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 Anna Karenina (1877)

  Anna, who had thought she knew her husband so well, was amazed at his appearance when he went in to her. His brow was lowering, and his eyes stared darkly before him, avoiding her eyes; his mouth was tightly and contemptuously shut. In his walk, in his gestures, in the sound of his voice there was a determination and firmness such as his wife had never seen in him. He went into her room, and without greeting her, walked straight up to her writing-table, and taking her keys, opened a drawer. “What do you want?” she cried. “Your lover’s letters,” he said. “They’re not here,” she said, shutting the drawer; but from that action he saw he had guessed right, and roughly pushing away her hand, he quickly snatched a portfolio in which he knew she used to put her most important papers. She tried to pull the portfolio away, but he pushed her back. “Sit down! I have to speak to you,” he said, putting the portfolio under his arm, and squeezing it so tightly with his elbow that his shoulder stood up. Amazed and intimidated, she gazed at him in silence. “I told you that I would not allow you to receive your lover in this house.” “I had to see him to....” She stopped, not finding a reason. “I do not enter into the details of why a woman wants to see her lover.” “I meant, I only....” she said, flushing hotly. This coarseness of his angered her, and gave her courage. “Surely you must feel how easy it is for you to insult me?” she said. “An honest man and an honest woman may be insulted, but to tell a thief he’s a thief is simply _la constatation d’un fait_.” “This cruelty is something new I did not know in you.” “You call it cruelty for a husband to give his wife liberty, giving her the honorable protection of his name, simply on the condition of observing the proprieties: is that cruelty?” “It’s worse than cruel—it’s base, if you want to know!” Anna cried, in a rush of hatred, and getting up, she was going away. “No!” he shrieked, in his shrill voice, which pitched a note higher than usual even, and his big hands clutching her by the arm so violently that red marks were left from the bracelet he was squeezing, he forcibly sat her down in her place. “Base! If you care to use that word, what is base is to forsake husband and child for a lover, while you eat your husband’s bread!” She bowed her head. She did not say what she had said the evening before to her lover, that _he_ was her husband, and her husband was superfluous; she did not even think that. She felt all the justice of his words, and only said softly: “You cannot describe my position as worse than I feel it to be myself; but what are you saying all this for?”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  He wanted to say too that if public opinion were an infallible guide, then why were not revolutions and the commune as lawful as the movement in favor of the Slavonic peoples? But these were merely thoughts that could settle nothing. One thing could be seen beyond doubt—that was that at the actual moment the discussion was irritating Sergey Ivanovitch, and so it was wrong to continue it. And Levin ceased speaking and then called the attention of his guests to the fact that the storm clouds were gathering, and that they had better be going home before it rained. Chapter 17 The old prince and Sergey Ivanovitch got into the trap and drove off; the rest of the party hastened homewards on foot. But the storm-clouds, turning white and then black, moved down so quickly that they had to quicken their pace to get home before the rain. The foremost clouds, lowering and black as soot-laden smoke, rushed with extraordinary swiftness over the sky. They were still two hundred paces from home and a gust of wind had already blown up, and every second the downpour might be looked for. The children ran ahead with frightened and gleeful shrieks. Darya Alexandrovna, struggling painfully with her skirts that clung round her legs, was not walking, but running, her eyes fixed on the children. The men of the party, holding their hats on, strode with long steps beside her. They were just at the steps when a big drop fell splashing on the edge of the iron guttering. The children and their elders after them ran into the shelter of the house, talking merrily. “Katerina Alexandrovna?” Levin asked of Agafea Mihalovna, who met them with kerchiefs and rugs in the hall. “We thought she was with you,” she said. “And Mitya?” “In the copse, he must be, and the nurse with him.” Levin snatched up the rugs and ran towards the copse. In that brief interval of time the storm clouds had moved on, covering the sun so completely that it was dark as an eclipse. Stubbornly, as though insisting on its rights, the wind stopped Levin, and tearing the leaves and flowers off the lime trees and stripping the white birch branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it twisted everything on one side—acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, and tall tree-tops. The peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into shelter in the servants’ quarters. The streaming rain had already flung its white veil over all the distant forest and half the fields close by, and was rapidly swooping down upon the copse. The wet of the rain spurting up in tiny drops could be smelt in the air.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “Why, how can one want to go to bed!” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, who, after drinking several glasses of wine at supper, was now in his most charming and sentimental humor. “Look, Kitty,” he said, pointing to the moon, which had just risen behind the lime trees—“how exquisite! Veslovsky, this is the time for a serenade. You know, he has a splendid voice; we practiced songs together along the road. He has brought some lovely songs with him, two new ones. Varvara Andreevna and he must sing some duets.” When the party had broken up, Stepan Arkadyevitch walked a long while about the avenue with Veslovsky; their voices could be heard singing one of the new songs. Levin hearing these voices sat scowling in an easy-chair in his wife’s bedroom, and maintained an obstinate silence when she asked him what was wrong. But when at last with a timid glance she hazarded the question: “Was there perhaps something you disliked about Veslovsky?”—it all burst out, and he told her all. He was humiliated himself at what he was saying, and that exasperated him all the more. He stood facing her with his eyes glittering menacingly under his scowling brows, and he squeezed his strong arms across his chest, as though he were straining every nerve to hold himself in. The expression of his face would have been grim, and even cruel, if it had not at the same time had a look of suffering which touched her. His jaws were twitching, and his voice kept breaking. “You must understand that I’m not jealous, that’s a nasty word. I can’t be jealous, and believe that.... I can’t say what I feel, but this is awful.... I’m not jealous, but I’m wounded, humiliated that anybody dare think, that anybody dare look at you with eyes like that.” “Eyes like what?” said Kitty, trying as conscientiously as possible to recall every word and gesture of that evening and every shade implied in them. At the very bottom of her heart she did think there had been something precisely at the moment when he had crossed over after her to the other end of the table; but she dared not own it even to herself, and would have been even more unable to bring herself to say so to him, and so increase his suffering. “And what can there possibly be attractive about me as I am now?...” “Ah!” he cried, clutching at his head, “you shouldn’t say that!... If you had been attractive then....” “Oh, no, Kostya, oh, wait a minute, oh, do listen!” she said, looking at him with an expression of pained commiseration. “Why, what can you be thinking about! When for me there’s no one in the world, no one, no one!... Would you like me never to see anyone?”

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  An hour later Anna, with Golenishtchev by her side and Vronsky on the front seat of the carriage, facing them, drove up to a new ugly house in the remote suburb. On learning from the porter’s wife, who came out to them, that Mihailov saw visitors at his studio, but that at that moment he was in his lodging only a couple of steps off, they sent her to him with their cards, asking permission to see his picture. Chapter 10 The artist Mihailov was, as always, at work when the cards of Count Vronsky and Golenishtchev were brought to him. In the morning he had been working in his studio at his big picture. On getting home he flew into a rage with his wife for not having managed to put off the landlady, who had been asking for money. “I’ve said it to you twenty times, don’t enter into details. You’re fool enough at all times, and when you start explaining things in Italian you’re a fool three times as foolish,” he said after a long dispute. “Don’t let it run so long; it’s not my fault. If I had the money....” “Leave me in peace, for God’s sake!” Mihailov shrieked, with tears in his voice, and, stopping his ears, he went off into his working room, the other side of a partition wall, and closed the door after him. “Idiotic woman!” he said to himself, sat down to the table, and, opening a portfolio, he set to work at once with peculiar fervor at a sketch he had begun. Never did he work with such fervor and success as when things went ill with him, and especially when he quarreled with his wife. “Oh! damn them all!” he thought as he went on working. He was making a sketch for the figure of a man in a violent rage. A sketch had been made before, but he was dissatisfied with it. “No, that one was better ... where is it?” He went back to his wife, and scowling, and not looking at her, asked his eldest little girl, where was that piece of paper he had given them? The paper with the discarded sketch on it was found, but it was dirty, and spotted with candle-grease. Still, he took the sketch, laid it on his table, and, moving a little away, screwing up his eyes, he fell to gazing at it. All at once he smiled and gesticulated gleefully. “That’s it! that’s it!” he said, and, at once picking up the pencil, he began rapidly drawing. The spot of tallow had given the man a new pose.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “But I’ve said so already, so why repeat it?” Anna suddenly interrupted him with an irritation she could not succeed in repressing. “No sort of necessity,” she thought, “for a man to come and say good-bye to the woman he loves, for whom he was ready to ruin himself, and has ruined himself, and who cannot live without him. No sort of necessity!” she compressed her lips, and dropped her burning eyes to his hands with their swollen veins. They were rubbing each other. “Let us never speak of it,” she added more calmly. “I have left this question to you to decide, and I am very glad to see....” Alexey Alexandrovitch was beginning. “That my wish coincides with your own,” she finished quickly, exasperated at his talking so slowly while she knew beforehand all he would say. “Yes,” he assented; “and Princess Tverskaya’s interference in the most difficult private affairs is utterly uncalled for. She especially....” “I don’t believe a word of what’s said about her,” said Anna quickly. “I know she really cares for me.” Alexey Alexandrovitch sighed and said nothing. She played nervously with the tassel of her dressing-gown, glancing at him with that torturing sensation of physical repulsion for which she blamed herself, though she could not control it. Her only desire now was to be rid of his oppressive presence. “I have just sent for the doctor,” said Alexey Alexandrovitch. “I am very well; what do I want the doctor for?” “No, the little one cries, and they say the nurse hasn’t enough milk.” “Why didn’t you let me nurse her, when I begged to? Anyway” (Alexey Alexandrovitch knew what was meant by that “anyway”), “she’s a baby, and they’re killing her.” She rang the bell and ordered the baby to be brought her. “I begged to nurse her, I wasn’t allowed to, and now I’m blamed for it.” “I don’t blame....” “Yes, you do blame me! My God! why didn’t I die!” And she broke into sobs. “Forgive me, I’m nervous, I’m unjust,” she said, controlling herself, “but do go away....” “No, it can’t go on like this,” Alexey Alexandrovitch said to himself decidedly as he left his wife’s room.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Whether there was something exceptional in Levin’s face, or that Vassenka was himself conscious that _ce petit brin de cour_ he was making was out of place in this family, but he was somewhat (as much as a young man in society can be) disconcerted at Levin’s entrance. “You ride in gaiters?” “Yes, it’s much cleaner,” said Vassenka, putting his fat leg on a chair, fastening the bottom hook, and smiling with simple-hearted good humor. He was undoubtedly a good-natured fellow, and Levin felt sorry for him and ashamed of himself, as his host, when he saw the shy look on Vassenka’s face. On the table lay a piece of stick which they had broken together that morning, trying their strength. Levin took the fragment in his hands and began smashing it up, breaking bits off the stick, not knowing how to begin. “I wanted....” He paused, but suddenly, remembering Kitty and everything that had happened, he said, looking him resolutely in the face: “I have ordered the horses to be put-to for you.” “How so?” Vassenka began in surprise. “To drive where?” “For you to drive to the station,” Levin said gloomily. “Are you going away, or has something happened?” “It happens that I expect visitors,” said Levin, his strong fingers more and more rapidly breaking off the ends of the split stick. “And I’m not expecting visitors, and nothing has happened, but I beg you to go away. You can explain my rudeness as you like.” Vassenka drew himself up. “I beg you to explain....” he said with dignity, understanding at last. “I can’t explain,” Levin said softly and deliberately, trying to control the trembling of his jaw; “and you’d better not ask.” And as the split ends were all broken off, Levin clutched the thick ends in his finger, broke the stick in two, and carefully caught the end as it fell. Probably the sight of those nervous fingers, of the muscles he had proved that morning at gymnastics, of the glittering eyes, the soft voice, and quivering jaws, convinced Vassenka better than any words. He bowed, shrugging his shoulders, and smiling contemptuously. “Can I not see Oblonsky?” The shrug and the smile did not irritate Levin. “What else was there for him to do?” he thought. “I’ll send him to you at once.” “What madness is this?” Stepan Arkadyevitch said when, after hearing from his friend that he was being turned out of the house, he found Levin in the garden, where he was walking about waiting for his guest’s departure. “_Mais c’est ridicule!_ What fly has stung you? _Mais c’est du dernier ridicule!_ What did you think, if a young man....” But the place where Levin had been stung was evidently still sore, for he turned pale again, when Stepan Arkadyevitch would have enlarged on the reason, and he himself cut him short.

• From Querelle (1953)

  His voice was harsh, decisive, ready for combat. He was carrying a cargo of explosives. He didn't recognize himself any more. He hoped to appeal to Mario and Norbert-no longer to that fantastic compound creature that consisted of the sum of their virtues-but in reality he had placed himse1f under the protection of that very idol. However, he did not yet admit this to himself, and for the first time in his life he invoked the Navy. "Lookahere, buddy, I hope you ain't trying to get my goat, or are you? Because, let me tell you, us sailors won't let anybody get away with that kind of shit. Understand?" "But I'm not trying to do anything, I was just passing . . . " Querelle looked at him. He felt safe in his uniform. He clenched his fists and immediately knew that every muscle, every nerve was taking up its battle station. He was shong, ready to pounce. His calves and arms were vibrating. His body was flexed for a fight in which he would measure up to an adversary-not this young man intimidated by his nerve-but to the power that had subjugated him in the brothel �parlor. Querelle did not know that he wanted to do battle for Mario, and for Norbert, the way one would do battle for a king's daughter and against the dragons. This fight was a trial. HDon't you know you can't push us around, not us Navy guys?'' Never before had Querelle applied such a label to himself. Those sailors proud of being sailors, animated by the esprit de corps, had always seemed comical to him. In his eyes they were 34 I JEAN GENET as ridiculous as the bigheads who played to the gaiiery and then got shown up for the braggarts they were. Never had Quereiie said, "Me, I'm one of the guys from the Vengeur." Or even, "Me, I'm a French salt . . . " But. now, having done so, he felt no shame; he felt completely at ease. "OK, scram." .

• 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 Anna Karenina (1877)

  “But that’s utter waste of time. That force finds a certain form of activity of itself, according to the stage of its development. There have been slaves first everywhere, then metayers; and we have the half-crop system, rent, and day laborers. What are you trying to find?” Levin suddenly lost his temper at these words, because at the bottom of his heart he was afraid that it was true—true that he was trying to hold the balance even between communism and the familiar forms, and that this was hardly possible. “I am trying to find means of working productively for myself and for the laborers. I want to organize....” he answered hotly. “You don’t want to organize anything; it’s simply just as you’ve been all your life, that you want to be original to pose as not exploiting the peasants simply, but with some idea in view.” “Oh, all right, that’s what you think—and let me alone!” answered Levin, feeling the muscles of his left cheek twitching uncontrollably. “You’ve never had, and never have, convictions; all you want is to please your vanity.” “Oh, very well; then let me alone!” “And I will let you alone! and it’s high time I did, and go to the devil with you! and I’m very sorry I ever came!” In spite of all Levin’s efforts to soothe his brother afterwards, Nikolay would listen to nothing he said, declaring that it was better to part, and Konstantin saw that it simply was that life was unbearable to him. Nikolay was just getting ready to go, when Konstantin went in to him again and begged him, rather unnaturally, to forgive him if he had hurt his feelings in any way. “Ah, generosity!” said Nikolay, and he smiled. “If you want to be right, I can give you that satisfaction. You’re in the right; but I’m going all the same.” It was only just at parting that Nikolay kissed him, and said, looking with sudden strangeness and seriousness at his brother: “Anyway, don’t remember evil against me, Kostya!” and his voice quivered. These were the only words that had been spoken sincerely between them. Levin knew that those words meant, “You see, and you know, that I’m in a bad way, and maybe we shall not see each other again.” Levin knew this, and the tears gushed from his eyes. He kissed his brother once more, but he could not speak, and knew not what to say. Three days after his brother’s departure, Levin too set off for his foreign tour. Happening to meet Shtcherbatsky, Kitty’s cousin, in the railway train, Levin greatly astonished him by his depression. “What’s the matter with you?” Shtcherbatsky asked him. “Oh, nothing; there’s not much happiness in life.” “Not much? You come with me to Paris instead of to Mulhausen. You shall see how to be happy.” “No, I’ve done with it all. It’s time I was dead.”

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Flo pointed out similar purses on white women’s laps, flat out refused to remove hers, and asked the stewardess why she was oppressing other women when she herself was oppressed. In solidarity with Flo, I took my satchel out of the overhead, though it really was luggage, and put it on my lap. Neither Flo nor I would budge. Finally, the plane took off anyway. We laughed about such scuffles later, and Flo kept reminding me that they gave us an opportunity to teach, though each one was also punishing to the soul. Mostly, though, stewardesses were a revolution waiting to happen. When I was on a plane from St. Louis, long the airport nearest home for Phyllis Schlafly—a creation of the Fairness Doctrine, because she was the rare woman the media could find who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment—a flight attendant whispered to me, “I had Phyllis Schlafly on my flight, and I put her in a middle seat!” I knew things were changing when I got on a flight from San Francisco, and found a stewardess wearing a button, I’M LINDA, FLY YOURSELF . Then some flight attendants rebelled against having just first names on their identifying pins. Why should they be Susie or Nan while the pilots were Commander Rothgart or Captain Armstrong? (Eventually they also demanded last names preceded by Ms. so they wouldn’t be identified by marital status.) Their name demand was right up there with salary and safety. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote, “When the slave leaves bondage, his first act is to name himself.” By the mid-1970s, a newly minted group called Stewardesses for Women’s Rights opened a small office in Rockefeller Center. I visited it and found women from many different airlines holding joint press conferences, pressuring in and outside their company unions, protesting their image in airline ads, and exposing such hazards as recirculated air that endangered them and their passengers. Knowing that the job would be more honored if men were doing it, too, they were making the integration of men into this all-female workforce as much a priority as integrating female pilots into the all-male cockpit. They pushed to change stewardesses to flight attendants, since even steward would mark a job description by gender. As I learned from listening to these smart women who were treated as not smart, stewardesses of the 1960s had filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), trying to change the “no men, no marriage” policy of their job. Aileen Hernandez, the only female or African American on the EEOC, supported them. Years later they finally won, but the airlines called the ruling “improper” because Hernandez, after leaving the EEOC, had become president of the National Organization for Women. A judge actually agreed. That’s why discrimination was still okay when I started flying a lot—and remained okay until 1986.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Now I hate the pimps.” She says truckers tend to be family men—executives are probably more likely to be johns—and she’s proud that husband-and-wife teams have a better safety record than men driving alone. At a fourth stop, there is a twenty-four-hour poker game. At a fifth, there is what seems to be a permanent floating argument about cross-country trucking and whether it can flex enough political muscle to make better safety laws.1 In this way, we hit every major truck stop between Boston and New York. I’ve spent most of my life on the road, yet I’d never seen this world that wakes when others sleep. My driver tells me it’s global. He’s met immigrant truckers looking for work who have driven English lorries, and everywhere from Eritrea’s mountainous roads to the crowded streets of India, where trucks are painted with flowers and gods and goddesses, an art form that drivers carried photos of, right along with photos of their families. Back in our shared cocoon in the rain, we’re quiet. The rhythm of our windshield wipers merges in my head with Brook Benton’s sensuous baritone: It’s a rainy night in Georgia and it looks like it’s rainin’ all over the world. I see Manhattan lights reflecting into the night sky, but I’ve lost all sense of time. This could go on forever. I realize I’ve been swimming in the shallows, and am only now discovering the deeps where the great whales meet. III. • I’m having lunch at West Hollywood’s Café Figaro with Florynce Kennedy. She is explaining to me that she quit being a lawyer because “the law is a one-ass-at-a-time proposition, and what you have to do is stop the wringer.” This is inspired by the sight of seven waitresses and no waiters, an index of suspicion. Flo says tips are probably being used as a legal excuse to pay less than the minimum wage.2 We quiz the manager. He assures us the pay is terrific, all seven waitresses adore their jobs, and more women are waiting in line. Back home in New York a week later, I find a letter waiting from those waitresses: “We don’t think any other occupational group can appreciate what you do for women as much as we. It’s not enough that we work hard for ridiculously low wages, we’re expected to softly come on to male customers so that they’ll spend more and return again. Our wonderful male manager advances the theory that it’s really to our benefit—we’ll get bigger tips. God, what an intellectual cripple. Don’t ever let up! The Subversive Seven.” Now it’s decades later, in 2014. I’m reading about beloved comedian and actor Bill Cosby, who has been accused by no fewer than thirty-nine women of drugging and sexually assaulting them at some time in the past. Each one feared she would not be believed, but when one came forward, they all began to.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: life is their only weapon against life, life is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the popula tion-control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dis possessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, torbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, torced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible tor their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wher ever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human life, or the "conscience" of the civilized world. There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this +90 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful in deed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the "vital interest" of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child. How ever-! could not have said any of this then, nor is so absurd a notion about to engulf the world now. But we were all starving children, after all, and none of our fathers, even at their most embittered and enraged, had ever suggested that we "die out." It was not we who were supposed to die out: this was, of all notions, the most forbidden, and we learned this fr om the cradle. Every trial, every beating, every drop of blood, every tear, were meant to be used by us fi>r a day that was coming-fi>r a day that was certainly coming, absolutely certainly, certainly coming: not fi>r us, perhaps, but for our children. The children of the despised and rejected are men aced fr om the moment they stir in the womb, and are there fore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not. And the children know it, which is how they manage to raise their children, and why they will not be persuaded-by their children's murderers, after all-to cease having children.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  (As of this writing, the mayor of Tallahassee, who, I was told, uses the word "nigger" freely, has seen the students of his city only at lunch counters and in court.) It was to break the official and managerial silence that the sit-in THEY CAN ' T TURN BACK of March 12 was organized. It was on this occasion that mem bers of the White Citizens' Council, along with friends, sympathizers and people who "just happened to be in fr om the country for the day," met the students with baseball bats and knives. The good people of Tallahassee were not in the streets that day, of course; there were only the students, the police and the mob; and from this, which has now become a pattern in the South, I think it is safe to suggest that the convictions of the good people have less reality than the venom and panic of the worst. The police did not arrest any members of the mob but dispersed the students with tear gas and arrested, in all, thirty-five of them, twenty-nine Negroes and six whites. Tallahassee has been quiet since March 12. The students felt that this time they themselves had been too quiet. Students from Tallahassee's two universities-Florida State, set up for whites, and Florida A. & M. for Negroes-are not allowed to visit each other's campuses. And so, on a Monday night dur ing my May visit, they met in a church to make plans for a prayer meeting on the steps of the Capitol to remind the town that the students had no intention of giving up their struggle. There were about twenty students, in a ratio of about two Negroes to one white. It was a CORE meeting (the Congress of Racial Equality is an organization dedicated to bringing about change by passive resistance to social injustice), and Haley, Steele and the warrior to whom I can give no name were present as the Adult Leadership. The prayer meeting had originally been the brain storm of R., a white student, foreign-born, very measured in speech, very direct in manner. There was first some uncertainty as to whether the prayer meeting should be held at all because of the pressure of exams and the homegoing plans of students, many of whom would have departed by Thursday.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  That Mrs. Yusuf, my god, the way she shouts! “I can feel it, I can feel one hair, not there, other side, in the front, no, no, feel properly, grab the skin with one hand and pull with the other, try again, just wipe your fingers if they’re sliding, don’t think you can rush away without finishing your job,” and on and on. What to do? I don’t like digging around in there be cause I know it’s where babies and all come from. But I don’t grumble because the fussy ladies always give a good tip. Thank god they are not all like that, or I would have to spend the whole day waxing and cleaning the thing of just one of them! Not that they are in any hurry. They can just lie there all day, I tell you. At least 1 don’t have to work at night, because the ladies only like me to wax during the day. I have to finish before the husband comes home, because the man doesn’t like his wife to be locked in a room with some outsider. Sometimes when there is a new lady who wants me to go over to do her waxing, she will ask, “How do I know that you will do a good job? It requires such talent, and if you do any thing wrong, I’ll have to go straight to the hospital.” So first I give the new lady the names of some other ladies that I work for, so they can call and find out. And then I tell her that I wax my own thing, not just others’, so there’s no need to worry. All of them, when they hear this, are so shocked! I’m just a poor village girl, so what do I need to wax for? As though you have to be rich to do it! Am I not a woman like them? Can’t I be beautiful like them? If my own sister’s husband likes it, then won’t mine also want it? I went back to my village for my oldest sister’s marriage, and just to teach her how ignorant she is, I took some wax and clean cloths, and I waxed her. What a fuss that stupid girl made! I had to sit on top of her so she wouldn’t run away. But then after the wedding, everyone in the village tells him he’s lucky to have such a clean, high-class woman. Until I return, my sister is pulling the hair out from down there one by one with her fingers.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “You know I should be the last person to hear of it.” “There isn’t a more spiteful creature than that Madame Kartasova!” “But what did she do?” “My husband told me.... She has insulted Madame Karenina. Her husband began talking to her across the box, and Madame Kartasova made a scene. She said something aloud, he says, something insulting, and went away.” “Count, your maman is asking for you,” said the young Princess Sorokina, peeping out of the door of the box. “I’ve been expecting you all the while,” said his mother, smiling sarcastically. “You were nowhere to be seen.” Her son saw that she could not suppress a smile of delight. “Good evening, maman. I have come to you,” he said coldly. “Why aren’t you going to _faire la cour à Madame Karenina?_” she went on, when Princess Sorokina had moved away. “_Elle fait sensation. On oublie la Patti pour elle_.” “Maman, I have asked you not to say anything to me of that,” he answered, scowling. “I’m only saying what everyone’s saying.” Vronsky made no reply, and saying a few words to Princess Sorokina, he went away. At the door he met his brother. “Ah, Alexey!” said his brother. “How disgusting! Idiot of a woman, nothing else.... I wanted to go straight to her. Let’s go together.” Vronsky did not hear him. With rapid steps he went downstairs; he felt that he must do something, but he did not know what. Anger with her for having put herself and him in such a false position, together with pity for her suffering, filled his heart. He went down, and made straight for Anna’s box. At her box stood Stremov, talking to her. “There are no more tenors. _Le moule en est brisé!_” Vronsky bowed to her and stopped to greet Stremov. “You came in late, I think, and have missed the best song,” Anna said to Vronsky, glancing ironically, he thought, at him. “I am a poor judge of music,” he said, looking sternly at her. “Like Prince Yashvin,” she said smiling, “who considers that Patti sings too loud.” “Thank you,” she said, her little hand in its long glove taking the playbill Vronsky picked up, and suddenly at that instant her lovely face quivered. She got up and went into the interior of the box. Noticing in the next act that her box was empty, Vronsky, rousing indignant “hushes” in the silent audience, went out in the middle of a solo and drove home. Anna was already at home. When Vronsky went up to her, she was in the same dress as she had worn at the theater. She was sitting in the first armchair against the wall, looking straight before her. She looked at him, and at once resumed her former position. “Anna,” he said. “You, you are to blame for everything!” she cried, with tears of despair and hatred in her voice, getting up.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  Levin had been six days in Kashin, visiting the assembly each day, and busily engaged about his sister’s business, which still dragged on. The district marshals of nobility were all occupied with the elections, and it was impossible to get the simplest thing done that depended upon the court of wardship. The other matter, the payment of the sums due, was met too by difficulties. After long negotiations over the legal details, the money was at last ready to be paid; but the notary, a most obliging person, could not hand over the order, because it must have the signature of the president, and the president, though he had not given over his duties to a deputy, was at the elections. All these worrying negotiations, this endless going from place to place, and talking with pleasant and excellent people, who quite saw the unpleasantness of the petitioner’s position, but were powerless to assist him—all these efforts that yielded no result, led to a feeling of misery in Levin akin to the mortifying helplessness one experiences in dreams when one tries to use physical force. He felt this frequently as he talked to his most good-natured solicitor. This solicitor did, it seemed, everything possible, and strained every nerve to get him out of his difficulties. “I tell you what you might try,” he said more than once; “go to so-and-so and so-and-so,” and the solicitor drew up a regular plan for getting round the fatal point that hindered everything. But he would add immediately, “It’ll mean some delay, anyway, but you might try it.” And Levin did try, and did go. Everyone was kind and civil, but the point evaded seemed to crop up again in the end, and again to bar the way. What was particularly trying, was that Levin could not make out with whom he was struggling, to whose interest it was that his business should not be done. That no one seemed to know; the solicitor certainly did not know. If Levin could have understood why, just as he saw why one can only approach the booking office of a railway station in single file, it would not have been so vexatious and tiresome to him. But with the hindrances that confronted him in his business, no one could explain why they existed. But Levin had changed a good deal since his marriage; he was patient, and if he could not see why it was all arranged like this, he told himself that he could not judge without knowing all about it, and that most likely it must be so, and he tried not to fret.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “I’ll see this minute,” answered the porter, and glancing into his room, he took out and gave her the thin square envelope of a telegram. “I can’t come before ten o’clock.—Vronsky,” she read. “And hasn’t the messenger come back?” “No,” answered the porter. “Then, since it’s so, I know what I must do,” she said, and feeling a vague fury and craving for revenge rising up within her, she ran upstairs. “I’ll go to him myself. Before going away forever, I’ll tell him all. Never have I hated anyone as I hate that man!” she thought. Seeing his hat on the rack, she shuddered with aversion. She did not consider that his telegram was an answer to her telegram and that he had not yet received her note. She pictured him to herself as talking calmly to his mother and Princess Sorokina and rejoicing at her sufferings. “Yes, I must go quickly,” she said, not knowing yet where she was going. She longed to get away as quickly as possible from the feelings she had gone through in that awful house. The servants, the walls, the things in that house—all aroused repulsion and hatred in her and lay like a weight upon her. “Yes, I must go to the railway station, and if he’s not there, then go there and catch him.” Anna looked at the railway timetable in the newspapers. An evening train went at two minutes past eight. “Yes, I shall be in time.” She gave orders for the other horses to be put in the carriage, and packed in a traveling-bag the things needed for a few days. She knew she would never come back here again. Among the plans that came into her head she vaguely determined that after what would happen at the station or at the countess’s house, she would go as far as the first town on the Nizhni road and stop there. Dinner was on the table; she went up, but the smell of the bread and cheese was enough to make her feel that all food was disgusting. She ordered the carriage and went out. The house threw a shadow now right across the street, but it was a bright evening and still warm in the sunshine. Annushka, who came down with her things, and Pyotr, who put the things in the carriage, and the coachman, evidently out of humor, were all hateful to her, and irritated her by their words and actions. “I don’t want you, Pyotr.” “But how about the ticket?” “Well, as you like, it doesn’t matter,” she said crossly. Pyotr jumped on the box, and putting his arms akimbo, told the coachman to drive to the booking-office. Chapter 30 “Here it is again! Again I understand it all!” Anna said to herself, as soon as the carriage had started and swaying lightly, rumbled over the tiny cobbles of the paved road, and again one impression followed rapidly upon another.

• From Anna Karenina (1877)

  “I don’t need to ask,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, “we have seen and are seeing hundreds and hundreds of people who give up everything to serve a just cause, come from every part of Russia, and directly and clearly express their thought and aim. They bring their halfpence or go themselves and say directly what for. What does it mean?” “It means, to my thinking,” said Levin, who was beginning to get warm, “that among eighty millions of people there can always be found not hundreds, as now, but tens of thousands of people who have lost caste, ne’er-do-wells, who are always ready to go anywhere—to Pogatchev’s bands, to Khiva, to Servia....” “I tell you that it’s not a case of hundreds or of ne’er-do-wells, but the best representatives of the people!” said Sergey Ivanovitch, with as much irritation as if he were defending the last penny of his fortune. “And what of the subscriptions? In this case it is a whole people directly expressing their will.” “That word ‘people’ is so vague,” said Levin. “Parish clerks, teachers, and one in a thousand of the peasants, maybe, know what it’s all about. The rest of the eighty millions, like Mihalitch, far from expressing their will, haven’t the faintest idea what there is for them to express their will about. What right have we to say that this is the people’s will?” Chapter 16 Sergey Ivanovitch, being practiced in argument, did not reply, but at once turned the conversation to another aspect of the subject. “Oh, if you want to learn the spirit of the people by arithmetical computation, of course it’s very difficult to arrive at it. And voting has not been introduced among us and cannot be introduced, for it does not express the will of the people; but there are other ways of reaching that. It is felt in the air, it is felt by the heart. I won’t speak of those deep currents which are astir in the still ocean of the people, and which are evident to every unprejudiced man; let us look at society in the narrow sense. All the most diverse sections of the educated public, hostile before, are merged in one. Every division is at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over and over again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them and is carrying them in one direction.” “Yes, all the newspapers do say the same thing,” said the prince. “That’s true. But so it is the same thing that all the frogs croak before a storm. One can hear nothing for them.” “Frogs or no frogs, I’m not the editor of a paper and I don’t want to defend them; but I am speaking of the unanimity in the intellectual world,” said Sergey Ivanovitch, addressing his brother. Levin would have answered, but the old prince interrupted him.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  In Minnesota, a young woman from Women of All Red Nations, a group born of the activism of the 1970s that forms local women’s circles and also speaks out on everything from land rights to health dangers, explained to me that Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife’s household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate—a failure of the imagination. Rather, female and male roles were distinct but flexible and equally valued. Women were usually in charge of agriculture and men of hunting, but one was not more important than the other. Women were also quite able to decide when and whether to have children. Sometimes when Native women came up to talk to me after meetings, they listed traditional herbs used as contraceptives or abortifacients, whether or not they were still in use. They knew that in the 1970s the Indian Health Service of the U.S. government admitted that thousands of Native women had been sterilized without their informed consent. Some called it a long-term strategy for taking over Indian lands, and others said it was the same racism that had sterilized black women in the South. Both the traditionalists and the young radicals of the American Indian Movement called it “slow genocide.” It also took away women’s ultimate power. I discovered that Native languages, Cherokee and others—like Bengali and other ancient languages—didn’t have gendered pronouns like he and she. A human being was a human being. Even the concept of chief, an English word of French origin, reflected a European assumption that there had to be one male kinglike leader. In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance. Men and women might have different duties, but the point was balance. For instance, men spoke at meetings, but women appointed and informed the men who spoke. I found plenty of non-Native testimony to this different way of life. For instance, in the early days of this nation, white women teachers in Native schools wrote about feeling safer in tribal communities than in their own. Ethnographers and journalists described the rarity of rape. Abuse of women was right up there with theft and murder as one of three reasons a man could not become a sachem, or wise leader. Anything that is prohibited must have existed, but it shocked Europeans by its rarity. I found testimonies like that of General James Clinton—no friend of the Indians he hunted down—who wrote in 1779, “Bad as these savages are, they never violate the chastity of any woman, [not even] their prisoner.”11 In California, I sat at a lunch table with a professor of premonotheistic spirituality, plus several women from some of the tribes in this state that has more Native Americans than any other.

• From My Life on the Road (2015)

  Because I still believed it was too soon for Hillary or any woman to be accepted as commander in chief, I wrote: If I were Obama, I would not feel personally betrayed by lack of support from someone like me, a new ally. If I were Hillary Clinton, I might feel betrayed by a longtime supporter who left me for a new face. In other words: Obama didn’t need me to win. Hillary Clinton might need me to lose. —ONCE AGAIN THE ROAD educated me—by showing me what voters were subjected to. I began to think that the wait for a female president might be even longer than I imagined. At airport gift shops, a nutcracker made to look like Hillary Clinton was sold as an election novelty. Her legs were handles, and her crotch was the place for cracking nuts. When I asked a sales clerk in the Washington, D.C., airport if there were complaints, she said yes, there had been a few, but it was selling well. When I asked her if there were similar nutcrackers of the male candidates, she said, “Certainly not!” On campuses, I saw young men wearing T-shirts that said TOO BAD O .J . DIDN’T MARRY HILLARY . All the wearers I saw were white. When I asked students what they thought about this slogan, they agreed it was uncool. They assured me most guys just put on their T-shirts and Facebook pages BROS BEFORE HOS . I watched as MSNBC political analyst Tucker Carlson said of Hillary Clinton, “I have often said when she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” I thought: No wonder that nutcracker is selling well. Also on MSNBC, Chris Matthews announced, “Let’s not forget—and I’ll be brutal—the reason she’s a U.S. senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a frontrunner, is her husband messed around. That’s how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn’t win there on her merit.”9 A woman reporter for The Washington Post wrote about a Hillary suit jacket that disclosed a bit of cleavage and called it “a provocation.” No such charge had been leveled at male presidential candidates, from John F. Kennedy to Obama, when they were photographed on the beach in bathing suits. About Hillary, Rush Limbaugh asked: “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older on a daily basis?” According to another Fox News analyst, “If that’s the face of experience, I think it’s going to scare away a lot of those independent voters.” At CNN, women correspondents told me they had been cautioned not to wear pantsuits on camera—they might look too much like Hillary.