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 Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Oh?” I drawled at her sarcastically, and rocked to my feet. “And whose fault is that? Huh? How am I supposed to know anything about love, anyway? How am I supposed to know anything at all? I’m just another ignorant Boatwright, you know. Another piece of trash barely knows enough to wipe her ass or spit away from the wind. Just like you and Mama and Alma and everybody.” I spit to the side deliberately. “Hell,” I said softly to her face. “Hellfire. We an’t like nobody else in the world.” Her dark eyes glittered at me, but I wasn’t afraid. My insides were boiling, and my skin burned. My hatred and rage were so hot I felt like I could have spit fire. When she put her hand on my wrist, I felt the hairs on my forearm tingle and stand up. A cold electric current ran up to the back of my neck. “People are the same,” she said in a whisper. “Everybody just does the best they can.” I took a long breath and let it out in a rush of bitter words. “Other people don’t go beating on each other all the time,” I told her. “They don’t get falling-down drunk, shoot each other, and then laugh about it. They don’t pick up and leave their husbands in the middle of the night and then never explain. They don’t move out alone to the edge of town without a husband or children or even a good friend, run around all the time in overalls, and sell junk by the side of the road!” Aunt Raylene crossed her arms over her breasts and looked at me. “I don’t like being yelled at, never have.” Her hands gripped her upper arms so tightly I saw the fingers tremble. “And I don’t know about other people, but I’ve always believed everybody does what they have to do in this life.” She stopped and started again. “When you’re thirty years old and supporting your own children and doing the best you can when you don’t know where your next dollar is coming from, then you can yell at me. Maybe.” She shook her head, and turned away, brushing loose dirt off her thighs. “It’s almost suppertime,” she told me. “And you’re filthy. You go get yourself cleaned up and I’ll see whether I feel like feeding you or not.” “You don’t have to feed me.” I couldn’t look at her and say it. My head dropped down and I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “I know what I have to do and what I don’t. You think about it, and you’ll see that the biggest part of why I live the way I do is that out here I can do just about anything I damn well please.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  He stretched a hand out like he was going to put it on my head, but I stepped back so that he would have had to bend forward to reach me. “Son of a bitch,” Grey would have called him, “slimy son of a bitch probably eats Tootsie Rolls all day long.” If he reached for me again, I decided, I’d bite him, but he just looked at me long and carefully. I knew I was supposed to feel ashamed, but I didn’t anymore. I felt outraged. I wanted to kick him or throw up on him or scream his name on the street. The longer he looked at me, the more I hated him. If I could have killed him with my stare, I would have. The look in his eyes told me that he knew what I was thinking. “I’m gonna do your mama a favor.” He smiled. “Help her to teach you the seriousness of what you’ve done.” Mama’s hand tightened on my shoulder, but she didn’t speak. “What we’re gonna do,” he announced, “is say you can’t come back in here for a while. We’ll say that when your mama thinks you’ve learned your lesson, she can come back and talk to me. But till then, we’re gonna remember your name, what you look like.” He leaned down again. “You understand me, honey?” I understood. I understood that I was barred from the Woolworth’s counters. I could feel the heat from my mama’s hand through my blouse, and I knew she was never going to come near this place again, was never going to let herself stand in the same room with that honey-greased bastard. I looked around at the bright hairbrushes, ribbons, trays of panties and socks, notebooks, dolls, and balloons. It was hunger I felt then, raw and terrible, a shaking deep down inside me, as if my rage had used up everything I had ever eaten. After that, when I passed the Woolworth’s windows, it would come back—that dizzy desperate hunger edged with hatred and an aching lust to hurt somebody back. I wondered if that kind of hunger and rage was what Tommy Lee felt when he went through his mama’s pocketbook. It was a hunger in the back of the throat, not the belly, an echoing emptiness that ached for the release of screaming. Whenever we went to visit Daddy Glen’s people, that hunger would throb and swell behind my tongue until I found myself standing silent and hungry in the middle of a family gathering full of noise and food. It was not only Daddy Glen’s brothers being lawyers and dentists instead of mechanics and roofers that made them so different from Boatwrights. In Daddy Glen’s family the women stayed at home.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Opponents of feminism and women priests can find a host of biblical texts to prove their case, but some of the New Testament authors had very different views and can be cited to show that in Christ there was neither male nor female and that women worked as ‘co-workers’ and ‘co-apostles’ in the early Church. Hurling texts around polemically is a sterile pursuit. Scripture is not able to provide certainty on this type of question. This is also the case with the question of scriptural violence. There is indeed a great deal of violence in the Bible – far more than there is in the Qur’an. And it is unquestionably true that throughout history people have used the Bible to justify atrocious acts. As Cantwell Smith observed, the Bible and its interpretation must be seen in historical context. The world has always been a violent place and scripture and its exegesis has often fallen prey to contemporary aggression. Joshua was presented by the Deuteronomists fighting with all the ruthlessness of an Assyrian general. The Crusaders ignored the pacifist teachings of Jesus and signed up for an expedition to the Holy Land because they were soldiers, wanted a militant religion and applied their distinctively feudal ethos to the Bible. The same is true in our own time. The modern period has seen violence and slaughter on an unprecedented scale and it is not surprising that this has affected the way some people have read the Bible. But because scripture has been so flagrantly abused in this way, Jews, Christians and Muslims have a duty to establish a counter-narrative that emphasizes the benign features of their exegetical traditions. Interfaith understanding and cooperation are now essential to our survival: perhaps members of the three monotheistic faiths should work together to establish a common hermeneutics. This would consist of a sustained critical, moral and spiritual examination of the problematic texts themselves, the way they have been interpreted throughout history, and an in-depth examination of the exegesis of the people who exploit them today. Their significance in the tradition as a whole should be defined clearly. Michael Fishbane’s suggestion that we construct a ‘canon within the canon’ to moderate the religiously articulated hatred of our time is extremely apposite. The Bible is indeed a witness to the danger of raging orthodoxies – and in our own day, not all these orthodoxies are religious. There is a form of ‘secular fundamentalism’ that is as bigoted, biased and inaccurate about religion as any Bible-based fundamentalism about secularism. There are good things and bad things in the Bible. The kabbalists were acutely aware of the flaws of their Torah and found inventive ways to qualify the harsh predominance of Din. There was a similar debate in the Bible itself. In the Pentateuch, P’s message of reconciliation opposed the stridency of Deuteronomy. In the New Testament, the battles of Revelation are juxtaposed with the pacifism of the Sermon on the Mount.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  We sat still, wonderfully behaved, almost afraid to move. “Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am.” We kept our backs straight and never spoke out of turn, trying to imagine that Daddy Glen would look out and see us and be proud. His people watched us out the windows. Behind them, shelves of books and framed pictures mocked me. How could Reese and I be worthy of all that, the roses in their garden, the sunlight on those polished windows and flowered drapes, the china plates gleaming behind glass cabinets? I stared in at the spines of those books, wanting it all, wanting the furniture, the garden, the big open kitchen with its dishes for everyday and others for special, the freezer in the utility room and the plushy seats on all the dining-room chairs. Reese tugged at my arm, wanting me to talk to her, but I couldn’t speak around the hunger in my throat. From behind the rosebushes, I heard Daryl and James talking. “Look at that car. Just like any nigger trash, getting something like that.” “What’d you expect? Look what he married.” “Her and her kids sure go with that car….” I pushed my black hair out of my eyes and looked in at one of my wide-mouthed cousins in a white dress with eyelet sleeves looking back at me, scratching her nose and staring like I was some elephant in a zoo—something dumb and ugly and impervious to hurt. What do they tell her about us? I wondered. That we’re not really family, just her crazy uncle’s wife’s nasty kids? You’re no relative of mine, you’re not my people, I whispered to myself. New and terrible words rolled around in my head while the air turned cool on my neck. To Reese’s surprise, I got up, shook out my skirt, and strolled off for a walk through Madeline’s rosebushes. I put my hands out and trailed them lightly along the thorny stalks and plush blossoms, scooping buds off as I passed. I pulled the buds apart, tearing the petals and dropping them down inside my dress. I even pulled up my skirt and tucked some in my panties, walking more slowly then to feel the damp silky flowers moving against my skin. Trash steals, I thought, echoing Aunt Madeline’s cold accent, her husband’s bitter words. “Trash for sure,” I muttered, but I only took the roses. No hunger would make me take anything else of theirs. I could feel a kind of heat behind my eyes that lit up everything I glanced at. It was dangerous, that heat. It wanted to pour out and burn everything up, everything they had that we couldn’t have, everything that made them think they were better than us. I stood in the garden and spun myself around and around, pouring out heat and rage and the sweet stink of broken flowers.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  He stood back up and passed the pennies to the salesgirl. He stretched a hand out like he was going to put it on my head, but I stepped back so that he would have had to bend forward to reach me. “Son of a bitch,” Grey would have called him, “slimy son of a bitch probably eats Tootsie Rolls all day long.” If he reached for me again, I decided, I’d bite him, but he just looked at me long and carefully. I knew I was supposed to feel ashamed, but I didn’t anymore. I felt outraged. I wanted to kick him or throw up on him or scream his name on the street. The longer he looked at me, the more I hated him. If I could have killed him with my stare, I would have. The look in his eyes told me that he knew what I was thinking. “I’m gonna do your mama a favor.” He smiled. “Help her to teach you the seriousness of what you’ve done.” Mama’s hand tightened on my shoulder, but she didn’t speak. “What we’re gonna do,” he announced, “is say you can’t come back in here for a while. We’ll say that when your mama thinks you’ve learned your lesson, she can come back and talk to me. But till then, we’re gonna remember your name, what you look like.” He leaned down again. “You understand me, honey?” I understood. I understood that I was barred from the Woolworth’s counters. I could feel the heat from my mama’s hand through my blouse, and I knew she was never going to come near this place again, was never going to let herself stand in the same room with that honey-greased bastard. I looked around at the bright hairbrushes, ribbons, trays of panties and socks, notebooks, dolls, and balloons. It was hunger I felt then, raw and terrible, a shaking deep down inside me, as if my rage had used up everything I had ever eaten. After that, when I passed the Woolworth’s windows, it would come back—that dizzy desperate hunger edged with hatred and an aching lust to hurt somebody back. I wondered if that kind of hunger and rage was what Tommy Lee felt when he went through his mama’s pocketbook. It was a hunger in the back of the throat, not the belly, an echoing emptiness that ached for the release of screaming. Whenever we went to visit Daddy Glen’s people, that hunger would throb and swell behind my tongue until I found myself standing silent and hungry in the middle of a family gathering full of noise and food.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Years later, when prevailing winds of the media culture shifted from fiction to memoir, some writers were eager to make their novels and stories over into autobiographical accounts. I found myself both horrified and enraged. Did they not know what they were doing? The damage done to a communal sense of what was truth and what was fiction unnerved me. It was not only that false biographies tended to overshadow true ones, they obscured a hard fact that all fiction writers know—which is simply that real life is far less believable than fiction. That is in fact part of the power of nonfiction narratives. To take details from “real life” into fiction and make them believable requires careful work: creating characters the reader can believe would do the unbelievable and setting up a scene where those events make some kind of sense. The shorthand of nonfiction does not require that work. One just keeps saying, “But this is true. This really happened.” I found myself questioning that assumption, and finding out that in fact the “truth” in some of these accounts was false. But there were others so well written that I found myself believing them and feeling a grotesque sense of betrayal when the books were revealed to be fiction. There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth. I have built my life on what I learned in books that took me inside characters whose struggles and dilemmas revealed intricate and astonishing things about human character. I have no doubt that some of those novels were based in part on the author’s experiences or real lives—but by moving the narrative over to fiction the author took on the responsibility of fully imagining a world separate from the perspective of one person’s experience. Asking “what if” and answering that question is the bedrock of what the novel can achieve. The story becomes something more than one persons perspective—it reaches as far as the novelist can imagine.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  You and your mama and your whole family. Everybody knows you’re all a bunch of drunks and thieves and bastards. Everybody knows you just come round so you can eat off my mama’s table and beg scraps we don’t want no more. Everybody knows who you are…” I was moving before I could stop myself, my hands flying up to slap together right in front of her face—a last-minute attempt not to hit her. “You bitch, you white-assed bitch.” I wrung my hands, trying to keep myself from slapping her pasty face. “Don’t you never hit anybody in the face,” Mama always said. “You little shit, you fuck off.” I put the words out as slick and fast as any of my uncles. Shannon’s mouth fell open. “You just fuck off!” I kicked red dirt up onto her gingham skirt. Shannon’s face twisted. “You an’t never gonna go to another gospel show with us again! I’m gonna tell my mama what you called me, and she an’t ever gonna let you come near me again.” “Your mama, your mama. You’d piss in a Pepsi bottle if your mama told you to.” “Listen to you. You…you trash. You nothing but trash. Your mama’s trash, and your grandma, and your whole dirty family…” I swung at her then with my hand wide open, right at her face, but I was too angry. I was crazy angry and I tripped, falling onto the red dirt on my spread hands. My right hand came down on a broken clay pot, hurting me so bad I could barely see Shannon’s dripping, flushed cheeks. “Oh…shit. You…shit.” If I could have jumped up and caught her, I would have ripped out handfuls of that cotton-candy hair. Shannon stood still and watched as I pushed myself up and grabbed my right hand with my left. I was crying, I realized, the tears running down my face while behind us the choir had never stopped singing. That woman’s voice still rolled over the cottonwoods. Was blind but now I see… “You’re ugly.” I swallowed my tears and made myself speak very quietly. “You’re God’s own ugly child and you’re gonna be an ugly woman. A lonely, ugly old woman.” Shannon’s lips started to tremble, poking out of her face so that she was uglier than I’d ever seen her, a doll carved out of cold grease melting in the heat. “You ugly thing,” I went on. “You monster, you greasy cross-eyed stinking sweaty-faced ugly thing!” I pointed all my fingers at her and spit at her patent-leather shoes. “You so ugly your own mama don’t even love you.” Shannon backed off, turned around, and started running. “Mamaaaaa!” she wailed as she ran. I kept yelling after her, more to keep myself from crying now than to hurt her. “Ugly…ugly…ugly.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  It was still early. I went out on the landing to watch the cars pass by, people from the nearby housing development on their way out to the new discount grocery, a few trucks with men coming home late from work, a bus from Bushy Creek Baptist with flat-faced children pressed against the windows staring at me hatefully. I glared back at them. Anger was like a steady drip of poison into my soul, teaching me to hate the ones that hated me. Who do they think they are? I whispered to myself. They piss honey? Shit morning-glory blossoms? Sit on their porches every Sunday morning and look down on the world with contempt? “I hate them,” I told Aunt Raylene when she came up behind me, waving at the bus as it passed. “Looking at us like we’re something nasty.” Aunt Raylene was picking blackberry seeds out of her teeth, looking off into the distance, and she surprised me when she reached over and slapped my shoulder. “They look at you the way you look at them,” she told me bluntly. “You don’t know who those children are. Maybe they’re nasty and silly and hateful. Maybe not. You don’t know what happens to them when they go home. You don’t know their daddies or mamas, who their people are, why they do things, or what they’re scared of. You think because they wear different clothes than you and go by so fast, they’re rich and cruel and thinking terrible things about you. Could be they’re looking at you sitting up here eating blackberries and looking at them like they’re spit on a stove—could be they’re jealous of you, hungry for what you got, afraid of what you would do if they ever stepped in the yard.” She reached down and pulled her string bag from her pocket and began to roll a cigarette. “You’re making up stories about those people. Make up a story where you have to live in their house, be one of their family, and pass by this road. Look at it from the other side for a while. Maybe you won’t be glaring at people so much.” I looked up at her sourly. “People say you ran off to the carnival with a man, but you never say nothing about him. How come he didn’t marry you?” The paper in Aunt Raylene’s hands shook. “People say? People will say anything. I ran off to the carnival, yeah, but not for no man. For myself. And I an’t never wanted to marry nobody. I like my life the way it is, little girl. I made my life, the same way it looks like you’re gonna make yours—out of pride and stubbornness and too much anger. You better think hard, Ruth Anne, about what you want and who you’re mad at. You better think hard.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I wore the penny loafers with only token protest. “Don’t worry about it,” Mama’s friend Mab told her. “Children are happier with dirt between their toes.” But I noticed that her girls turned up for school in saddle oxfords, and at church in patent-leather pumps, and sniffed at Reese and me in our discount loafers. I wasn’t sure what Mama noticed, what she could afford to notice, but when I sat with her on Sunday afternoon and watched her run down her columns of figures, I suspected that she saw everything and hated it all. She’d look out at my flushed and sweating stepfather muscling the lawnmower around the edges of the yard and sigh into her coffee cup. “We an’t gonna be able to stay here,” she’d say, and I knew it was about time to move again. One winter we spent three months staying over with Aunt Alma, who had bought a new house on no money down. None of us expected her to keep it, and the bank filed papers on it almost as soon as we’d arrived. Something happened to me, something I had never felt before and did not know how to fight. Anger hit me like a baseball coming hard and fast off a new bat. The first day at the district school the teacher pursed her lips and asked me my name, and that anger came around and stomped on my belly and throat. I saw tired patience in her eyes, a little shine of pity, and a contempt as old as the red dust hills I could see through the windows of her classroom. I opened my lips but could not speak. “What’s your name, now, honey?” the woman asked me again, speaking slowly, as if she suspected I was not quite bright. The anger lifted in me and became rage. “Roseanne,” I answered as blithely as if I’d never been called anything else. I smiled at her like a Roseanne. “Roseanne Carter. My family’s from Atlanta, just moved up here.” I went on lightly, talking about the school I’d gone to in Atlanta, making it up as I went along, and smiling wider as she kept nodding at me. It scared me that it was so easy—my records, after all, had not caught up with me—that people thought I could be a Roseanne Carter from Atlanta, a city I had never visited.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Daddy Glen’s worried about Christmas and money. He’d like to do something special. Last night he was talking about how we’ve never had his brothers to dinner in all these years.” I looked down into the pot of potatoes, remembering the last time we had gone out to the Waddells’, the way Daddy Glen had stuttered when his father spoke to him. That old man was horrible, and working for him must be hell, even I knew that. Mama leaned in so that her mouth was close to my cheek. “I don’t know. I just don’t understand why his daddy treats Glen so bad. Glen’s always trying to please him, and that old man takes every chance he gets to make Glen look like a fool. It just eats Glen up, eats him up.” She sighed. “Let’s be careful for a while, Bone. Be real careful, baby.” She hesitated as if there were something more she would say, but instead gave my shoulders another squeeze and went to change out of her uniform. I watched her walk away, her head bent forward. How long had it been since I had seen Mama not tired, not sad, not scared? Forever. It seemed like forever. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] I kept looking for something special in me, something magical. I was growing up, wasn’t I? But the only thing different about me was my anger, that raw boiling rage in my stomach. Cherokee maybe, wild Indian anger maybe, like Shannon’s anger, bottomless and horrible. I pulled my lips back so my teeth showed. Every third family in Greenville might have a little Cherokee, but I had been born with a full head of black hair. I’ve got my great-granddaddy’s blood in me, I told myself. I am night’s own daughter, my great-grandfather’s warrior child. I pushed my hair up high on my head and searched my pupils for the red highlights that sparked in the depths, dark shiny red like rubies or fresh bright blood. Dangerous, I told myself. I could be dangerous, oh yes, I could be dangerous. Let Daddy Glen yell at Mama again, let him hurt her, let him hurt me, just let him. He’d better be careful. He’s got no idea what I might not do. If I had a razor, I would surely cut his throat in the dead of night, then run away to live naked and alone in the western hills like someone in a Zane Grey novel. All I had to do was grow a little, grow into myself. Daddy Glen yelled at me at dinner. “That bathroom’s a sty. Way your mama has to work, least you could do is clean up now and then, help out some around here.” Mama sighed and pushed her plate away. Reese ate with her head down, and I said nothing. Mama had said to be careful. Carefully, I kept my head turned, watching lights from the highway reflect off the kitchen curtains, not looking at Daddy Glen.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  A terrible clarity seized me. I was thinking way ahead of myself. Uncle Travis’s shotgun was at his house, in Aunt Ruth’s bedroom closet. If I could get there, get it in my hands, I’d hide it until he was there, right there, as he would be, certainly. At the door or standing in the living room, telling his version of things, explaining it all away, crying again or begging, or just holding Mama by the arms the way he had held me. I would have to be careful, not let anyone stop me until I could blow his head off, blow his neck open, his blood everywhere like a whirlwind. I had to do it. I had to, or he would kill me, me and her, someday, I knew, both of us. If I had to die, then that was the way it would be. “Ruth’s, Mama,” I breathed. “Take me to Ruth’s.” If I could get my hands on that gun, I’d never let it go. Maybe I could just pretend I needed it the way Alma had needed her razor, just to hold it like a doll or something, so that they’d tell the cops, “We never thought she’d use it.” Never. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Mama said. No. Ruth’s. But she wasn’t listening to me. Was I saying it or just thinking it? “Anney. Oh, Anney.” Daddy Glen was right beside us, blood on his face. From her or me? I wondered. Something had hit him. I stared at his face like it was a road map, a route to be memorized, a way to get back to who I really was. After I shot him, there would be nothing left, no way back. All right. “Please, Anney.” He sobbed like a child, and she pulled me tighter into her armpit. Her free hand snaked out and slapped him, drew back, made a fist, and punched him full on. “Ohhh,” he howled. “Don’t, don’t.” He staggered back, tripping on scattered dishes. “Anney!” he whined like a little boy. “I don’t know what happened. I was just gonna talk to her, darling. I just wanted you to come home, for us all to be together again!” Mama kept moving, dragging me with her, using her hip to open the door, half-carrying me down the steps. Not a pause, not a hesitation, across the yard toward her car. “Anney, please! I didn’t mean it. I went crazy. I went crazy. Honey, listen to me!” I was dizzy. Everything hurt, but it was better, better. Strength was coming back, and with it thought. My muscles felt weak but no longer severed from tendons and bones. I could move now. There would be a way. Look how hurt I was. There would be a story we could tell. It would be self-defense. It would be justifiable. I grinned to feel the blood trickling down my neck. Look how hurt I was! Thank you, God.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “I’ve heard about you. I just never met your daughter before.” Mrs. Pearl seemed to shiver all over, then catch herself. Pressed to her mama’s stomach, Shannon began to wail. “Shannon, what are you going on for?” She pushed her daughter away from her side and pulled out a blue embroidered handkerchief to wipe her face. “I think we all kind of surprised each other.” The man stepped forward and gave Mrs. Pearl a slow smile, but his eyes kept wandering back to Shannon. I wiped my mouth again and stopped myself from spitting. Mrs. Pearl went on stroking her daughter’s face but looking up into the man’s eyes. “I love it when you sing,” she said, and half giggled. Shannon pulled away from her and stared up at them both. The hate in her face was terrible. For a moment I loved her with all my heart. “Well,” the man said. He rocked from one boot to the other. “Well…” I reached for Shannon’s hand. She slapped mine away. Her face was blazing. I felt as if a great fire was burning close to me, using up all the oxygen, making me pant to catch my breath. I laced the fingers of my hands together and tilted my head back to look up at the stars. If there was a God, then there would be justice. If there was justice, then Shannon and I would make them all burn. We walked away from the tent toward Mr. Pearl’s battered DeSoto. “Someday,” Shannon whispered. “Yeah,” I whispered back. “Someday.” Driving backcountry with Mr. Pearl when he went on his prospecting trips meant stopping in at little rural churches with gospel choirs, shabby tents with a soloist or two, and occasional living-room prayer meetings that might shelter an extraordinary young singer. Following up Mr. Pearl’s tips was extended, tedious work requiring great patience and tact. All too many of the singers couldn’t sing at all, and hadn’t an ear good enough to know when they went off tune. A few were enthusiastic enough that Mr. Pearl cautiously encouraged them to try out for one of the existing gospel groups. But mostly all he found was an echo of the real stuff, a diluted blend of harmony and aspiration. “Pitiful, an’t it?” Shannon sounded like her father’s daughter. “That sad old organ music just can’t stand against a slide guitar.” I nodded reluctantly. I still wanted to believe that spirit, determination, and hard work could lift even the most pedestrian voice into the rarefied atmosphere of heartfelt gospel music.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  It just eats Glen up, eats him up.” She sighed. “Let’s be careful for a while, Bone. Be real careful, baby.” She hesitated as if there were something more she would say, but instead gave my shoulders another squeeze and went to change out of her uniform. I watched her walk away, her head bent forward. How long had it been since I had seen Mama not tired, not sad, not scared? Forever. It seemed like forever. I kept looking for something special in me, something magical. I was growing up, wasn’t I? But the only thing different about me was my anger, that raw boiling rage in my stomach. Cherokee maybe, wild Indian anger maybe, like Shannon’s anger, bottomless and horrible. I pulled my lips back so my teeth showed. Every third family in Greenville might have a little Cherokee, but I had been born with a full head of black hair. I’ve got my great-granddaddy’s blood in me, I told myself. I am night’s own daughter, my great-grandfather’s warrior child. I pushed my hair up high on my head and searched my pupils for the red highlights that sparked in the depths, dark shiny red like rubies or fresh bright blood. Dangerous, I told myself. I could be dangerous, oh yes, I could be dangerous. Let Daddy Glen yell at Mama again, let him hurt her, let him hurt me, just let him. He’d better be careful. He’s got no idea what I might not do. If I had a razor, I would surely cut his throat in the dead of night, then run away to live naked and alone in the western hills like someone in a Zane Grey novel. All I had to do was grow a little, grow into myself. Daddy Glen yelled at me at dinner. “That bathroom’s a sty. Way your mama has to work, least you could do is clean up now and then, help out some around here.” Mama sighed and pushed her plate away. Reese ate with her head down, and I said nothing. Mama had said to be careful. Carefully, I kept my head turned, watching lights from the highway reflect off the kitchen curtains, not looking at Daddy Glen. After dinner, I scrubbed the tub and took a long, hot bath. I looked for black hairs in my navel and felt for fuzz between my legs. I was smooth and clean. I took up Mama’s hand mirror and propped it at an angle between my legs. My chin was pink and dimpled, my neck pale underneath, so that I could see the blue lines of veins threading up to my ears. I put my palms flat on my cheeks, pushed back and slanted my eyes. My face remained unreadable, my eyes blank and silvery. My face told nothing. It was scary, stern and empty. I bent my head back, looking down to my reddish-brown nipples, my puckered belly button, long thighs, and bruised knees.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  At the door or standing in the living room, telling his version of things, explaining it all away, crying again or begging, or just holding Mama by the arms the way he had held me. I would have to be careful, not let anyone stop me until I could blow his head off, blow his neck open, his blood everywhere like a whirlwind. I had to do it. I had to, or he would kill me, me and her, someday, I knew, both of us. If I had to die, then that was the way it would be. “Ruth’s, Mama,” I breathed. “Take me to Ruth’s.” If I could get my hands on that gun, I’d never let it go. Maybe I could just pretend I needed it the way Alma had needed her razor, just to hold it like a doll or something, so that they’d tell the cops, “We never thought she’d use it.” Never. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Mama said. No. Ruth’s. But she wasn’t listening to me. Was I saying it or just thinking it? “Anney. Oh, Anney.” Daddy Glen was right beside us, blood on his face. From her or me? I wondered. Something had hit him. I stared at his face like it was a road map, a route to be memorized, a way to get back to who I really was. After I shot him, there would be nothing left, no way back. All right. “Please, Anney.” He sobbed like a child, and she pulled me tighter into her armpit. Her free hand snaked out and slapped him, drew back, made a fist, and punched him full on. “Ohhh,” he howled. “Don’t, don’t.” He staggered back, tripping on scattered dishes. “Anney!” he whined like a little boy. “I don’t know what happened. I was just gonna talk to her, darling. I just wanted you to come home, for us all to be together again!” Mama kept moving, dragging me with her, using her hip to open the door, half-carrying me down the steps. Not a pause, not a hesitation, across the yard toward her car. “Anney, please! I didn’t mean it. I went crazy. I went crazy. Honey, listen to me!” I was dizzy. Everything hurt, but it was better, better. Strength was coming back, and with it thought. My muscles felt weak but no longer severed from tendons and bones. I could move now. There would be a way. Look how hurt I was. There would be a story we could tell. It would be self-defense. It would be justifiable. I grinned to feel the blood trickling down my neck. Look how hurt I was! Thank you, God. “Anney!” He was following us. “Please, Anney!” Keep moving, Mama. Across the sparse grass and dirt, up to the car. Mama gasped into my ear, holding me against her trembling rib cage.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I tried to reach her with my right hand but the pain made me gasp. “Mama,” I pleaded, but she still wasn’t looking at me. “Lord God, Lord God, Lord God.” Her cry was low, sibilant, painful. She was holding him, his head pressed to her belly. His bloody hairline was visible past the angle of her hip. “Mama,” I whispered. “Help me, God,” she pleaded in a raw, terrible voice. “Help me.” I could see her fingers on Glen’s shoulder, see the white knuckles holding him tight. My mouth closed over the shout I would not let go. Rage burned in my belly and came up my throat. I’d said I could never hate her, but I hated her now for the way she held him, the way she stood there crying over him. Could she love me and still hold him like that? I let my head fall back. I did not want to see this. I wanted Travis’s shotgun, or my sharp killing hook. I wanted everything to stop, the world to end, anything, but not to lie bleeding while she held him and cried. I looked up into white sky going gray. The first stars would come out as the sky darkened. I wanted to see that, the darkness and the stars. I heard a roar far off, a wave of night and despair waiting for me, and followed it out into the darkness. Bastard Out of Carolina 21 A unt Alma has a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, with a few wedding invitations, funeral announcements, and baby pictures pasted down beside page after page of headlines. “Oh, we’re always turning up in the news,” she used to joke when she’d show people that book. Her favorite is the four-page spread the Greenville News did when Uncle Earle’s convertible smashed into the barbershop across the street from the county courthouse a few months before it burned down. There are pictures of the front end of the car propped up on a barber stool just a few feet short of splintered silvered mirrors, another of Earle sitting on the curb leaning forward with his head in his hands, and a series of the barber picking through the remains of his shop with the help of a highway patrolman and Granny Boatwright. The barber looks funny, holding up his shaving brush and cup in fingers that blur a little so that you can see he must have still been shaking. HE DIDN’T COME IN FOR A SHAVE , the headline reads under the picture of the car on the stool. BOATWRIGHT captions the close-up of Earle’s numb face. In those pictures, Uncle Earle looks scary, like a thief or a murderer, the kind of gaunt, poorly shaven face sketched on a post office wall.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Reese looked confused. “What do mean sisters do?” “They do everything their brothers do. Only they do it first and fastest and meanest.” Reese still looked confused, but Patsy Ruth whooped. “Yeah! I want to be the Rifleman’s mean sister.” Patsy Ruth ran off to get Grey’s old broken plastic rifle. All afternoon she pretended it was a sawed-off shotgun like the one on “Wanted Dead or Alive.” Reese finally got into it and started playing at being shot off the porch. I took Aunt Alma’s butcher knife and announced that I was Jim Bowie’s mean sister and no one was to mess with me. I practiced sticking Aunt Alma’s knife into the porch and listened to the boys cursing in the backyard. I was mean, I decided. I was mean and vicious, and all I really wanted to be doing was sticking that knife in Daddy Glen. That evening, Patsy Ruth entertained Alma and Wade by running up and down yelling “Ten-four, ten-four” until she knocked over Aunt Alma’s glass. “What in God’s name are you playing at, child?” “I was being Broderick Crawford’s mean sister,” Patsy Ruth wailed, wiping her nose. “His what?” Uncle Wade started laughing into his glass. “His what?” He rocked back on his cane-bottom chair and ground his cigarette out on the porch. Aunt Alma shook her head and looked at Patsy Ruth like she had gone crazy. “Broderick Crawford’s mean sister! My Lord, what they don’t think up.” Patsy Ruth was humiliated and angry. She pointed at me. “She told me about it. She told me I could.” Wade reached out and slapped my fanny. “Girl, you got a mind that scares me.” He swatted me again, but lightly, and he kept grinning. “Broderick Crawford’s mean sister.” I didn’t care. I played mean sisters for all I was worth. Bastard Out of Carolina 15 M ama let Aunt Raylene take Reese and me along when she went to visit Uncle Earle at the county farm. Aunt Raylene said he would be there another three months and he was lonely to see his nieces and nephews. “Why don’t you take Grey and Garvey?” Mama asked her. “Show them what’s gonna happen to them if they keep breaking into telephones.” “The hell with that.” Aunt Raylene was sensitive about Grey and Garvey, who had been picked up by the highway patrol for drag-racing in Uncle Beau’s truck when they were supposed to be staying the night at her place. Alma got mad at Raylene for not keeping a more watchful eye on them, and Raylene came close to slapping Garvey when he boasted that they were the youngest in the family ever to be arrested.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I’m gonna wave at you from the roof, and then you can tell me I’m crazy.” He did it too, tied a good long rope to the chain dangling off his hook and swung it around and around until he got it high enough, and launched it at the house. The barbs dug right into the wood below the roofline and gouged deep enough to support Grey’s weight, though once he climbed up there, he couldn’t swing around to get a leg over the roof’s edge after all. Garvey tried it next, forgetting that they had been arguing, but he had the same problem. He did manage to hang on to the ridgepole while he worked the hook loose and tossed it down. Then he slid down after it, by some miracle not breaking any bones. Neither of them saw me grab Garvey’s abandoned hook and start edging toward the side of the house. “We’ll aim it at the roof this time,” Garvey told us. “Get it on the roof itself. Then we’ll be able to climb over the top by pulling up on the rope.” “You’ll do no such thing!” Aunt Raylene had come up behind me while we were all looking at Garvey. She grabbed one hook out of my hands and the other from Grey. “You trying to kill one of these children?” She looked up then and saw the holes the hook had gouged in her wall. “Oh my Jesus!” Her left hand snaked out and slapped first Grey, then Garvey. “You digging holes in my house! You planning to just walk off and leave it like that, I suppose. No matter that it’s gonna let the rain in and rot my wall.” The chain dangling from one fist knocked against the skirt of the print dress she’d worn to go into town. “I’m surprised you an’t killed each other already. No.” She shook her head and spat snuff juice to the side. “No. What’s surprising is that I an’t killed you already.” “It an’t that deep a hole,” Grey tried to tell her. “It an’t gonna let the rain in.” The color rushed into Aunt Raylene’s face, and her eyes went glassy. I thought for a moment how Uncle Beau said Aunt Raylene moved out to the river after she got in trouble on the carnival circuit and cut a man up for trying to mess with her. Now she looked like she was going to swing one of those hooks at Grey’s belly. The other kids took off at a run, and Grey stumbled back out of her reach. “Aunt Raylene,” he pleaded, sweat breaking out on his face, “Aunt Raylene, now, Aunt Raylene, wait…” “You crazy little bastard,” she hissed at him. She caught his arm in one hand and shook him back and forth like a fish on a pole. “All of you. Don’t you know what this is?”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Don’t doubt that. She loves you more than her life, and she an’t never gonna forgive herself for what she’s done to you, what she allowed to happen.” Aunt Raylene gripped the steering wheel fiercely and stared at me. “I shouldn’t talk so much. I’ve said enough.” She wiped her mouth. “We need some time. You need some time. You know what you look like, girl?” I turned away. I knew what I looked like. At the hospital when they had left me alone in the bathroom for a minute, I had looked at myself in the mirror and known I was a different person. Older, meaner, rawboned, crazy, and hateful. I was full of hate. I had spit on the glass, spit on my life, not caring anymore who I was or would be. I had wanted to laugh at everyone, Raylene and the nurses, all of them watching me like some fragile piece of glass ready to shatter around boiling water. I was boiling inside. I was cooking away. I was who I was going to be, and she was a terrible person. “Ruth Anne,” Aunt Raylene whispered. “Girl, look at me. Stop thinking about what happened. Don’t think about it. Don’t try to think about nothing. You can’t understand it yet. You don’t have to. It don’t make sense, and I can’t explain it to you. You can’t explain it to yourself. Your mama…” She stopped, and I looked back at her. “Your mama loves you. Just hang on, girl. Just hang on. It’ll be better in time, I promise you.” I promise you, she said. My mouth twisted. I stared at her hatefully. Raylene looked at me as if my rage hurt her, but she said nothing, just climbed heavily out of the truck. She moved slowly, hugging her old purse to her bosom and stopping only to give the panting dog a quick pat on the head before she went up and laid the purse on the steps. She came back and took me up again as easily as if I weighed no more than that purse. She carried me inside the house, the dog following, and put me in her bed. The dog settled himself on the rug, comfortably. I lay still, ignoring Aunt Raylene’s movements but thinking even so about the woman she had loved, the woman who had loved her child more. It was too much for me. I’d have to think about it some other time. The dog turned to me with hopeful brown eyes, his tongue hanging down as if he wanted me to invite him up on the bed.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I hate you.” “I’ve prayed for you to die,” he hissed between set white teeth. His hand caught the front of my blouse and dug into the material. “Just die and leave us alone. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d have been all right. Everything would have been all right.” He sobbed and dragged me forward so that I was up on my knees swaying in his grip until my blouse tore, and I fell back under him. He grabbed for me again, and something hit me hard between the legs. I screamed. His boot or his leg? He dropped down on top of me. “You’re not going anywhere.” He laughed. “You think you’re so grown-up. You think you’re so big and bad, saying no to me. Let’s see how big you are, how grown!” His hands spread what was left of my blouse and ripped at the zipper on my pants, pulling them down my thighs as my left hand groped to hold them. I tried to kick, but I was pinned. Tears were streaming down my face, but I wasn’t crying. I was cursing him. “Damn you! Damn you! Damn you! God will damn you!” He reached with one hand to shove my pants down almost to my ankles and with the other to open his britches. “You’ll shut up. I’ll shut you up. I’ll teach you.” He ripped my panties off me like they were paper. Then he jerked me up a little and spread my legs. “You fucker!” I punched up at him with my almost useless right arm. “You little cunt. I should have done this a long time ago. You’ve always wanted it. Don’t tell me you don’t.” His knee pushed my legs further apart, and his big hand leisurely smashed the side of my face. He laughed then, as if he liked the feel of my blood on his fist, and hit me again. I opened my mouth to scream, and his hand closed around on my throat. “I’ll give you what you really want,” he said, and his whole weight came down hard. My scream was gaspy and low around his hand on my throat. He fumbled with his fingers between my legs, opened me, and then reared back slightly, looking down into my face with his burning eyes. “Now,” he said, and slammed his body forward from his knees. “You’ll learn.” His words came in short angry bursts. “You’ll never mouth off to me again. You’ll keep your mouth shut. You’ll do as you’re told. You’ll tell Anney what I want you to tell her.” I gagged. He rocked in and ground down, flexing and thrusting his hips. I felt like he was tearing me apart, my ass slapping against the floor with every thrust, burning and tearing and bruising. “God!”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Dr. Westcott (in his Com., p. xxxiii.): "John knew that to be with Christ was life, to reject Christ was death; and he did not shrink from expressing the thought in the spirit of the old dispensation. He learned from the Lord, as time went on, a more faithful patience, but he did not unlearn the burning devotion which consumed him. To the last, words of awful warning, like the thunderings about the throne, reveal the presence of that secret fire. Every page of the Apocalypse is inspired with the cry of the souls beneath the altar, ’How long’ (Rev. 6:10); and nowhere is error as to the person of Christ denounced more sternly than in his Epistles (2 John 10; 1 John 4:1ff.)." Similar passages in Stanley. II. The Mission of John.