work in the steel mill, do your” He shouted back at me. “What the hell is this about, looking tough?”’ “Yeah,” I yelled, “in a way. But not like you’re saying it. All we got is the clothes we wear, the bikes we tide, and where we work, you know? You can ride a Honda and work in a bindery or you can ride a Harley and work at the steel plant. The other butches are gonna leave sooner or later, and I don’t want to get stuck in that sweatshop with that rinky-dink union.” I knew Id hurt him, but I couldn’t find a way to retreat. “If you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it to you,” I told him. “Well, I think it’s stupid.” He sounded like a kid. That’s when I knew I had really hurt him. “The company was ordered to hire fifty women, but they don’t have to keep them. If five of you last the ninety days to get into the union I’ll eat Jim Boney’s baseball mitt.” 108 = Leslie Feinberg I was riled. “It’s my baseball mitt,’ I reminded him and hung up the phone. Tuesday night was bitter cold. We huddled around the flames leaping out of metal barrels. It was a long, long night. My stomach tightened every time I thought about the contract ratification meeting. “You think we made a mistake?” Jan asked me. I didn’t answer. Fuck Duffy, | thought to myself. He doesnt understand us.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I waited for Theresa to speak. I could hear her breathing, deep and even. I stroked her shoulder and arm with my hand, feeling the definition of each muscle. “Honey, we’ve got to talk about it,” I said. She sat in silence with me for a long time. Then she got up without a word and went to bed. For weeks we didn’t talk about it. We didn’t talk much at all. But we found little things to argue about, small explosions that threatened to ignite big ones. When I shut down sexually, Theresa could always melt my stone. But when I turned into one big 158 Leslie Feinberg emotional rock, when I completely shut down like a slab of granite and needed her to chip away until I was free, she railed against me. It didn’t work. I was still trapped in stone. “Talk to me,” she shouted. “T’m watching TV!” I lied. She got up and stood in front of the television. “You're not talking to me.” I exhaled dramatically in exasperation. “Fine. Now you want to talk. Great. Let’s talk’ My tone was flat and closed like a door still slammed shut. “Never mind,’ Theresa stormed out of the room. I continued to stare at the television. She banged the bedroom door. Now both our doors were shut. I snapped off the television and smoked in silence. The stone walls around me melted, leaving me feeling vulnerable and taw. Now that Theresa had retreated from her frontal assault, I remembered how much I needed her. Suddenly I panicked. Maybe I'd already lost her, but I just didn’t realize it. I got up and walked slowly toward the bedroom. Theresa opened the bedroom door and walked toward me. We embraced each other feverishly. “I’m sorry, baby,” I told her. “When I get like that I don’t know how to get out of it.” Theresa squeezed me in her arms. “I know, Jess. Tm sorry too.” I could hear the faint strains of Marvin Gaye on someone’s radio outside. “You know what I wish?” I asked her. “I wish there was still a gay bar where we could go dancing, like we used to.” Theresa sighed. “They have lesbian dances on campus. I wish we could go there. I wish we could go somewhere and be welcome.” We held each other and swayed to the sound. Theresa pulled slightly away from me. She looked me up and down with a smile and hooked her finger in my belt. She gently pulled me toward our bedroom. Let’s get it on, she sang quietly. We fought and we made love in order to make up. It became an alarming pattern. “Youre a woman!” Theresa shouted at breakfast. She pushed her plate away. Her part-time temp work had put that meal on the table. “No, Pm not,” I yelled back to her. “I’m a he- she. That’s different.”

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Bolt touched my arm. I jumped back; he looked hurt. “There’s big safety problems here, too. We see a lot of stuff in maintenance and set-up that you don’t see. People have accidents—fingers caught in molds, stuff like that. The company tries to intimidate them out of filing for compensation. We write up equipment problems, and management just files them in the wastepaper basket.” I listened and nodded. Bolt shrugged. “So we gotta know, Jesse. Where do you stand?” I sighed. This was a good job for me. I wished it would stay that way. But everything was always changing. “Look,” I told the guys. “You want to bring a union in here, that’s fine with me.” Bolt moved closer to me. “That’s not good enough. We need you on the organizing committee.” I didn’t want to make waves. Why couldn’t I just sign a union card like everybody else and do my job? “I don’t want to get involved,” I told him. “Listen,” he said as he leaned toward me. I backed up a bit. “I’m sticking my neck out on this thing and I don’t even know if [ll be eligible for the union because the labor board might consider me a gang boss.” “You can count on me in an election,” I told him, “but I’m not an organizer.” Bolt shook his head. “That’s not what Frankie told me. She said you helped win that strike.” “Look, Bolt, I don’t want to get involved. Pll support you all and do my job. Just leave me alone.” Bolt shook his head. “I thought you were different.” I sighed. “TI don’t want to be different.” We heard the shouting all the way from the other end of the plant. We ran the length of the factory. By the time we got there, all that was left was blood on the concrete floor. “Who got hurt?” I whispered to Bolt. His calloused hands formed tight fists. “George.” I looked at the lake of blood on the floor. “Is he dead?” Bolt shrugged. “We don’t know yet.” He pounded his fist on the forklift next to us. “I wrote up this tow motor myself last month. The brakes were shot.” The plant superintendent waved his arms. “Let’s everybody get back to work. It does no good to stand around.” I was surprised when everyone went back to their jobs. I was half expecting an insurrection. That came two weeks later. The accident was all we talked about. The company was experimenting with bigger molds that could stamp out plastic garbage cans. George was assigned to use the forklift to carry the mold over to the injection machine. While he was standing in front of the forklift attaching the mold, the brakes gave out. One of the arms of the forklift pierced George’s back just below the lung.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But if I told a friend that my sister was hateful and Mamaw overheard, she’d remember it and tell me the next time we were alone that I had committed the cardinal sin of disloyalty. “How dare you speak about your sister to some little shit? In five years you won’t even remember his goddamned name. But your sister is the only true friend you’ll ever have.” Yet in her own life, with three children at home, the men who should have been most loyal to her—her brothers and husband—conspired against her. Papaw seemed to resist the social expectations of a middle-class father, sometimes with hilarious results. He would announce that he was headed to the store and ask his kids if they needed anything; he’d come back with a new car. A new Chevrolet convertible one month. A luxurious Oldsmobile the next. “Where’d you get that?” they’d ask him. “It’s mine, I traded for it,” he’d reply nonchalantly. But sometimes his failure to conform brought terrible consequences. My young aunt and mother would play a little game when their father came home from work. Some days he would carefully park his car, and the game would go well—their father would come inside, they’d have dinner together like a normal family, and they’d make one another laugh. Many days, however, he wouldn’t park his car normally—he’d back into a spot too quickly, or sloppily leave his car on the road, or even sideswipe a telephone pole as he maneuvered. Those days the game was already lost. Mom and Aunt Wee would run inside and tell Mamaw that Papaw had come home drunk. Sometimes they’d run out the back door and stay the night with Mamaw’s friends. Other times Mamaw would insist on staying, so Mom and Aunt Wee would brace for a long night. One Christmas Eve, Papaw came home drunk and demanded a fresh dinner. When that failed to materialize, he picked up the family Christmas tree and threw it out the back door. The next year he greeted a crowd at his daughter’s birthday party and promptly coughed up a huge wad of phlegm at everyone’s feet. Then he smiled and walked off to grab himself another beer. I couldn’t believe that mild-mannered Papaw, whom I adored as a child, was such a violent drunk. His behavior was due at least partly to Mamaw’s disposition. She was a violent nondrunk. And she channeled her frustrations into the most productive activity imaginable: covert war. When Papaw passed out on the couch, she’d cut his pants with scissors so they’d burst at the seam when he next sat down. Or she’d steal his wallet and hide it in the oven just to piss him off. When he came home from work and demanded fresh dinner, she’d carefully prepare a plate of fresh garbage. If he was in a fighting mood, she’d fight back. In short, she devoted herself to making his drunken life a living hell.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I knew that if any of my relatives walked in and ran up a bill of over a thousand dollars, they’d be asked to pay immediately. I hated the feeling that my boss counted my people as less trustworthy than those who took their groceries home in a Cadillac. But I got over it: One day, I told myself, I’ll have my own damned tab. I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They’d buy two dozen-packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about. Mamaw listened intently to my experiences at Dillman’s. We began to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust. Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole. Every two weeks, I’d get a small paycheck and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else. This was my mind-set when I was seventeen, and though I’m far less angry today than I was then, it was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re gettin’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”20 At around that time, our neighbor—one of Mamaw and Papaw’s oldest friends—registered the house next to ours for Section 8. Section 8 is a government program that offers low-income residents a voucher to rent housing. Mamaw’s friend had little luck renting his property, but when he qualified his house for the Section 8 voucher, he virtually assured that would change.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Can you change this with a new law or program? Probably not. Some scales aren’t that amenable to the proverbial thumb. I’ve learned that the very traits that enabled my survival during childhood inhibit my success as an adult. I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle. This makes little sense in my current relationships, but without that attitude, my childhood homes would have consumed me. I learned early to spread my money out lest Mom or someone else find it and “borrow” it—some under the mattress, some in the underwear drawer, some at Mamaw’s house. When, later in life, Usha and I consolidated finances, she was shocked to learn that I had multiple bank accounts and small past-due balances on credit cards. Usha still sometimes reminds me that not every perceived slight—from a passing motorist or a neighbor critical of my dogs—is cause for a blood feud. And I always concede, despite my raw emotions, that she’s probably right. A couple of years ago, I was driving in Cincinnati with Usha, when somebody cut me off. I honked, the guy flipped me off, and when we stopped at a red light (with this guy in front of me), I unbuckled my seat belt and opened the car door. I planned to demand an apology (and fight the guy if necessary), but my common sense prevailed and I shut the door before I got out of the car. Usha was delighted that I’d changed my mind before she yelled at me to stop acting like a lunatic (which has happened in the past), and she told me that she was proud of me for resisting my natural instinct. The other driver’s sin was to insult my honor, and it was on that honor that nearly every element of my happiness depended as a child—it kept the school bully from messing with me, connected me to my mother when some man or his children insulted her (even if I agreed with the substance of the insult), and gave me something, however small, over which I exercised complete control. For the first eighteen or so years of my life, standing down would have earned me a verbal lashing as a “pussy” or a “wimp” or a “girl.” The objectively correct course of action was something that the majority of my life had taught me was repulsive to an upstanding young man. For a few hours after I did the right thing, I silently criticized myself. But that’s progress, right? Better that than sitting in a jail cell for teaching that asshole a lesson about defensive driving. ConclusionShortly before Christmas last year, I stood in the kids’ section of a Washington, D.C., Walmart, shopping list in hand, gazing at toys and talking myself out of each of them.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But none of them had ever uttered such unreflective tripe. As the student prattled on, I thought about the never-ending training on how to respect Iraqi culture—never show anyone the bottom of your foot, never address a woman in traditional Muslim garb without first speaking to a male relative. I thought about the security we provided for Iraqi poll workers, and how we studiously explained the importance of their mission without ever pushing our own political views on them. I thought about listening to a young Iraqi (who couldn’t speak a word of English) flawlessly rap every single word of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” and laughing along with him and his friends. I thought about my friends who were covered in third-degree burns, “lucky” to have survived an IED attack in the Al-Qaim region of Iraq. And here was this dipshit in a spotty beard telling our class that we murdered people for sport. I felt an immediate drive to finish college as quickly as possible. I met with a guidance counselor and plotted my exit—I’d need to take classes during the summer and more than double the full-time course load during some terms. It was, even by my heightened standards, an intense year. During a particularly terrible February, I sat down with my calendar and counted the number of days since I’d slept more than four hours in a day. The tally was thirty-nine. But I continued, and in August 2009, after one year and eleven months at Ohio State, I graduated with a double major, summa cum laude. I tried to skip my graduation ceremony, but my family wouldn’t let me. So I sat in an uncomfortable chair for three hours before I walked across the podium and received my college diploma. When Gordon Gee, then president of the Ohio State University, paused for an unusually long photograph with the girl who stood in front of me in line, I extended my hand to his assistant, nonverbally asking for the diploma. She handed it to me, and I stepped behind Dr. Gee and down off the podium. I may have been the only graduating student that day to not shake his hand. On to the next one, I thought. I knew I’d go to law school later the next year (my August graduation precluded a 2009 start to law school), so I moved home to save money. Aunt Wee had taken Mamaw’s place as the family matriarch: She put out the fires, hosted family gatherings, and kept us all from breaking apart. She had always provided me with a home base after Mamaw’s death, but ten months seemed like an imposition; I didn’t like the idea of disrupting her family’s routine. But she insisted, “J.D., this is your home now. It’s the only place for you to stay.” Those last months living in Middletown were among the happiest of my life.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  New and better solutions that protect children, or at least do not further traumatize them, are badly needed. The system is flawed. For starters, as children mature they want their concerns heard. They don’t want to be bullied. They don’t want to cry alone. They want a say in how their schedules are determined. In this, their complaints are absolutely in accord with their best interests and with their wish to grow toward greater independence and more self-regulation. Few people emerge full-grown like Athena from the head of Zeus. We grow up slowly and gradually, taking step after step toward independent judgment and adulthood. Older children and adolescents especially want a say in how they spend their vacations—a time they want for pursuing emerging interests and spending summers with friends at home or at camp. Yet we continue to penalize children of divorce by insisting that they spend every summer with one or the other parent so that the calendars of each adult will balance the other and the parents’ legal rights to their children will be protected. There are powerful lessons in these findings. When they reached adulthood, all of the children in this study who had been court ordered or mediated to visit a parent on a schedule that remained rigidly fixed and unmodified were angry at one or both parents. Most were very angry at the parent they had been ordered to visit. All rejected the parent whom they were forced to visit when they got older. They said things like “I don’t care if I ever see him again,” or “We have nothing in common because we never really talked in all those years.” Sometimes they said, “I feel sorry for my father but that’s all I feel.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I can't," I shouted. "Just fuck off a minute Cherif, Christ I've got enough to think about without you freaking out, you stupid cunt." But something had cracked in him, he was beating on my arm so it was hard to steer; I squinted in the mirror through the already misting rear window, and for a second at him, bare-toothed. I indicated right and craned forward through the murk for somewhere to pull in, and Cherif, who had never driven in his life, snatched at the hand-brake—the car swerved out for a second at the rear, and the van blasted its horn and swerved too, it was going too fast; in the wing-mirror its headlights flashed as it loomed within an inch of the wing and then hurtled past, a hand like a conductor's, brutal, damning, out of the window. "I was about to stop," I said quietly, when I'd come to a halt. "You could have written off Mrs Altidore's car within two minutes of leaving her house." I felt in fact that I had somehow escaped from a run of bad luck. I had caught a mirror before it shattered or avoided seeing the new moon through glass. I could speak for some time in this prudential vein, in the hushed control I placed on my fright, denying the childish wound of being accused, however justly. But he was fumbling with the seat-belt, prodding and tugging at the simple catch, which at last came free. It was an old belt that didn't retract and he flung it with a clatter against the tin and plastic of the door. He jumped out of the car and stood for a moment gazing away, as if trying to choose the perfect phrase with which to go: I waited for one of his broody poetic claims, while the rain streaked down around him and over the inside of the open door. But he merely pulled the belt of the coat free and then shrugged the heavy garment off. He bundled it loosely, tumblingly, and without looking tossed it in at me like something common and contemptible. Then he turned back down the street, leaving the door standing out like a broken wing. I leant over and pulled it to and then sat and watched him quickly dwindle in the rain-bubbled side-mirror, with an involuntary catch of pleasure at his big handsome backside—he was terribly sexy to me for a moment.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  We thrummed over the cobbles of the Street of Disappointments with a new speed and a new compression of misery. There was something about Cherif’s coat, as he sat beside me, that only darkened the mood. It had got a soaking, of course, its first, and even within the sour-sweet stuffiness of the car it gave off a melancholy smell of its own, of wet wool, doggy and defenceless—a smell of defeat. I knew that it had lost its sheeny down, its expensive freshness, and that it would never be new again. I wondered why he didn't take it off. He had sat hunched in it in the Altidores' hall for quarter of an hour whilst I changed and talked. I came downstairs patting the pockets of Luc's best sports-jacket, the one I had sometimes envied him, fine grey tweed with a wide yellow square in it, and there Cherif stubbornly was, un-attuned, unamenable, like a foreman summoned to the mill-owner's house. In the car he said nothing, but I knew he was glancing at me as I drove, and at the little bufferings my face was taking from the feelings I was sparring with. I winced and ducked at the wheel and knocked my glasses as I knuckled away furious tears. I couldn't take him with me on this journey, or pretend a merely tutelary interest in Luc when I was gasping already with anger and anxiety. I would have to tell him he couldn't come. Then he said, "Let me out of the car." There was a van on my tail in the lashing rain, I couldn't instantly stop, but he was in a passion of his own. "Let me out," he said again, with a frightening edge. "I can't," I shouted. "Just fuck off a minute Cherif, Christ I've got enough to think about without you freaking out, you stupid cunt." But something had cracked in him, he was beating on my arm so it was hard to steer; I squinted in the mirror through the already misting rear window, and for a second at him, bare-toothed. I indicated right and craned forward through the murk for somewhere to pull in, and Cherif, who had never driven in his life, snatched at the hand-brake—the car swerved out for a second at the rear, and the van blasted its horn and swerved too, it was going too fast; in the wing-mirror its headlights flashed as it loomed within an inch of the wing and then hurtled past, a hand like a conductor's, brutal, damning, out of the window. "I was about to stop," I said quietly, when I'd come to a halt. "You could have written off Mrs Altidore's car within two minutes of leaving her house."

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  From the child’s point of view, a stepfather is resented if he marches into the home in seven-league boots, telling the mom that she’s been too lenient and that the children need a man’s firm hand. Taking over the discipline without first earning the child’s respect and loyalty is a bad mistake. (My experience is that it is better for child and stepparent if discipline remains with the mother, especially during the early years of the remarriage.) Adolescents are especially offended and angered by this kind of insensitivity and are deeply dismayed when their mothers don’t take their side. They conclude that their mother and stepfather have ganged up against them. They can remain angry for many years, well into their adult life. Billy rejected his stepfather from the outset and was unresponsive to genuine overtures of friendship. Why? Because as far as Billy was concerned, Tom never got past being the interloper—the enemy who had taken Billy’s place at the center of his mother’s attention and affection. Billy desperately wanted his mother to return to her caregiving role. He wanted his stepfather out of his life, period. Although his anger at the stepfather dissipated over the years, they never became close, and as adults they had almost no relationship. Billy never identified with his stepfather’s values. He never shared his companionship or interests. Essentially he never gave the relationship a chance. The boy was too aggrieved to recognize the virtues that the stepfather had as a parent, even though his biological father didn’t come close to measuring up. Billy had an agenda with his own father that gave him no choice but to reject his stepfather. The adolescent-stepfather relationship is particularly hard to navigate. After all, the teenager is busily engaged in breaking free of parental authority. Rules are the natural battleground of the adolescent’s struggle toward independence. Few stepfathers realize that their stepchildren are angry not at them per se but because they are caught up in a developmental stage that goes with anger at adults in authority positions. So when the new man comes down on the kid like a ton of bricks, he can only expect further rebellion. This behavior can start a no-win cycle of rebellion and punishment that in one instance in this study led to a sixteen-year-old stealing and wrecking the stepfather’s new sports car. The stepfather retaliated by sending the boy to juvenile hall. In another instance, an overly nosy stepfather began to monitor his stepdaughter’s conversations with her friends with the excuse that she might get involved with the wrong company. Although these and similar battles occur in intact families, stepfathers and adolescents are in special jeopardy because their bonding is fragile.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Sensing my resistance, Mom transitioned. She became apologetic and desperate. She cried and begged. “I promise I’ll do better. I promise.” I had heard it many times before, and I didn’t believe it even a little. Lindsay once told me that, above all, Mom was a survivor. She survived her childhood, she survived the men who came and went. She survived successive brushes with the law. And now she was doing everything she could to survive an encounter with the nursing board. I exploded. I told Mom that if she wanted clean piss, she should stop fucking up her life and get it from her own bladder. I told Mamaw that enabling Mom made it worse and that if she had put her foot down thirty years earlier, then maybe Mom wouldn’t be begging her son for clean piss. I told Mom that she was a shitty mother and I told Mamaw that she was a shitty mother, too. The color drained from Mamaw’s face, and she re fused to even look me in the eye. What I had said had clearly struck a nerve. Though I meant these things, I also knew that my urine might not be clean. Mom collapsed onto the couch, crying quietly, but Mamaw wouldn’t give in so easily, even though I’d wounded her with my criticism. I pulled Mamaw into the bathroom and whispered a confession—that I had smoked Ken’s pot twice in the past few weeks. “I can’t give it to her. If Mom takes my pee, we could both be in trouble.” First, Mamaw assuaged my fears. A couple of hits of pot over three weeks wouldn’t show up on the screen, she told me. “Besides, you probably didn’t know what the hell you were doing. You didn’t inhale, even if you tried.” Then she addressed the morality of it. “I know this isn’t right, honey. But she’s your mother and she’s my daughter. And maybe, if we help her this time, she’ll finally learn her lesson.” It was the eternal hope, the thing to which I couldn’t say no. That hope drove me to voluntarily attend those many N.A. meetings, consume books on addiction, and participate in Mom’s treatment to the fullest extent that I could. It had driven me to get in the car with her when I was twelve, knowing that her emotional state could lead her to do something she’d regret later. Mamaw never lost that hope, after more heartache and more disappointment than I could possibly fathom. Her life was a clinic in how to lose faith in people, but Mamaw always found a way to believe in the people she loved. So I don’t regret relenting. Giving Mom that piss was wrong, but I’ll never regret following Mamaw’s lead. Her hope allowed her to forgive Papaw after the rough years of their marriage. And it convinced her to take me in when I needed her most.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Others had been abandoned by their fathers but were also locked in conflict with their mothers. Sex is a way to get even with both parents—to get what their moms couldn’t have (a man), to get what they missed growing up (a man), and to vent their anger and disdain (onto that same man). It’s doubtful the women learn much from these experiences since the men, as they describe them, are mostly indistinguishable. Many of these women show poor judgment in terms of protecting their own health and safety. Sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies are common; abortion left them depressed but was preferable to raising a child with a man they did not want. Young women who follow this path are relatively unsupervised during adolescence and have the abiding sense that they are accountable to no one. There’s no harm in doing whatever feels good at the time, they reason. These are also the girls who were privy from childhood to the many details of their parents’ sexual love affairs and escapades plus accusations and counteraccusations of infidelity during the marriage. They may very well have been stimulated by what they witnessed and overheard. One youngster age eleven told me, “Every time I go to my mom’s parties I get so excited I want to swallow my tongue.” Taking the Leap I REMEMBER AWAITING my interview with Paula six years later, when she was twenty-one, with both anticipation and trepidation. I wasn’t disappointed. Now engaged and living with her fiancé in Seattle, she attracted attention when she walked into the restaurant overlooking Puget Sound where we had agreed to meet. Thin to the point of emaciation, dramatically dressed and heavily made up in black lipstick and nail polish, she chain-smoked and barely picked at her salad. She spoke glowingly of her boyfriend, whom she had met a few months earlier during a dance rave while high on Ecstasy. “What attracted you to him?” I asked. “He was the best-looking guy on the dance floor,” she answered proudly. “I was determined to get him for myself. At two A.M. we were both at the bar. I had a few drinks and we started talking. We ended up in bed and that was that.” Knowing Paula over the years as I had, I ventured another question. “I know you’ve had a lot of boyfriends, Paula. What made Brad different? How did you decide he was the one you’d marry?” This was another time when Paula startled me by the frankness of her reply. Throwing herself back in her chair and regarding me from beneath long, hennaed bangs, she lit another cigarette. “You really want to know?” “It’s important that I understand,” I told her seriously. “He’s not really different from the others. He loves me, he’s kinda hyper, and he likes to party. He’s good in bed. He’s a really cute Italian guy. I think I was just ready to settle down.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Mamaw saw it as a betrayal, ensuring that “bad” people would move into the neighborhood and drive down property values. Despite our efforts to draw bright lines between the working and nonworking poor, Mamaw and I recognized that we shared a lot in common with those whom we thought gave our people a bad name. Those Section 8 recipients looked a lot like us. The matriarch of the first family to move in next door was born in Kentucky but moved north at a young age as her parents sought a better life. She’d gotten involved with a couple of men, each of whom had left her with a child but no support. She was nice, and so were her kids. But the drugs and the late-night fighting revealed troubles that too many hillbilly transplants knew too well. Confronted with such a realization of her own family’s struggle, Mamaw grew frustrated and angry. From that anger sprang Bonnie Vance the social policy expert: “She’s a lazy whore, but she wouldn’t be if she was forced to get a job”; “I hate those fuckers for giving these people the money to move into our neighborhood.” She’d rant against the people we’d see in the grocery store: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.” These were bizarre views for my bleeding-heart grandma. And if she blasted the government for doing too much one day, she’d blast it for doing too little the next. The government, after all, was just helping poor people find a place to live, and my grandma loved the idea of anyone helping the poor. She had no philosophical objection to Section 8 vouchers. So the Democrat in her would resurface. She’d rant about the lack of jobs and wonder aloud whether that was why our neighbor couldn’t find a good man. In her more compassionate moments, Mamaw asked if it made any sense that our society could afford aircraft carriers but not drug treatment facilities—like Mom’s—for everyone. Sometimes she’d criticize the faceless rich, whom she saw as far too unwilling to carry their fair share of the social burden. Mamaw saw every ballot failure of the local school improvement tax (and there were many) as an indictment of our society’s failure to provide a quality education to kids like me. Mamaw’s sentiments occupied wildly different parts of the political spectrum. Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat. Because of this, I initially assumed that Mamaw was an unreformed simpleton and that as soon as she opened her mouth about policy or politics, I might as well close my ears. Yet I quickly realized that in Mamaw’s contradictions lay great wisdom. I had spent so long just surviving my world, but now that I had a little space to observe it, I began to see the world as Mamaw did.