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.

Page 25 of 447 · 20 per page

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Charges of “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight” circulated throughout the war, but especially after the Confederate Congress passed the Conscription Act of 1862, instituting the draft for all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. Exemptions were available to educated elites, slaveholders, officeholders, and men employed in valuable trades—leaving poor farmers and hired laborers the major target of the draft. Next the draft was extended to the age of forty-five, and by 1864 all males from seventeen to fifty were subject to conscription. 17 The Union army and Republican politicians advanced a strategy aimed at further exploiting class divisions between the planter elite and poor whites in the South. Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, as well as many Union officers, believed they were fighting a war against a slaveholding aristocracy, and that winning the war and ending slavery would liberate not only slaves but also poor white trash. In his memoir, Grant voiced the class critique of the Union command. There would never have been secession, he wrote, if demagogues had not swayed nonslaveholding voters and naïve young soldiers to believe that the North was filled with “cowards, poltroons, and negro- worshippers.” Convinced that “one Southern man was equal to five Northern men,” Confederate soldiers saw themselves as a superior people. (The same five- to-one ratio was used by North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper when he defended the Anglo-Saxon race in Land of Gold and claimed that one Kentuckian could trounce five dwarfish and feeble Nicaraguans.) In Grant’s estimation, the war was fought to liberate nonslaveholders, families exiled to poor land, who had few opportunities to better themselves or educate their children. “They too needed emancipation,” he insisted. Under the “old régime,” the prewar South, they were nothing but “poor white trash” to the planter aristocracy. They did as told and were accorded the ballot, but just so long as they parroted the wishes of the elite. 18 • • • By 1861, both sides saw the other as an alien culture doomed to extinction. In a speech delivered in 1858, the same year as Hammond’s famous mudsill oration, William H. Seward, the leading New York Republican who was to serve in Lincoln’s cabinet, coined the term “irrepressible conflict.” For Seward, free labor was a higher form of civilization, practiced by the “Caucasians and Europeans.” He blamed slavery on the Spanish and Portuguese, and reduced all of South America to a land of brutality, imbecility, and economic backwardness. Toppling slavery in the U.S. South, in Seward’s grand historical schema, was merely an extension of the continental march of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The two class systems—slave and free—were locked in a battle for domination, and only one would survive. 19 Of course, southern ideologues argued the exact opposite. Slavery was a vigorous and vibrant system, they insisted, and more effective than free labor. With a docile workforce, the South had eliminated conflict between labor and capital.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Left alone with Sister Marie, he began by lifting up her veil, and bidding her look in his face. Sister Marie replied that her rule forbade her to look at men. "That is well said, my daughter," said the prior, "but you are not to believe that monks are men." For fear, then, of being guilty of disobedience, Sister Marie looked at him, and thought him so ugly that it seemed to her more a penance than a sin to look at him. The reverend father, after talking of the love he bore her, wanted to put his hands on her breasts. She re- 2i8 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [Nnel ii. pulsed him as she ought ; and the reverend father, vexed at so unwonted a beginning, exclaimed in great anger, " What business has a nun to know that she has breasts ?" " I know that I have," replied Sister Marie ; " and I am very certain that neither you nor anyone else shall ever touch them. I am neither young enough nor igno- rant enough not to know what is a sin and what is not so." Seeing, then, that he could not compass his designs in that way, he had recourse to another expedient, and said, " I must declare my infirmity to you, my daughter; I have a malady which all the physicians deem incurable, unless I delight myself with a woman whom I passion- ately love. I would not for my life commit a mortal sin ; but even should it come to that, I know that simple fornication is not to be compared to the sin of homicide. So if you love my life, you will hinder me from dying, and save your own conscience." She asked him what sort of diversion it was that he contemplated ; to which he replied that she might rest her conscience on his, and he assured her that he would do nothing which would leave any weight on either. To let her judge by the preliminaries what sort of pastime it was he asked of her, he embraced her and tried to throw her on a bed. Making no doubt then of his wicked intention, she cried out, and defended herself so well that he could only touch her clothes. Seeing, then, that all his devices and efforts were fruitless, like — I will not say a madman, but like a man without conscience or reason, he put his hand under her robe, and scratched all that came under his nails with such fury that the poor girl, shrieking with all her might, fell in a faint. The abbess, hearing her cries, ran to the dormitory, reproaching herself for having left her relation alone with the reverend father. She stood for a moment at Third day \ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 210

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over this globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomizes our daughters and our earth. It is not the anger of Black women which corrodes into blind, dehumanizing power, bent upon the annihilation of us all unless we meet it with what we have, our power to examine and to redefine the terms upon which we will live and work; our power to envision and to reconstruct, anger by painful anger, stone upon heavy stone, a future of pollinating difference and the earth to support our choices. We welcome all women who can meet us, face to face, beyond objectification and beyond guilt. * One poem from this series is included in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1978), pp. 105–108.† This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, New York, 1984), first published in 1981.‡ From “For Each of You,” first published in From A Land Where Other People Live (Broadside Press, Detroit, 1973), and collected in Chosen Poems: Old and New (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 1982), p. 42.Fourth of July The first time I went to Washington, D.C. was on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child. At least that’s what they said to us all at graduation from the eighth grade. My sister Phyllis graduated at the same time from high school. I don’t know what she was supposed to stop being. But as graduation presents for us both, the whole family took a Fourth of July trip to Washington, D.C., the fabled and famous capital of our country. It was the first time I’d ever been on a railroad train during the day. When I was little, and we used to go to the Connecticut shore, we always went at night on the milk train, because it was cheaper. Preparations were in the air around our house before school was even over. We packed for a week. There were two very large suitcases that my father carried, and a box filled with food. In fact, my first trip to Washington was a mobile feast; I started eating as soon as we were comfortably ensconced in our seats, and did not stop until somewhere after Philadelphia. I remember it was Philadelphia because I was disappointed not to have passed by the Liberty Bell.

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

  But in England the rule was Rhadamanthine; the fags’ names on duty were put up on a blackboard, and if you were not on time, ay, and servile to boot, you’d get a dozen from an ash plant on your behind and not laid on perfunctorily and with distaste, as the Doctor did it, but with vim so that I had painful weals on my backside and couldn’t sit down for days without a smart. The fags too, being young and weak, were very often brutally treated just for fun. On Sunday mornings in summer, for instance, we had an hour longer in bed. I was one of the half dozen juniors in the big bedroom; there were two older boys in it, one at each end, presumably to keep order; but in reality to teach lechery and corrupt their younger favorites. If the mothers of England knew what goes on in the dormitories of these boarding-schools throughout England, they would all be closed, from Eton and Harrow upwards or downwards, in a day. If English fathers even had brains enough to understand that the fires of sex need no stoking in boyhood, they too would protect their sons from the foul abuse. But I shall come back to this. Now I wish to speak of the cruelty. Every form of cruelty was practiced on the younger, weaker and more nervous boys. I remember one Sunday morning, the half dozen older boys pulled one bed along the wall and forced all the seven younger boys underneath it, beating with sticks any hand or foot that showed. One little fellow cried that he couldn’t breathe and at once the gang of tormentors began stuffing up all the apertures, saying that they would make a “Black Hole” of it. There were soon cries and strugglings under the bed and at length one of the youngest began shrieking so that the torturers ran away from the prison, fearing lest some master should hear. One wet Sunday afternoon in midwinter, a little nervous “Mother’s darling” from the West Indies who always had a cold and was always sneaking near the fire in the big schoolroom, was caught by two of the Fifth and held near the flames. Two more brutes pulled his trowsers tight over his bottom, and the more he squirmed and begged to be let go, the tighter they held the trowsers and the nearer the flames he was pushed, till suddenly the trowsers split apart scorched through, and as the little fellow tumbled forward screaming, the torturers realized that they had gone too far. The little “Nigger” as he was called, didn’t tell how he came to be so scorched but took his fortnight in sick bay as a respite.

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

  The 10 to 15 percent of couples who do fight in court consume the lion’s share of our attention but they do not represent the norm. 1 Most parents negotiate a divorce settlement, decide on custody arrangements, and go their separate ways. Unfortunately, many of them stay intensely angry with one another. In our study, a third of the couples were fighting at the same high pitch ten years after their divorce was final. Their enduring anger stemmed from continued feelings of hurt and humiliation fueled by new complaints (child support is too burdensome or too little) and jealousy over new, often younger partners. The notion that divorce ends the intense love/hate relationship of the marriage is another myth of our times. Like many divorced people, Karen’s mother frequently called her ex-husband and got into shouting matches. As a result, the children were exposed to the hurt and anger that led to the breakup throughout their growing up years. Millions of children today experience the same unrelenting drama of longing and anger that refuses to die. It is, of course, hard to know how often divorce is precipitated by factors outside the marriage. I have seen a good number of such instances. Indeed, it is one of the common causes—or more precisely, final triggers—of divorce, yet few people seem to recognize its importance. Whenever people are shaken by a serious loss in their lives—be it the termination of a job, death of a parent, serious illness in a child, or any grievous event that can evoke powerful and primitive passions—the bereaved person will turn to their spouse for comfort. If the partner responds with understanding and tenderness, the marriage can be forever enriched. But the tragedy can also split people apart when the bereaved person is deeply disappointed in the partner’s response and feels rejected in his or her hour of greatest need. Grief turns to rage as the two people end up irrationally blaming the other—one for not having empathy, the other for making insatiable demands. The initial loss is soon compounded, anger and accusations take over, and the marriage cascades downward. Mrs. James followed this script to the letter. It’s especially tragic when divorce occurs as the sequel to a serious life crisis. The suffering person loses whatever support there was in the marriage and confronts the transition from marriage to singlehood in a depleted state. The children are badly frightened and apprehensive about what lies ahead. It’s as if the entire family at its weakest point is expected to deal with an earthquake and its aftershocks. What happened to this family is instructive.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  With Carnival week nearing, in Paris, more than a century ago, the Count de Morny invited to a fancy ball at his house “une noble dame que la Russie a prêtée cet hiver à la France” (as reported by Henrys in the Gazette du Palais section of the Illustration, 1859, p. 251). This was Nina, Baroness von Korff, whom I have already mentioned; the eldest of her five daughters, Maria (1842–1926), was to marry in September of the same year, 1859, Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov (1827–1904), a friend of the family who was also in Paris at the time. In view of the ball, the lady ordered for Maria and Olga, flower-girl costumes, at two hundred and twenty francs each. Their cost, according to the glib Illustration reporter, represented six hundred and forty-three days “de nourriture, de loyer et d’entretien du père Crépin [food, rent and footwear],” which sounds odd. When the costumes were ready, Mme de Korff found them “trop décolletés” and refused to take them. The dressmaker sent her huissier (warrant officer), upon which there was a bad row, and my good great-grandmother (she was beautiful, passionate and, I am sorry to say, far less austere in her private morals than it would appear from her attitude toward low necklines) sued the dressmaker for damages. She contended that the demoiselles de magasin who brought the dresses were “des péronnelles [saucy hussies]” who, in answer to her objecting that the dresses were cut too low for gentlewomen to wear, “se sont permis d’exposer des théories égalitaires du plus mauvais goût [dared to flaunt democratic ideas in the worst of taste]”; she said that it had been too late to have other fancy dresses made and that her daughters had not gone to the ball; she accused the huissier and his acolytes of sprawling on soft chairs while inviting the ladies to take hard ones; she also complained, furiously and bitterly, that the huissier had actually threatened to jail Monsieur Dmitri Nabokoff, “Conseiller d’État, homme sage et plein de mesure [a sedate, self-contained man]” only because the said gentleman had attempted to throw the huissier out of the window. It was not much of a case but the dressmaker lost it. She took back her dresses, refunded their cost and in addition paid a thousand francs to the plaintiff; on the other hand, the bill presented in 1791 to Christina by her carriage maker, a matter of five thousand nine hundred forty-four livres, had never been paid at all.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Subsequently he was informed that the women took advantage of what he had said, and that their husbands could no longer be masters : and this mischief he desired to remedy, as he had that under which the women had laboured. To this end, in another sermon he compared women to devils, and said that the two were man's greatest enemies and perpetual persecutors, which he could not get rid of, especially women. " In fact," said he, " the devils fly when they are shown the cross, and women do quite the contrary, for it is that which tames them, makes them go and come, and is the cause of their putting their husbands into no end of passions. Would you know, my good people," said he to the husbands, •• the way this is to be remedied .-* Here it is. When F^fth day\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 403 you see that your wives torment you incessantly, as is their wont, take the handle of the cross, and thrash them well with it. You will not have done this above three or four times before you will find yourselves the better for it, and will see that as the devil is driven away by the cross, so you will drive your wives away, and make them hold their tongues, by virtue of the handle of the same cross, provided it be not attached." There, ladies, is a sample of the sermons of the ven- erable Cordelier de Valles, of whose life I will tell you no more, and for good reason. I will only say that for all he put a good face on the matter, for I knew the man, he was much more for the women than the men. " He gave a very bad proof of that in this last ser- mon of his," said Parlamente, " since he instructed the men to maltreat them." " You do not discern his cunning," said Hircan. "As you have not much experience of war, you cannot be acquainted with the stratagems that are necessary in it, one of the greatest of which is to create division in the enemy's camp ; for then he is more easily beaten. Just so Master Monk knew that aversion and anger be- tween husband and wife often occasion a loose rein to be given to female honour. As virtue is the guard of that honour, it finds itself under the fangs of the wolf before it is aware that it is gone astray." " Be that as it may," said Parlamente, " I could never love a man who had sown discord between my husband and me to the extent of coming to blows ; for with beat- ing there is an end to love. Yet they can be so very demure, as I have heard, when they want to cajole some woman or another, and talk in so engaging a manner, 4o4 ^HE HEPTAMERON OF THE \JVovel 46.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Straight-backed and indignant, one by one, my family and I got down from the counter stools and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged, as if we had never been Black before. No one would answer my emphatic questions with anything other than a guilty silence. “But we hadn’t done anything!” This wasn’t right or fair! Hadn’t I written poems about Bataan and freedom and democracy for all? My parents wouldn’t speak of this injustice, not because they had contributed to it, but because they felt they should have anticipated it and avoided it. This made me even angrier. My fury was not going to be acknowledged by a like fury. Even my two sisters copied my parents’ pretense that nothing unusual and anti-american had occurred. I was left to write my angry letter to the president of the united states all by myself, although my father did promise I could type it out on the office typewriter next week, after I showed it to him in my copybook diary. The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D.C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all. I Am Your Sister Black Women Organizing Across Sexualities Whenever I come to Medgar Evers College I always feel a thrill of anticipation and delight because it feels like coming home, like talking to family, having a chance to speak about things that are very important to me with people who matter the most. And this is particularly true whenever I talk at the Women’s Center. But, as with all families, we sometimes find it difficult to deal constructively with the genuine differences between us and to recognize that unity does not require that we be identical to each other. Black women are not one great vat of homogenized chocolate milk. We have many different faces, and we do not have to become each other in order to work together. It is not easy for me to speak here with you as a Black Lesbian feminist, recognizing that some of the ways in which I identify myself make it difficult for you to hear me. But meeting across difference always requires mutual stretching, and until you can hear me as a Black Lesbian feminist, our strengths will not be truly available to each other as Black women.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Representative Crockett may have compared speculators to sneaky coons in an 1824 speech before the Tennessee House, but he never lost sight of the legal ploys used to trick poorer settlers out of their land warrants. In the end, the man, not the legend, did a better job of exposing class conflict in the backcountry, where real speculators were routinely pitted against real squatters. 37 David Crockett was an avid backer of Andrew Jackson in the 1828 election, but soon enough abandoned the imperious general. Crockett’s Land Bill made enemies back in Tennessee, and he disapproved of the Indian Removal Bill, which allowed for forced expulsion of the Cherokees and other “civilized tribes” from the southeastern states. Indian removal went along with the unfair treatment of squatters, who were expelled from the public domain and were barred from securing land that they had settled and improved. Jackson’s allies responded to Crockett’s defection by calling him unsavory and uneducated. Crockett accused Jackson of going back on his principles, and refused to go along with the partisan dog pack. In 1831, he wrote that he “would not wear a collar round my neck, with ‘my dog’ on it, and the name of ANDREW JACKSON on the collar.” Three years later he made submission to party into an ugly slur, saying he would rather “belong to a nigger, and be a raccoon dog, as the partisan of any man.” In Crockett’s backcountry class hierarchy, there was the free white male landowner, the squatter, the black man, the dog, and then, if his language was to be taken seriously, the party man. 38 • • • Democrat Andrew Jackson’s stormy relationship with Crockett was replicated again and again with any number of contemporaries over the course of a career that was built on sheer will and utter impulse. Most of his loyal supporters eventually ended up on the opposition side of the partisan divide, joining the Whig Party. Controversy, large and small, seemed to follow the man. Because Jackson had relatively little experience holding political offices, his run for the presidency drew even more than the normal amount of attention to his personal character. A biography written for campaign purposes filled in the gaps in his generally combative résumé. Whether supporters portrayed him as the conquering hero or his enemies labeled him King Andrew I, all focused on his volatile emotions. He certainly lacked the education and polite breeding of his presidential predecessors. 39 As an outsider to Washington, save for a brief, unproductive stint in Congress, his qualifications came from the field of war, where his record sparked heated criticism. His ardent backers claimed him as the spiritual successor to the sainted General Washington, but Jackson’s origins lay far from the Potomac, beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Old Hickory had made his home in places where the population was thin and the law fungible.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " my worst suffering is to see you the dupe of those whose duty it is to preserve your honour and all that is yours." This made the duke wondrously eager to know what she meant, and he begged her to speak openly, without fear or disguise. " I shall never be surprised," she said at last, after repeated refusals, "if strangers make war on princes, since those who are most bound to them undertake to wage such a horrible war against them that the loss of domains is nothing in comparison with it. I say this, monsieur, with reference to a gentle- man " (here she named her enemy) " whom you have fed, reared, treated more like a relation than a domestic, and who, by way of gratitude, has had the impudence and the baseness to attempt the honour of your wife, on which depends that of your house and your children. Though he long laboured to insinuate to me things that left me no doubt of his black perfidy, yet my heart, which is only for you, and thinks only on you, could not com- prehend him ; but at last he explained himself, and I replied to him as my rank and my honour required. I hate him, however, so that I cannot bear the sight of him ; and this it was, monsieur, which made me keep my room and lose the happiness of your company. I beseech you, monsieur, not to keep such a pestilence near you ; for after such a crime, the fear of your being made acquainted with it might very likely induce him to do something worse. You now know, monsieur, the cause of my grief, which seems to me most just and most worthy that you should right it without delay." The duke, who on the one hand loved his wife and felt himself outraged, and on the other hand loved the gentleman, of whose fidelity he had often had practical proof, could hardly believe this lie was truth. He with- drew to his chamber in great perplexity and anger, and ^26 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE [Novel '/O.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  It tempered the British announcement with a reminder to readers that some of the Carters in old England were poachers, the American equivalent of would-be moonshiners. Noble blood or hillbilly moonshiners? A spokesman for the British study, Debrett’s Peerage, invoked eugenic thinking when he claimed that the Carter family had produced “intelligent to brilliant” people. The family line had its share of “sleepers,” the expert confided, and it was from those less successful branches that Jimmy’s brother Billy had acquired his less fine attributes. 29 That said, Billy Carter was no sleeper. He became a redneck luminary, and tourists poured into the Carters’ hometown of Plains looking for autographs and photographs with the down-home celebrity. He began producing his own beer, Billy Beer, and hired an agent to coordinate talks he gave around the country. He was known for voicing ornery, uncensored opinions. Billy smoked five packs of Pall Malls a day, and his code name on the CB radio was “Cast Iron,” for his iron-gutted ability to drink anything and a lot of it. He was no “Holy Roller,” no celebrant of the “Lost Cause.” When asked what side he would have fought on in the Civil War, Billy joked, “I’d probably hid out in the swamp.” In 1981, after his brother left office, Billy was peddling mobile homes. 30 Roy Blount said he wished that Jimmy had a bit more of Billy in him, a little more irreverence and sass: “The first Cracker President should have been a mixture of Jimmy and Billy, . . . Billy’s hoo-Lord-what-the-hell-get-out-the-way attitude heaving up under Jimmy’s prudent righteousness—or Jimmy’s idealism heaving up under Billy’s sense of human limitations—and forming a nice-and- awful compound like life in Georgia.” Blount’s Cracker President would have “a richer voice, and a less dismissable smile.” 31 There was probably more redneck in Jimmy than Blount realized. When speechwriter Bob Shrum resigned from the Carter team in 1976, he exposed a less compassionate candidate. The man who publicly advocated for miners when he spoke before a labor audience told Shrum privately that “he opposed increased black-lung benefits for miners, because ‘they chose to be miners.’” Seemingly lacking an understanding of class conditions, Carter right then revealed a mean streak a mile wide. Should miners suffer because they accepted the dangers of the job? He showed his mean side again in 1977 when he endorsed the Hyde Amendment for restricting Medicaid payments to poor women seeking abortions.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  For the satisfaction of justice, the brother-in-law was advised to go and solicit his pardon of King Francis I. To this end, after having honourably interred the father, mother, and child, he set out on one Good Friday, to solicit his pardon at court ; and he obtained it through the favour of Fran9ois Olivier, Chancellor of Alen^on, afterwards, in consideration of his great endowments, chosen by the king to be chancellor of France. I am persuaded, ladies, that after this story, which is the very truth, there is not one of you but will think twice before giving reception to such guests. Let it at least 236 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE {Novel 23. teach you that the more hidden the venom, the more dangerous it is. " Surely," said Hircan, " this husband was a great fool to bring such a gallant to sup by the side of such a handsome and virtuous woman." " I have seen the time," said Geburon, "when there was not a house in our country in which there was not a chamber for the good fathers ; but at present people know them so well that they are more feared than ad- venturers." " It seems to me," said Parlamente, " that a woman in bed ought never to let monk or priest into her room except to administer to her the sacraments of the church ; and for my part, when I summon any of them to my bedside, it may be taken for a sure sign that I am very far gone." " If everybody was as austere as you," said Enna- suite, " the poor clergy would no longer be free to see women when and where they pleased, and that would be Vv'orse to them than excommunication." " Have no fear on their account," said Saffredent ; " these worthies will never want for women." " Is this not too bad } " exclaimed Simontault. " It is they who unite us with our wives in the bonds of wed- lock, and they have the wickedness to try to disunite us, and make us break the oath they have imposed upon us." " It is a pity," said Oisille, " that they who have the administration of the sacraments make light of them in this manner. They ought to be burned alive." "You would do better to honour them than to blame them," replied Saffredent, "and to flatter instead of abusing them ; for it is they who have the power to burn and dishonour others, therefore, let them alone ; and let us see, whom does Oisille caJl on ? " Third day:\ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 237 "On Dagoucin," she replied ; "for I see he is so pensive that it strikes me he must have something good at the tip of his tongue."

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

  One more incident belongs in this thirteenth year, and is worthy perhaps of record. Freed of the bullying and senseless cruelty of the older boys who for the most part, still siding with Jones, left me severely alone, the restraints of school life began to irk me. “If I were free”, I said to myself, “I’d go after E… or some other girl and have a great time; as it is, I can do nothing, hope for nothing.” Life was stale, flat and unprofitable to me. Besides, I had read nearly all the books I thought worth reading in the school library, and time hung heavy on my hands: I began to long for liberty as a caged bird. What was the quickest way out? I knew that my father as a Captain in the Navy could give me or get me a nomination so that I might become a Midshipman. Of course I’d have to be examined before I was fourteen; but I knew I could win a high place in any test. The summer vacation after I was thirteen on the 14th of February I spent at home in Ireland as I have told, and from time to time, bothered my father to get me the nomination. He promised he would, and I took his promise seriously. All the autumn I studied carefully the subjects I was to be examined in and from time to time wrote to my father reminding him of his promise. But he seemed unwilling to touch on the matter in his letters which were mostly filled with Biblical exhortations, that sickened me with contempt for his brainless credulity. My unbelief made me feel immeasurably superior to him. Christmas came and I wrote him a serious letter, insisting that he should keep his promise. For the first time in my life I flattered him, saying that I knew his word was sacred: but the time-limit was at hand and I was getting nervous lest some official delay might make me pass the prescribed limit of age. I got no reply: I wrote to Vernon who said he would do his best with the Governor. The days went on, the 14th of February came and went: I was fourteen. That way of escape into the wide world was closed to me by my father. I raged in hatred of him.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  metaphysico-devotional rhapsodies. One of them, however, deserves more special mention, as marking the author's dissent from the religion of Rome. " The mirror of the sinful soul " {Miroir de fame pecheresse) " was composed in a strain very unusual in the Church of Rome, there being no mention made in it either of male or female saints, or of merits, or of any other purgatory than the blood of Jesus Christ." * The work was consequently assailed \vith fierce denunciations from the orthodox pulpits. A comedy was acted by the students of the College of Navarre, in which the queen was represented as a Fury of Hell, and the Sorbonne decreed at least, if it did not promulgate, a censure upon her heretical production. Mar- garet complained to her brother, and the result was that Nicolas Cop, rector of the Sorbonne, expressly disowned the censure pronounced by the body over which he presided ; the student-comedians, and the most intemperate of the preachers, were committed to prison \ and Noel Beda, syndic of the faculty of theology, who had been the most ardent promoter of the attacks on the king's sister, died in confinement at Mont Saint Michel. The Heptameron is, of all Margaret's works, the one on which her literary reputation has mainly rested since her death. We have sketched its bibliographical history in our preface, and it now remains for us to speak of its composition. Dunlop, who may be considered as expressing the general opinion of literary historians, says that " few of the tales composed in it are original ; for, except about half-a-dozen which are histori- cally true, and are mentioned as having fallen under the knowledge and observation of the Queen of Navarre, they may all be traced to the Fabliaux, the Italian novels, and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles." On the contrary, the last editors j of the Heptameron allege that " its distinctive character is, that it reproduces, under a tolerably transparent veil, real events which happened at the court of France, especially in the reigns of Louis XI., Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I. Of the seventy-two tales which compose the Hep- * Beza Hist. Ecclesiasf, book i. p. 5. I QUEEN OF NA VARRE. xli

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  As for Margaret's behaviour towards Charles V., let us again have recourse to Brantome, whom we shall quote as often as we can : " She spoke so bravely and so handsomely to the emperor concerning his bad treatment of the king her brother that he was quite astonished, setting before him his ingratitude and felony wherewith he, the vassal, dealt towards his lord on account of Flanders ; then she reproached him with the hardness of his heart for being so devoid of pity with regard to so great and so good a king ; and said that acting in tliat manner was not the way to win a heart so noble and royal and so sovereign as that of the king her brother ; and that, should he die in consequence of his rigorous treatment, his death would not remain unpunished, for he had children who would be grown up some day, and would take signal vengeance. These words, pronounced so bravely, and with so much passion, made the emperor bethink himself, so that he moderated his behaviour, and visited the king, and promised him many fine things, which he did not, however, perform for that time. But if this queen spoke so well to the emperor, she did still more so to those of his council, where she had audience, and where she triumphed with her fine speaking and graceful manner, of which she had no lack." Margaret took great pains to hasten the conclusion of the marriage between Francis I. and Eleonore of Austria, widow of the King of Portugal, rightly regarding the alliance as the surest means of a prompt deliverance. Though the royal widow had been promised to the Constable of Bourbon, the emperor did not hesitate to sacrifice his engagement with the illustrious deserter to the interests of his policy. He himself, fascinated by Margaret's talent and graces, entertained for a moment the idea of a union with her, and sent a letter to the regent containing a distinct proposal to that effect. In the same letter the emperor said, with reference to the Con- stable of Bourbon, that "there were good marriages in France, and quite enough for him ; naming Madame Renee with, whom jjxvi MEMOIR OF MARGARET,

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  This method presupposes a normal psychology of introspection to be established in its main features. But where the origin of these features, or their dependence upon one another, is in question, it is of the utmost importance to trace the phenomenon considered through all its possible variations of type and combination. So it has come to pass that instincts of animals are ransacked to throw light on our own; and that the reasoning faculties of bees and ants, the minds of savages, infants, madmen, idiots, the deaf and blind, criminals, and eccentrics, are all invoked in support of this or that special theory about some part of our own mental life. The history of sciences, moral and political institutions, and languages, as types of mental product, are pressed into the same service. Messrs. Darwin and Galton have set the example of circulars of questions sent out by the hundred to those supposed able to reply. The custom has spread, and it will be well for us in the next generation if such circulars be not ranked among the common pests of life. Meanwhile information grows, and results emerge. There are great sources of error in the comparative method. The interpretation of the 'psychoses' of animals, savages, and infants is necessarily wild work, in which the personal equation of the investigator has things very much its own way. A savage will be reported to have no moral or religious feeling if his actions shock the observer unduly. A child will be assumed without self-consciousness because he talks of himself in the third person, etc., etc. No rules can be laid down in advance. Comparative observations, to be definite, must usually be made to test some pre- existing hypothesis; and the only thing then is to use as much sagacity as you possess, and to be as candid as you can. THE SOURCES OF ERROR IN PSYCHOLOGY. The first of them arises from the Misleading Influence of Speech. Language was originally made by men who were not psychologists, and most men to-day employ almost exclusively the vocabulary of outward things. The cardinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope, and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, with the broadest genera of aesthetic feeling, joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order which this vocabulary deigns to note by special words. The elementary qualities of sensation, bright, loud, red, blue, hot, cold, are, it is true, susceptible of being used in both an objective and a subjective sense. They stand for outer qualities and for the feelings which these arouse.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The consummate showman rode to Senate victory in 1912—quite literally—on the back of an ox. When his Democratic primary opponent derided his supporters as an ignorant herd, he exploited the incident. Traveling through Mississippi giving speeches, he liked to pull up in a “cracker cart” amid a long line of cattle. At one rally he rode into town astride a single ox. The beast was adorned with flags and streamers labeled “redneck,” “cattle,” and “lowdown.” He dramatically embraced the white trash identity. 40 Insofar as the surviving planter elite and middle-class Mississippians despised Vardaman, he intentionally drummed up class resentments. In his reminiscence, William Percy, the son of Vardaman’s Democratic opponent, LeRoy Percy, best expressed the class anger. Recalling how he surveyed the surly crowd, wondering if Vardaman’s army would launch rotten eggs at his father, Percy wrote: They were the sort of people that lynch Negroes, that mistake hoodlumism for wit, and cunning for intelligence, that attend revivals and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards. They were undiluted Anglo- Saxons. They were the sovereign voter. It was so horrible it seemed unreal. Though he had no patience for the politics of hate run as a sideshow, Percy conceded that Vardaman was a savvy politician who gave the “sovereign voter” what he wanted—red meat. 41 Roosevelt, a patrician, had little choice but to joust with his redneck foes. In 1905, during his southern tour, he rebuked Arkansas governor Jeff Davis for defending the lynch mob. One newspaper joked that the president’s entourage was wise to travel through Mississippi at night, so that Vardaman wouldn’t have to shoot him. Roosevelt also ruffled the feathers of the proud white women of the South when he had dared to class Jefferson Davis (the Confederate president) with Benedict Arnold. When he did that, one incensed Georgia woman declared that the president had dishonored his mother’s blood. 42 Blood was thicker than water for Roosevelt, but not in the way the testy Georgia woman would have viewed the matter. His understanding of race and class remained rooted in evolutionary thinking, and he believed that blacks were naturally subordinate to the Anglo-Saxon. But he also felt progress was possible, which was why he backed Booker T. Washington’s program for industrial education at Tuskegee Institute. If blacks proved themselves capable of economic self-sufficiency, then they could qualify for greater political rights. But the Harvard-educated president never abandoned the premise that racial traits were carried in the blood, conditioned by the experiences of one’s ancestors. As an ardent exponent of “American exceptionalism,” Roosevelt argued that the nineteenth-century frontier experience had transformed white Americans into superior stock. 43 Roosevelt’s motto can be summed up in three words: “work-fight-breed.” There is clear evidence that he was influenced by the mountaineers’ myth, by which good Saxon stock was separated from the debased southern poor white. History was written in blood, sweat, and “germ protoplasm”—the turn-of-the- century term for what we now refer to as genes.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  It is probably true, as some have argued, that sympathy for Leninism on the part of English and American liberal opinion in the twenties was swung by consideration of home politics. But it was also due to simple misinformation. My friend knew little of Russia’s past and this little had come to him through polluted Communist channels. When challenged to justify the bestial terror that had been sanctioned by Lenin—the torture-house, the blood-bespattered wall—Nesbit would tap the ashes out of his pipe against the fender knob, recross sinistrally his huge, heavily shod, dextrally crossed legs, and murmur something about the “Allied Blockade.” He lumped together as “Czarist elements” Russian émigrés of all hues, from peasant Socialist to White general—much as today Soviet writers wield the term “Fascist.” He never realized that had he and other foreign idealists been Russians in Russia, he and they would have been destroyed by Lenin’s regime as naturally as rabbits are by ferrets and farmers. He maintained that the reason for what he demurely called “less variety of opinion” under the Bolsheviks than in the darkest Tsarist days was “the want of any tradition of free speech in Russia,” a statement he got, I believe, from the sort of fatuous “Dawn in Russia” stuff that eloquent English and American Leninists wrote in those years. But the thing that irritated me perhaps most was Nesbit’s attitude toward Lenin himself. All cultured and discriminating Russians knew that this astute politician had about as much taste and interest in aesthetic matters as an ordinary Russian bourgeois of the Flaubertian épicier sort (the type that admired Pushkin on the strength of Chaykovski’s vile librettos, wept at the Italian opera, and was allured by any painting that told a story); but Nesbit and his highbrow friends saw in him a kind of sensitive, poetic-minded patron and promoter of the newest trends in art and would smile a superior smile when I tried to explain that the connection between advanced politics and advanced art was a purely verbal one (gleefully exploited by Soviet propaganda), and that the more radical a Russian was in politics, the more conservative he was on the artistic side.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  That said, Daniels’s observation was not historically accurate: as we know, Jackson was vilified by his enemies as a violent, lawless cracker, and Lincoln was disparagingly termed a poor white “mudsill.” But even Daniels had to admit that many other southerners defined the redneck as one who was “raised on hate.” He despised blacks and demeaned “nigger lovers.” In the mold of Bob Ewell, he stood prepared to stick a knife in the back of any who crossed him. That, then, was the label that stuck. 62 • • • And what about the hillbilly? Though redneck and hillbilly were both defined by the American Dialect Society in 1904 as “uncouth countrymen,” the following regional distinction was offered: “Hill-billies came from the hills, and the rednecks from the swamps.” Like rednecks, hillbillies were seen as cruel and violent, but with most of their anger directed at neighbors, family members, and “furriners” (unwelcomed strangers). Like the legendary Hatfields and McCoys in the 1880s, they were known for feuding and explosive bouts of rage. When they weren’t fighting, they were swilling moonshine and marrying off their daughters at seven. Like the squatter of old, they were supposedly given to long periods of sloth. Stories spread of shotgun marriages, accounts of barefoot and pregnant women. In a 1933 study of an isolated community in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, a woman being interviewed blurted out that marriage meant she was “goin’ to have her number” (of children). “I done had mine,” she explained. “Fifteen. Nine living and six dead.” 63 Hollywood released Mountain Justice in 1938, a film based on the actual murder trial of “the Hill-billy girl” Ruth Maxwell, who had slain her father in self-defense when he came at her in a drunken rage. In coverage of the trial, Maxwell’s home of Wise County, Virginia, was described as a place where “slattern women and gangling men take up the dull business of living.” Warner Brothers made the film both hokey and violent. The film’s technical adviser told the studio to ship in “six coon hounds, 30 corncob pipes, 43 plugs of chewing tobacco,” and over a thousand yards of calico—all to make sure that a very dim portrait of mountain ways was presented. Advance promotion promised a “Gripping Melodrama of Lust and Lash.” The most shocking on-screen moment occurs as Ruth’s father towers over her with an enormous bullwhip.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Led by a former candidate for governor, they formed a strange caravan of oxcarts, livestock, and dogs, altogether numbering over two thousand. The men were categorized by observers as white trash: “tall, sallow, cadaverous, and leathery.” They joined the starving, mud-covered women and barefoot children who comprised the South’s forgotten poor white exiles. 47 Public shaming was another tactic used by the Union army. In New Orleans, General Benjamin Butler’s infamous Order No. 28 declared that any woman showing disrespect to a Union soldier would be treated as a prostitute, a punitive measure that denied the assumption of moral purity accorded upper-class women. More devastating was Order No. 76, by which Butler required all men and women to give an oath of allegiance; those who failed to do so had their property confiscated. Women’s equal political treatment exposed what lay hidden behind the “broad folds of female crinoline,” that men were hiding assets in their wives’ names. A victorious officer observed that in taking Fredericksburg in 1862, Union soldiers destroyed the homes of the wealthy, leaving behind dirt from their “muddy feet.” Vandalism was another way to disgrace prominent Confederates: seizing the symbols of wealth and status, smashing them, and leaving it behind as rubbish. The muddy footprint of the mudsill foot soldier was an intentionally ironic symbol of class rage. 48 One person who took this message to heart was Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. As a military governor, Johnson became the bête noire of Confederates, the only U.S. senator from a seceding state to remain loyal to the Union. His loyalty earned him a place on the Republican ticket as Lincoln’s running mate in 1864. Johnson, an old guard Jacksonian Democrat, felt no constraint in voicing his disgust with the bloated planter elite. By the time he took over as military governor, he was already known for his confrontational style, eager to duke it out with those he labeled “traitorous aristocrats.” He vigorously imposed assessments to pay for poor refugee women and children, who he claimed were reduced to poverty because of the South’s “unholy and nefarious rebellion.” Not surprisingly, Johnson’s detractors looked upon the once-lowly tailor as undeserving white trash. He had a reputation for vulgarity in the course of his stump speeches. One politician he ran against before the war went so far as to call him “a living mass of undulating filth.” If Lincoln was white trash in the eyes of genteel southerners, Johnson looked worse. 49 By the time General William T. Sherman orchestrated his famous March to the Sea in 1864, Union leaders believed that only widespread humiliation and suffering would end the war.