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 Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “He gave her a questioning glance. On her face the expression of anguish and ennui changed, it seemed to me, when she looked at him, into an expression of anxiety for him. For a moment I stood in the doorway, holding the dagger hidden behind my back. Suddenly he smiled, and in a voice that was indifferent almost to the point of ridicule, he said: “‘We were having some music.’ “‘I did not expect—,’ she began at the same time, chiming in with the tone of the other. “But neither he nor she finished their remarks. The same rage that I had felt the previous week took possession of me. I felt the need of giving free course to my violence and ‘the joy of wrath.’ “No, they did not finish. That other thing was going to begin, of which he was afraid, and was going to annihilate what they wanted to say. I threw myself upon her, still hiding the dagger, that he might not prevent me from striking where I desired, in her bosom, under the breast. At that moment he saw . . . and, what I did not expect on his part, he quickly seized my hand, and cried: “‘Come to your senses! What are you doing? Help! Help!’ “I tore my hands from his grasp, and leaped upon him. I must have been very terrible, for he turned as white as a sheet, to his lips. His eyes scintillated singularly, and—again what I did not expect of him—he scrambled under the piano, toward the other room. I tried to follow him, but a very heavy weight fell upon my left arm. It was she. “I made an effort to clear myself. She clung more heavily than ever, refusing to let go. This unexpected obstacle, this burden, and this repugnant touch only irritated me the more. I perceived that I was completely mad, that I must be frightful, and I was glad of it. With a sudden impulse, and with all my strength, I dealt her, with my left elbow, a blow squarely in the face. “She uttered a cry and let go my arm. I wanted to follow the other, but I felt that it would be ridiculous to pursue in my stockings the lover of my wife, and I did not wish to be grotesque, I wished to be terrible. In spite of my extreme rage, I was all the time conscious of the impression that I was making upon others, and even this impression partially guided me.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “If it were only that! Take all the poetry, the painting, the sculpture, beginning with Pouschkine’s ‘Little Feet,’ with ‘Venus and Phryne,’ and you will see that woman is only a means of enjoyment. That is what she is at Trouba,[*] at Gratchevka, and in a court ball-room. And think of this diabolical trick: if she were a thing without moral value, it might be said that woman is a fine morsel; but, in the first place, these knights assure us that they adore woman (they adore her and look upon her, however, as a means of enjoyment), then all assure us that they esteem woman. Some give up their seats to her, pick up her handkerchief; others recognize in her a right to fill all offices, participate in government, etc., but, in spite of all that, the essential point remains the same. She is, she remains, an object of sensual desire, and she knows it. It is slavery, for slavery is nothing else than the utilization of the labor of some for the enjoyment of others. That slavery may not exist people must refuse to enjoy the labor of others, and look upon it as a shameful act and as a sin. [*] A suburb of Moscow. “Actually, this is what happens. They abolish the external form, they suppress the formal sales of slaves, and then they imagine and assure others that slavery is abolished. They are unwilling to see that it still exists, since people, as before, like to profit by the labor of others, and think it good and just. This being given, there will always be found beings stronger or more cunning than others to profit thereby. The same thing happens in the emancipation of woman. At bottom feminine servitude consists entirely in her assimilation with a means of pleasure. They excite woman, they give her all sorts of rights equal to those of men, but they continue to look upon her as an object of sensual desire, and thus they bring her up from infancy and in public opinion. “She is always the humiliated and corrupt serf, and man remains always the debauched Master. Yes, to abolish slavery, public opinion must admit that it is shameful to exploit one’s neighbor, and, to make woman free, public opinion must admit that it is shameful to consider woman as an instrument of pleasure.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Their voice broke and she let go of their ear and kissed them, a fluttering warning shock of her orgasm growing at the crux of her pelvis, just above her cunt. They tasted like greasy takeout and baby powder, like lilacs and sweat and weed and pussy. She forced her tongue into their mouth, choking them for a moment before pulling back and biting down on their plump lower lip. They squealed. I’m disgusting. “Fucking whore,” she whispered, letting their lip slip through her teeth, and spat full in their face. She let go of their right wrist and reached down between them to slip a finger between her slick lips. It was coming now. Like clawing at an itch she hadn’t been able to reach in days. Feather looked up at her with those big, soft eyes, like a newborn fawn. Spit glistened on their cheek and the labial fold of their nose. They were smiling at her. She wanted to slap them, to scratch their shoulders and their soft little breasts, but she was so close and her whole body was aching for it. She stroked and thrust without restraint at her swollen cunt, her breath coming in choppy little gasps. A blatt of static cut through her oncoming release. Her walkie, crackling somewhere in the heap of discarded clothes at the foot of Feather’s bed. She thumbed her clit frantically, biting her lip, but she knew it was gone. Hot frustration bled down through the still-tense muscles of her thighs. She blew her hair out of her face, every sensation—from the slight chafing on her inner thighs to the tickle of her own hair against the back of her neck—suddenly irritating. The walkie crackled again. An older woman’s pack-a-day voice fuzzed through the speaker. “Central for Lieutenant Pierce, Central for Lieutenant Pierce. Report to City Hall ASAP. Acknowledge. Over.” She scrambled off Feather, kicking them in the hip in her rush to the edge of the bed. “Sorry!” she hissed, though really she was angry with them. She didn’t know why. She dropped to her stomach and fished through her pants until she found the ruggedized black plastic brick and clicked the PTT. “This is Pierce. On my way. Over.” “Don’t keep her waiting. Over and out.” Ramona scooted off the edge of the bed, getting her feet under her, stepping into her fatigues, and yanking them up without bothering to look for her underwear. She was dripping a little, but the dark fabric would hide the worst of it. Sports bra, undershirt, putting her head through an armhole and almost ripping the worn cotton trying to get it right. Her high felt suddenly like suffocating. Her fingers fumbled with buttons and zippers. She nearly forgot to buckle her gun belt. Feather sighed, rolling over and reaching for the piece and lighter on the stacked milk crates beside the bed.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Johnson, smiling and a little cross-eyed, in a crown of flowers, real and silk, in a framed print by the door. Stop looking at me. There was nothing I could do. The scratch of pen on paper halted. “Oh, and Pierce?” She paused, her hand on the doorknob. “Ma’am?” “No one thinks any less of you. Women have certain urges.” The pen resumed its scratching progress. “But with an eye toward the future, I would consider investing in a good dildo.” “I loved my sister,” said Corinne. She walked a yard or so ahead, hauling every now and then on the rope she’d tied as a crude collar around Beth’s neck so that Beth had to lurch forward clumsily over the exposed roots and treacherous deadfalls of the forest floor, without her arms for balance, or else strangle. Dawn had just begun to break. “I loved her more than anything in the world. This fucking wasteland, this pit, scuttling around after my ex-boss’s psychopathic teenager so I can be sure I’m right there to tell her how important and special she is while she gets stoned and watches cartoons and screams at us because the hard drive with her favorite cached YouTube videos got corrupted. I did it for Sylvia. So she could have a place to live. So I could see her. Touch her. Now I have no one.” Her voice broke. “Nothing.” “She was gonna—” A swift jerk of the leash and she stumbled forward down the sloping forest floor, rough linen biting into her throat. She coughed. “Kill me.” Corinne rounded on her, eyes bulging, a vein in her forehead standing out so dramatically Beth took a half step back on pure reflex and choked herself again. “Six months of compensated manual labor, ” Corinne bit out as Beth gagged and spat, “is not a death sentence .” “Oh, you think they were gonna send us back once we were done putting a new wing on the Judy Chicago Memorial Museum of Interesting Vaginas?” “Don’t look at me like that,” Corinne spat, points of color blazing in her cheeks. “I don’t give a shit about any of that weird uterus worship. I have trans friends.” “Your sister was taking me to die.” Corinne hauled on the rope with a scream of pure frustrated rage, dragging Beth downslope at a stumbling run. Beth tripped over a half-buried rock and went sprawling, skinning her shoulder against the rough bark of a pine tree. Beth thought she felt her left pinky break beneath her as she levered herself awkwardly up into a sitting position. It felt as though her veins were full of thick, dark venom. “You know she came to see me a few times,” Beth rasped, spitting bloody mucus. “Got herself a little daddy fix. What a fucking ass she had.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The eldest and most religiously conservative of the Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, made use of the last play in his Oresteian trilogy, The Furies (Eumenides) to present a confrontation drama between patriarchal or paternal authority and what appear to be the defeated claims of an earlier order, one which had placed emphasis upon maternal claims and was in Bachofen’s view matriarchal. Working on the material of much earlier myth, the playwright has sharpened the Olympian decision between the claims of Clytemnestra and the Furies as against those of Agamemnon and Orestes to become something of an ideological conflict.125 One must go back before the scene of the play and recall the chain of events out of which its action arises. Clytemnestra had killed Agamemnon upon his return from Troy. A victorious general, coming home in triumph with a booty of captive women, among them the Trojan princess Cassandra, now maddened by rape and enslavement-Agamemnon’s assassination is a blow against all patriarchal authority; Clytemnestra’s act constitutes the most outrageous rebellion against the masculine authority of husband and king. In further treason to marital and political lordship, she has taken a lover during Agamemnon’s ten-year absence, and now aspires to share the throne with him. Above all, Clytemnestra seems to be defending the claims of mother-right in seeking to avenge her daughter Iphigenia, whom Agamemnon had enticed from her by promising that she was to marry Achilles, the pride of his army. Upon the girl’s arrival in his camp at Aulis, her father slaughtered the “bride,” a human sacrifice to propitiate the winds that carried him to Troy and glory. Deeply offended at his mother’s offense against primogeniture and masculine prerogative, Orestes then revenged his father’s death. But in committing matricide, he has provoked the rage of the Furies, who pursue him from city to city. In The Flies, Sartre passed off these dark avengers as guilt, remorse, or the force of public opinion. But in Aeschylus they appear as the deposed powers of a matriarchate, reduced already to the level of harridans. And their cry that Orestes’ crime must be punished (Clytemnestra already having paid for hers with her life) has something of the sound of matriarchy’s last stand in the ancient world.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The Russian retreat from a sexual revolution began with the worried discussions of the twenties, but did not get under way until the mid-thirties, and was not completed until 1944.47 Everything was done to re-enforce the family. In the new law of 1935 parents were again held responsible for their children’s education and behavior. Soviet ideology now announced that sexual union was to be “in principle a life-long union with children.” Sex and the family, sex and procreation, were welded together again. Having declined to fulfill its promise of crèches and collective housekeeping, and in view of its experience without them, as well as in view of the priority it put upon industrial projects, particularly armaments, Stalin’s Russia preferred to bolster the family so that it might perform the functions the state had promised but did not choose to afford. At the same time it now felt secure that the “new Soviet family” (the old, consisting of an earlier generation, had posed a threat) which Makarenko promulgated, with Stalin’s support, would be an admirable vehicle of state-directed socialization. Paternal authority was to be upheld again, which is not surprising when one understands that the state saw itself as delegating its authority to parents and in turn demanding them to rear the young in the correct manner.48 The new divorce law of 1936 punished the error of “mistaking infatuation with love” in fines levied for divorce of 30–50 roubles. In 1944 a harsher law raised the fine to 500–2000 roubles and required petition to a lower and higher court, both of which specialized in reconciliations. Free divorce had once been “the gift of the revolution”; now great financial, judicial, and ideological barriers were raised against it. Common law marriage, recognized since 1927 was revoked. The ZAG (civil registry) offices were smartened up and marriage and divorce no longer transacted at the same counter; encouragement was given so that weddings might become ritualistic again. Illegitimacy was reinstituted as a concept, severely penalized and stigmatized both in mother and child. The father was in such cases no longer held responsible. This of course permitted sexuality to become more exploitative than it had been in the 1920s. It is ironic that the reaction, put through in the name of protecting women and children (“the weak”) actually made their situation far worse. Women now had very little relief or escape from the total housekeeping and child-care burden as the old ideal of sexual equality became increasingly irrelevant to a nation preparing for war through the imposition of a militarist and authoritarian atmosphere often scarcely indistinguishable from traditional patriarchy. The archetypal figures of the mother and the soldier replaced the revolutionary comrades and lovers. Svetlov exulted that “motherhood has become a joy.” Vast campaigns were launched to honor mothers of large families, the law of 1936 awarded bonuses to women with six or more children; the law of 1944 rewarded mothers of seven or more with honorary titles and decorations.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I was something different, something new. I just hope that, twenty years in the future, they’d be comparing some kid to me: “Yeah, you see that kid shoot, he reminds me so much of Arnold Spirit.” Maybe that will happen. I don’t know. Can an Indian have a legacy in a white town? And should a teenager be worried about his fricking legacy anyway? Jeez, I must be an egomaniac. Well, anyway, our record was 12 wins and 1 loss when we had our rematch with Wellpinit. They came to our gym, so I wasn’t going to get burned at the stake. In fact, my white fans were going to cheer for me like I was some kind of crusading warrior: [image "Illustration depicting one character running playing basketball in two gyms. In the Wellpinit Gym, he is labeled ‘White-lover’ and is being booed, while in the Reardan, he is encouraged with cheers like ‘Destroy them, Arnold!’ In both parts, he thinks, ‘Who am I?’" file=image_rsrc4T9.jpg] Jeez, I felt like one of those Indian scouts who led the U.S. Cavalry against other Indians. But that was okay, I guess. I wanted to win. I wanted revenge. I wasn’t playing for the fans. I wasn’t playing for the white people. I was playing to beat Rowdy. Yep, I wanted to embarrass my best friend. He’d turned into a stud on his team. He was only a freshman, too, but he was averaging twenty-five points a game. I followed his progress in the sports section. He’d led the Wellpinit Redskins to a 13–0 record. They were the number one–ranked small school in the state. Wellpinit had never been ranked that high. And it was all because of Rowdy. We were ranked number two, so our game was a big deal. Especially for a small-school battle. And most especially because I was a Spokane Indian playing against his old friends (and enemies). A local news crew came out to interview me before the game. “So, Arnold, how does it feel to play against your former teammates?” the sports guy asked me. “It’s kind of weird,” I said. “How weird?” “Really weird.” Yep, I was scintillating. The sports guy stopped the interview. “Listen,” he said. “I know this is a difficult thing. You’re young. But maybe you could get more specific about your feelings.” “My feelings?” I asked. “Yeah, this is a major deal in your life, isn’t it?” Well, duh, yeah, of course it was a major deal. It was maybe the biggest thing in my life ever, but I wasn’t about to share my feelings with the whole world. I wasn’t going to start blubbering for the local sports guy like he was my priest or something. I had some pride, you know? I believed in my privacy. It wasn’t like I’d called the guy and offered up my story, you know?

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  To accommodate the many disturbing exceptions to sexual temperamental norms Freud made use of a sliding scale of gradation and variation of masculine and feminine, with Platonic ideals at either end, probably borrowed from Weininger. To this he added the theory of bisexuality. Bisexuality could be invoked, as Freud explained, when dealing with “ladies” who “whenever some comparison turned out to be unfavorable to their sex were able to utter a suspicion that we, the male analysts, had been unable to overcome certain deeply-rooted prejudices against what was feminine and this was being paid for in the partiality of our researches.” Freud then informs the reader how he responded: “Standing on the ground of bisexuality, we had no difficulty in avoiding impoliteness. We had only to say: ‘This does not apply to you. You’re the exception; on this point you are more masculine than feminine.’”96 Women who dispute logic are called men for their pains. And since the sexual-temperamental differentiation is, although supported by behavioral differences which constitute social norms, still thought by Freudians to be physiological in origin, to say that a female is not feminine is merely confusing. Nor does the theory of bisexuality provide much relief to the individual since femininity is forcefully prescribed and praised as the mature resolution of the child’s bisexual dilemma. On a number of occasions Freud allowed that masculine and feminine in their pure form are theoretical constructs of uncertain character.97 He further allows, as most social science has done since—to insidious effect—for overlap and graduated patterns. Yet the general effect of Freudian thought was, despite the theory of bisexuality, to equate, even to prescribe, what it defines as masculine with the biological male, feminine with the biological female. By 1933, when he came to write his definitive work on the subject, “Femininity” Freud had come to define the feminine as a “preference” for passive aims, or to put it in his own somewhat paradoxical phrase “the active pursuit of a passive function.”98 Freud had gradually rejected his earlier hypothesis that feminine temperament might be largely formed by the effect of learning processes and social pressure and, though still sometimes acknowledging in passing a social component, went further and further in identifying “feminine” attributes with “constitutional” “instinctive” or genetic tendencies.99

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “All that day I did not speak to my wife. I could not. Her proximity excited such hatred that I feared myself. At the table she asked me, in presence of the children, when I was to start upon a journey. I was to go the following week to an assembly of the Zemstvo, in a neighboring locality. I named the date. She asked me if I would need anything for the journey. I did not answer. I sat silent at the table, and silently I retired to my study. In those last days she never entered my study, especially at that hour. Suddenly I heard her steps, her walk, and then a terribly base idea entered my head that, like the wife of Uri, she wished to conceal a fault already committed, and that it was for this reason that she came to see me at this unseasonable hour. ‘Is it possible,’ thought I, ‘that she is coming to see me?’ On hearing her step as it approached: ‘If it is to see me that she is coming, then I am right.’ “An inexpressible hatred invaded my soul. The steps drew nearer, and nearer, and nearer yet. Would she pass by and go on to the other room? No, the hinges creaked, and at the door her tall, graceful, languid figure appeared. In her face, in her eyes, a timidity, an insinuating expression, which she tried to hide, but which I saw, and of which I understood the meaning. I came near suffocating, such were my efforts to hold my breath, and, continuing to look at her, I took my cigarette, and lighted it. “‘What does this mean? One comes to talk with you, and you go to smoking.’ “And she sat down beside me on the sofa, resting against my shoulder. I recoiled, that I might not touch her. “‘I see that you are displeased with what I wish to play on Sunday,’ said she. “‘I am not at all displeased,’ said I. “‘Can I not see?’ “‘Well, I congratulate you on your clairvoyance. Only to you every baseness is agreeable, and I abhor it.’ “‘If you are going to swear like a trooper, I am going away.’ “‘Then go away. Only know that, if the honor of the family is nothing to you, to me it is dear. As for you, the devil take you!’ “‘What! What is the matter?’ “‘Go away, in the name of God.’ “But she did not go away. Was she pretending not to understand, or did she really not understand what I meant? But she was offended and became angry.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “But how quick is the shift of passions from one extreme to another! and how little are they acquainted with the human heart who dispute it! I could not see this amiable criminal, so suddenly the first object of my love, and as suddenly of my just hate, on his knees, bedewing my hands with his tears, without relenting. He was still stark-naked, but my modesty had been already too much wounded, in essentials, to be so much shocked as I should have otherwise been with appearances only; in short, my anger ebbed so fast, and the tide of love returned so strong upon me, that I felt it a point of my own happiness to forgive him. The reproaches I made him were murmured in so soft a tone, my eyes met his with such glances, expressing more languor than resentment, that he could not but presume his forgiveness was at no desperate distance; but still he would not quit his posture of submission, till I had pronounced his pardon in form; which after the most fervent entreaties, protestations, and promises, I had not the power to withhold. On which, with the utmost marks of a fear of again offending, he ventured to kiss my lips, which I neither declined nor resented: but on my mild expostulation with him upon the barbarity of his treatment, he explained the mystery of my ruin, if not entirely to the clearance, at least much to the alleviation of his guilt, in the eyes of a judge so partial in his favour as I was grown.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  And you know this better than I; whichever of the two fails to subjugate will soon feel the feet of the other on his neck—” “And as a rule the man that of the woman,” cried Madame Venus with proud mockery, “which you know better than I.” “Of course, and that is why I don’t have any illusions.” “You mean you are now my slave without illusions, and for that reason you shall feel the weight of my foot without mercy.” “Madame!” “Don’t you know me yet? Yes, I am cruel—since you take so much delight in that word-and am I not entitled to be so? Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman’s entire but decisive advantage. Through his passion nature has given man into woman’s hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.” “Exactly your principles,” I interrupted angrily. “They are based on the experience of thousands of years,” she replied ironically, while her white fingers played over the dark fur. “The more devoted a woman shows herself, the sooner the man sobers down and becomes domineering. The more cruelly she treats him and the more faithless she is, the worse she uses him, the more wantonly she plays with him, the less pity she shows him, by so much the more will she increase his desire, be loved, worshipped by him. So it has always been, since the time of Helen and Delilah, down to Catherine the Second and Lola Montez.” “I cannot deny,” I said, “that nothing will attract a man more than the picture of a beautiful, passionate, cruel, and despotic woman who wantonly changes her favorites without scruple in accordance with her whim —” “And in addition wears furs,” exclaimed the divinity. “What do you mean by that?” “I know your predilection.” “Do you know,” I interrupted, “that, since we last saw each other, you have grown very coquettish.” “In what way, may I ask?” “In that there is no way of accentuating your white body to greater advantage than by these dark furs, and that—” The divinity laughed. “You are dreaming,” she cried, “wake up!” and she clasped my arm with her marble-white hand. “Do wake up,” she repeated raucously with the low register of her voice. I opened my eyes with difficulty.

• From My People (2022)

  I was born in Attapulgus, Georgia. My father was a field hand and my mother worked in the white folks’ house. I raised myself while she raised the white folks’ children. And we got to get some help for the old. And we got to do something about this educational system. That’s what produced the hippies. White colleges. I got more respect for the hippies than I have for the hypocrites. “RC is just a place we have to sleep and get some food to fight a war—a nonviolent war. We are here for an economic bill of rights. Congress’s job is to solve the problems. We are political analysts and psychiatrists and Congress is the patient.” On that Sunday morning there was a sense of movement and activity throughout the camp. This was true on any given day. Near the entrance to the camp, young boys played checkers and whist, and some were getting haircuts. Over the PA system in City Hall, someone was calling for attention. “Will Cornbread please report to City Hall immediately? Attention. Will Cornbread please report to City Hall immediately?” Like Leon and JT, most people didn’t know any other name for Cornbread but Cornbread. But Cornbread was a household word because he was on the case. Also on that morning, a tall, thin, white man looking like the church pictures of Jesus took up a position behind a table near the checkers game and began making predictions—that there would be a big snow in August; that there would be a Republican president in 1972; that people of America would one day eat one another. “Are you open to question?” someone called out. He did not respond. The thin man continued, saying that he had prophesied the burning in Washington. He was interrupted again, by another voice from what had become a building crowd. “Tell me what the number gon’ be so I can be a rich man tomorrow.” An elderly Negro man with a pair of crutches next to his chair called out, to no one in particular, “Hey, where are my cigars?” I asked the crippled man where he came from. Coy, Alabama. How long had he been at RC? “Since they drove the first nail,” he answered. “What have you been doing?” “Well, I can’t do much. I’ve got arthritis. I usually get up about four a.m. and just sit here. But I tried to organize a men’s Bible class like at my church back home. Not too much success, though. I had a lovely time yesterday. Seven of us went out to a church and we had services. Then we had a wonderful dinner there—fried chicken, candied potatoes, and wrinkle steaks. You know what those are, don’t you?” He smiled. “If I can hop a ride, I want to go back.” Sitting behind him were two young men. One was saying, “I got to fly home to court tomorrow. Charge of marijuana.

• From My People (2022)

  “If asking for an end to discrimination in housing one year, and a black dormitory the next sounds contradictory, it’s not,” Joe said. Then, talking all at once, they said that the demand was the logical next step to take with a university that says one thing, but does another. Earlier, Ben Colebert had said it bothered him that some black students would want to request such a thing, but added, “The university should spend less of its energies condemning it, and more trying to find out why they want it.” One indication of why might be revealed in the letter President Davison wrote to Benham in response to the demands. The letter, dated March 8, 1969, stated, in part: As for the recruitment of athletes, Athletic Director Evans has advised all coaches by memorandum that the university would recruit regardless of race, creed, or color. A Negro student has been designated to receive a tuition and books scholarship in the spring quarter if he is academically eligible to compete. To date, six Negro athletes have been offered full scholarships (three in football, two in track, and one in basketball) or would have been had they been academically eligible. This sounded vaguely reminiscent of the series of technicalities on which Hamilton and I were denied admission to the university for a year and a half. On KA, President Davison wrote: “Kappa Alpha is a duly constituted and recognized social fraternity and is in compliance with the provision of the department of student activities. The university cannot arbitrarily abolish such an organization.” It seemed almost as if the incidence of racism had risen in direct proportion to the number of blacks on campus. Joe put it this way: “To me racism is when you take English 101 and have to read Heart of Darkness , and point out that it’s racist, just like Othello , and the teacher takes points off my essay for it. In short, when you’re looking at things from a black perspective, they can’t understand it.” Several students at different times told me of a psychology professor who, upon seeing two black girls in his class, launched into a discussion of the high incidence of crime, illegitimacy, syphilis, and gonorrhea among black people, and ended by saying that he knew of at least two people who were going to flunk the course. The girls withdrew from the class. In some instances, escape was not so easy. One sociology major told me of a course required for a master’s in his field. It was called “Community Reconnaissance.” He was told he could not take the course that time around because it involved a field trip to Oglethorpe County, where the class was to survey community leaders on what they felt was wrong with their communities. The student, Leonard Lester, called Pie by the other blacks, said that he suspected there weren’t any black leaders in the area, but he demanded that he be allowed to take the course.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  To the layman it may appear abstruse that warfare is the inevitable bier logical destiny of the male, just as it is difficult or obscure how “nurturance” is the lifelong biological destiny of all females if one has already conceded that while childbirth and breast-feeding are biological, child care itself is only culturally assigned to women. Furthermore, classic studies in cultural anthropology used to prove that there was a nearly infinite variety in the division of roles and of labor. It is also highly relevant to examine the status line along which division of labor is established. In a culture where men weave and women fish, just as in a culture where men fish and women weave, it is axiomatic that whichever activity is assigned to the male is the activity with the greater prestige, power, status, and rewards.215 Having established the validity of their archetypal sex roles satisfactorily, it only remains to these authorities to insist that the conditioning be pervasive and efficient; prescription swiftly follows on description: If each generation were left entirely to its own devices, therefore, without even an older generation to copy, sex differences in role would presumably be almost absent in childhood and would have to be developed after puberty at the expense of considerable relearning on the part of one or both sexes.216 Hence, the advocacy of every means of enforcing orthodoxy to the sex role stereotype, as such educated opinion is now convinced of its “useful function”217 and even more determined that deviance or lack of pressure may produce that state of misfortune they refer to as “discontinuities in cultural conditioning.”218 Our authors are pleased to end their investigation of this branch of the subject on a complacent note: “The differences in socialization between the sexes in our society, then, are no arbitrary custom of our society, but a very widespread adaptation of culture to the biological substratum of human life.”219 As warfare is cultural and so is the question of who cares for children, it is still very unclear what the biological substratum might be. But biology is a word to conjure by, particularly in the social sciences; a vague reference to the male’s larger musculature is expected to silence criticism. It is also to be expected that, even though it is intellectually understood that (beyond breast-feeding) the assignment of child care is cultural rather than biological, middle-class Americans will let that slip by and infer that childbirth must mean child care, the two together again constituting “biology.” It is one of conservatism’s favorite myths that every woman is a mother.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  SA: Well, in various places, kids actually led the efforts against the bans. In Boise, Idaho, this young woman actually led the effort. She ended up in a city park distributing copies of True Diary to the public to battle against her own school board. So I’ve gotten letters from all sorts of kids like that who are fighting their own parents. Even last night at my son’s school, there was a man who was a liberal—it’s a very liberal school in a very liberal city—and we were talking about the influence of culture on our children and he advocated getting rid of your television, and I just shook my head. I mean, what a cliché, number one. And also, how censorious. What a censorious impulse. Does that man even recognize his own censorious impulses? That he wants to get rid of the outside world. That he wants to get rid of any image, any idea, any story, any thought that might upset him, that might cause him to have a conversation with his own child. Or, “Oh my God, there’s going to be something on that box I disagree with. Oh my God, I have to stop that.” Book banning punishes the imagination. Book banning punishes dialogue. Book banning turns disagreement into something evil and unwanted. Book banning turns opposing ideas into sins. Book banning is fundamentally religious, regardless of the religion. And I’m a secular warrior for free speech. JW: The book has given you so many opportunities to speak to communities about that, too. SA: Oh yeah, it’s been amazing, and it’s also so cute and quaint. It actually makes me feel so positive about books. That people are still so afraid of books that they’ll ban a book, they’ll keep their kid from reading a book, and yet their kid has an iPhone in their hands, access to every porn site in the world, access to all the porn that has ever been created, and yet they want my book banned because a teenage boy twice mentions masturbation. I think it says some-thing about books still being far more powerful. That the written word is still far more powerful than people think it is. JW: That immersion, that their kids are not just going to see pictures, they’re going to get ideas. SA: Yes, yes, yes. Scary books. Scary books. JW: This was your first YA book. Did it cause you to look at that genre differently? Read differently?

• From Going Clear (2013)

  If the IRS doesn’t recognize you, why should we?” As a part of the settlement, Miscavige revealed, the agency agreed to send notices to every country in the world, explaining what Scientology was. “It is very complete and very accurate,” Miscavige said of the government brochure. “How do I know? We wrote it!” Miscavige summed up the mood in the Sports Arena: “The future is ours.” A MONTH AFTER the church’s historic triumph over the IRS in 1993, Rathbun blew. He had come to see Miscavige in a different light during the two years they labored over the tax case. The last six months of the tax case had been particularly arduous. During that period, he slept only about four hours a night. The former athlete was a physical wreck. “ I’m only doing this for LRH,” he told himself, as he and Miscavige ate dinners together night after night in Washington and trudged back to the Four Seasons in Georgetown. “I’m not going to be this guy’s bitch for the rest of my life.” No doubt the stress affected Miscavige as well. On the night of his big victory speech in the Sports Arena, Miscavige showed up for a run-through, but the stage manager, Stefan Castle, was still fiddling with the cues for a complicated laser and pyrotechnic display. According to Castle, Miscavige stormed out into the arena and began to strangle him. Miscavige let him go before any real harm was done, but it was an alarming signal. Amy Scobee, head of the Celebrity Centre at the time, also noted that Miscavige’s personality began to shift immediately after the IRS decision, becoming more aggressive and hostile. At the party at the Celebrity Centre following his speech, Miscavige rudely shoved her aside as he entered. “ You just want to get rid of me,” she remembers him saying. As far as Rathbun was concerned, it didn’t help that Miscavige scarcely acknowledged him in the speech that night. Immediately after the event, reporters from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were calling Rathbun to ask about Miscavige’s salary, which had been disclosed in the IRS documents. Miscavige and his wife together were making more than $100,000 a year—not an extraordinary figure by the standards of world religious leaders, but quite a contrast to the $30 a week most of the Sea Org members were earning. Miscavige was outraged by the impertinence of the reporters, and Rathbun felt that he was taking it out on him. This was all coming at a time when he had been postponing a final visit to see his father, who was dying of cancer. The St. Petersburg Times published an editorial demanding that Congress investigate the tax-exemption decision. Rathbun was sent to Florida to turn around the Times editorial board, who were not at all persuaded by his arguments. Miscavige was furious that Rathbun failed to handle the situation.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  On a green hill in the background, I drew grave mounds in brown and topped them off with white crosses, each penciled with “R.I.P.” That truth—that death came in a big blind swipe—was gradually taking form in my head, picking up force and gaining motion like its own kind of storm. It was drawing me away from the other kids in a way I didn’t even notice. They still saw the world as some playground smiled over by God. I couldn’t, and their innocence rankled me to the point of fury. When Baptist girls standing next to me on the choir risers got all misty-eyed singing about the purple mountains’ majesty, I would often elbow or jostle them out of nothing but spite. If they turned my way in outrage, I’d make a wide-eyed apology. I couldn’t help myself. Sundays, when Carol Sharp came home from Bible school—her black hair pinched and shining in twin plastic barrettes, her petticoat sticking her pink skirt out sideways—and announced, while I was digging for worms in the flower box, how God had made me from dirt, I said I wasn’t dirt, and I wasn’t God’s Barbie doll either. And why would God set Death loose among us like some wind-up robot destroyer if he loved us so much. Carol was ready for this. “There are some mysteries in life the Lord doesn’t want us to understand,” which serene declaration caused me to turn our garden hose on her full force. Something in me had died when Grandma had, and while I didn’t miss her one iota, I keenly felt the loss of my own trust in the world’s order. Leechfield itself would make you think that way—the landscape, I mean. You needed to watch out for the natural world down there, to defend yourself against it. One fall morning I was crossing a meadow to a sugarcane field with a friend’s family when the bird dogs that had been running alongside the men with rifles turned and went into a hard point right at one little girl’s feet. Somebody’s daddy told us all to freeze still, which we did. He took aim with his Winchester where this four-year-old was standing in her red Keds, scared enough to wet her pants. When he fired, a rattlesnake flew thirty feet up in the still air. It landed with a plop in the weeds, where the dogs fell on it. You might well start toting a rifle or shotgun around after that, for reasons that had nothing to do with other human beings. It’s nature itself, revered in other climates, that’s Leechfield’s best advertisement for firearms. The woods held every species of poisonous snake, spider, and rabid biting creature available in that latitude. Even at the beach, there were signs warning you to stay out of the eelgrass because of the alligators. The Gulf itself was warm as dishwater and brown. There were stingrays and sea snakes under its surface.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “ She was a sweet, innocent thing thrown into chaos,” one of her shipmates recalled. John Brousseau was married to Shelly’s older sister, Clarisse, and one day he proposed that the two couples go fishing. Miscavige had never been. They drove up to Lake Hemet, a glacial lake in the mountains above Gold Base. It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was glinting off the water, a mild breeze was blowing, the wildflowers were out, and birds were singing. Everyone was dressed in shorts or jeans. They had brought sandwiches and sodas for a picnic. Brousseau baited the poles with salmon eggs, and then showed the others how to cast. He said to just let the line sink to the bottom and then sit back and wait. Maybe a trout would take a bite. Brousseau recalls looking over at Miscavige five minutes later. He was visibly shaking, his veins were bulging. “ You got to be kidding me!” he said. “This is it? You just sit here and fucking wait?” Brousseau said that was the general idea. “I can’t stand it!” Brousseau remembers Miscavige saying. “I feel like jumping in and grabbing a fish with my fucking hands! Or cramming the hook down their fucking throats!” That was the end of the fishing trip. After Quentin’s suicide and Mary Sue’s prison sentence, the remainder of Hubbard’s family broke apart. His oldest daughter, Diana, had been Hubbard’s main supporter. She and her husband, Jonathan Horwich, lived at Flag Base in the Fort Harrison penthouse in Clearwater, with their daughter, Roanne. As her father became increasingly remote, Diana decided to try her luck as a singer and songwriter. She released a soft-jazz album titled LifeTimes in 1979, using notable Scientologist musicians, including Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke, as backup. The cover features her in a black dress, lips parted, arms crossed, her pale shoulders hunched, and her waist-length red hair stirring in the breeze. Although the album received little notice, Diana decided to leave her husband, and the Sea Org, and marry John Ryan, a public Scientologist who had produced her record. She moved to Los Angeles to dedicate herself to music. Horwich agreed to the divorce, but he refused to part with Roanne, who was two years old at the time. Hubbard strongly supported this decision, but Mary Sue was opposed. She wanted her granddaughter to be nearby, and she began agitating for Diana to gain custody. Several missions were sent to bargain with Diana, but she was unmoved. Finally, Jesse Prince got the assignment. “ It was a do or die mission,” he recalled. If he didn’t succeed in gaining clear custody of Roanne for Horwich, he would be sent back to the RPF. For whatever reason, Diana signed the release he put in front of her. Hubbard was thrilled. He rewarded Prince with a leather coat, a gold chain, some cash, and an M14 assault rifle. Suzette, Diana’s younger sister, was increasingly disaffected.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  And he can’t hardly breathe.” I slid out of the covers and pulled on a hooded sweatshirt. Her hair was silky white, a glow in the dark room. “Won’t let you?” I said. The concept of permission as applied to Mother was foreign. She answered with a tired sigh. I took the sloshing vaporizer, which was the old hot-steam type she’d used for our croup as kids. Daddy was sitting on the edge of that oceanic bed in his boxer shorts barking out a dry cough. His head hung down between his broad shoulders like a wounded bull’s. On his right thigh was a plum-colored bump where he’d caught some shrapnel during the war. “Daddy?” I said, and he roared up for me to get the fuck out, which assault seemed to blast all available oxygen from the room. Maybe my hair flew back in cartoon astonishment. Then he wound down again into a gasping cough. He’d never talked to me that way, and I froze in it. After a while he seemed to forget I was standing there. He lay back down. He wasn’t exactly coughing, but his breathing had a jagged gasp in the middle of it. When I started nosing around behind the dresser for an electrical outlet, he roared up again. “What you want in here?” More coughs, the tendons on his neck stood out in sharp relief. I turned on the dresser lamp. The room was icebox cold, but he was in a flop sweat, his face bright with fever. The bedclothes held moist wrinkles where he’d been resting. I told him I was fixing to plug the vaporizer in. A bead of sweat hung from his nose. He wiped it with the back of his hand and squinted my way. “Your mother sent you in here, didn’t she?” Then he started a rant against her the likes of which I’d never heard. She was the most selfish person he’d ever known. She’d ruined everybody she ever touched. Including me and my sister. We weren’t nothing. Lecia with her Phi Beta Kappa in physics. Me with my MFA—Mother-Fucking Asshole’s what that stood for. Where he got the wind for all this, I can’t guess. His voice came out in a guttural rasp, like the possessed kid in that exorcist movie. Daddy railed down to his last breath: I couldn’t master my own rosy red ass, he said. Thermometers had degrees, he said. I still didn’t know my butt from a hole in the ground. I was crying by then. Once coughing had shut him up again, I started groping along the baseboard for an outlet. The lamp cord got jostled in the process, so the room plunged to black. He didn’t say anything. When I plugged the vaporizer in, a chubby road of steam started puffing right in my face. It smelled of menthol chest rub. He waved his ropy arm in the mist.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  So, weak and poor and scared, I let them call me names while I tried to figure out what to do. And it might have continued that way if Roger the Giant hadn’t taken it too far. It was lunchtime and I was standing outside by the weird sculpture that was supposed to be an Indian. I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn’t have a telescope, so I was just an idiot. Roger the Giant and his gang of giants strutted over to me. “Hey, Chief,” Roger said. It seemed like he was seven feet tall and three hundred pounds. He was a farm boy who carried squealing pigs around like they were already thin slices of bacon. I stared at Roger and tried to look tough. I read once that you can scare away a charging bear if you wave your arms and look big. But I figured I’d just look like a terrified idiot having an arm seizure. “Hey, Chief,” Roger said. “You want to hear a joke?” “Sure,” I said. “Did you know that Indians are living proof that niggers fuck buffalo?” I felt like Roger had kicked me in the face. That was the most racist thing I’d ever heard in my life. Roger and his friends were laughing like crazy. I hated them. And I knew I had to do something big. I couldn’t let them get away with that shit. I wasn’t just defending myself. I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo. So I punched Roger in the face. He wasn’t laughing when he landed on his ass. And he wasn’t laughing when his nose bled like red fireworks. I struck some fake karate pose because I figured Roger’s gang was going to attack me for bloodying their leader. But they just stared at me. They were shocked. “You punched me,” Roger said. His voice was thick with blood. “I can’t believe you punched me.” He sounded insulted. He sounded like his poor little feelings had been hurt. I couldn’t believe it. He acted like he was the one who’d been wronged. “You’re an animal,” he said. I felt brave all of a sudden. Yeah, maybe it was just a stupid and immature school yard fight. Or maybe it was the most important moment of my life. Maybe I was telling the world that I was no longer a human target. “You meet me after school right here,” I said. “Why?” he asked. I couldn’t believe he was so stupid. “Because we’re going to finish this fight.” “You’re crazy,” Roger said. He got to his feet and walked away. His gang stared at me like I was a serial killer, and then they followed their leader. I was absolutely confused.