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 284 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Cleanness (2020)

  It was about joy, the story he would tell me, but it wasn’t joy I saw as he moved back and forth between my cock and my hand, or not only joy. I had the sense that he was looking for something and not finding it, making his movements sharper and faster; he was asking a question I didn’t know how to answer, that I tried to answer by jabbing my hand and twisting it with each movement he made. But he was frustrated, I thought, and finally he stopped his motion, he forced himself down on my cock, taking me as deep as he could, shaking his head a little as if to work me in deeper, like a dog worrying a toy. I used my free hand to grab his head and fucked him as hard as I could, savagely, in a way meant to hurt him. I tilted slightly on my side and wrapped my legs around his head, trapping him and moving my hips very fast, as hard and as fast as I could, an uncontrolled motion, a kind of spasm to echo his own spasm as he choked on me, though even as he choked he locked his arms around my ass, to keep me from pulling away. I made a sound then too, loud and guttural, almost a shout, and it was only when I heard it that I realized it was anger I felt, hot and eager, I didn’t know where it came from but I would make him feel it too, I thought. I held him in place even as I felt him try to pull his head back, even after he started slapping my thighs again I held him down. I wanted to frighten him, I think, I wanted it not to be a game. You want it, I said as he struggled, you want it, take it then, I said, take it, you fucking whore, and it was the shock of the words that made me let him go, the words and what I felt as I said them. I pulled my fingers from him (slowly now, gently), and he grabbed my hand and brought it to his mouth, cleaning it though it wasn’t dirty, he was immaculate, he had cleaned himself out before I arrived. As he lay on his side gasping he said again So fucking good, not smiling now, and I thought I had satisfied him. But when he stood I saw he wasn’t satisfied, his cock was still hard as he stepped across the room and bent over to pick up the coil of my belt.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  She’d kept her pregnancy secret for as long as she could, and she was so fat to begin with that this deception came within two months of bringing her to term. Her name was Tina Flood, but everyone just called her The Flood. She was fifteen years old. The sheriff had talked to Tina, and on the basis of what she said he’d persuaded her father to hold off awhile before filing charges. Tina had said she didn’t want to charge anyone with anything, she just wanted Chuck to marry her. Mr. Flood, on the other hand, wanted to send the whole bunch of them to jail. But he must have known that this would do nothing for his daughter, and he must also have known that for Tina to marry into a family like the Bolgers would be a piece of luck wilder than anyone could have sanely imagined for her. So he had taken the sheriff’s advice. He was just waiting for Chuck to say the word. Chuck came back from the house that night and sat on his bed and told me everything. He also told me that he had no intention of marrying Tina Flood. He’d said this to the sheriff, too, said he’d spend the rest of his life in jail first. The sheriff told him not to make up his mind too fast. He would keep Mr. Flood at bay until Chuck had a chance to think about it and talk things over with his folks. But he left no doubt of the outcome if Chuck turned Tina down. He would go to prison. The charge was serious, and the case against him and the others was rock solid. Chuck said he wouldn’t do it. I told him I wouldn’t either. I encouraged him, but in my heart I was glad he was in trouble, and not just because it would take the heat off me. I was still hurt that he had deserted me in my own trouble. It did not displease me to see Chuck on the griddle now, and to have the chance to show him that I was a better friend than he had been. I would stand up for him. No one else did. Not Huff or Psycho, not even his parents. Mrs. Bolger was in too much pain even to speak to him. She wept constantly, and hardly ever left the house. Mr. Bolger’s worry for her expressed itself in implacable anger toward Chuck. He rode Chuck hard, and when he wasn’t riding him he watched him furiously, especially during meals. Dinner was the worst time of the day. No one spoke. The sounds of steel on china, of chewing and swallowing, of chairs creaking, all seemed amplified and grotesque. Chuck’s sisters bolted their food and got out of there. So did I. Chuck had to stay, and then, when everyone else was gone, get browbeaten by his father. Mr. Bolger wanted him to marry Tina Flood.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Well, after that I've got to, er, I've got to do some teaching." He lay very still, and I could feel his heart beating indignantly. "Are you teaching Luc?" I pushed myself free of him and sat up. "For god's sake don't go on about that," I said. "That's all over long ago. I can't think what I ever saw in the little shit." I walked out into the main room, improvising as I went; I didn't want to watch his reactions. "He's so . . . so arrogant, and lazy, he's impossible to teach. He's got a girlfriend. I mean . . . He's not attractive, his mouth is horrible, as everyone says, it's virtually deformed ... ." My flesh was prickling and I had tears in my eyes from the confusion of play-acting and heresy. I kept myself hunched away when Cherif padded after me and hugged me from behind in his turn. When I swung into Long Street I nearly tripped on a busy little terrier that yapped in alarm and scampered aside. I looked up and there was the bearded figure of Old Gus. He came on with his glaring swagger, his stick slicing as if at grass-stalks. I stepped aside myself, and as I was just by him he halted and said amiably, "Could you spare me a few francs?" I pretended for a moment not to have heard, but then in an old muddle of principle and superstition dug my hand into my pocket and brought out all my change, quite a bit, a couple of quid, started to pick among it and then just gave it all to him. I felt an immediate certainty of worth, of providence's palm being greased and of a prompt reward, an hour of new sweetness with Luc. Old Gus pocketed the money, and stared at me with his withering eye. "Bastard!" he barked, with hatred and ferocity, smacked his stick against the pavement, turned on his heel and stamped off.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  So before my freshman year started, I told Mom that I’d live with her so long as I could stay in Middletown’s schools and see Mamaw whenever I wanted. She said something about needing to transfer to a Dayton school after my freshman year, but I figured we’d cross that bridge in a year, when we had to. Living with Mom and Matt was like having a front-row seat to the end of the world. The fighting was relatively normal by my standards (and Mom’s), but I’m sure poor Matt kept asking himself how and when he’d hopped the express train to crazy town. It was just the three of us in that house, and it was clear to all that it wouldn’t work out. It was only a matter of time. Matt was a nice guy, and as Lindsay and I joked, nice guys never survived their encounters with our family. Given the state of Mom and Matt’s relationship, I was surprised when I came home from school one day early during my sophomore year and Mom announced that she was getting married. Perhaps, I thought, things weren’t quite as bad as I expected. “I honestly thought you and Matt were going to break up,” I said. “You fight every day.” “Well,” she replied, “I’m not getting married to him.” It was a story that even I found incredible. Mom had been working as a nurse at a local dialysis center, a job she’d held for a few months. Her boss, about ten years her senior, asked her out to dinner one night. She obliged, and with her relationship in shambles, she agreed to marry him a week later. She told me on a Thursday. On Saturday we moved into Ken’s house. His home was my fourth in two years. Ken was born in Korea but raised by an American veteran and his wife. During that first week in his house, I decided to inspect his small greenhouse and stumbled upon a relatively mature marijuana plant. I told Mom, who told Ken, and by the end of the day it had been replaced with a tomato plant. When I confronted Ken, he stammered a bit and finally said, “It’s for medicinal purposes, don’t worry about it.” Ken’s three children—a young girl and two boys about the same age I was—found the new arrangement as strange as I did. The oldest boy fought constantly with Mom, which—thanks to the Appalachian honor code—meant that he fought constantly with me. Shortly before I went to bed one night, I came downstairs just as he called her a bitch. No self-respecting hillbilly could stand idly by, so I made it abundantly clear that I meant to beat my new stepbrother to within an inch of his life. So unquenchable was my appetite for violence that night that Mom and Ken decided that my new stepbrother and I should be separated. I wasn’t even particularly angry.

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

  I was not surprised at her anger but I wondered if other feelings lay buried under the surface, especially feelings of love, disappointment, or regret. “Did you ever make any attempt to get closer to him?” She answered angrily. “I remember forever those dreary weekends and those lonely Julys without my friends when I cried my eyes out. I have no reason in the world to be in contact with him and so why should I bother?” There was no mistaking Joan’s anger and sense of having been treated unjustly by powerful forces over which she had no control. As we talked, I had a sad sense that both father and daughter had missed a unique opportunity to get to know and cherish each other. Their spontaneous interest in one another had been blocked by a system that could only antagonize an adolescent and discourage a father from having to make the effort to find points of mutual interest with his daughter. By relying on his “rights,” he lost her. What a pity. How foolish we are to think that we can legislate or direct the human heart. When Joan was twenty-eight years old I asked her about her social life. “Oh, I go out a lot,” she said. “And I get hurt a lot. Maybe it has to do with my being dominated all those years by my dad and the court. But it’s hard for me to stand up for what I want. I never learned to fight for myself.” Joan clearly made a connection between the powerlessness she felt as a child and her current relationships with men. If she is right—and I believe she is—then our interventions are not only misguided but may have harmed an entire generation of young people who grew up under similar circumstances. How many are still reacting to their feelings of having been bullied and made to feel powerless? Two Wrongs Don’t Make a RightTHE AMERICAN LEGAL system is under the impression that its activities and decisions are geared toward safeguarding children after divorce. But I have rarely met a child who felt protected by this system. On the contrary, most children would be very surprised to hear that any judge, attorney, mediator, or anyone else had their interests at heart when setting up court-ordered visiting. Many do not feel protected by their own parents in the planning of visiting or custody. Instead, they feel silenced. The visiting schedule, which the children deem arbitrary and oppressive, is made without their interests and wishes in mind.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The victim's testimony must, therefore, be altered. But, since no one outside the victim's situation dares imagine the victim's situation, this testimony can be altered only after it CHAPTER THREE has been delh·ered; and after it has become the object of some study. The purpose of this scrutiny is to emphasize certain striking details which can then be used to quite another pur pose than the ,·ictim had in mind. Gi,·en the complexity of the human being, and the complexities of society, this is not difficult. (Or, it does not appear to be difficult: the endless re,·isions made in the victim's testimony suggest that the en deavor may be impossible. Wounded Knee comes to mind, along with "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," and we ha\'e yet to hear from J\ly Lai.) Thus, for example, ghetto citizens have been heard to complain, ,·ery loudly, of the damage done to their homes during any ghetto uprising, and a grateful Re public fastens on this as a bene,·olent way of discouraging future uprisings. But the truth is, and every ghetto citizen knows this, that no one trapped in the ghetto owns anything, since they certainly do not own the land. Anyone who doubts this has only to spend tomorrow walking through the ghetto nearest to his. Once the ,·ictim's testimony is deJi,·ered, howe,·er, there is, thereafter, forever, a witness somewhere: which is an irreduc ible incom·enience for the makers and shakers and accomplices of this world. These run together, in packs, and corroborate each other. They cannot bear the judgment in the eyes of the people whom they intend to hold in bondage forever, and who know more about them than their lovers. This remote, public, and, as it were, principled, bondage is the indispen sable justification of their own: when the prisoner is free, the jailer faces the mid of himself.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It demands a tremendous effort of the will and an absolute surrender of the personality to act on the lies one tells oneself It is not true that people become liars without knowing it. A liar always knows he is lying, and that is why liars travel in packs: in order to be reassured that the judgment day will never come t< >r them. They need each other t(>r the well-being, the health, the perpetuation of their lie. They have a tacit agreement to guard each other's secrets, for TO BE BAPTIZED they have the same secret. That is why all liars arc cruel and filthy minded-one's merely got to listen to their dirty jokes, to what they think is funny, which is also what they think is real. The flower children seemed completely aware that the blacks were their denied brothers, seemed even to be patiently waiting for the blacks to recognize that they had repudiated the house. For it seemed to have struck the flower children-I judged this fr om their conduct, fr om what seemed to be their blind and moving need to become organic, autonomous, lov ing and joyful creatures; their desire to connect love, joy, and eroticism, so that all flowed together as one-that they were themselves the issue of a dirty joke, the dirty joke which has always been hidden at the heart of the legend of the Virgin birth. They were in the streets in the hope of becoming whole. They had taken the first step-they had said, No. Whether or not they would be able to take the second step, the harder step-of saying, Yes, and then going for their own most pri vate broke-was a question which much exercised my mind, as indeed it seemed to exercise the minds, very loosely speak ing, of all the tourists and policemen in the area. When the heir of a great house repudiates the house, the house cannot continue, unless it looks to alien blood to save it; and here were the heirs and heiresses of all the ages, in the streets, along with that blood always considered to be most alien, never lawfully to be mixed with that of the sons and daughters of the great house. I seemed to observe in some of the eyes that watched them that same bright, paranoid, flinching bewilderment I have seen in the eyes of some white Americans when they encoun ter a black man abroad.

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

  But with all due respect, our rigid court structure may be the wrong forum for making decisions about parents and children at the time of divorce. Judges have no special training to help them deal with families in crisis. They are charged with safeguarding the best interests of children without knowledge about the needs of children at different developmental stages. Few have been exposed to studies on the impacts of divorce on children and what helps or hinders their adjustment. Moreover, the courts are hard pressed for time and staff. This frustration with our current system is widely shared among judges. Findings from this twenty-five-year study challenge the central assumption of our court policy: namely, that if parents refrain from conflict, issues around custody, contact, and economic support will be settled expeditiously, both parents will resume their parenting roles, and the child will resume her normal developmental progress. But it is manifestly misguided to expect that muting conflict between divorced parents by itself will reinstate the course of parenting observed in intact families. It is in fact misguided to expect that arrangements made at the time of the breakup will effectively shape the child’s future. What influences the child are the long-term circumstances of life during the postdivorce years. As couples exit the courthouse steps, profound changes in parent-child relationships lie ahead. Parenting in the postdivorce family is far less stable than parenting in the functioning intact family. Visiting or custody arrangements that work immediately after the divorce when both parents are single often collapse when a new wife or husband has priorities that may not include time or sacrifices on behalf of children from the former marriage. Everything changes when a second marriages fails, or when the individual circumstances of each parent zig and zag, or when the child gets older and has different needs plus a mind of her own. Only a very small handful of children in this study continued to have close relationships with both parents during the postdivorce years. The course of parent-child relationships is far less predictable than either parents or courts acknowledge. To help parents and children in divorcing families, our courts and mental health professionals associated with the legal system need a more realistic view of the postdivorce family. Parent educators should address the long-term needs of children and help parents anticipate the changes and stresses that lie ahead as they try to meet those challenges. Although discouraging conflict is important, parent education courses should prepare mothers and fathers for the long haul. They will be coparents for many years, meeting the challenges of sole or joint custody, visiting, and myriad financial and emotional crises that inevitably arise until the child becomes an adult.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They arc present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, morco\ler-even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity-quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot pos sibly arrive at a more sure-fire formula for cruelty. This is why those pious calls to "respect the law," always to be heard fr om prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Ne gro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect. On April 1 7 , some school children overturned a fr uit stand in Harlem. This would have been a mere childish prank if the children had been white-had been, that is, the children of that portion of the citizenry for whom the police work and who have the power to control the police. But these children were black, and the police chased them and beat them and took out their guns; and Frank Stafford lost his eye in exactly the same way The Harlem Six lost their liberty-by trying to protect the younger children. Daniel Hamm, for example, tells us that " ... we heard children scream. We turned around and walked back to sec what happened. I saw this policeman with his gun out and with his billy in his hand. I like put myself in the way to keep him fr om shooting the kids. Because first of all he was shaking like a leaf and jumping all over the place. And I thought he might shoot one of them." He was arrested, along with Wallace Baker, carried to the police station, bcatcn-"six and twelve at a time would beat us. They got so tired beating us they just came in and started spitting on us-they even bring phlegm up and spit on me." REPORT FROM OCCUPIED TERRITORY 735 This went on all day. In the evening, Wallace Baker and Daniel Hamm were taken to Harlem Hospital for X rays and then carried back to the police station, where the beating con tinued all night. They were eventually released, with the fruit stand charges pending, in spite of the testimony of the fruit-stand owner. This fruit-stand owner had already told the police that neither Wallace Baker nor Daniel Hamm had ever been at his store and that they certainly had had nothing to do with the fruit-stand incident. But this had no effect on the conduct of the police. The boys had already attracted the at tention of the police, long before the fru it-stand riot, and in a perfectly innocent way.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is absolutely true, no matter who denies it-no black man can possibly deny it. Now, in the interest of the public peace, it is the Black Panthers who are being murdered in their beds, by the dutiful and zealous police. But, for a policeman, all black men, es pecially young black men, are probably Black Panthers and all black women and children are probably allied with them: just as, in a Vietnamese village, the entire population, men, women, children, are considered as probable Vietcong. In the village, as in the ghetto, those who were not dangerous before the search-and-destroy operation assuredly become so after ward, for the inhabitants of the village, like the inhabitants of the ghetto, realize that they are identified, judged, menaced, murdered, solely because of the color of their skin. This is as curious a way ofwaging a war for a people's fr eedom as it is of maintaining the domestic public peace. The ghetto, beleaguered, betrayed by Washington, by the total lack of vision of the men in Washington, determined to outwit, withstand, survive, this present, overwhelming danger, 4- H NO NAME IN THE STREET yet lacks a focus, a rallying point, a spokesman. And many of us looked at each other and sighed, saying, Lord, we really ueed Malcolm 11011'. Hollywood, or a segment of it, at least, was becoming in creasingly active on the question of civil rights-now, I thought, sourly, and somewhat unjustly, that the question had been rendered moribund. Just the same, there was a ground swell to replace the toothsome, grimly folksy mayor, Sam Yorty, who had been in office since 1911, with someone who had heard of the twentieth century, in this case, Tom Bradley, a Negro. People like Jack Lemmon, Jean Seberg, Robert Culp, and france Nuyen were actively supporting Martin Luther King, pledging money and getting others to pledge, and some were helping to raise money for a projected Malcolm X foundation. Marlon Brando was very much in the forefront of all this. He had a strong interest in the Black Panthers and was ac quainted with many of them. On April 6, Eldridge Cleaver was wounded, and Bobby Hutton was killed, in Oakland, in what the police describe as a "shoot-out." Marlon called me to say that he was going up to Oakland. I wanted to go with him, but Martin Luther King had been murdered two days before, and, to tell the truth, I was in a state resembling shock. I can't describe this, or defend it, and I won't dwell on it.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is not by chance, and it is not an act of God. It is a result of the action of the American institutions, all of which arc racist: it is re velatory of the real and helpless impulse of most white Amer icans toward black people. 804 OTHER ESSAYS Therefore, in a couple of days, blacks may be using the vote to outwit the Final Solution. Yes. The Final Solution. No black person can afford to forget that the history of this coun try is genocidal, fr om where the buffalo once roamed to where our ancestors were slaughtered (from New Orleans to New York, fr om Birmingham to Boston) and to the Caribbean to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Saigon. Oh, yes, let fr eedom ring. Why are you voting for Carter, Uncle Jimmy ? Well, don't, first of all, take this as an endorsement. It's meant to be a hard look at the options, which, however, may no longer exist by the time you read this, may no longer exist as I write. I lived in California when Ronald Reagan was Governor, and that was a very ugly time-the time of the Black Panther harassment, the beginning (and the end) of the Soledad Brothers, the persecution, and trial, of Angela Davis. That, all that, and much more, but what I really found unspeakable about the man was his contempt, his brutal contempt, for the poor. Perhaps because he is a Southerner, there lives in Carter still-I think-an ability to be tormented. This does not nec essarily mean much, so many people preferring torment to action, or responsibility, and it is, furthermore, a very real question (for some; some would say that it's not a question at all) as to how much of Carter belongs to Carter. But if he can still be tormented, he can be made to pause-the ma chinery can be made to pause-and we will have to find a way to use that pause. It is terror that informs the American political and social scene-the terror of leaving the house of bondage. It isn't a terror of seeing black people leave the house of bondage, for white people think that they know that this cannot really hap pen, not even to Leontyne Price, or Mohammad Ali, who are, after all, "exceptions," with white blood, and mortal. No, white people had a much better time in the house of bondage than we did, and God bless their souls, they're going to miss it-all that adulation, adoration, ease, with nothing to do but fornicate, kill Indians, breed slaves and make money. Oh, there were rough times, too, as Shane, True Grit and Rocky inf(>rm us, but the rules of the game were clear, and the re wards demanded nothing more complex than stamina. God THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE 8os was a businessman, like all "real" Americans, and understood that "business was business."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is very nearly impos sible, after all, to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind. The fact that F.A.M.U. is a Negro university merely serves to demonstrate this Amer ican principle more clearly; and the pressure now being placed on the Negro administration and faculty by the white Florida State Board of Control further hampers the university's ef fectiveness as a training ground for future citizens. In fact, if the Florida State Board of Control has its way, Florida will no longer produce citizens, only black and white sheep. I do not think or, more accurately, I refuse to think that it JVill have its way but, at the moment, all that prevents this are the sorely menaced students and a handful of even more sorely menaced teachers and preachers. My driver impresses upon me the newness of most of the campus buildings. Later on I found out that these buildings date fr om 1956, just two years after the Supreme Court de clared the separate-but-equal statute to be invalid. The old buildings, however, are dreadfully old and some of the faculty live in barracks abandoned by the Air Force after the Second World War. These too were "renovated" after the separate but-equal statute had been outlawed. During the time that "separate-but-equal" was legal it did not matter how unequal facilities t<>r Negroes were. But now that the decree is illegal THEY CAN ' T TURN BACK 62 5 the South is trying to make Negro facilities equal in order to keep them separate. From this it may not be unfair to con clude that a building, a campus or a system is considered ren ovated when it has merely been disguised. But I do not say any of this to my driver. The university guesthouse is not expecting me; this fr ight ens and angers me, and we drive to a motel outside of town. The driver and the Negro woman who runs the motel know each other in a casual, friendly way. I have only large bills and the driver has no change; but the woman tells him she will take the money I owe him out of my room rent and pay him when he comes again. They speak together exactly as though they were old fr iends, yet with this eerie distance between them. It is impossible to guess what they really think of each other. Some students I met in New York had told me about Richard Haley. I had written him and he now arrives and places himself, shortly, as my ally and my guide. He and an other member of F.A.M.U.'s staff had come to the airport earlier to meet me but had arrived too late.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Yet when they called his name to the transfer office, he lost no time gathering his things and getting in the van to leave. — A week later, Walter sat in the van with shackles pinching his ankles and chains tightly wound around his waist. He could feel his feet beginning to swell because the circulation was cut off by the metal digging into his skin. The handcuffs were too tight, and he was becoming uncharacteristically angry. “Why you got these chains on me this tight?” The two Baldwin County deputies who had picked him up a week earlier had not been friendly on the trip from death row to the courthouse. Now that he had been convicted of capital murder, they were downright hostile. One seemed to laugh in response to Walter’s question. “Them chains is the same as they were when we picked you up. They just feel tighter because we got you now.” “You need to loosen this, man, I can’t ride like this.” “It ain’t going to happen, so you should get your mind off it.” Walter suddenly recognized the man. At the end of the trial when the jury had found Walter guilty, his family and several of the black people who had attended the trial were in shocked disbelief. Sheriff Tate claimed that Walter’s twenty-four-year-old son, Johnny, said, “Somebody’s going to pay for what they’ve done to my father.” Tate asked deputies to arrest Johnny, and there was a scuffle. Walter saw the officers wrestle his child to the ground and place him in handcuffs. The more he looked at the two deputies driving him back to death row, the more convinced he became that one of them had tackled his son. The van began to move. They wouldn’t tell Walter where he was going, but as soon as they got on the road it was clear that they were taking him back to death row. He had been upset and distraught on the day of his arrest, but he was so sure he’d be released soon. He got frustrated when the days turned into weeks at the county jail. He was depressed and terrified when they took him to death row before trial before being convicted of any crime, and the weeks became months. But when the nearly all-white jury pronounced him guilty, after fifteen months of waiting for vindication, he was shocked, paralyzed. Now he felt himself coming back to life—but all he could feel was seething anger. The deputies were driving him back to death row and talking about a gun show they were planning to attend. Walter realized that he had been foolish to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. He knew Tate was vicious and no good, but he assumed that the others were just doing what they had been told. Now he was feeling something that could only be described as rage. “Hey, I’m going to sue all of y’all!”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  TO BE BAPTIZED 4-4-1 The fate of his client depends, to put it brutally, on the client's money: one may say, generally, that, if a poor man in trouble with the law receives justice, one can suppose heavenly inter vention. A poor man is always an isolated man, in the sense that his intimates are as ignorant and as helpless as he. Tony has been in prison since October 2 7 , 196 7 , and remains in prison still. He had been brought to trial once in all that time; the trial resulted in a hung jury. A citizen more favorably placed than Tony would never have been treated in this way. It would appear, for example, that Tony's constitutional rights were vi olated at the very moment he was arrested because of the means used to identify him. This question has never been brought up, though Tony has insisted on it time and again. The police are very sensitive about being accused of \'iolating a suspect's constitutional rights-they are, indeed, as sensitive to any and all criticism as aging beauty queens-and would never have arrested Tony in the way that they did if they had not been certain that his accusation could never be heard. Tony had almost nothing going for him, except his devoted sister, Valerie, and me. But neither Valerie nor I are equipped to deal with the world into which we found ourseh·es so sud denly plunged, and I found myself severely handicapped in this battle by being forced to fight it from three thousand miles away. This meant that there was a vacuum where Tony's witness should ha\'e been. This would not have been so if the system worked differently, or if it were served by different people. But the system works as it works, and it attracts the people it attracts. The poor, the black, and the ignorant become the stepping stones of careers; for the people who make up this remarkable club are judged by their number of arrests and convictions. These matter far more than justice, if justice can be said to matter at all. It is clearly much easier to drag some ignorant wretch to court and burden him with whatever crimes one likes than it is to undergo the inconvenience and possible danger of finding out what actually happened, and who is actually guilty.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Al abama, for example, was not, merely, the action of a mob. That blood is on the hands of the state of Alabama: which sent those mobs into the streets to execute the will of the State. And, though I know that it has now become inconven ient and impolite to speak of the American Jew in the same breath with which one speaks of the American black (I hate to say I told you so, sings the right righteous Reverend Ray Charles, but: I told you so), I yet contend that the mobs in the streets of Hitler's Germany were in those streets not only by the will of the German State, but by the will of the western world, including those architects of human freedom, the Brit ish, and the presumed guardian of Christian and human mo rality, the Pope. The American Jew, if I may say so-and I THE PRICE OF THE TICKET say so with love, whether or not you believe me-makes the error of believing that his Holocaust ends in the New World, where mine begins. My diaspora continues, the end is not in sight, and I certainly cannot depend on the morality of this panic-stricken consumer society to bring me out of-: Egypt. A mob cannot afford to doubt: that the Jews killed Christ or that niggers want to rape their sisters or that anyone who fails to make it in the land of the fr ee and the home of the brave deserves to be wretched. But these ideas do not come from the mob. They come fr om the state, which creates and manipulates the mob. The idea of black persons as property, for example, does not come fr om the mob. It is not a spon taneous idea. It does not come fr om the people, who knew better, who thought nothing of intermarriage until they were penalized for it: this idea comes from the architects of the American State. These architects decided that the concept of Property was more important-more real-than the possibil ities of the human being. In the church I come from-which is not at all the same church to which white Americans belong-we were coun selled, fr om time to time, to do our first works over. Though the church I come from and the church to which most white Americans belong are both Christian churches, their relation ship--due to those pragmatic decisions concerning Property made by a Christian State sometime ago-cannot be said to involve, or suggest, the fellowship of Christians. We do not, therefore, share the same hope or speak the same language.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I don't know if Riker's is Jewish, but I didn't like scrubbing their floors. I don't know if the big, white bruiser who thought it was fun to call me "Shine" was Jewish, but I know I tried to kill him-and he stopped calling me "Shine." I don't know if the last taxi driver who refused to stop for me was Jewish, but I know I hoped he'd break his neck before he got home. And I don't think that General Electric or Gen eral Motors or R.C.A. or Con Edison or Mobiloil or Coca Cola or Pepsi-Cola or Firestone or the Board of Education or the textbook industry or Hollywood or Broadway or televi sion-or Wall Street, Sacramento, Dallas, Atlanta, Albany, or Washington-arc controlled by Jews. I think they are con trolled by Americans, and the American Negro situation is a direct result of this control. And anti-Semitism among Ne- NEGROES ARE ANTI-SEMITIC BECAUSE ... 74-I groes, inevitable as it may be, and understandable, alas, as it is, does not operate to menace this control, but only to con firm it. It is not the Jew who controls the American drama. It is the Christian. The root of anti-Semitism among �egroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples-all m·er the globe-to the Christian world. This is a fact which may be difficult to grasp, not only for the ghetto's most blasted and embittered inhab itants, but also for many Jews, to say nothing of many Chris tians. But it is a fact, and it will not be ameliorated-in fact, it can only be aggra,·ated-by the adoption, on the part of colored people now, of the most devastating of the Christian \'lCeS. Of course, it is true, and I am not so naive as not to know it, that many Jews despise �egroes, even as their Aryan broth ers do. (There are also Jews who despise Jews, e\·en as their Aryan brothers do.) It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,ooo,ooo by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots-or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew. It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Some of us, fol lowing Martin, and, however we may sometimes have dis agreed with him, feeling his love, and believing I have a dream! could sometimes raise in an evening $ 3 o,ooo or $4-o,ooo or $5 o,ooo-yes: which was gone in bail-bond money in the morning. And, yes, my fr iend, that is called collusion. The kids would die in the chain gang, and we would drop dead on the road. Or, as my fr iend the actress Miss Ruby Dee once put it to me, after four girls were killed in the 19 6 3 bombing of the Birmingham Sunday School, and as we were trying to organize a protest rally-to demand, in fact-that the American people, in the light of so dreadful an event, declare Christmas a day of mourning, of atonement: asoon, there won't be enough black people to go a round." I was present at the culmination of the voter-registration drive in Selma, Alabama, not so very long ago. My friend James Forman had been organizing for six months, or there abouts; it is not easy, in such a town, where virtually every 7 68 OTHER ESSAYS white man considers that he owns every black man. (I am speaking with the utmost restraint and will not attempt to describe the events of that day.) Nevertheless, hundreds of people came out early in the morning and lined up in fr ont of the courthouse. In Selma, there arc two courthouses, the state courthouse and a Federal courthouse, and they face each other across a narrow street-catty-corner to these two buildings is a re cruiting station (Uncle Sam JVants you !) . The sheriff, armed, forced us to move from one side of the street to the other-that is, to the steps of the Federal court house. "We" arc now, among others, Representative John Conyers, my brother David, and myself. Representatives of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation arc standing on the steps with us, under the American flag. (We have already seen the sheriff and his deputies beat up two black boys and hurl them into a truck-but they were on the wrong side of the street.) The sheriff crosses the street and demands that we leave the steps of the Federal courthouse. I ask the Justice Department, or the F.B.I., if he has any right to throw us off Federal prop erty. No, is the answer, but JVe can}t do anything about it. I am watching the recruiting station. We'll move inside be cause the alternative is slaughter.

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

  In these families, the children hardly matter to their parents. Instead of existing as real people separate from the parents’ wishes or sudden whims, the children are shadowy figures who hover on the periphery of their parents’ lives like courtiers or slaves in the sultan’s palace waiting to be summoned. In Carol’s family the parents are themselves the children. They are astonishingly self-absorbed, acting out their own impulses while being completely unaware of their children’s suffering. They don’t understand or care that their immoral behavior will warp the developing conscience of their children and harm the children’s future relationships. It’s fashionable in some circles to claim that people who divorce are more selfish or, as the saying goes, more “narcissistic” than those who stay married. But it would be hard to think of any couple more self-centered than Carol’s parents and others in this group of very troubled intact marriages. EIGHTOur Failure to InterveneLarry entered adolescence like a hungry tiger. He became involved in every drug known to teenagers and went to school every day stoned. He stayed out late and came home sick from drinking booze. With a vengeance, he violated every rule that his mother or the school laid down. Finally, in despair, his mother called her ex-husband and asked if he would take the boy because she could not control him. She reminded Larry’s father that he had offered many times to take his son into his life and that this was the time to follow through on his promises. The next day, Larry was in his room packing his clothes when the phone rang. It was his dad who hemmed and hawed and finally said, “This is not a good time for you to come live with me.” Instantly Larry understood the deeper message: there will never be a good time. Feeling totally betrayed, he turned on his mother and began beating her with his fists. She managed to escape into her bedroom and, terrified by her son’s behavior, called 911. Larry was taken to the local police station and spent the rest of the day in a marathon session with a specially trained officer and his mother. For hours, he howled in anger and despair about how much he hated his father for rejecting him and how his whole life had been ruined by his parents’ divorce.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He had the story all ready. "Yes, they brought him back to school in the first lesson." " actually done anything wrong?" "Drink. Drugs. Smoking. Theft. Trespassing. Swearing at a policeman." "You're supposed to be talking English," I said, to hide the shock this incident still caused me. I didn't want him to find the words to go on about it. The imagined scene was too tender and painful, too much my own dark possession. "I have the idea you didn't like Luc very much." He was silent, turned to gaze through his smeared side-window at the hidden farms. "He set fire to my hair," he said at last. "Oh my god." "Altidore and Dhondt. Dhondt was worse, but Altidore always did what he said. They set fire to my cape and gave me an asthma attack." It was a wonder he wasn't done for arson as well. "But that's terrible," I said; I was cross and disappointed and very slightly excited. "Yes, it is. I had to go to hospital as you know. Altidore had already had his warning before he ran away." "But you think it was . . . Dhondt who was really behind it." I was lost in this horrible vision of Luc as a coward and a bully. It must have been Dhondt with his dreadful gorged cudgel who had driven him on. "Turn left, Turn left!" shouted Marcel, as if I were stupid beyond redemption. We came to a nondescript town—it didn't even have a name: the sign lay in the verge beside a lorry's water-logged tyre-ruts. Marcel announced that he was hungry, and I wished he hadn't come with me: I saw my quest hindered by his needs and robbed of its proper comfortless urgency. We sat in an empty cafe and looked out over the empty square. Marcel ate a cheeseburger greedily—he laid claim to his food as though his fat had its independent demands; but it delayed and solaced him too. I half watched him, half kept an eye on the warmemorial and the passers-by in the precipitate dusk. Then the rain ceased—there was a brief brightening, hurried glimpses of light above the housetops, yellow cloud-grottoes from which winged faces might momentarily tumble above a holy victory or a martyrdom. The pavement dazzled. I smiled at Marcel and his clown's mouth of ketchup. The truth was I didn't know how to talk to him—I only had the stock resources of the language lesson, the useful topics, the factitious interest. I got out my cigarettes and then thought smoke might upset him. "I'm just going outside," I said.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Hold on, Edward," said the boy, looking around him to assess the damage my outburst might be doing and perhaps to make sure that he had no audiences for the rest of his act. Again the hand on the shoulder, and this time the side of his body pressed lightly against mine. "Sit down a minute, you know . . ." "There's no point in sitting down," I snapped. And then, "Oh shit, where's my watch?"—my dear father's gold watch with the stop-hand that had slyly timed many a Messiah and Gerontius . . . I rummaged in the locker, grateful at least that I had caught the offender and that that above all could be saved. But it was still there, rolled in my sock in the toe of a shoe. I turned round almost panting at the waves of pain and apprehension these kids were so wantonly inflicting on me. At the same time I was aware of not speaking in my own voice, of being betrayed by anger into routine threats and dead formulae. The skinny boy muttered "Mark", but Mark stared at him and then slowly sat down; and there was something about that slowed pressing together of the slatted pine bench and the boy's naked bottom, maybe something calculated, maybe not, the momentary heightening of his nakedness by contact with the inanimate, hard world, the fore-image too of the faintly flushed stripes the slats would leave when he stood, as if after some delicate accurate thrashing, that tilted the balance for him. I sat down in turn and so after a moment did the other boy, opposite us and wary. He shivered slightly and hunched the towel around him. Mark looked me straight in the eyes and reddened as he said, "I'll do anything you like, Edward." Telling Matt the story as we hurried in the early hours from the bar towards his flat, I had trouble conveying the keenness of the dilemma, this particular boy sitting naked beside me, breathing through his mouth into my face, his wet hair releasing sudden trickles down his neck, and making fabulous proposals that I had grumpily to reject. "You should have brought him back here," said Matt. "We could have taken turns with him." He gave his short nagging laugh, that always sounded bitter or unmeant. "Yeah, we could have fucked him at the same time. You ever do that?" "Oh yes," I said, "but not since I was a kid myself . . . " He looked at me admiringly in the street-lamp's masking glow. "You're really wild," he said.