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

  Many did, but there were consequences when they broke the rules. (It’s important to bear in mind that the youngsters in the comparison group had been neighbors of the families that divorced, making the differences in the families all the more striking.) The same kind of rule-based structure exists in remarried families, but the moral authority of stepparents is almost never equal to that of a biological parent. When push comes to shove in adolescence, as it so often does, the boy or girl is likely to shout, “Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?” Little Boy Lost MY THIRD INTERVIEW with Larry took place shortly after the episode in the police station when he was seventeen years old. The little master of the house had grown into a tall, slender young man with reddened eyes and a sallow complexion. Chain-smoking Marlboros, face fixed in a scowl, he spat out his feelings: “The last five years have been a total bummer. My mom gets on my nerves just like she always got on my dad’s nerves. She wants me to be responsible.” He threw back his head and laughed. “Christ, I come home every night bombed out of my head. I drink more than my dad did when he was a kid. Except for all the Russian crap, I think I’m going to live a lot of my life just like my dad. It helps me solve my problems to drink. A couple of weeks ago I hit my girlfriend in the face.” He seemed proud. “I guess I’m going to live my life like my dad.” I was deeply dismayed by his words and hostile manner. “Tell me,” I said, “how much do you feel in control of your life?” Larry’s shoulders sagged as he answered truthfully, “About three-quarters. I’m maybe three-quarters in control.” And then he described how disappointed he was in the father who seemed no longer interested in him. “Do you know that when my dad got remarried, I didn’t find out for four months! When I talk to him, it’s always by phone. I guess he’s pretty busy.” Then Larry hastily pulled back, regained his scowl, and returned to the familiar theme. “My life is a lot worse because of their divorce. Not having a father was hard on me. My mom pushed him out. I’ll never forgive her for that.” After I left Larry sitting at his kitchen table that day, I had the sense of seeing a lost child who had advanced in years but who had hardly matured since his mother took him and his sister to a motel in the middle of the night. It was as if he had remained fixated developmentally from that time on. As an adolescent, he was just beginning to face the pain of his increasing distance from his father. He continued blaming his mother for all his suffering.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I made some sardonic comment about the name of the diner and we walked out into the streets. This was the time of what was called the "brown-out," when the lights in all American cities were very dim. When we re-entered the streets something happened to me which had the tcJrce of an optical illusion, or a nightmare. The streets were very crowded and I was facing north. People were mov ing in every direction but it seemed to me, in that instant, that all of the people I could see, and many more than that, were moving toward me, against me, and that everyone was white. I remember how their f.<ces gleamed. And I felt, like a physical sensation, a click at the nape of my neck as though NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON 71 some interior string connecting my head to my body had been cut. I began to walk. I heard my friend call after me, but I ignored him. Heaven only knows what was going on in his mind, but he had the good sense not to touch me-l don't know what would have happened if he had-and to keep me in sight. I don't know what was going on in my mind, either; I certainly had no conscious plan. I wanted to do something to crush these white faces, which were crushing me. I walked for perhaps a block or two until I came to an enormous, glit tering, and fashionable restaurant in which I knew not even the intercession of the Virgin would cause me to be served. I pushed through the doors and took the first vacant scat I saw, at a table for two, and waited. I do not know how long I waited and I rather wonder, until today, what I could possibly have looked like. Whatever I looked like, I frighte ned the waitress who shortly appeared, and the moment she appeared all of my fury flowed towards her. I hated her for her white face, and for her great, astounded, frightened eyes. I felt that if she found a black man so frightening I would make her fright worth -while. She did not ask me what I wanted, but repeated, as though she had learned it somewhere, "We don't serve Negroes her e." She did not say it with the blunt, derisive hostility to which I had grown so accustomed, but, rather, with a note of apology in her voice, and fear. This made me colder and more murderous than ever. I felt I had to do something with my hands. I wanted her to come close enough for me to get her neck between my hands. So I pretended not to have under stood her, hoping to draw her closer.

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

  I admit that I found her protest both rational and convincing. Since she had been given no say over her free time, how could she think differently? She was keenly aware that none of her friends had such obligations. I was also concerned by the strength of her feeling that her father and “some silly judge” had treated her unjustly. As a young teenager, she was trying to establish her own ideas and values, yet the adults who held authority over her life set a questionable example. “What happens when you ask him if you can go to a weekend school activity?” Tears welled in Joan’s eyes. “He won’t let me change. I tried. He says that’s his time.” She shook her head sadly. Then in a rush she added, “When summer comes, all the other kids in my class look forward to it. I dread it. I hate July. It’s terrible for me. Last July I cried the whole month and thought, why am I being sentenced? What crime did I commit? I was so lonely and I missed my friends. Paula and I would cry ourselves to sleep every night. I felt like a second-class citizen.” After this interview, I worried about Joan. Surely her conclusion that she was being sentenced by the court, like someone who had broken the law, to spend lonely summers with her father was hurtful to her and would not contribute to her loving or respecting him then or in the future. Her phrase “second-class citizen” reverberated in my mind. For her part, Paula’s mom quickly came to appreciate the new freedom offered by two childless weekends per month. She could spend Friday nights in the city with her boyfriend and long weekends catching up on work, sleeping, and reading the Sunday paper. She became as protective as her ex-husband about keeping the schedule as planned. She turned a deaf ear to Joan’s and Paula’s complaints that their social life was being disrupted, that school projects weren’t getting done, and that Santa Rosa was boring. The girls’ initial excitement at seeing their father quickly faded to grumbling, resentment, and protests. When neither parent showed a willingness to listen or to change the arrangement, complaints gradually subsided into sullen acceptance and apathy. Paula displayed a rare moment of animation when I asked her about her visits with her father during our five-year follow-up visit. Her cheeks growing pink with indignation, she burst out, “Racer can’t come on the bus and Daddy won’t drive down to get us. Mom doesn’t take good care of Racer while I’m gone and sometimes he doesn’t even have water when I get back!”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is how his mother tells it: "I think it was three (detectives) come up and they asked are you Danny Hamm? And he says yes and right away-g un right to the head and slapping him up, one gun here and one here-just all the way down the hall-beating him and knocking him around with the gun to his head." The other boys were arrested in the same way, and, again of course, they were beaten; but this arrest was a far greater torture than the first one had been because some of the mothers did not know where the boys were, and the police, who were holding them, refused for many hours to say that they were holding them. The mothers did not know of what it was their children were accused until they learned, via television, that the charge was murder. At that time in the state of New Y ark, this charge meant death in the electric chair. Let us assume that all six boys are guilty as (eventually) charged. Can anyone pretend that the manner of their arrest, or their treatment, bears any resemblance to equal justice under the law? The Police Department has loftily ref used to "dignify the charges." But can anyone pretend that they would dare to take this tone if the case involved, say, the sons of Wall Street brokers? I have witnessed and endured the bru tality of the police many more times than once-but, of course, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself , quite as though it were an swerable only to itself . But it cannot be allowed to be an swerable only to itself ; it must be made to answer to the community which pays it, and which it is legally sworn to protect; and if American Negroes arc not a part of the Amer- REPOR T FR OM OCCUP IED TERRITORY 737 ican community, then all of the American professions are a fraud. This arrogant autonomy, which is guaranteed the police, not only in New York, by the most powerful forces in American lif e--o therwise, they would not dare to claim it, would, in deed, be unable to claim it-creates a situation which is as close to anarchy as it already, visibly, is close to martial law. Here is Wallace Baker's mother speaking, describing the night that a police officer came to her house to collect the evidence which he hoped would prove that her son was guilty of murder. The late Mrs. Sugar had run a used-clothing store and the policeman was looking for old coats. "N asty as he was that night in my house. He didn't ring the bell. So I said, have you got a search warrant? He say, no, I don't have no search warrant and I'm going to search anyway.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors, through 4-00 years and at least three wars. Why i__s_m_�_fn:edom, my citizenship, in question now? What one begs the Amer- AM ER ICAN DR EAM AND AME RIC AN NEGR O 717 ican people to do, for all our sakes, is simply to acceot:/our historv _ _ It seems to me when I watch Americans in Europe that what they don't know about Europeans is what they don't know about me. They were not trying to be nasty to the French girl, rude to the French waiter. They did not know that they hurt their feelings: they didn't have any sense that this particular man and woman were human beings. Thev walked over them with the same so� qf.J:�_L�rJdj gnorance. and condescension, the chann..a.IJ. d..cheerfulness,. with which they had patted me on tbe_ head.and- which made them upset when I was upset. When I was brought up I was taught in American history books that Mrica had no history and that neither had I. I was a savage abo�t whom the least sard the-be ttef\\vfio fiad been saved by Europe and who had been brought to America_ill CQ!:Irse, I believed it. I diqr1 't h�v� much _c hQi�e .. These were the only books there were. Everyone else seemed to agree. If you went out of Harlem the whole world agreed. What you saw was much bigger, whiter, cleaner, safer. The garbage was collected, the children were happy. You would go back home and it would seem, of course, that this .was an- .ac;t4>t=- Goo. You. belonged where white peopl�_l;!t_j :Q!!. It is only since World War II that there has been a counter image in the world. That image has not come about because of any legislation by any American Government, but because Mrica was suddenly on the stage of the world and Mricans had to be dealt with in a way they had never been dealt with before. This gave the Amer:iqq_ Negro, for_the _ .first time, a sense of himself not as a savage. It has �reatec land .will - create a great �any col1 undniffis . - ·· -- -- One of the things the white worlp __ q()_��-not know,_b _uLI think I know, rs tli'[fo�ople are just like everybody s....�� we are also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, liars. We are human, too. Unl ess we can establish some kind of dialogue between those people who enjoy the American dream and those people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble. This is what concerns me most. We are sitting in this 718 OTHER ES SAYS room and we arc all civilized; we can talk to each other, at least on certain levels, so that we can walk out of here assum ing that the measure of our politeness has some effect on the world.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  That summer, for example, it was not enough to get into a fight on Lenox Avenue, or curse out one's cronies in the barber shops. If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Har lem's churches, pool halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct tashion, Harlem and its citizens arc lik ely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood. That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro's real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and sat isf.<ctory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON one has to blot so much out of the mind-and the heart that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self destructi\·e pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that loYe comes easily: the white "·orld is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous hu miliation, and, abm·e all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reac tions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has dri,·en so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of haYing to decide between amputation and gangrene . Amputation is swift but time may prm·e that the amputation was not necessary-or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is sl o"·, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one's symptoms right. The idea of going through lif e as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly , in agony, with poison. And the trouble, finally , is that the risks are real eyen if the choices do not exist. "But as for me and my house," my father had said, ""·e ''ill sen·e the Lord." I wondered, as we dro,·e him to his resting place, what this line had meant for him. I had heard him preach it many times.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This task would have been extremely difficult even had ther e obtained in the black world a greater unity-geogr aphical, spiritual, and historical-than is actually the case. Under the circumstances, it was an endeavor com plicated by the nearly indefinable complexi ties of the word PRI NCES AND POWER S culture, by the fact that no coherent statement had yet been made concer ning the relationship of black cultur es to each other, and, finally, by the necessity, which had obtained throughout the confer ence, of avoiding the political issues. The inability to discuss politics had cert ainly handicapped the conference, but it could scarcely have been run otherwise. The political question would have caused the conference to lo se itself in a war of political ideologies. Moreover, the con ference was being held in Paris, many of the delegates repre sented areas which belonged to France, most of them represented areas which were not free. There was also to be considered the delicate position of the American delegation, which had sat throughout the conference uncomf ortably aware that they might at any moment be fo rced to rise and leave the hall. The declaration of political points of view being thus pro hibited, the "cultural" debate which raged in the hall that morning was in peipetual danger of drown ing in the sea of the unstated. For, according to his political posi tion, each del egate had a different interpretation of his culture, and a dif ferent idea of its future, as well as the means to be used to make that future a reality. A solution of a kind was offered by Senghor's suggestion that two comm ittees be fo rmed, one to take an inventory of the past, and one to deal with present prospects. There was some feeling that two com mittees were scarcely necessary. Diop suggested that one committee be fo rmed, which, if necessary, could divide itself into two. Then the question arose as to just how the commit tee should be appointed, whether by count ries or by cultur al areas. It was decided, at length, that the commit tee should be set up on the latter basis, and should have re solutions drafted by noon. "It is by these res olutions," protested Mercer Cook, "that we shall make our selves known. It cannot be done in an ho ur." He was entirely right. At eleven-twenty a commit tee of eighteen mem bers had been fo rmed. At fo ur o'clock in the afternoon they were still invisible. By this time, too, the most tr emendous impatience reigned in the crowded hall, in which, today, Negroes by far out numbered whites. At fo ur-twenty five the impatience of the audience erupted in whistles, cat calls, and stamping of feet.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I didn't ted that my unsupported testimony would mean very much, and I couldn't get the groundswcll going which might TO BE BAPTIZED 443 lead to a public hue and cry. I couldn't work at it full time because I was under contract in Calit(Jrnia and had to get back there. And, furthermore, I now had to finish that screenplay, if only to collect my tee: what price justice indeed! Val and I would meet in Siegel's office, to learn that the trial had been postponed again, but that this might be all to the good because it meant that Judge So-and-So instead of Judge What-not would be sitting-at least, he would try to make certain that it was Judge What-not instead ofJudge So and-So. He, Siegel, was on friendly terms with Judge What not, he'd call him later in the evening. And he would smile in a very satisfied way, as though to say, You see how I'm putting myself out for you, how much I take your interests to heart. No, his private investigators had failed to locate Dennis Morris. (Morris is the unknown who identified Tony by means of a photograph.) Morris had disappeared. No one seemed to know where he was. No, there was no word about the where abouts of Michael Crist, either. All of this took time and money-and he would light a cigar, his bright blue eyes watching me expectantly. Well, what in the world could we say to this tcrrit)•ing old man? How could we know whether he had spoken to a single person, or made the remotest phone call on Tony's behalt? We could spend the rest of our lives in this office, while Tony was perishing in jail, and ne,·er know. He didn't care about Tony, but we hadn't expected him to-we had supposed that he cared about something else. What? his honor as a criminal lawyer? Probably-which proved what t(Jo)s we were. His honor as a criminal lawyer was absolutely unassailable, he was a lifetime member of the club. We had no way whatever of lighting a fire under his ass and making him do what we were paying him to do. He didn't need us. There were thousands like us, yes, and black like us, who would keep him in cigars forever, turning over their nickels and dimes to get their loved ones out of trouble. And sometimes he would get them out he had no objection to getting people out of trouble. But it was a lottery; it depended on whose number came up; and he certainly wasn't bucking the machine. Day after day after day, we would leave him and go to the Tombs, and I would see Tony: who was bearing up fantastically well; I'd not have +++ NO NAME IN THE STREET believed he could be so tough.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Tony had been beaten, and beaten very hard; his cheekbones had disappeared and one of his eyes was crooked; he looked swollen above the neck, and he took down his shirt collar, presently, to show us the swel ling on his shoulders. And he was weeping, trying not to-I had seen him with tears in his eyes, but I had never seen him weeping. But when I say that heads surely rolled and that someone had goofed, I do not mean that they goofed because they beat him. They goofed because they let us see him. No one would have taken my word for this beating, or our lawyer's word. But Fritz knows what it means to be beaten in prison. And he, therefore, not only alerted the German press, but armed with the weight of one of the most powerful of German pub- 4-24- NO NAME IN THE STRE ET lishing houses, sued the German state. So, there it was, after all, anyway, in the newspapers, and I, too, had to meet the press. "I' ve got a religious medallion," Tony said-he has become a kind of Muslim, or, at least, an anti-Chr istian-"and the guard told me the other day that they were going to let me have it back again. Because they took it, you know. And I wanted it back. It means a lot to me-I'm not about to kill myself with it, I'm not about to kill myself. So, when the guard walked in, I asked him for it because he said he would bring it to me Friday night." (And this was Friday.) "Well, I don't know, he jumped salty and he walked out. And I started beating on the door of my cell, trying to make him come back, to listen to me, at least to explain to me why I couldn't have it, after he'd promised. And then the door opened and fifteen men walked in and they beat me up-fifteen men!" The headline on one of the German newspapers, which, incongruously or cunningly enough also has beneath the headline an old photograph of myself, laughing, is: "Tony Never Lies"! This means at least two things, for it is not hu manly possible for it to mean what it says. It means that Tony has never lied to me, though I have frequently watched him attempt to delude me into his delusions: but we human beings do this with each other all the time. Friends and lovers are able, sometimes, not always, to resist and correct the delu sions. But it also means something exceedingly difficult to capture, which is that some people are liars, and some people are not. We will return to this speculation later. Somewhere in the Bible there is the chilling observation: Ye are liars, and the truth's not in you. I had been in London when Malcolm was murdered.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Beneath the widely published catalogue of brutal it y-bringing to mind, somehow, an image, a memory of church-b ells burdening the air-is this reality which, in the same nightmare notion, he both flees and rushes to embrace. In America, now, this country dcmted to the death of the paradox-which may, therefore, be put to death by one-his lot is as ambiguous as a tableau by Katka. To flee or not, to move or not, it is all the same; his doom is written on his forehead, it is carried in his heart. In Native Sou, Bigger Thomas stands on a Chicago street corner watching airplanes flown by white men racing against the sun and "Goddamn" he says, the bitterness bubbling up lik e blood, remembering a million indignities, the terrible, rat-infested house, the hu miliation of home-relief , the intense, aimless, ugly bickering, IS NO TES OF A NATIVE SON hating it; hatred smoulders through these pages like sulphur fire. All of Bigger's lite is controlled, defined by his hatred and his tear. And later, his tear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape; he dies, having come, through this violence, we are told, t()r the first time, to a kind of lif e, having for the first time redeemed his manhood. Below the surface of this novel there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is Uncle Tom's descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exa ctly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New En gland woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses. And, indeed, within this web of lust and fury, black and white can only thrust and counter-thrust, long tor each other's slow, exq uisite death; death by torture, acid, knives and burning; the thrust, the counter-thrust, the longing mak ing the heavier that cloud which blinds and suffocates them both, so that they go down into the pit together. Thus has the cage betrayed us all, this moment, our lite, turned to noth ing through our terrible attempts to insure it. For Bigger's tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him lite, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-hum an and feels constrained, therefore, to battle tor his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our lif e; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult-that is, accept it.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Now, this means that one's concept of human freedom is in a sense frozen or strangled at the root. This has to do, of course, with the fact that though he was born in Nazareth under a very hot sun, and though we know that he spent his life beneath that sun, the Christ I was presented with was presented to me with blue 7 49 750 OTHER ESSAYS eyes and blond hair, and all the virtues to which I, as a black man, was expected to aspire had, by definition, to be white. This may seem a very simple thing and fr om some points of view it might even seem to be a desirable thing. But in fact what it did was make me very early, make us, the blacks, very early distrust our own experience and refuse, in effect, to ar ticulate that experience to the Christians who were our op pressors. That was a great loss for me, as a black man. I want to suggest that it was also a great loss for you, as white people. For example, in the church I grew up in, we sang a song that that man who was hung on a Roman cross between two thieves would have understood better than most church prel ates. We sang-and we knew what we meant when we sang it-"I've been rebuked and I've been scolded." We won our Christianity, our faith, at the point of a gun, not because of the example afforded by white Christians, but in spite of it. It was very difficult to become a Christian if you were a black man on a slave ship, and the slave ship was called 'The Good Ship Jesus.' These crimes, for one must call them crimes, against the human being have brought the church and the entire Western world to the dangerous place we find ourselves in today. Because if it is true that your testimony as Christians has proven invalid; if it is true that my importance in the Christian world was not as a living soul, dear to the sight of God, but as a means of making money, and representatively more sinister than that too representing some terrifying di vorce between the flesh and the spirit; if that is true (and it would be very difficult to deny the truth of this) then at this moment in the world's history it becomes necessary for me, t< >r my own survival, not to listen to what you say but to watch very carefully what you do, not to read your pronouncements but to go back to the source and to check it for myself.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was a gam ble which I knew I might lose, and which I lost-a very bad day at the races: but I learned something. Fox was then resolving the Cuban-A merican tension by means of a movie called Chef. This enterprise gave us Omar Sharif, as Chc Guevara, and Jack Palance, as Fidel Castro: the resulting vaudeville team is not required to sing, or dance, nor is it permitted, using the words very loosely, to act. The United Fruit Company is not mentioned. John Foster Dulles is not mentioned, either, though he was the lawyer for said company, nor is his brother, Allen, who was the head of the CIA. In the person of Chc, we arc confronted with a doomed, romantic clown. His attempts to awaken the peasants merely disturb them, and their goats: this observation, which is in exorably and inevitably true on one level, is absolutely false on the level at which the film uses it. In the person of Castro, we arc confronted with a cigar-smoking, brandy-drinking maniac: a "spic," as clearly unsuited for political responsibility as the nigger congressmen of The Birth of a Nation. 55 0 CHAPTER THREE 55 1 Since both the film for which I had been hired, and Che! were controversial, courageous, revolutionary films, being packaged for the consumer society, it was hoped that our film would beat Che! to the box-office . This was not among my concerns. I had a fairly accurate idea of what Ho llywood was about to do with Che!. (This is not black, bitter paranoia, but cold, professional observation: you can make a fairly accurate guess as to the direction a film is likely to take by observing who is cast in it, and who has been assigned to direct it. ) The intention of Che! was to make both the man, and his Bolivian adventure, irrelevant and ridiculous; and to do this, further more, with such a syrup of sympathy that any incipient Che would think twice before leaving Mama, and the ever-ready friend at the bank. Che, in the film, is a kind of Lawrence of Arabia, trapped on the losing side, and unable, even, to un derstand the natives he has, mistakenly, braved the jungles to arouse. I had no intention of so betraying Malcolm, or his natives. Yet, my producer had been advised, in an inter-office memo which I, quite unscrupulously, intercepted, that the writer (me) should be advised that the tragedy of Malcolm's lif e was that he had been mistreated, early, by some whites, and betrayed (later) by many blacks: emphasis in the original. The writer was also to avoid suggesting that Malcolm's trip to Mecca could have had any political implications, or reper cussions.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In Kingsblood Royal the sting of transgression is removed by the complete innocence of the transgressor and the impossibility of taking his one-thirty-second Negro-ness seriously. God Is For White Folks ends in quite an impressive display of abrupt insanity, murders, and sudden deaths in which all of the elderly trans gressors arc destroyed and the lover and his lass, produced, incontrovertibly, by sin, are redeemed through blood and al lowed to enter the manse. In The Path of Thunder, Lanny, despite his father's blood, is dark, and Sarie is fair, and they arc shot to death in an old cabin; it is Lanny's father, inci dentally, who shoots them. But the quarrel here is not with the violent incident; or the THE IMAGE OF THE NEGRO violent death; or the difficulty of union between black and white. The reports ofviolence may not come in the nature of a revelation, but it is a real and valid aspect of the lives that Negroes lead. One suspects, however, that the very fr equency and sameness of the reports operate on the public mind as a bludgeon, numbing the hypothetical response; it may, indeed, be insisted that unless the report has the urgency of a reve lation, the report is worthless. Out of whatever motives, we have here, in effect, merely the exploitation of an ugly reality. Finally, we are shown noth ing, we feel nothing, nothing is illuminated. The worthless ness of these novels consists precisely in that they supposedly expose a reality that in actuality they conspire to mask. For this is not the reality: the reality is more sinister, more treach erous, and more profound than this; and it is, above all, more personal. In none of the foregoing has it been my purpose to resurrect or exploit the ancient bogeyman of sex between the races, but only to inquire how and why in the first place it became a bogeyman at all, and why, if it has been exorcised, it exerts yet, as the sole breath oflife in these ambitious novels, so ferocious and unmistakable a force. It is a question we are inclined to dismiss with jeers: that old stum But the question has not been answered and the failure is significant.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My little Philanderer could make a fortune out of escorting truly glamorous men—and not all of them would turn out to be as weird as the eye-catching Gabriel. It was quite likely, wasn’t it, that Phil had already caught Gabriel’s eye? I found the corner by the service lift and the steep flight of stairs up to Phil’s attic. It was a drab, cheapjack little area, unambiguously removed from the public, and yet I had come to love it in a way I never could the rest of the monstrous edifice. The little room—and above it the lonely roof—were nothing really, but like the lovers’ cottage in ‘Tea for Two’ they had been wonderfully sufficient for our romance. I knew there was no chance of finding him in—he would be well off on his laddish booze by now—but it would be comforting to sit there for a bit with the window open and surrounded by his empty clothes. When I put my key in the lock, though, there was a muffled call of surprise, I thought, from within. Phil and Bill were kneeling face to face on the bed. Bill’s hand rested on Phil’s shoulder, and it looked like some College jerk-off job. Their tilting dicks, alert as orgiasts’ on a Greek vase, withered astonishingly under my expressionless stare. Not for them the witless priapism of Gabriel; but there was enough defiance in their confusion for them not to blabber excuses—not to say anything at all. And I couldn’t think of anything much to say. I know I swallowed and coloured and took in, as if I needed to satisfy myself, the circumstantial details. Certainly there were no signs of passionate haste. Bill’s trousers were neatly folded and his vast smalls were spread like an antimacassar across the back of the chair. I nodded repeatedly and slowly withdrew, closing the door as if not to disturb a sleeper. Before I had reached the top of the stairs I heard a gasped ‘Oh my God’ and a loud frightened laugh. And so to James’s. By the time I got there my anger, hurt, care were welling up under the frigid discipline I had instinctively assumed. I smeared away stupid tears.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 3: Whereas fortitude, as stated above [3297](A[6]), has two acts, namely endurance and aggression, it employs anger, not for the act of endurance, because the reason by itself performs this act, but for the act of aggression, for which it employs anger rather than the other passions, since it belongs to anger to strike at the cause of sorrow, so that it directly cooperates with fortitude in attacking. On the other hand, sorrow by its very nature gives way to the thing that hurts; though accidentally it helps in aggression, either as being the cause of anger, as stated above ([3298]FS, Q[47], A[3]), or as making a person expose himself to danger in order to escape from sorrow. In like manner desire, by its very nature, tends to a pleasurable good, to which it is directly contrary to withstand danger: yet accidentally sometimes it helps one to attack, in so far as one prefers to risk dangers rather than lack pleasure. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. iii, 5): “Of all the cases in which fortitude arises from a passion, the most natural is when a man is brave through anger, making his choice and acting for a purpose,” i.e. for a due end; “this is true fortitude.” Whether fortitude is a cardinal virtue?Objection 1: It seems that fortitude is not a cardinal virtue. For, as stated above [3299](A[10]), anger is closely allied with fortitude. Now anger is not accounted a principal passion; nor is daring which belongs to fortitude. Therefore neither should fortitude be reckoned a cardinal virtue. Objection 2: Further, the object of virtue is good. But the direct object of fortitude is not good, but evil, for it is endurance of evil and toil, as Tully says (De Invent. Rhet. ii). Therefore fortitude is not a cardinal virtue. Objection 3: Further, the cardinal virtues are about those things upon which human life is chiefly occupied, just as a door turns upon a hinge [cardine]. But fortitude is about dangers of death which are of rare occurrence in human life. Therefore fortitude should not be reckoned a cardinal or principal virtue. On the contrary, Gregory (Moral. xxii), Ambrose in his commentary on Lk. 6:20, and Augustine (De Moribus Eccl. xv), number fortitude among the four cardinal or principal virtues.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He merited a mere 2 5 . The other two men got a total of 3 0 years in the 197 2 trial-the fire was in 1968. In any event, some of the most pertinent details of the cases arc to be found in major newspapers and in the Congressional Record: Messrs. John Conyers Jr., Ronald V. Dcllums and Charles B. Rangel speaking. And the mother of Ben Chavis, speaking fr om a church in Raleigh, N.C., has the most pertinent question, especially in light of the fact that her son is a Christian minister: "You in the Christian church, will you be diligent in keeping them fr om getting my son?" And the entire horror evolved fr om the manner in which a Wilmington judge decided to desegregate a Wilmington high school, and the tact that the black students wished to declare the birthday of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a day of mourning. I have said that it is not a new thing I have to tell you, and, indeed, most of it is not new for me. I might in my own mind, 766 OPEN LETTER TO MR. CARTER 7 6 7 as I write, be speaking of the Scottsboro Boys: where I came in, so to speak. If I know, you must certainly know of the silent pact made between the North and the South, after Reconstruction, the purpose of which was-and is-to keep the nigger in his place. If I know, then you must certainly know, that keeping the nigger in his place was the most extraordinarily effective way of keeping the poor white in his place, and also, of keeping him poor: The situation of the Wilmington ro and of the Charlotte 3 is a matter of Federal collusion, and would not be possible without that collusion. When those black children and white children and black men and white men and black women and white women were marching, behind Martin, up and down those dusty roads, trespassing, trespassing wherever they were, in the wrong waiting room, at the wrong coffee counter, in the wrong de partment store, in the wrong toilet, and were carried off to jail, they found themselves before federally appointed judges, who gave them the maximum sentence. Some people died beneath that sentence, some went mad, some girls will never become pregnant again.

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

  But why didn’t Billy have a clue about what was coming? For a woman to empty the household takes not only careful planning but a towering rage that builds over time until it explodes in an extraordinary act of hatred and revenge. Yet Billy was taken by surprise. He was looking miserable. I touched his arm and said, “Billy, I can’t think of anything worse that could happen. What she did was awful. Thank God you didn’t kill yourself. What led to her anger? Do you understand that?” “If you mean did I hit her, I never laid a hand on her.” “Perhaps she felt trapped.” “I never thought of that.” “Do you think she was frustrated by having nothing to do except wait for an exhausted man to return home in time for sleep?” “I never thought of that, either. She complained, but look, I’m used to women complaining.” The men in this study who divorced had experiences much like Billy’s, although not as savage in their impact. In every case except one, the woman left in anger and the man was stunned. These young men genuinely liked their wives and wanted the marriage to continue. They later tried to explain what happened with platitudes—“she was too young,” “she wanted somebody else”—but basically they had no idea why their wives had deserted them. Billy was one of the very few who honestly said, “I didn’t hear her.” None of these men had been violent in their marriages nor was infidelity a big issue, although it happened occasionally. They knew their wives had complaints but did nothing to deal with the problems. One man told me that he didn’t notice that his wife had left a week earlier because he was working on a big computer assignment. When he realized she was gone, he went into an acute depression. Most recovered slowly. Several did not have any contact with another woman for years after. One man whose wife left when he was twenty-four was still not dating ten years later. He’d decided to remain alone rather than take another chance. “Once is enough,” he stated. Why don’t these young men hear their wives’ complaints? The men are intelligent and competent at work. They are decent people. But they are blind and deaf to their women and taken entirely by surprise when they leave.

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

  Some siblings maintain the family’s moral standards. One young woman told me, “My brother and I have been incredibly close. We have always adored each other. Mom was nuts. Dad was gone. Whenever they got together, there would be mayhem in our house. When my dad came home it was like a time bomb. They would scream and throw things. Mom would hide or disappear and my brother and I would go find her. Things were so crazy, we tried to make it safe between us. Other kids thought we were strange. If my brother and I had a disagreement, we would sit down and discuss it calmly. We are very proud of how we helped each other. We are still very close.” ELEVENUndoing the PastWhile he was telling me about Anja, Larry got an urgent phone call from one of his partners about an emergency on a job site. He listened attentively, quickly assessed the situation, and offered a solution to be implemented in three phases. I was impressed by his decisiveness and ability to plan—and told him so after he got off the phone. This clearly struck a chord. His eyes became very bright as he replied, “I believe in planning. I’m always thinking about ten years ahead. It’s the best way I know of to make your life turn out the way you want it to. All the important things in my life—my education, my career, and even my marriage—have turned out because I’ve figured out what I wanted ahead of time. Sometimes it took me a while. I was pretty dumb about the marriage part, but after a while I caught on.” I decided to tease him a little. “So, you tried to plan your love life? Tell me about it.” Larry flung himself back in his chair and laughed. “I figured we’d get to that.” He settled himself and thought for a moment. “It really goes back to my mother. She told me that she knew, after one year, that her marriage was wrong but she ended up staying for ten years anyway. She felt it was morally wrong to divorce and to deprive her children of a proper family, so she stayed and got abused and beaten down until she couldn’t take it anymore. It took me a long time to see it this way but I absolutely think she made the right choice in leaving.” Larry sighed and went on. “But out of that I formed in myself a promise never to get a divorce. You remembered when you called me that I had told you, ‘When I decide to get married, it will be to the day I die.’ That was exactly my view. But the result was that I just avoided the whole issue because it seemed too much. To be truthful, it was terrifying. I asked myself, How can anyone be sure? There’s no way for that. Anyway, I was working so hard that women had no place.”

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  359 Jonathan Swift Lecture 54 From Pope, who is generally optimistic about the possibility of reform, we turn now to Jonathan Swift, who sees little reason to hope for any progress in the human condition. Swift, who died in 1745, composed his own epitaph, later rendered from the Latin by fellow Anglo-Irishman, W.B. Yeats, as: “Savage indignation there/Cannot lacerate his breast.” O ne still feels, in reading Swift, that “savage indignation” directed at the hypocrisies and compromises of human society, as experienced by Gulliver ( Gulliver’ s Travels, 1726), or against the English for their pro fi t-driven policies in Ireland in A Modest Proposal (1729). In this lecture, we will use these two texts to analyze the “other” side of Neoclassical thought: the extremism produced by the single-minded pursuit of the ideal of reason untempered by compassion and Swift’s rejection of the optimism and benevolence that Enlightenment thinkers championed. Born in Dublin in 1667, Swift spent much of his early years moving between Dublin and London, hoping to rise in importance in both politics and the Church. His hopes for a position in the Church of England were disappointed, and he fi nally made his home in Dublin when he was appointed dean of St. Patrick’s in 1713. While in England, Swift met Pope, and it was during his time as a member of the Scriblerus Club that he composed part of Gulliver’ s Travels (1726). Swift’s fi nal trip to England took place in 1727. By 1735, when a collected edition of his works was published in Dublin, his memory was beginning to deteriorate. In 1738, he slipped into senility and fi nally suffered a paralytic stroke; in 1742, guardians were offi cially appointed to care for his affairs. He died three years later. Swift wrote vehemently in defense of the Irish, whom he felt were abused both politically and economically by the English. Swift’s satire is in the Juvenalian tradition, a harsh and accusatory kind of satire in which

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He was still aglow with his new role as Sibylle's esquire, sent on to the coast whilst she retreated home. I glanced in a tall mirror and saw us as a headwaiter might, as a boy with an uncle, a godfather perhaps, a bachelor evidently, who lacked an easy way with youngsters, and disheartened the lad when he was meant to be giving him a treat. The age-gap seemed to widen between us; he gripped his cutlery like a child, and piled in the good, overdressed food as if determined to get value from that at least, whilst I was too racked by other hungers to want to eat. Sometimes he pointed his knife at something and I told him what it was called in English, and he repeated the word with a nod. Dismal canned music played, the short tape slurring from incessant repetition, fragments of Mozart and Tchaikovsky swung and sugared—I saw the morning studio, the shirt-sleeved sessioneers, the villainous arranger, the mockery of everything I held dear. At another table was a respectable couple with a clever-looking boy in glasses. I knew the constraints between them at a glance, and picked up some of the exeat talk, the mother's resentful account of things at home, the son's attempts to convey the excitements of study in which the parents had no interest. A reading-list was gone into in some detail; one gathered this week he was doing The Republic —"by Plato". I found myself enlisting their support. "Isn't this music awful?" I called across. They didn't at first get my meaning, and when they did it was clear that the parents, if they'd noticed it at all, were quite grateful for its faceless protection, whilst the boy allied himself with me: "Terrible, terrible", and then seemed to regret the momentary hysteria of his tone. At a further table two old ladies had noticed the unusual breakout of conversation between strangers and I took their anxious gaze for support of my cause. I gestured to a waiter but just at the moment that he slipped away into the kitchen. I realised I was terribly angry, shaking with a sense of injustice that had glimpsed an outlet. Marcel kept his eyes on his plate, but could hardly swallow for embarrassment and horror at finding out for sure that he was sharing a room with a madman. As I turned round I kicked him under the table and he gave a yelp that accelerated the frenzy. "Excuse me!" I called to another waiter, whose back was to me, already laying the tables with sugar and jams for breakfast, when doubtless, if nothing was done, the same tape would be inanely spooling. It had just begun its second circuit of the evening, a hellish perpetual loop.