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 Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Whatever I looked like, I frightened 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 here.” 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 understood her, hoping to draw her closer. And she did step a very short step closer, with her pencil poised incongruously over her pad, and repeated the formula: “… don’t serve Negroes here.” Somehow, with the repetition of that phrase, which was already ringing in my head like a thousand bells of a nightmare, I realized that she would never come any closer and that I would have to strike from a distance. There was nothing on the table but an ordinary water-mug half full of water, and I picked this up and hurled it with all my strength at her. She ducked and it missed her and shattered against the mirror behind the bar. And, with that sound, my frozen blood abruptly thawed, I returned from wherever I had been, I saw, for the first time, the restaurant, the people with their mouths open, already, as it seemed to me, rising as one man, and I realized what I had done, and where I was, and I was frightened. I rose and began running for the door. A round, potbellied man grabbed me by the nape of the neck just as I reached the doors and began to beat me about the face. I kicked him and got loose and ran into the streets. My friend whispered, “ Run! ” and I ran. My friend stayed outside the restaurant long enough to misdirect my pursuers and the police, who arrived, he told me, at once. I do not know what I said to him when he came to my room that night. I could not have said much. I felt, in the oddest, most awful way, that I had somehow betrayed him. I lived it over and over and over again, the way one relives an automobile accident after it has happened and one finds oneself alone and safe. I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  To say nothing, speaking as a Black citizen, regarding his countrymen, of friends like these. There is an unadmitted icy panic coiled beneath the scaffolding of these present days, hopes, endeavors. I have said that the Civilized have never been able to honor, recognize, or describe the Savage. Once they had decided that he was savage, there was nothing to honor, recognize or describe. But the savages describe the Europeans, who were not yet, when they landed in the New (!) World, White, as the people from heaven. Neither did the savages in Africa have any way of foreseeing the anguished diaspora to which they were about to be condemned. Even the chiefs who sold Africans into slavery could not have had any idea that this slavery was meant to endure forever, or for at least a thousand years. Nothing in the savage experience could have prepared them for such an idea, any more than they could conceive of the land as something to be bought and sold. (As I cannot believe that people are actually buying and selling air space above the towers of Manhattan.) Nevertheless, all of this happened, and is happening. Out of this incredible brutality, we get the myth of the happy darky and Gone With the Wind. And the North Americans appear to believe these legends, which they have created and which absolutely nothing in reality corroborates, until today. And when these legends are attacked, as is happening now—all over a globe which has never been and never will be White—my countrymen become childishly vindictive and unutterably dangerous. The unadmitted panic of which I spoke above is created by the terror that the Savage can, now, describe the Civilized: the only way to prevent this is to obliterate humanity. This panic proves that neither a person nor a people can do anything without knowing what they are doing. Neither can anyone avoid paying for the choices he or she has made. It is savagely, if one may say so, ironical that the only proof the world—mankind—has ever had of White supremacy is in the Black face and voice: that face never scrutinized, that voice never heard. The eyes in that face prove the unforgivable and unimaginable horror of being a captive in the promised land, but also prove that trouble don’t last always: and the voice, once filled with a rage and pain that corroborated the reality of the jailer, is addressing another reality, in other tongues. The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant. Or—as they are, indeed, already, in all but actual fact: obsolete. For, if trouble don’t last always, as the Preacher tells us, neither does Power, and it is on the fact or the hope or the myth of Power that that identity which calls itself White has always seemed to depend.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  I went to the same self-service restaurant three times and stood with all the Princeton boys before the counter, waiting for a hamburger and coffee; it was always an extraordinarily long time before anything was set before me; but it was not until the fourth visit that I learned that, in fact, nothing had ever been set before me: I had simply picked something up. Negroes were not served there, I was told, and they had been waiting for me to realize that I was always the only Negro present. Once I was told this, I determined to go there all the time. But now they were ready for me and, though some dreadful scenes were subsequently enacted in that restaurant, I never ate there again. It was the same story all over New Jersey, in bars, bowling alleys, diners, places to live. I was always being forced to leave, silently, or with mutual imprecations. I very shortly became notorious and children giggled behind me when I passed and their elders whispered or shouted—they really believed that I was mad. And it did begin to work on my mind, of course; I began to be afraid to go anywhere and to compensate for this I went places to which I really should not have gone and where, God knows, I had no desire to be. My reputation in town naturally enhanced my reputation at work and my working day became one long series of acrobatics designed to keep me out of trouble. I cannot say that these acrobatics succeeded. It began to seem that the machinery of the organization I worked for was turning over, day and night, with but one aim: to eject me. I was fired once, and contrived, with the aid of a friend from New York, to get back on the payroll; was fired again, and bounced back again. It took a while to fire me for the third time, but the third time took. There were no loopholes anywhere. There was not even any way of getting back inside the gates. That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels. Once this disease is contracted, one can never be really carefree again, for the fever, without an instant’s warning, can recur at any moment. It can wreck more important things than race relations. There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood—one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Thus, the African, exile, pagan, hurried off the auction block and into the fields, fell on his knees before that God in Whom he must now believe; who had made him, but not in His image. This tableau, this impossibility, is the heritage of the Negro in America: Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow! For black is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white. It is this cry, implacable on the air and in the skull, that he must live with. Beneath the widely published catalogue of brutality—bringing to mind, somehow, an image, a memory of church-bells burdening the air—is this reality which, in the same nightmare notion, he both flees and rushes to embrace. In America, now, this country devoted to the death of the paradox—which may, therefore, be put to death by one—his lot is as ambiguous as a tableau by Kafka. 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 Son, 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 like blood, remembering a million indignities, the terrible, rat-infested house, the humiliation of home-relief, the intense, aimless, ugly bickering, hating it; hatred smoulders through these pages like sulphur fire. All of Bigger’s life is controlled, defined by his hatred and his fear. And later, his fear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape; he dies, having come, through this violence, we are told, for the first time, to a kind of life, 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 exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  So into the tiny studio I went, and was told to talk directly into one of the cameras. During the journey, I had hastily concocted a little argument. I remembered that some years ago, while I was still living in Oxford, I had dropped into Blackfriars one evening. The Dominicans had been celebrating the Mass together and had just reached the consecration, pointing toward the Eucharistic bread and saying in unison, “This is my body.” The words had suddenly struck me as horribly ironic. At the time, I weighed about ninety pounds; I was in my anorexic phase, and was doing my best to make my body disappear. I thought of Rebecca; I thought of the way our bodies had rebelled against the religious regime we had endured. Of all the great world religions, Christianity should value the body most. After all, it taught that God had in some sense taken a human body and used it to redeem the world; everything about the physical should have been sacred and sacramental. But that had not happened. Instead, the churches had found it almost impossible to integrate the sexual with the divine and had developed a Platonic aversion to the body—particularly the bodies of women. So that morning, in the hot little studio, I told that story. I also spoke of my anorexia and my epilepsy. I recalled my blackouts and the way I had been instructed by my superiors to subjugate my body to my will. I recalled the physical penances we had used to keep our bodies in line. And then I branched out and spoke of the failure of the churches to make creative use of their cult of the body of Christ. I remembered how Francis of Assisi had called his body Brother Ass, as though it were simply a stupid, sexually rampant beast of burden. I mentioned the women saints, such as Margaret Mary Alocoque, who had suffered from anorexia; Catherine of Siena had starved herself to death with the church’s approbation. I spoke of the barely concealed disgust felt by the Fathers of the church when they were forced to contemplate the female body; recalled that in the convent at Matins each Saturday, we had listened to readings from Saint Bernard or Saint Augustine, who had speculated about the virginity of the Mother of God in a way that even then had seemed prurient to me: How exactly had Mary remained a virgin after giving birth to Jesus? Did her hymen remain intact after the birth? I finally concluded my little talk by suggesting that a religion that found it impossible to accommodate the physical makeup of half the human race had a grave problem. I looked at the clock. My twenty minutes was up.

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

  “Right away. As soon as we can.” I ate a bowl of soup while my mother finished packing. She carried the suitcases into the front hall and then walked down to the corner to call a cab. That was when I remembered the rifle. I went to the closet and saw it there with Roy’s things, his boots and jackets and ammo boxes. I carried the rifle to the living room and waited for my mother to come back. “That thing stays,” she said when she saw it. “It’s mine,” I said. “Don’t make a scene,” she told me. “I’ve had enough of those things. I’m sick of them. Now put it back.” “It’s mine,” I repeated. “He gave it to me.” “No. I’m sick of guns.” “Mom, it’s mine.” She looked out the window. “No. We don’t have room for it.” This was a mistake. She had put the argument in practical terms and now it would be impossible for her to argue from principle again. “Look,” I said, “There’s room. See, I can break it down.” And before she could stop me I had unscrewed the locking bolt and pulled the rifle apart. I dragged one of the suitcases back into the living room and unzipped it and slid the two halves of the rifle in between the clothes. “See?” I said. “There’s plenty of room.” She had watched all this with her arms crossed, her lips pressed tightly together. She turned to the window again. “Keep it then,” she said. “If it means that much to you.” IT WAS RAINING when our cab pulled up. The cabby honked and my mother started wrestling one of the suitcases down the steps. The cabby saw her and got out to help, a big man in a fancy Western shirt that got soaked in the drizzle. He went back for the other two bags while we waited in the cab. My mother kidded him about how wet he was and he kidded her back, looking in the rearview mirror constantly as if to make sure she was still there. As we approached the Greyhound station he stopped joking and began to quiz her in a low, hurried voice, asking one question after another, and when I got out of the cab he pulled the door shut behind me, leaving the two of them alone inside. Through the rain

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  So by the time I flew out to Tel Aviv on that cold January day, I was convinced that my mission in life was to unmask the dogmatic intolerance of the churches. But there had been one slightly unsettling incident just a few weeks earlier. I had quickly become aware that if I wanted to understand Saint Paul, I needed to know a great deal more about Judaism. So far I had simply regarded it as a mere prelude to Christianity, superannuated and superseded by the later, more inspiring faith. I had accepted without question the portrait of Judaism in the New Testament, derived in large part (I now realized) from Paul’s early polemic with Jesus’ disciples, who had wanted Christianity to remain a strictly Jewish sect. From my earliest years I had been taught that Judaism had become an empty faith: wedded to external observances and with no spiritual dimension, it was a religion that had lost its heart. Jews staggered under the burdensome requirements of the Law of Moses but could no longer understand the spirit that had originally inspired these now soulless commandments. No wonder Jesus had lambasted the Pharisees, comparing them to gleaming white tombs that looked beautiful from the outside but contained only corruption and decay! The Pharisees had constantly clashed with Jesus, castigated him for breaking the Law by healing the sick on the Sabbath or eating with people who did not observe their pointless purity laws. But I was now beginning to learn that many of Jesus’ teachings about charity and loving-kindness were almost identical with those of the leading rabbis of his day. Clearly I would have to revise my childhood view of Judaism. Nick put me in touch with Hyam Maccoby, who, like me, had done a piece for Opinions. He had delivered a swingeing attack on the New Testament view of the Pharisees, pointing out not only that they were among the most liberal Jews of their time but that in all likelihood Jesus had been a Pharisee himself. Michael Goulder was slightly dismissive of Hyam’s ideas about Christianity, but I found Hyam’s depiction of Judaism compelling and we agreed to meet for lunch. He worked as the librarian at the Leo Baeck College in North London, and I warmed to him immediately as he escorted me round the library, pulling books off the shelves, recommending some authors, and warning me against others. It was over egg-and-tomato sandwiches at a small greasy-spoon café near the tube station that Hyam delivered his bombshell. He was arguing that Jesus could well have belonged to the school of Rabbi Hillel, one of the leading Pharisees. Jesus had, after all, taught a version of Hillel’s Golden Rule.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Through the Narrow Gate had been published six weeks earlier. Writing it had been one of the hardest things that I had ever done. It had taken three full drafts to get it right. The first had been very angry; I had poured out all the bitterness and rage that had accumulated over the past ten years, fulminating about the absurdities and cruelties of our training. June, my agent, had looked at the draft, suggested different narrative techniques to vary the tempo, but had then asked a crucial question: “If it was really as bad as that, why did you stay so long?” That had hit home, and I returned to my script and started again. This time, I made myself remember some of the more positive things about the convent years. I recalled the excitement of those first days in the postulantship, when I had been convinced that I had embarked on the road to holiness; the beauty of the liturgy; the kindness of some of my superiors; and the grief that I had felt when it had become clear that I must leave. I realized that the order had itself been undergoing a painful period of transition. For the first time in years, I allowed myself to feel the attraction of the ideal that had propelled me into the convent and kept me there. June had been far more satisfied with this second attempt. A final draft, with some fine-tuning and additions, took only a few weeks, and the manuscript was ready for the publishers. It had been sold at auction just a year after Sally had sat me down at her father’s desk and forced me to make a start.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Saint Paul seemed a great place to start. I was convinced that many if not all of the failings of Christianity could be traced back to this pugnacious apostle. The churches’ obsession with complex doctrine, their denigration of women and the body, their intolerance and authoritarian corruption could all be laid at his door. He had perverted the simple, loving message of Jesus, and the religion that came after him had never fully recovered. But as I started to read a little more deeply, I found that the role of Paul in early Christianity had been even more significant. I had stumbled unawares into the minefield of New Testament scholarship, whose findings astounded me. In the convent, I had been introduced to the rudiments of modern biblical criticism while working for my theology diploma, but this had been a very ladylike syllabus, which had excluded most of the really challenging material. Now, reading in my flat in the weeks before my departure for Israel, while June was arguing with Channel 4 about my contract, I made some startling discoveries. A disturbing number of eminent scholars agreed that Jesus had no intention of founding a new religion. He had preached only to his fellow Jews, and there was nothing strikingly original about his teaching, which was in line with other strands of first-century Judaism. Jesus certainly never claimed to be God, but preferred the title “Son of Man,” which emphasized his humanity. After the scandal of his crucifixion, his traumatized disciples had had visions of him risen from the tomb and concluded that he was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, who would shortly return to inaugurate the kingdom of God on earth. But the early Christians still regarded themselves as forming an exclusively Jewish sect. It was Saint Paul, who had never known the historical Jesus, who had first marketed the faith for the non-Jewish world of the Roman Empire. But even Paul had not seen Jesus as divine in any simplistic way. When he called him “Son of God,” he used the phrase in its strictly Jewish sense: Jesus was an ordinary human being who had been given a special mission by God; as a result of his obedience and devotion, he had been elevated to a position of unique intimacy with God and given the title “Lord,” or kyrios. But (I now read) there is always a clear distinction in the New Testament between the kyrios Christos and God the Father.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  To tell his story is to begin to liberate us from his image and it is, for the first time, to clothe this phantom with flesh and blood, to deepen, by our understanding of him and his relationship to us, our understanding of ourselves and of all men. But this is not the story which Native Son tells, for we find here merely, repeated in anger, the story which we have told in pride. Nor, since the implications of this anger are evaded, are we ever confronted with the actual or potential significance of our pride; which is why we fall, with such a positive glow of recognition, upon Max’s long and bitter summing up. It is addressed to those among us of good will and it seems to say that, though there are whites and blacks among us who hate each other, we will not; there are those who are betrayed by greed, by guilt, by blood lust, but not we; we will set our faces against them and join hands and walk together into that dazzling future when there will be no white or black. This is the dream of all liberal men, a dream not at all dishonorable, but, nevertheless, a dream. For, let us join hands on this mountain as we may, the battle is elsewhere. It proceeds far from us in the heat and horror and pain of life itself where all men are betrayed by greed and guilt and bloodlust and where no one’s hands are clean. Our good will, from which we yet expect such power to transform us, is thin, passionless, strident: its roots, examined, lead us back to our forebears, whose assumption it was that the black man, to become truly human and acceptable, must first become like us.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  It transpired that I was to be the chief weapon in John’s antireligious arsenal. “You’re so bright, darling,” he repeatedly exclaimed. “God—you’re clever!” he would breathe ecstatically, after I had uttered what seemed to me a perfectly commonplace remark. Constantly he and Nick would congratulate me on having escaped from the clutches of the church. Like the tabloid newspapers, they treated me as a heroine, who had, with great resourcefulness, escaped from deadly peril. “How did you come to be the person you are?” Nick once wrote to me on a postcard. I was amused and flattered. After all the years of failure, of being told that I was simply not up to the rigorous demands of a university career and being treated like a tiresome child at Dulwich, this adulation was delightful. Of course, I could see that it was over the top, but I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t enjoyed it. And it was all such fun. This was the eighties, and John was constantly sweeping me off for delicious, bibulous lunches and dinners, where we all discoursed wittily on, among other things, the absurdity of the religious enterprise. And the more I gave voice to the distaste that I still felt for the church and its claims, the more repelled I became. There was also something cathartic in this iconoclasm. For years I had kept quiet about my frustration with religion, and even though writing Through the Narrow Gate had redeemed certain aspects of the convent years, there was still a residue of anger. I hated the high-handed way that the Christian authorities had behaved over the centuries, haranguing the faithful on their sexual lives, telling them what to believe and what kind of contraception they could use. I was appalled by their attitude toward women. I was incensed by the way they claimed a monopoly of truth and had persecuted others for not submitting to the theological niceties that they endorsed. A cursory glance at Christian history with its crusades, inquisitions, persecutions, and bloody wars of religion was surely proof enough that on the whole faith had done more harm than good. This was what certainty did for you! For years I had kept these thoughts to myself. But now I could name my anger, give it a definite form and shape. This was liberating and healing, like lancing a boil. I was chiefly angry about the churches’ obsession with intellectual conformity. Of course, I had not been tortured for my false beliefs by inquisitors or massacred like the victims of the Crusaders. But in my own small way, I had suffered from this intolerance. I remembered the scene with Mother Greta: No, the arguments for the historicity of the Resurrection are not true, Sister, but please don’t tell the others.

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

  fresh. You could almost smell the Listerine on his breath, the Mennen on his cheeks. We were looking right down at him. With the palm of his left hand he kept the beat of the song against the steering wheel. His right arm rested on the back of the empty seat beside him, which would not remain empty for long. He was on his way to pick someone up. We held no conference. One look was enough to see that he was everything we were not, his life a progress of satisfactions we had no hope of attaining in any future we could seriously propose for ourselves. The first egg hit the street beside him. The second egg hit the front fender. The third egg hit the trunk and splattered his shoulders and neck and hair. We looked down just long enough to tally the damage before pulling our heads back. A moment passed. Then a howl rose skyward. No words—just one solitary soul cry of disbelief. We could still hear the music coming from his radio. The light must have changed, because a horn honked, and honked again, and someone yelled something, and another voice answered harshly, and the song was suddenly lost in the noise of engines. We rolled back and forth on the roof for a while. Just as we were getting ready to go back down to Silver’s apartment, the Thunderbird screeched around the corner up the block. We could hear the driver cursing. The car moved slowly toward the light, combusting loudly. As it passed below we peered over the parapet again. The driver was scanning the sidewalks with stiff angry jerks of his head. He seemed to have no idea where the eggs had come from. We let fly again. One hit the hood with a loud boom, another landed in the seat beside him, the last exploded on the dashboard. Covered with egg and eggshell, he rose in his seat and bellowed. There was more honking at the light. Again he tore away and again he came back, still bellowing. Six eggs were left in the carton. Each of us took two. Silver knelt by the edge, risking a few hurried glances into the street while holding his arm out behind him to keep us in check until the moment was right. Then he beckoned furiously and we reared up beside him and got rid of our eggs and dropped back out of sight before they hit. The driver was looking up at the building across the street; he never laid eyes on us. We heard the eggs smack the pavement, boom against the car. This time there was no cry of protest. The silence made me uncomfortable and in my discomfort I grinned at Silver, but Silver did not grin back. His face was purple and twitching with anger as if he had been the one set upon and outraged. He was beside himself. Breathing loudly, clenching and unclenching his jaw, he leaned over the edge and cupped

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Further, the militant men and women of the thirties were not, upon examination, significantly emancipated from their antecedents, however bitterly they might consider themselves estranged or however gallantly they struggled to build a better world. However they might extol Russia, their concept of a better world was quite helplessly American and betrayed a certain thinness of imagination, a suspect reliance on suspect and badly digested formulae, and a positively fretful romantic haste. Finally, the relationship of the Negro to the Worker cannot be summed up, nor even greatly illuminated, by saying that their aims are one. It is true only insofar as they both desire better working conditions and useful only insofar as they unite their strength as workers to achieve these ends. Further than this we cannot in honesty go. In this climate Wright’s voice first was heard and the struggle which promised for a time to shape his work and give it purpose also fixed it in an ever more unrewarding rage. Recording his days of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before him had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when they speak of the Negro: that fantastic and fearful image which we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash. This is the significance of Native Son and also, unhappily, its overwhelming limitation. Native Son begins with the Brring! of an alarm clock in the squalid Chicago tenement where Bigger and his family live. Rats live there too, feeding off the garbage, and we first encounter Bigger in the act of killing one. One may consider that the entire book, from that harsh Brring! to Bigger’s weak “Good-by” as the lawyer, Max, leaves him in the death cell, is an extension, with the roles inverted, of this chilling metaphor. Bigger’s situation and Bigger himself exert on the mind the same sort of fascination. The premise of the book is, as I take it, clearly conveyed in these first pages: we are confronting a monster created by the American republic and we are, through being made to share his experience, to receive illumination as regards the manner of his life and to feel both pity and horror at his awful and inevitable doom. This is an arresting and potentially rich idea and we would be discussing a very different novel if Wright’s execution had been more perceptive and if he had not attempted to redeem a symbolical monster in social terms. One may object that it was precisely Wright’s intention to create in Bigger a social symbol, revelatory of social disease and prophetic of disaster. I think, however, that it is this assumption which we ought to examine more carefully.

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

  was just a figure of speech, Dwight said. He thought everybody knew that. He also let drop, casually, as if the information were of no consequence, that I would not be allowed to shoot after all. It was for grown-ups, not kids. That was all they needed, a bunch of kids running around with guns. “But you said I could.” Dwight was assembling my Winchester, which he apparently meant to use himself. “They just told me a couple of days ago,” he said. I could tell he was lying—that he’d known all along. I couldn’t do a thing but stand there and look at him. Pearl, smiling a little, watched me. “Dwight,” my mother said, “you did tell him.” He said, “I don’t make the rules, Rosemary.” I started to argue, but my mother gave my shoulder a hard squeeze. When I glanced up at her she shook her head. Dwight couldn’t figure out how the rifle fit together, so I did it for him while he looked on. “That,” he said, “is the most stupidly constructed firearm I have ever seen, bar none.” A man with a clipboard came up to us. He was collecting entry fees. After Dwight paid him he started to move off, but my mother stopped him and held out some money. He looked at it, then down at his clipboard. “Wolff,” she said. “Rosemary Wolff.” Still studying his clipboard, he asked if she wanted to shoot. She said she did. He looked over at Dwight, who busied himself with the rifle. Then he dropped his eyes again and mumbled something about the rules. “This is an NRA club, isn’t it?” my mother asked. He nodded. “Well, I am a dues-paying member of the NRA, and that gives me the right to participate in the activities of other chapters when I’m away from my own.” She said all of this very pleasantly. Finally he took the money. “You’ll be the only woman shooting,” he said. She smiled.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  She stopped, and he stopped with her, and she stared into his haggard, burning face. ‘I got to take my underground,’ she said. ‘You got anything you want to say to me?’ ‘I been living a long time,’ he said, ‘and I ain’t never seen nothing but evil overtake the enemies of the Lord. You think you going to use that letter to hurt me—but the Lord ain’t going to let it come to pass. You going to be cut down.’ The praying women approached them, Elizabeth in the middle. ‘Deborah,’ Florence said, ‘was cut down—but she left word. She weren’t no enemy of nobody —and she didn’t see nothing but evil. When I go, brother, you better tremble, ‘cause I ain’t going to go in silence.’ And, while they stared at each other, saying nothing more, the praying women were upon them. Now the long, the silent avenue stretched before them like some grey country of the dead. It scarcely seemed that he had walked this avenue only (as time was reckoned up by men) some few hours ago; that he had known this avenue since his eyes had opened on the dangerous world; that he had played here, wept here, fled, fallen down, and been bruised here—in that time, so far behind him, of his innocence and anger. Yes, on the evening of the seventh day, when, raging, he had walked out of his father’s house, this avenue had been filled with shouting people. The light of the day had begun to fail—the wind was high, and the tall lights, one by one, and then all together, had lifted up their heads against the darkness—while he hurried to the temple. Had he been mocked, had anyone spoken, or laughed, or called? He could not remember. He had been walking in a storm. Now the storm was over. And the avenue, like any landscape that has endured a storm, lay changed under Heaven, exhausted and clean, and new. Not again, for ever, could it return to the avenue it once had been. Fire, or lightning, or the latter rain, coming down from these skies which moved with such pale secrecy above him now, had laid yesterday’s avenue waste, had changed it in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, as all would be changed on the last day, when the skies would open up once more to gather up the saints. Yet the houses were there, as they had been; the windows, like a thousand, blinded eyes, stared outward at the morning—at the morning that was the same for them as the mornings of John’s innocence, and the mornings before his birth. The water ran in the gutters with a small, discontented sound; on the water travelled paper, burnt matches, sodden cigarette-ends; gobs of spittle, green-yellow, brown, and pearly; the leavings of a dog, the vomit of a drunken man, the dead sperm, trapped in rubber, of one abandoned to his lust.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  And so eating together a shared meal framed by the breaking of the bread and the passing of the cup was not happening. Thus the way the Lord’s Supper was practiced at Corinth reflected the social hierarchy and inequality of that world. This is what Paul protests against, and this is the context for his warning: Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves. (11:27–29) In some Christian denominations, the words about partaking “in an unworthy manner” have been understood to mean in an unworthy state of repentance, and “without discerning the body” as referring to failing to discern the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine. But in Paul’s context, something simpler and at the same time more important is meant: “discerning the body” refers to the community as the body of Christ. The way the Lord’s Supper was being practiced at Corinth denied the equality of life “in Christ,” life in the body and Spirit of Christ. Instead, it perpetuated the gulf between rich and poor and conformed life “in Christ” to the normalcy of this world. Instead, “in Christ” everybody is to be at the same table and eat the same meal. Don’t literalize this—it’s not about monotony of food, though it precludes monopoly of food. Within the community, everybody is equal and should get the same—it is a share meal, a sharing of God’s stuff, of God’s earth. Everybody gets enough. This is the supper of the Lord. HIERARCHY AND SPIRITUAL GIFTS IN CORINTH The community in Corinth was divided not only by hierarchy and inequality based on material wealth and power. Some were also claiming superiority based on the possession of particular spiritual gifts. The issue was speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, to use the technical term. Some saw glossolalia as a public manifestation of having received the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, and therefore as evidence of spiritual superiority. The problem and Paul’s response take up the next three chapters of his first letter to Corinth, 12–14. We begin by noting that speaking in tongues in Corinth was not the same phenomenon as reported in the story of Pentecost in Acts 2:4–11.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  If that’s a sin, well, I’ll go on down to Hell and pay for it. But don’t you fret, Reverend—it ain’t your soul.’ He moved and stood next to her, full of anger. ‘Girl,’ he said, ‘don’t you believe God? God don’t lie—and He says, plain as I’m talking to you, the soul that sinneth, it shall die. ’ She sighed. ‘Reverend, look like to me you’d get tired, all the time beating on poor little Esther, trying to make Esther something she ain’t. I just don’t feel it here, ’ she said, and put one hand on her breast. ‘Now, what you going to do? Don’t you know I’m a woman grown, and I ain’t fixing to change?’ He wanted to weep. He wanted to reach out and hold her back from the destruction she so ardently pursued—to fold her in him, and hide her until the wrath of God was past. At the same time there rose to his nostrils again her whisky-laden breath, and beneath this, faint, intimate, the odour of her body. And he began to feel like a man in a nightmare, who stands in the path of oncoming destruction, who must move quickly—but who cannot move. ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ rang over and over again in his mind, like a bell—as he moved closer to her, undone by her breath, and her wide, angry, mocking eyes. ‘You know right well,’ he whispered, shaking with fury, ‘you know right well why I keep after you—why I keep after you like I do.’ ‘No, I don’t,’ she answered, refusing, with a small shake of the head, to credit his intensity. ‘I sure don’t know why you can’t let Esther have her little whisky, and have her little ways without all the time trying to make her miserable.’ He sighed with exasperation, feeling himself begin to tremble. ‘I just don’t want to see you go down, girl, I don’t want you to wake up one fine morning sorry for all the sin you done, old, and all by yourself, with nobody to respect you.’ But he heard himself speaking, and it made him ashamed. He wanted to have done with talking and leave this house—in a moment they would leave, and the nightmare would be over. ‘Reverend,’ she said, ‘I ain’t done nothing that I’m ashamed of, and I hope I don’t do nothing I’m ashamed of, ever.’ At the word ‘Reverend,’ he wanted to strike her; he reached out instead and took both her hands in his. And now they looked directly at each other. There was surprise in her look, and a guarded triumph; he was aware that their bodies were nearly touching and that he should move away.

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

  bread. She wasn’t allowed to go out with boys. But the boys wouldn’t give up. One night some of them parked in front of her house and sang “When It’s Springtime in the Rockies.” When they called out, “Goodnight, Rosemary!” Daddy went berserk. He ran into the street waving his Navy .45. As the driver sped off Daddy fired several shots at a boy in the rumble seat, who ducked just before two bullets whanged into the metal over his head. My grandmother collapsed and had to be given digitalis. Daddy didn’t let it go at that. In full uniform he prowled the school parking lot the next morning, inspecting cars for bullet holes. My mother took off a few months after her mother died, when she was still a girl. But Daddy left some marks on her. One of them was a strange docility, almost paralysis, with men of the tyrant breed. Another was a contradictory hatred of coercion. She’d never been able to spank me. The few times she tried I came away laughing. She couldn’t even raise her voice convincingly. That wasn’t the way she wanted to be with me, and she didn’t think I needed it anyway. Marian thought otherwise. Sometimes at night I heard the two of them arguing about me, Marian strident, my mother quiet and implacable. It was just the age I was going through, she said. I’d grow out of it. I was a good boy. ON HALLOWEEN, TAYLOR and Silver and I broke out some windows in the school cafeteria. The next day two policemen came to school and several boys with bad reputations were called out of class to talk to them. Nobody thought of us, not even of Taylor, who had a recorded history of window breaking. The reason nobody thought of us was that at school, in the presence of really tough kids who got into fights and talked back to teachers, we were colorless and mild. At the end of the day the principal came on the public address system and announced that the guilty parties had been identified. Before taking action, however, he wanted to give these individuals a chance to come forward on their own. A voluntary confession now would work greatly in their favor later on. Taylor and Silver and I avoided looking at each other. We knew it was a bluff, because we’d been in the same classroom all day long. Otherwise the trick would have worked. We didn’t trust each other, and any suspicion that one of us was weakening would have created a stampede of betrayal.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  The buildings on this street, so near that John could touch them on either side, were narrow, also, rising like spears into the sky, and they were made of beaten gold and silver. John knew that these buildings were not for him—not to-day— no, nor to-morrow, either! Then, coming up this straight and silent street, he saw a woman, very old and black, coming toward them, staggering on the crooked stones. She was drunk, and dirty, and very old, and her mouth was bigger than his mother’s mouth, or his own; her mouth was loose and wet, and he had never seen anyone so black. His father was astonished to see her, and beside himself with anger; but John was glad. He clapped his hands, and cried: ‘See! She’s uglier than Mama! She’s uglier than me!’ ‘You mighty proud, ain’t you,’ his father said, ‘to be the Devil’s son?’ But John did not listen to his father. He turned to watch the woman pass. His father grabbed his arm. ‘You see that? That’s sin. That’s what the Devil’s son runs after.’ ‘Whose son are you?’ John asked. His father slapped him. John laughed, and moved a little away. ‘I seen it. I seen it. I ain’t the Devil’s son for nothing.’ His father reached for him, but John was faster. He moved backward down the shining street, looking at his father—his father who moved toward him, one hand outstretched in fury. ‘And I heard you—all the night-time long. I know what you do in the dark, black man, when you think the Devil’s son’s asleep. I heard you, spitting, and groaning, and choking—and I seen you, riding up and down, and going in and out. I ain’t the Devil’s son for nothing.’ The listening buildings, rising upward yet, leaned, closing out the sky. John’s feet began to slip; tears and sweat were in his eyes; still moving backward before his father, he looked about him for deliverance; but there was no deliverance in this street for him. ‘And I hate you. I hate you. I don’t care about your golden crown. I don’t care about your long white robe. I seen you under the robe, I seen you!’ Then his father was upon him; at his touch there was singing, and fire. John lay on his back in the narrow street, looking up at his father, that burning face beneath the burning towers. ‘I’m going to beat it out of you. I’m going to beat it out.’ His father raised his hand. The knife came down. John rolled away, down the white, descending street, screaming: ‘Father! Father! ’ These were the first words he uttered.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  I been doing the will of the Lord, and can’t nobody sit in judgment on me but the Lord. The Lord called me out, He chose me, and I been running with Him ever since I made a start. You can’t keep your eyes on all this foolishness here below, all this wickedness here below—you got to lift up your eyes to the hills and run from the destruction falling on the earth, you got to put your hand in Jesus’ hand, and go where He says go.’ ‘And if you been but a stumbling-stone here below?’ she said. ‘If you done caused souls right and left to stumble and fall, and lose their happiness, and lose their souls? What then, prophet? What then, the Lord’s anointed? Ain’t no reckoning going to be called of you? What you going to say when the wagon comes?’ He lifted up his head, and she saw tears mingled with his sweat. ‘The Lord,’ he said, ‘He sees the heart—He sees the heart.’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I done read the Bible, too, and it tells me you going to know the tree by its fruit. What fruit I seen from you if it ain’t been just sin and sorrow and shame?’ ‘You be careful,’ he said, ‘how you talk to the Lord’s anointed. ‘Cause my life ain’t in that letter—you don’t know my life.’ ‘Where is your life, Gabriel?’ she asked, after a despairing pause. ‘Where is it? Ain’t it all done gone for nothing? Where’s your branches? Where’s your fruit?’ He said nothing; insistently, she tapped the letter with her thumbnail. They were approaching the corner where she must leave him, turning westward to take her underground home. In the light that filled the streets, the light that the sun was now beginning to corrupt with fire, she watched John and Elisha just before them, John’s listening head bent, Elisha’s arm about his shoulder. ‘I got a son,’ he said at last, ‘and the Lord’s going to raise him up. I know—the Lord has promised—His word is true.’ And then she laughed. ‘That son,’ she said, ‘that Roy. You going to weep for many a eternity before you see him crying in front of the altar like Johnny was crying to-night.’ ‘God sees the heart,’ he repeated, ‘He sees the heart.’ ‘Well, He ought to see it,’ she cried, ‘He made it! But don’t nobody else see it, not even your own self! Let God see it—He sees it all right, and He don’t say nothing." ‘He speaks,’ he said, ‘He speaks.