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 Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  This boy on the sofa went deliberately , with a whole lot of other boys, all the way to the west side, just looking for a fight. I declare, I do wonder what goes on in your head.’ ‘You know right well,’ his mother said, looking directly at his father, ‘that Johnny don’t travel with the same class of boys as Roy goes with. You done beat Roy too many times, here, in this very room for going out with them bad boys. Roy got hisself hurt this afternoon because he was out doing something he didn’t have no business doing, and that’s the end of it. You ought to be thanking your Redeemer he ain’t dead.’ ‘And for all the care you take of him,’ he said, ‘he might as well be dead. Don’t look like you much care whether he lives, or dies.’ ‘ Lord , have mercy,’ said Aunt Florence. ‘He’s my son, too,’ his mother said, with heat. ‘I carried him in my belly for nine months and I know him just like I know his daddy, and they’s just exactly alike. Now. You ain’t got no right in the world to talk to me like that.’ ‘I reckon you know ,’ he said, choked, and breathing hard, ‘all about a mother’s love. I sure reckon on you telling me how a woman can sit in the house all day and let her own flesh and blood go out and get half butchered. Don’t you tell me you don’t know no way to stop him, because I remember my mother, God rest her soul, and she’d have found a way.’ ‘She was my mother, too,’ said Aunt Florence, ‘and I recollect, if you don’t, you being brought home many a time more dead than alive. She didn’t find no way to stop you. She wore herself out beating on you, just like you been wearing yourself out beating on this boy here.’ ‘My, my, my ,’ he said, ‘you got a lot to say.’ ‘I ain’t doing a thing,’ she said, ‘but trying to talk some sense into your big, black, hard head.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  I be blessed, anyway, if I think you was in your right mind when you married her. And it’s me that’s going to have your baby!’ ‘You want me,’ he asked at last, ‘to leave my wife—and come with you?’ ‘ I thought,’ she answered, ‘that you had done thought of that yourself, already, many and many a time.’ ‘You know,’ he said, with a halting anger, ‘I ain’t never said nothing like that. I ain’t never told you I wanted to leave my wife.’ ‘I ain’t talking,’ she shouted, at the end of patience, ‘about nothing you done said! ’ Immediately, they both looked toward the closed kitchen doors—for they were not alone in the house this time. She sighed, and smoothed her hair with her hand; and he saw then that her hand was trembling and that her calm deliberation was all a frenzied pose. ‘Girl,’ he said, ‘does you reckon I’m going to run off and lead a life of sin with you somewhere, just because you tell me you got my baby kicking in your belly? How many kinds of a fool you think I am? I got God’s work to do—my life don’t belong to you. Nor to that baby, neither—if it is my baby.’ ‘It’s your baby,’ she said, coldly, ‘and ain’t no way in the world to get around that. And it ain’t been so very long ago, right here in this very room, when looked to me like a life of sin was all you was ready for.’ ‘Yes,’ he answered, rising, and turning away, ‘Satan tempted me and I fell. I ain’t the first man been made to fall on account of a wicked woman.’ ‘You be careful,’ said Esther, ‘how you talk to me. I ain’t the first girl’s been ruined by a holy man, neither.’ ‘Ruined?’ he cried. ‘You? How you going to be ruined? When you been walking through this town just like a harlot, and a-kicking up your heels all over the pasture? How you going to stand there and tell me you been ruined? If it hadn’t been me, it sure would have been somebody else.’ ‘But it was you,’ she retorted, ‘and what I want to know is what we’s going to do about it.’ He looked at her. Her face was cold and hard—ugly; she had never been so ugly before. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, deliberately, ‘what we is going to do.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  She had thought to wait until her mother, who was so ill now that she no longer stirred out of bed, should be buried—but suddenly she knew that she would wait no longer, the time had come. She had been working as cook and serving-girl for a large white family in town, and it was on the day her master proposed that she become his concubine that she knew her life among these wretched people had come to its destined end. She left her employment that same day (leaving behind her a most vehement conjugal bitterness), and with part of the money that with cunning, cruelty, and sacrifice she had saved over a period of years, bought a railroad ticket to New York. When she bought it, in a kind of scarlet rage, she held like a talisman at the back of her mind the thought: ‘I can give it back, I can sell it. This don’t mean I got to go.’ But she knew that nothing could stop her. And it was this leave-taking that came to stand, in Florence’s latter days, and with many another witness, at her bedside. Grey clouds obscured the sun that day, and outside the cabin window she saw that mist still covered the ground. Her mother lay in bed, awake; she was pleading with Gabriel, who had been out drinking the night before, and who was not really sober now, to mend his ways and come to the Lord. And Gabriel, full of the confusion, and pain, and guilt that were his whenever he thought of how he made his mother suffer, but that became nearly insupportable when she taxed him with it, stood before the mirror, head bowed, buttoning his shirt. Florence knew that he could not unlock his lips to speak; he could not say yes to his mother, and to the Lord; and he could not say no. ‘Honey,’ their mother was saying, ‘don’t you let your old mother die without you look her in the eye and tell her she going to see you in glory. You hear me, boy?’ In a moment, Florence thought with scorn, tears would fill his eyes, and he would promise to ‘do better.’ He had been promising to ‘do better’ since the day he had been baptized. She put down her bag in the centre of the hateful room. ‘Ma,’ she said, ‘I’m going. I’m a-going this morning.’

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Just take hold of that mop and put some soap and water in the bucket.’ ‘Lord,’ said Elisha, running water into the sink, and talking, it seemed, to the water, ‘that sure is a sassy nigger out there. I sure hope he don’t get hisself hurt one of these days, running his mouth thataway. Look like he just won’t stop till somebody busts him in the eye.’ He sighed deeply, and began to lather his hands. ‘Here I come running all the way so he wouldn’t bust a gut lifting one of them chairs, and all he got to say is “put some water in the bucket.” Can’t do nothing with a nigger nohow.’ He stopped and turned to face John. ‘Ai’nt you got no manners, boy? You better learn how to talk to old folks.’ ‘You better get out here with that mop and pail. We ain’t got all night.’ ‘Keep on,’ said Elisha. ‘I see I’m going to have to give you your lumps to-night.’ He disappeared. John heard him in the toilet, and then over the thunderous water he heard him knocking things over in the back room. ‘ Now what you doing?’ ‘Boy, leave me alone. I’m fixing to work.’ ‘It sure sounds like it.’ John dropped his broom and walked into the back. Elisha had knocked over a pile of camp chairs, folded in the corner, and stood over them angrily, holding the mop in his hand. ‘I keep telling you not to hide that mop back there. Can’t nobody get at it.’ ‘I always get at it. Ain’t everybody as clumsy as you.’ Elisha let fall the stiff grey mop and rushed at John, catching him off balance and lifting him from the floor With both arms tightening around John’s waist he tried to cut John’s breath, watching him meanwhile with a smile that, as John struggled and squirmed, became a set, ferocious grimace. With both hands John pushed and pounded against the shoulders and biceps of Elisha, and tried to thrust with his knees against Elisha’s belly. Usually such a battle was soon over, since Elisha was so much bigger and stronger and as a wrestler so much more skilled; but to-night John was filled with a determination not to be conquered, or at least to make the conquest dear. With all the strength that was in him he fought against Elisha, and he was filled with a strength that was almost hatred. He kicked, pounded, twisted, pushed, using his lack of size to confound and exasperate Elisha, whose damp fists, joined at the small of John’s back, soon, slipped.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  School was going better for me than I had ever hoped. For the first time in my life, I began to know, really know, I was smart—smart as defined by being able to do the white man’s work, being able to study. I was finally learning german, and doing a fine job of it. Mostly, with the help of Muriel and my old therapist, I had learned to study. Muriel, who had studied german in school, also helped me with german conversation, and for a while I was more articulate in german than I was in english. Sometimes Toni stayed over on Seventh Street. In the chilly exultations of middle spring, the three of us would wake at dawn, pick up Nicky and Joan, and go fishing in Sheepshead Bay on Saturday mornings. We returned in the afternoon, the boats heavy with flounder and blackfish. And on Sundays, often, there was Jill and her daddy’s typewriters. Muriel, Jill, and I walked back to Seventh Street through the darkening Sunday city—the unmistakable smell of early May was on the warming air. It was late when we got home, and Jill stayed over. The next day was Monday, which meant work as usual. I went to bed and left them both still talking in the middle room. Sometime between midnight and morning I woke with a start in horror and disbelief. The muffled sounds coming from the next room were unmistakable. Muriel. Muriel and Jill were making love on the middle-room couch. I lay rigid, trying not to hear, trying not to be awake or there at all, trapped like some wild animal between a seven-story drop out the front windows and the activity going on in the next room. NO EXIT. Had it been anyone else on our couch with Muriel my pain and fury might have been less. There was so much unsettled history between Jill and me. The cruelest weapon at hand, or so it felt. In our own house. With me in the next room. A veil of red fury settled over my consciousness which I had not felt since those days in my mother’s house when I used to burst into nosebleeds instead of tears. I bit down on a mouthful of woolen blanket, feeling like I had to commit murder, only there was no one to kill. I fell asleep again immediately in desperate self-protection. When I got up the house was quiet and empty. I could not even say, “How could you, you little bitch, with her of all people?” We couldn’t even talk about it. Muriel wasn’t there. I walked back and forth through the apartment wringing my hands until the fingers tingled and grew red. How was I going to manage this day? Where was she? I wanted to wring her neck. Slowly I got dressed, and engineered myself out onto the street.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  All you got to do is listen.’ ‘I been listening many a night-time long,’ said Florence, then, ‘and He ain’t never spoke to me.’ ‘He ain’t never spoke,’ said Gabriel, ‘because you ain’t never wanted to hear. You just wanted Him to tell you your way was right. And that ain’t no way to wait on God.’ ‘Then tell me,’ said Florence, ‘what He done said to you—that you didn’t want to hear?’ And there was silence again. Now they both watched John and Elisha. ‘I going to tell you something, Gabriel,’ she said. ‘I know you thinking at the bottom of your heart that if you just make her, her and her bastard boy, pay enough for her sin, your son won’t have to pay for yours. But I ain’t going to let you do that. You done made enough folks pay for sin, it’s time you started paying.’ ‘What you think,’ he asked, ‘you going to be able to do—against me?’ ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘I ain’t long for this world, but I got this letter, and I’m sure going to give it to Elizabeth before I go, and if she don’t want it, I’m going to find some way—some way, I don’t know how—to rise up and tell it, tell everybody, about the blood the Lord’s anointed is got on his hands.’ ‘I done told you,’ he said, ‘that’s all done and finished; the Lord done give me a sign to make me know I been forgiven. What good you think it’s going to do to start talking about it now?’ ‘It’ll make Elizabeth to know,’ she said, ‘that she ain’t the only sinner… in your holy house. And little Johnny, there—he’ll know he ain’t the only bastard.’ Then he turned again, and looked at her with hatred in his eyes. ‘You ain’t never changed,’ he said. ‘You still waiting to see my downfall. You just as wicked now as you was when you was young.’ She put the letter in her bag again. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I ain’t changed. You ain’t changed neither. You still promising the Lord you going to do better—and you think whatever you done already, whatever you doing right at that minute, don’t count. Of all the men I ever knew, you’s the man who ought to be hoping the Bible’s all a lie—’cause if that trumpet ever sounds, you going to spend eternity talking.’ They had reached her corner.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 7. --Of the Cause of Cain's Crime and His Obstinacy, Which Not Even the Word of God Could Subdue. But though God made use of this very mode of address which we have been endeavoring to explain, and spoke to Cain in that form by which He was wont to accommodate Himself to our first parents and converse with them as a companion, what good influence had it on Cain? Did he not fulfill his wicked intention of killing his brother even after he was warned by God's voice? For when God had made a distinction between their sacrifices, neglecting Cain's, regarding Abel's, which was doubtless intimated by some visible sign to that effect; and when God had done so because the works of the one were evil but those of his brother good, Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. For thus it is written:"And the Lord said unto Cain, Why are thou wroth, and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou offerest rightly, but dost not rightly distinguish, hast thou not sinned? Fret not thyself, for unto thee shall be his turning, and thou shalt rule over him. " [785]In this admonition administered by God to Cain, that clause indeed, "If thou offerest rightly, but dost not rightly distinguish, hast thou not sinned? " is obscure, inasmuch as it is not apparent for what reason or purpose it was spoken, and many meanings have been put upon it, as each one who discusses it attempts to interpret it according to the rule of faith. The truth is, that a sacrifice is "rightly offered" when it is offered to the true God, to whom alone we must sacrifice. And it is "not rightly distinguished" when we do not rightly distinguish the places or seasons or materials of the offering, or the person offering, or the person to whom it is presented, or those to whom it is distributed for food after the oblation. Distinguishing [786] is here used for discriminating,--whether when an offering is made in a place where it ought not or of a material which ought to be offered not there but elsewhere; or when an offering is made at a wrong time, or of a material suitable not then but at some other time; or when that is offered which in no place nor any time ought to be offered; or when a man keeps to himself choicer specimens of the same kind than he offers to God; or when he or any other who may not lawfully partake profanely eats of the oblation. In which of these particulars Cain displeased God, it is difficult to determine. But the Apostle John, speaking of these brothers, says, "Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  You better stop trying to blame everything on Elizabeth and look to your own wrongdoings.’ ‘Never mind, Florence,’ his mother said, ‘it’s all over and done with now.’ ‘I’m out of this house,’ he shouted, ‘every day the Lord sends, working to put the food in these children’s mouths. Don’t you think I got a right to ask the mother of these children to look after them and see that they don’t break their necks before I get back home?’ ‘You ain’t got but one child,’ she said, ‘that’s liable to go out and break his neck, and that’s Roy, and you know it. And I don’t know how in the world you expect me to run this house, and look after these children, and keep running around the block after Roy. No , I can’t stop him, I done told you that, and you can’t stop him neither. You don’t know what to do with this boy, and that’s why you all the time trying to fix the blame on somebody. Ain’t nobody to blame , Gabriel. You just better pray God to stop him before somebody puts another knife in him and puts him in his grave.’ They stared at each other a moment in an awful pause, she with a startled, pleading question in her eyes. Then, with all his might, he reached out and slapped her across the face. She crumpled at once, hiding her face with one thin hand, and Aunt Florence moved to hold her up. Sarah watched all this with greedy eyes. Then Roy sat up, and said in a shaking voice: ‘Don’t you slap my mother. That’s my mother. You slap her again, you black bastard, and I swear to God I’ll kill you.’ In the moment that these words filled the room, and hung in the room like the infinitesimal moment of hanging. jagged light that precedes an explosion, John and his father were staring into each other’s eyes. John thought for that moment that his father believed the words had come from him, his eyes were so wild and depthlessly malevolent, and his mouth was twisted into such a snarl of pain. Then, in the absolute silence that followed Roy’s words, John saw that his father was not seeing him, was not seeing anything unless it were a vision. John wanted to turn and flee, as though he had encountered in the jungle some evil beast, crouching and ravenous, with eyes like Hell unclosed; and exactly as though, on a road’s turning, he found himself staring at certain destruction, he found that he could not move. Then his father turned and looked down at Roy. ‘What did you say?’ his father asked. ‘I told you,’ said Roy, ‘not to touch my mother.’ ‘You cursed me,’ said his father. Roy said nothing; neither did he drop his eyes. ‘Gabriel,’ said his mother, ‘Gabriel.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Jim goes back to his car, drives around Selma, to determine its vibrations before he gets out to walk, perhaps to hustle. Suddenly, in his rear-view mirror, he sees a car stop abruptly, motor left running just feet away from a young hustler standing on a corner. Four doors fly open, and five men jump out, kicking and punching the lone hustler. Jim makes a swift U-turn. Two other hustlers on the street rush toward the scene. The five attackers jump laughing into their car and, lights turned off, speed away. Jim and the two others lean over the dazed hustler. “I'll take you to the hospital,” Jim offers. The kid spits blood, but straightens up. “No, no, I'm okay,” he insists, checking himself out. “Besides, the cops might hassle me there.” Jim knows he's right; and despite the savage intentions, the attackers didn't have enough time to hurt him seriously. “Just—uh—give me a lift to Gardner, okay?” he asks Jim. In the car, the kid says, “Fucking shits.” Jim experiences the same rage he feels at the marauding cops. He drops the kid off before a run-down apartment house. “Sure you're okay?” “Yeah, thanks, thanks.” Driving away, Jim glances at the blood on the passenger seat. In all his years on the streets, through all the different phases of his street life—he has never felt more acutely the presence of violence and hate in the sexual arena. Now he needs to wash away his rage. He drives to Santa Monica Boulevard. Near Andy's Coffee Shop he and a handsome man begin the slow choreography. Finally the two are together around the corner. Yes, Jim will go home with this man, he knows. Yes, and that will end this weekend, yes, and the hunt, he thinks suddenly, and, yes, that's okay. “What are you into?” the man asks. Jim feels a hint of disappointment; that question often indicates the search for something specialized. Or the man might be a vice cop. “Depends. You?” Jim is deliberately evasive. “Heavy S & M,” the man answers. Jim rejects it. “Too bad, you look tough.” The man crosses the street toward a mean-looking motorcyclist leaning sulkily on his bike. In minutes, the two roar off together. On the corner, Jim sticks out his thumb, hitchhiking. For long minutes, no one stops. Doubts peck at him. But here's a car now. “You hustling?” the man asks Jim as they drive away. Jim sizes up the man, attractive; certainly not into paying. “No, I'm not hustling.” “Too bad, I like only hustlers,” the man says. Jim gets out at Fairfax. He feels an increasingly empty aching. He hitchhikes back to Highland. Gets another ride back to Fairfax. Nothing. Back on Highland, he returns to his car and drives to the area of the costume bars. No one in the alleys now. Terrace Circle.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  One day I watched DeLois step off the curb of 142nd Street against the light, slow and deliberate. A high yaller dude in a white Cadillac passed by and leaned out and yelled at her, “Hurry up, you flat-footed, nappy-headed, funny-looking bitch!” The car almost knocking her down. DeLois kept right on about her leisurely business and never so much as looked around. To Louise Briscoe who died in my mother’s house as a tenant in a furnished room with cooking privileges—no linens supplied. I brought her a glass of warm milk that she wouldn’t drink, and she laughed at me when I wanted to change her sheets and call a doctor. “No reason to call him unless he’s real cute,” said Miz Briscoe. “Ain’t nobody sent for me to come, I got here all by myself. And I’m going back the same way. So I only need him if he’s cute, real cute.” And the room smelled like she was lying. “Miz Briscoe,” I said, “I’m really worried about you.” She looked up at me out of the corner of her eyes, like I was making her a proposition which she had to reject, but which she appreciated all the same. Her huge bloated body was quiet beneath the grey sheet, as she grinned knowingly. “Why, that’s all right, honey. I don’t hold it against you. I know you can’t help it, it’s just in your nature, that’s all.” To the white woman I dreamed standing behind me in an airport, silently watching while her child deliberately bumps into me over and over again. When I turn around to tell this woman that if she doesn’t restrain her kid I’m going to punch her in the mouth, I see that she’s been punched in the mouth already. Both she and her child are battered, with bruised faces and blackened eyes. I turn, and walk away from them in sadness and fury. To the pale girl who ran up to my car in a Staten Island midnight with only a nightgown and bare feet, screaming and crying, “Lady, please help me oh please take me to the hospital, lady…” Her voice was a mixture of overripe peaches and doorchimes; she was the age of my daughter, running along the woody curves of Van Duzer Street. I stopped the car quickly, and leaned over to open the door. It was high summer. “Yes, yes, I’ll try to help you,” I said. “Get in.” And when she saw my face in the streetlamp her own collapsed into terror. “Oh no!” she wailed. “Not you!” then whirled around and started to run again. What could she have seen in my Black face that was worth holding onto such horror? Wasting me in the gulf between who I was and her vision of me. Left with no help.

• From The City of God

  Translator's Preface."Rome having been stormed and sacked by the Goths under Alaric their king, [4] the worshippers of false gods, or pagans, as we commonly call them, made an attempt to attribute this calamity to the Christian religion, and began to blaspheme the true God with even more than their wonted bitterness and acerbity. It was this which kindled my zeal for the house of God, and prompted me to undertake the defence of the city of God against the charges and misrepresentations of its assailants. This work was in my hands for several years, owing to the interruptions occasioned by many other affairs which had a prior claim on my attention, and which I could not defer. However, this great undertaking was at last completed in twenty-two books. Of these, the first five refute those who fancy that the polytheistic worship is necessary in order to secure worldly prosperity, and that all these overwhelming calamities have befallen us in consequence of its prohibition. In the following five books I address myself to those who admit that such calamities have at all times attended, and will at all times attend, the human race, and that they constantly recur in forms more or less disastrous, varying only in the scenes, occasions, and persons on whom they light, but, while admitting this, maintain that the worship of the gods is advantageous for the life to come. In these ten books, then, I refute these two opinions, which are as groundless as they are antagonistic to the Christian religion. "But that no one might have occasion to say, that though I had refuted the tenets of other men, I had omitted to establish my own, I devote to this object the second part of this work, which comprises twelve books, although I have not scrupled, as occasion offered, either to advance my own opinions in the first ten books, or to demolish the arguments of my opponents in the last twelve. Of these twelve books, the first four contain an account of the origin of these two cities--the city of God, and the city of the world. The second four treat of their history or progress; the third and last four, of their deserved destinies. And so, though all these twenty-two books refer to both cities, yet I have named them after the better city, and called them The City of God. "

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of the living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it any more. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled. Notes of a Native Son Stranger in the Village From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the village; I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a “sight” outside of the city. It did not occur to me—possibly because I am an American—that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro. It is a fact that cannot be explained on the basis of the inaccessibility of the village. The village is very high, but it is only four hours from Milan and three hours from Lausanne. It is true that it is virtually unknown. Few people making plans for a holiday would elect to come here. On the other hand, the villagers are able, presumably, to come and go as they please—which they do: to another town at the foot of the mountain, with a population of approximately five thousand, the nearest place to see a movie or go to the bank. In the village there is no movie house, no bank, no library, no theater; very few radios, one jeep, one station wagon; and, at the moment, one typewriter, mine, an invention which the woman next door to me here had never seen. There are about six hundred people living here, all Catholic—I conclude this from the fact that the Catholic church is open all year round, whereas the Protestant chapel, set off on a hill a little removed from the village, is open only in the summertime when the tourists arrive. There are four or five hotels, all closed now, and four or five bistros, of which, however, only two do any business during the winter.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  I’m praying for you.’ Something struggled in her face then, as she stood for yet a moment more and watched him—a mixture of fury and amusement; it reminded him of the expression he had often found on the face of Florence. And it was like the look on the faces of the elders during that far-off and so momentous Sunday dinner. He was too angry, while she thus stared at him, to trust himself to speak. Then she shrugged, the mildest, most indifferent gesture he had ever seen, and smiled. ‘I’m mighty obliged to you, Reverend,’ she said. Then she went into the house. This was the first time they spoke in the yard, a frosty morning. There was nothing in that morning to warn him of what was coming. She offended him because she was so brazen in her sins, that was all; and he prayed for her soul, which would one day find itself naked and speechless before the judgment bar of Christ. Later, she told him that he had pursued her, that his eyes had left her not a moment’s peace. ‘That weren’t no reverend looking at me them mornings in the yard,’ she had said. ‘You looked at me just like a man, like a man what hadn’t never heard of the Holy Ghost.’ But he believed that the Lord had laid her like a burden on his heart. And he carried her in his heart; he prayed for her and exhorted her, while there was yet time to bring her soul to God. But she had not been thinking about God; though she accused him of lusting after her in his heart, it was she who, when she looked at him, insisted on seeing not God’s minister but a ‘pretty man.’ On her tongue the very title of his calling became a mark of disrespect. It began on an evening when he was to preach, when they were alone in the house. The people of the house had gone away for three days to visit relatives; Gabriel had driven them to the railroad station after supper, leaving Esther clearing up the kitchen. When he came back to lock up the house, he found Esther waiting for him on the porch steps. ‘I didn’t think I’d better leave,’ she said, ‘till you got back. I ain’t got no keys to lock up this house, and white folks is so funny. I don’t want them blaming me if something’s missing.’ He realized immediately that she had been drinking—she was not drunk, but there was whisky on her breath.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Then Richard shouted: ‘But J wasn’t there! Look at me, goddammit—I wasn’t there! ’ ‘You black bastards,’ the man said, looking at him, ‘you’re all the same.’ Then there was silence in the station, the eyes of the white men all watching. And Richard said, but quietly, knowing that he was lost: ‘But all the same, mister, I wasn’t there.’ And he looked at the white man’s bloody shirt and thought, he told Elizabeth, at the bottom of his heart: ‘I wish to God they’d killed you.’ Then the questioning began. The three boys signed a confession at once, but Richard would not sign. He said at last that he would die before he signed a confession to something he hadn’t done. ‘Well then,’ said one of them, hitting him suddenly across the head, ‘maybe you will die, you black son-of-a-bitch.’ And the beating began. He would not, then, talk to her about it; she found that, before the dread and the hatred that filled her mind, her imagination faltered and held its peace. ‘What we going to do?’ she asked at last. He smiled a vicious smile—she had never seen such a smile on his face before. ‘Maybe you ought to pray to that Jesus of yours and get Him to come down and tell these white men something.’ He looked at her a long, dying moment. ‘Because I don’t know nothing else to do,’ he said. She suggested: ‘Richard, what about another lawyer?’ And he smiled again. ‘I declare,’ he said, ‘Little-bit’s been holding out on me. She got a fortune tied up in a sock, and she ain’t never told me nothing about it.’ She had been trying to save money for a whole year, but she had only thirty dollars. She sat before him, going over in her mind all the things she might do to raise money, even to going on the streets. Then, for very helplessness, she began to shake with sobbing. At this, his face became Richard’s face again. He said in a shaking voice: ‘Now, look here, Little-bit, don’t you be like that. We going to work this out all right.’ But she could not stop sobbing. ‘Elizabeth,’ he whispered, ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth.’ Then the man came and said that it was time for her to go. And she rose. She had brought two packets of cigarettes for him, and they were still in her bag. Wholly ignorant of prison regulations, she did not dare to give them to him under the man’s eyes. And, somehow, her failure to remember to give him the cigarettes, when she knew how much he smoked, made her weep the harder. She tried—and failed—to smile at him, and she was slowly led to the door.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 33. --That the Overthrow of Rome Has Not Corrected the Vices of the Romans. Oh infatuated men, what is this blindness, or rather madness, which possesses you? How is it that while, as we hear, even the eastern nations are bewailing your ruin, and while powerful states in the most remote parts of the earth are mourning your fall as a public calamity, ye yourselves should be crowding to the theatres, should be pouring into them and filling them; and, in short, be playing a madder part now than ever before? This was the foul plague-spot, this the wreck of virtue and honor that Scipio sought to preserve you from when he prohibited the construction of theatres; this was his reason for desiring that you might still have an enemy to fear, seeing as he did how easily prosperity would corrupt and destroy you. He did not consider that republic flourishing whose walls stand, but whose morals are in ruins. But the seductions of evil-minded devils had more influence with you than the precautions of prudent men. Hence the injuries you do, you will not permit to be imputed to you:but the injuries you suffer, you impute to Christianity. Depraved by good fortune, and not chastened by adversity, what you desire in the restoration of a peaceful and secure state, is not the tranquillity of the commonwealth, but the impunity of your own vicious luxury. Scipio wished you to be hard pressed by an enemy, that you might not abandon yourselves to luxurious manners; but so abandoned are you, that not even when crushed by the enemy is your luxury repressed. You have missed the profit of your calamity; you have been made most wretched, and have remained most profligate. Chapter 34. --Of God's Clemency in Moderating the Ruin of the City. And that you are yet alive is due to God, who spares you that you may be admonished to repent and reform your lives. It is He who has permitted you, ungrateful as you are, to escape the sword of the enemy, by calling yourselves His servants, or by finding asylum in the sacred places of the martyrs. It is said that Romulus and Remus, in order to increase the population of the city they founded, opened a sanctuary in which every man might find asylum and absolution of all crime,--a remarkable foreshadowing of what has recently occurred in honor of Christ. The destroyers of Rome followed the example of its founders. But it was not greatly to their credit that the latter, for the sake of increasing the number of their citizens, did that which the former have done, lest the number of their enemies should be diminished.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Florence smiled inwardly a small, malicious smile, watching his slow bafflement, and panic, and rage; and she looked at her mother again. ‘She got you,’ she repeated. ‘She don’t need me.’ ‘You going north,’ her mother said, then. ‘And when you reckon on coming back?’ ‘I don’t reckon on coming back,’ she said. ‘You come crying back soon enough,’ said Gabriel, with malevolence, ‘soon as they whip your butt up there four or five times.’ She looked at him again. ‘Just don’t you try to hold your breath till then, you hear?’ ‘Girl,’ said her mother, ‘you mean to tell me the Devil’s done made your heart so hard you can just leave your mother on her dying bed, and you don’t care if you don’t never see her in this world no more? Honey, you can’t tell me you done got so evil as all that?’ She felt Gabriel watching her to see how she would take this question—the question that, for all her determination, she had dreaded most to hear. She looked away from her mother, and straightened, catching her breath, looking outwards through the small, cracked window. There, outside, beyond the slowly rising mist, and farther off than her eyes could see, her life awaited her. The woman on the bed was old, her life was fading as the mist rose. She thought of her mother as already in the grave; and she would not let herself be strangled by the hands of the dead. ‘I’m going, Ma,’ she said. ‘I got to go.’ Her mother leaned back, face upward to the light and began to cry. Gabriel moved to Florence’s side and grabbed her arm. She looked up into his face and saw that his eyes were full of tears. ‘You can’t go,’ he said. ‘You can’t go. You can’t go and leave your mother thisaway. She need a woman, Florence, to help look after her. What she going to do here, all alone with me?’ She pushed him from her and moved to stand over her mother’s bed. ‘Ma,’ she said, ‘don’t be like that. Ain’t a blessed thing for you to cry about so. Ain’t a thing can happen to me up North can’t happen to me here. God’s everywhere, Ma. Ain’t no need to worry.’ She knew that she was mouthing words; and she realized suddenly that her mother scorned to dignify these words with her attention. She had granted Florence the victory—with a promptness that had the effect of making Florence, however dimly and unwillingly, wonder if her victory was real. She was not weeping for her daughter’s future, she was weeping for the past, and weeping in an anguish in which Florence had no part. And all of this filled Florence with a terrible fear, which was immediately transformed into anger. ‘Gabriel can take care of you,’ she said, her voice shaking with malice. ‘Gabriel ain’t never going to leave you. Is you, boy?’ and she looked at him.

• From Cults Inside Out: How People Get In and Can Get Out (2014)

  The investigation began with the death of Stacy Dawn Murphy, twenty, at Arrowhead in 2012 but would eventually include the additional Narconon Arrowhead-related deaths of Hillary Holten, twenty-one; Gabriel Graves, thirty-two; and the 2009 death of Kaysie Dianne Werninck, twenty-eight. During 2013 a number of lawsuits were filed across the United States against Narconon. Five lawsuits filed against the Arrowhead facility in Oklahoma alleged fraud, deceit, breach of contract, and civil conspiracy.922 Lucas Catton, once the president of the Arrowhead facility in Oklahoma, left in 2004. In an interview Canton said, “It’s all based on deception. Everything from the success rate to their counseling certifications, to their general requirements of what it takes to be a staff member to their connection to the Church of Scientology—every single one of those things is deceptively portrayed to the general public versus what really goes on behind the closed doors.”923 Search warrants were executed at a Narconon-related rehabilitation clinic during April 2013. Narconon in Georgia is under investigation for insurance fraud. One patient’s insurer was reportedly billed $166, 275 for doctor’s visits that never took place. At the time the warrants were executed, Danny Porter, the Gwinnett County district attorney, said, “We are actively and vigorously pursuing an investigation.”924 Concerned families claimed that Narconon financially exploited them. “No one ever said, ‘We’re going to open up two credit cards in your name,’” said Scott Maxey, a Chicago man who received new credit cards in the mail that were already charged to their limits to pay Narconon.925 Scientology Shrinking Despite its prodigious efforts in recent years, which includes buying and renovating impressive buildings Scientology calls its “Ideal Orgs,” or operational urban hubs, census figures seem to demonstrate that Scientology is in decline with a shrinking membership. For example, according to a 2011 census there are only 2,163 Australians who call themselves Scientologists. This reflects a 13.7 percent drop in Australian membership alone over the past five years.926 The US Census Bureau and American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) estimates appear to reflect the same. ARIS estimated that there were fifty-five thousand Scientologists in the United States in 2001, but by 2008 that number reportedly dwindled to about twenty-five thousand.927 CHAPTER 15 SCIENTOLOGY INTERVENTION A middle-aged Scientologist confronted his wife and served her with divorce papers. He was determined to leave his family in an effort to become a full-time member of the Sea Organization, commonly called Sea Org. First established by L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology’s founder, Sea Org is now composed of the full-time staff serving at Scientology centers or what are called “Orgs” around the world.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  She would, otherwise, certainly have fallen down, or began to weep. She looked at the smiling policeman. ‘Richard ain’t robbed no store,’ she said. ‘Tell me where he is.’ ‘And I tell you,’ he said, not smiling, ‘that your boyfriend robbed a store and he’s in jail for it. He’s going to stay there, too—now, what you got to say to that?’ ‘And he probably did it for you, too,’ the other policeman said. ‘You look like a girl, a man could rob a store for.’ She said nothing; she was thinking how to get to see him, how to get him out. One of them, the smiler, turned now to the landlady and said: ‘Let’s have the key to his room. How long’s he been living here?’ ‘About a year,’ the landlady said. She looked unhappily at Elizabeth. ‘He seemed like a real nice boy.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, mounting the steps, ‘they all seem like real nice boys when they pay their rent.’ ‘You going to take me to see him?’ she asked of the remaining policeman. She found herself fascinated by the gun in his holster, the club at his side. She wanted to take that pistol and empty it into his round, red face; to take that club and strike with all her strength against the base of his skull where his cap ended, until the ugly, silky, white man’s hair was matted with blood and brains. ‘Sure, girl,’ he said, ‘you’re coming right along with us. The man at the station-house wants to ask you some questions.’ The smiling policeman came down again. ‘Ain’t nothing up there,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’ She moved between them, out into the sun. She knew that there was nothing to be gained by talking to them any more. She was entirely in their power; she would have to think faster than they could think; she would have to contain her fear and her hatred, and find out what could be done. Not for anything short of Richard’s life, and not, possibly, even for that, would she have wept before them, or asked of them a kindness. A small crowd, children and curious passers-by, followed them as they walked the long, dusty, sunlit street. She hoped only that they would not pass anyone she knew; she kept her head high, looking straight ahead, and felt the skin settle over her bones as though she were wearing a mask. And at the station she somehow got past their brutal laughter. ( What was he doing with you, girl, until two o’clock in the morning? — Next time you feel like that, girl, you come by here and talk to me.) She felt that she was about to burst, or vomit, or die. Though the sweat stood out cruelly, like needles on her brow, and she felt herself, from every side, being covered with a stink and filth, she found out, in their own good time, what she wanted to know.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Although she had turned her back to him, she felt that he was no longer smiling and that his eyes, watching her, had darkened. ‘And what kind of man you think you married?’ ‘I thought I married a man with some get up and go to him, who didn’t just want to stay on the bottom all his life!’ ‘And what you want me to do, Florence? You want me to turn white?’ This question always filled her with an ectasy of hatred. She turned and faced him, and, forgetting that there was someone sitting in the parlour, shouted: ‘You ain’t got to be white to have some self-respect! You reckon I slave in this house like I do so you and them common niggers can sit here every afternoon throwing ashes all over the floor?’ ‘And who’s common now, Florence?’ he asked, quietly, in the immediate and awful silence in which she recognized her error. ‘Who’s acting like a common nigger now? What you reckon my friend is sitting there a-thinking? I declare, I wouldn’t be surprised none if he wasn’t a-thinking: “Poor Frank, he sure found him a common wife.” Anyway, he ain’t putting his ashes on the floor—he putting them in the ashtray, just like he knew what a ashtray was.’ She knew that she had hurt him, and that he was angry, by the habit he had at such a moment of running his tongue quickly and incessantly over his lower lip. ‘But we’s a-going now, so you can sweep up the parlour and sit there, if you want to, till the judgment day.’ And he left the kitchen. She heard murmurs in the parlour, and then the slamming of the door. She remembered, too late, that he had all his money with him. When he came back, long after nightfall, and she put him to bed and went through his pockets, she found nothing, or almost nothing, and she sank helplessly to the parlour floor and cried. When he came back at times like this he would be petulant and penitent. She would not creep into bed until she thought that he was sleeping. But he would not be sleeping. He would turn as she stretched her legs beneath the blankets, and his arm would reach out, and his breath would be hot and sour-sweet in her face. ‘Sugar-plum, what you want to be so evil with your baby for? Don’t you know you done made me go out and get drunk, and I wasn’t a-fixing to do that? I wanted to take you out somewhere to-night.’ And, while he spoke, his hand was on her breast, and his moving lips brushed her neck.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 3. --That We Need Only to Read History in Order to See What Calamities the Romans Suffered Before the Religion of Christ Began to Compete with the Worship of the Gods. But remember that, in recounting these things, I have still to address myself to ignorant men; so ignorant, indeed, as to give birth to the common saying, "Drought and Christianity go hand in hand. " [88]There are indeed some among them who are thoroughly well-educated men, and have a taste for history, in which the things I speak of are open to their observation; but in order to irritate the uneducated masses against us, they feign ignorance of these events, and do what they can to make the vulgar believe that those disasters, which in certain places and at certain times uniformly befall mankind, are the result of Christianity, which is being everywhere diffused, and is possessed of a renown and brilliancy which quite eclipse their own gods. [89]Let them then, along with us, call to mind with what various and repeated disasters the prosperity of Rome was blighted, before ever Christ had come in the flesh, and before His name had been blazoned among the nations with that glory which they vainly grudge. Let them, if they can, defend their gods in this article, since they maintain that they worship them in order to be preserved from these disasters, which they now impute to us if they suffer in the least degree. For why did these gods permit the disasters I am to speak of to fall on their worshippers before the preaching of Christ's name offended them, and put an end to their sacrifices? [88] Pluvia defit, causa Christiani. Similar accusations and similar replies may be seen in the celebrated passage of Tertullian's Apol. c. 40, and in the eloquent exordium of Arnobius, C. Gentes. [89] Augustin is supposed to refer to Symmachus, who similarly accused the Christians in his address to the Emperor Valentinianus in the year 384. At Augustin's request, Paulus Orosius wrote his history in confutation of Symmachus' charges.