Anxiety

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

  The SPDC was located in downtown Atlanta in the Healey Building, a sixteen-story Gothic Revival structure built in the early 1900s that was in considerable decline and losing tenants. I worked in a cramped circle of desks with two lawyers and did clerical work, answering phones and researching legal questions for staff. I was just getting settled into my office routine when Steve asked me to go to death row to meet with a condemned man whom no one else had time to visit. He explained that the man had been on the row for over two years and that they didn’t yet have a lawyer to take his case; my job was to convey to this man one simple message: You will not be killed in the next year. — I drove through farmland and wooded areas of rural Georgia, rehearsing what I would say when I met this man. I practiced my introduction over and over. “Hello, my name is Bryan. I’m a student with the...” No. “I’m a law student with...” No. “My name is Bryan Stevenson. I’m a legal intern with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, and I’ve been instructed to inform you that you will not be executed soon.” “You can’t be executed soon.” “You are not at risk of execution anytime soon.” No. I continued practicing my presentation until I pulled up to the intimidating barbed-wire fence and white guard tower of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center. Around the office we just called it “Jackson,” so seeing the facility’s actual name on a sign was jarring—it sounded clinical, even therapeutic. I parked and found my way to the prison entrance and walked inside the main building with its dark corridors and gated hallways, where metal bars barricaded every access point. The interior eliminated any doubt that this was a hard place. I walked down a tunneled corridor to the legal visitation area, each step echoing ominously across the spotless tiled floor. When I told the visitation officer that I was a paralegal sent to meet with a death row prisoner, he looked at me suspiciously. I was wearing the only suit I owned, and we could both see that it had seen better days. The officer’s eyes seemed to linger long and hard over my driver’s license before he tilted his head toward me to speak. “You’re not local.” It was more of a statement than a question. “No, sir. Well, I’m working in Atlanta.”

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

  As it was, Walter didn’t initially think much of the flirtations of Karen Kelly, a young white woman he’d met at the Waffle House where he ate breakfast. She was attractive, but he didn’t take her too seriously. When her flirtations became more explicit, Walter hesitated, and then persuaded himself that no one would ever know. After a few weeks, it became clear that his relationship with Karen was trouble. At twenty-five, Karen was eighteen years younger than Walter, and she was married. As word got around that the two were “friends,” she seemed to take a titillating pride in her intimacy with Walter. When her husband found out, things quickly turned ugly. Karen and her husband, Joe, had long been unhappy and were already planning to divorce, but her scandalous involvement with a black man outraged Karen’s husband and his entire family. He initiated legal proceedings to gain custody of their children and became intent on publicly disgracing his wife by exposing her infidelity and revealing her relationship with a black man. For his part, Walter had always stayed clear of the courts and far away from the law. Years earlier, he had been drawn into a bar fight that resulted in a misdemeanor conviction and a night in jail. It was the first and only time he had ever been in trouble. From that point on, he had no exposure to the criminal justice system. When Walter received a subpoena from Karen Kelly’s husband to testify at a hearing where the Kellys would be fighting over their children’s custody, he knew it was going to cause him serious problems. Unable to consult with his wife, Minnie, who had a better head for these kinds of crises, he nervously went to the courthouse. The lawyer for Kelly’s husband called Walter to the stand. Walter had decided to acknowledge being a “friend” of Karen. Her lawyer objected to the crude questions posed to Walter by the husband’s attorney about the nature of his friendship, sparing him from providing any details, but when he left the courtroom the anger and animosity toward him were palpable. Walter wanted to forget about the whole ordeal, but word spread quickly, and his reputation shifted. No longer the hard-working pulpwood man, known to white people almost exclusively for what he could do with a saw in the pine trees, Walter now represented something more worrisome. — Fears of interracial sex and marriage have deep roots in the United States.

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

  As we all left the courthouse, we offered each other solemn goodbyes. “We’ll pray for you,” the aunt said as they departed. On the way to my car, I considered asking them to say something to the prosecutor and state lawyers about not wanting Mr. Richardson to be executed, although it was clear that the State wasn’t acting on behalf of these victims. The courtroom had been filled with state lawyers and other officials watching the hearing, but they had long since fled the courthouse without so much as a word to any of the battered souls standing in the back of the room. I was haunted by the tragic irony that they felt I was their best hope for help. The trial judge had denied our request for a stay of execution by the time I got back to Montgomery. He ruled our evidence was “untimely,” meaning that he could not consider it. With less than a week before the execution, the next few days involved one frantic filing after the next. Finally, on the day before the execution, I filed a petition for review and a motion for a stay of execution in the U.S. Supreme Court. Even in death penalty cases, the Court grants review only in a small percentage of the cases filed. A petition for certiorari, a request to review a lower court’s ruling, is very rarely granted, but I’d known all along that the Supreme Court was our best chance for a stay of execution. Even when lower courts granted a stay, the State would appeal, so the Supreme Court would almost always make the final decision to permit an execution to proceed or not. The execution was scheduled for 12:01 A.M. on August 18. I had finally finished the petition and faxed it to the Court late on the night of August 16 and had spent the next morning in my Montgomery office, waiting anxiously for the Court’s decision. I tried to busy myself by reading files in other cases, including Walter McMillian’s. I didn’t expect we’d hear from the Court until the afternoon, but that didn’t keep me from staring at the phone all morning. Whenever the phone rang, my pulse quickened. Eva and Doris, our receptionist, knew that I was anxiously awaiting the call. We had submitted an extensive clemency petition to the governor with affidavits from family members and color photographs, but I didn’t expect anything in response. The petition detailed Herbert’s military service and explained why military veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are worthy of compassion. I wasn’t very hopeful. Michael Lindsey had received a life verdict from the jury and was executed instead; Horace Dunkins was intellectually disabled, and the governor had not spared him, either. Herbert would likely be seen as even less sympathetic.

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

  I was having an increasingly difficult time managing it all. At the same time, Walter’s authorized length of stay at the Montgomery facility was up, so we frantically made arrangements for him to move back home, where his sister would do the best she could to take care of him. It was a worrisome situation for him and his family, for all of us. By the time Jimmy Dill was scheduled for execution in Alabama, the entire EJI staff was exhausted. The execution date couldn’t have come at a more difficult time. We had no prior involvement in Mr. Dill’s case, which meant getting up to speed in the thirty days before his scheduled execution. It was an unusual crime. Mr. Dill was accused of shooting someone during the course of a drug deal after an argument erupted. The shooting victim did not die; Mr. Dill was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. He was in jail for nine months awaiting trial while the victim was released from the hospital and was recovering fine. But after several months of caring for him at home, the victim’s wife apparently abandoned him and he became gravely ill. When he died, state prosecutors changed the charges against Mr. Dill from assault to capital murder. Jimmy Dill suffered from an intellectual disability and had been sexually and physically abused throughout his childhood. He struggled with drug addiction until his arrest. He was appointed counsel who did very little to prepare the case for trial. Almost no investigation was done into the poor medical care the victim had received, care that constituted the actual cause of death. The state made a plea offer of twenty years, but it was never adequately communicated to Mr. Dill, so he went to trial, was convicted, and was sentenced to death. The appellate courts affirmed his conviction and sentence. He couldn’t find volunteer counsel for his postconviction appeals, so most of his legal claims were procedurally barred because he had missed the filing deadlines. When we first looked at Mr. Dill’s case a few weeks before his scheduled execution, no court had reviewed critical issues about the reliability of his conviction and sentence. Capital murder requires an intent to kill, and there was a persuasive argument that there was no intent to kill in this case and that poor health care had caused the victim’s death. Most gunshot victims don’t die after nine months, and it was surprising that the state was seeking the death penalty in this case. And the U.S. Supreme Court had previously banned the execution of people with mental retardation, so Mr. Dill should have been shielded from the death penalty because of his intellectual disability, but no one had investigated or presented evidence in support of the claim.

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

  27. And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly. 28. Now no man at the table knew for what intent he spake this unto him. 29. For some of them thought, because Judas had the bag, that Jesus had said unto him, Buy those things that we have need of against the feast; or, that he should give something to the poor. 30. He then having received the sop went immediately out: and it was night. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxii. 1) Our Lord after His twofold promise of assistance to the Apostles in their future labours, remembers that the traitor is cut off from both, and is troubled at the thought: When Jesus had thus said, He was troubled in spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray Me. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. lx. 1) This did not come into His mind’then for the first time; but He was now about to make the traitor known, and single him out from the rest, and therefore was troubled in spirit. The traitor too was now just about to go forth to execute his purpose. He was troubled at the thought of His Passion being so near at hand, at the dangers to which His faithful followers would be brought at the hand of the traitor, which were even now impending over Him. Our Lord deigned to be troubled also, to shew that false brethren cannot be cut off, even in the most urgent necessity, without the troubling of the Church. (Tr. lxi. 1.). He was troubled not in flesh, but in spirit; for on occasion of scandals of this kind, the spirit is troubled, not perversely, but in love, lest in separating the tares, some of the wheat too be plucked up with them. (Tr. lx. 5.). But whether He was troubled by pity for perishing Judas, or, by the near approach of His own death, He was troubled not through weakness of mind, but power: He was not troubled because any thing compelled Him, but He troubled Himself, as was said above. And in that He was troubled, He consoles the weak members of His body, i. e. His Church, that they may not think themselves reprobate, should they be troubled at the approach of death. ORIGEN. (t. xxxii. 11.) His being troubled in spirit, was the human part, suffering under the 1excess of the spiritual. For if every Saint lives, acts, and suffers in the spirit, how much more is this true of Jesus, the Rewarder of Saints.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The irreducible inconvenience of the moral choice is that it is, by definition, arbitrary-though it sounds so grandiose and, on the surface, unreasonable, and has no justification but (or in) itself My reaction, in the present instance, was unrea sonable on its face, not only because of my ignorance of the Arab world, but also because I could not aficct their destiny 37 8 NO NAME IN THE STREET in any degree. And yet, their destiny was somehow tied to mine, their battle was not theirs alone but was my battle also, and it began to be a matter of my honor not to attempt to avoid this loaded tact. And, furthermore-though this was truer in principle than it was in fact, as I had had occasion to learn-my life in Paris was to some extent protected by the fact that I carried a green passport. This passport proclaimed that I was a fr ee citizen of a fr ee country, and was not, therefore, to be treated as one of Europe's uncivilized, black possessions. This same passport, on the other side of the ocean, underwent a sea change and proclaimed that I was not an African prince, but a domestic nigger and that no foreign government would be offended if my corpse were to be found clogging up the sewers. I had never had occasion to reflect before on the brilliance of the white strategy: blacks didn't know each other, could barely speak to each other, and, therefore, could scarcely trust each other-and therefore, wherever we turned, we found our selves in the white man's territory, and at the white man's mercy. Four hundred years in the West had certainly turned me into a Westerner-there was no way around that. But t( mr hundred years in the West had also failed to bleach me-there was no way around that, either-and my history in the West had, for its daily effect, placed me in such mortal danger that I had fled, all the way around the corner, to France. And if I had fled, to Israel, a state created for the purpose of protecting Western interests, I would have been in yet a tighter bind: on which side of Jerusalem would I have decided to live? In 1948, no African nation, as such, existed, and could certainly neither have needed, nor welcomed, a penniless black American, with the possible exception of Liberia. But, even with black over seers, I would not have lasted long on the Firestone rubber plantation. I have said that I was almost entirely ignorant of the details of the Algerian-french complexity, but I was endeavoring to correct this ignorance; and one of the ways in which I was going about it compelled me to keep a file of the editorial pronouncements made by M.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On the other hand, I couldn't really regret it, since it seemed to me that in this perpetual and bitter fer ment I was learning something which kept me in touch with reality and would deepen the truth of the scenario. Rut I anticipate. People have their environments: the Bev erly Hills Hotel was not mine. For no reason that I could easily name, its space, its opulence, its shapelessness, depressed and fr ightened me. The people in the bar, the lounge, the halls, the walks, the swimming pools, the shops, seemed as rootless as I, seemed unreal. In spite-perhaps because of all my cff<>ns to feel relaxed and fr ee and at home (fix America is my home!) I began to feel unreal-almost as though I were playing an unworthy part in a cheap, unworthy drama. I, who have spent half my life in hotels, sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, terrified, wondering where I was. But, though I scarcely realized it, and might even have been ashamed to admit it to myself, I think that this had partly to do with the fact that I was the only black person in the hotel. I must stress that in no way whatever did anyone in the hotel ever make me ted this, nor, indeed, did I ever consciously feel it-it's only now, in looking back, that I suspect it had to be partly that. My presence in the hotel was absolutely unques tioned, even by people who did not know who I was, or who TO BE BAPTIZED 429 thought I was Sammy Davis. It was simply taken for granted that I would not have been in the hotel if I had not belonged there. This, irrationally enough, got to me-did I belong there? In any case, thousands of black people, miles away, did not belong there, though some of them sometimes came to visit me there. (People had to come and get me, or come to visit me, because I do not drive.) The drive from Beverly Hills to Watts and back again is a long and loaded drive-l some times felt as though my body were being stretched across those miles. I don't think I felt anything so trivial as guilt, guilt at what appeared to be my comparative good fortune. I knew more about comparative fortunes than that, but I felt a stunning helplessness.

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

  This was the moment when the other pawnbrokers had told me to get lost. “Get your thieving ass out of here,” was what the first one had said. I watched her pick things up and set them down again, record players, clarinets, toasters, cameras, whatever came to hand. The shop was long and narrow. Electric guitars hung from the ceiling. Rifles and shotguns were locked in racks against the far wall, beneath a pipe holding up a row of shiny suits with flyaway lapels. “I’m about to close up,” she said. Then she added, as if I had begged her, “All right, maybe I can take a look.” Chuck opened and closed the trunk while I carried the stuff inside. He looked ready to bolt. His face was sickly white and he rolled his eyes like a spooked horse at the people moving past—derelicts, sailors, Indians in cowboy hats, winos doing their wino shuffle and shouting at enemies they alone could see. I was skittish myself. But it took more than a boy with his arms full of firepower to get the attention of these citizens. No one gave us a second look. The pawnbroker ignored me as I went back and forth to the car. I lined everything up on the top of the cabinet and waited. “That it?” she said. I said that was it. She came from around back and locked the door. Then she went behind the counter again. She ran her eyes over the goods. She picked up the double-barreled shotgun, broke it open, held the barrels up to the light and squinted through each of them in turn. Then she snapped the gun shut again, hard, too hard. It was painful to watch. I knew that gun, as I knew the other gun and the rifles. I had used them all and felt respect for them, and something more than respect. I did not like to see them handled as this woman handled them, slapping them around, levering and pumping the actions as if she were trying to break them. But I said nothing. I was unnerved by her big competent hands and her doll’s face that never changed expression, and most of all by her refusal to look at me. The longer she didn’t look at me the more I wanted her to. She made me feel insubstantial, which gave her the edge. And she knew what she was doing. She tore down every gun and rifle without hesitation, checked its barrel, checked its firing mechanism, and put it together again as fast as I could have. Once she’d looked at them all she shrugged and said, “I don’t need this truck.” “But you said you’d look at them.” She turned to the shelf behind her and started lifting things again. “I looked at them.”

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

  294 Lecture 44: William Shakespeare—Hamlet William Shakespeare—Hamlet Lecture 44 In this lecture, we’ll take a careful look at Hamlet, which Shakespeare probably wrote in 1600, arguably Shakespeare’s best-known play, unarguably a very great tragedy. There are many ways of looking at this play, and it’s a play of huge complexity. A s in the lecture on Shakespearean comedy, we will focus on Shakespeare’s ability to weave together multiple plots, showing, for example, how the madness of Hamlet is echoed in the madness of Ophelia. The con fl ict in the play between Hamlet’s introspective world and the Machiavellian court of Claudius will provide another central focus for the lecture, as we use this play to make some generalizations about the nature of Shakespearean tragedy. We will look in particular at the play that Hamlet stages to “catch the conscience of the king” as a touchstone both for what is characteristic of Shakespearean tragedy and unique in Hamlet. Just as The Merchant of Venice is representative of Shakespearean comedy, Hamlet is representative of Shakespearean tragedy. Hamlet is a classic tragedy, ending in the deaths of all the main characters. The play begins shortly after the death of Prince Hamlet’s father and the hasty remarriage of Hamlet’s mother to her late husband’s brother, Claudius. Hamlet is brooding over his mother’s marriage. Hamlet is full of self-conscious theatricality. Claudius sends just about everyone to spy on Hamlet, that is, to “act” as if they are Hamlet’s friends. The courtier Polonius spies on Hamlet. Ophelia, Polonius’s daughter and Hamlet’s love interest, spies on Hamlet. Two of Hamlet’s classmates, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, also spy on him. The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears, tells Hamlet that he has been murdered by Claudius, and demands revenge. The plot thickens. Hamlet fi ghts against this sort of theatricality with more theatricality, both feigning madness and employing the theater itself. Hamlet uses a play that recreates the circumstances of his father’s death. This is an

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

  I hadn’t told the officers I was a lawyer or informed them that what they were doing was illegal. Should I have said more to them? Despite the work I’d done assisting people on death row, I questioned how prepared I was to do really difficult things. I even started having second thoughts about going to Alabama to start a law office. I couldn’t stop thinking about how at risk young kids are when they get stopped by the police. My complaint made it through the review process at the Atlanta Police Department. Every few weeks I’d get a letter explaining that the police officers had done nothing wrong and that police work is very difficult. I appealed these dismissals unsuccessfully up the chain of command. Finally, I requested a meeting with the chief of police and the police officers who had stopped me. This request was denied, but the deputy chief met with me. I had asked for an apology and suggested training to prevent similar incidents. The deputy chief nodded politely as I explained what had happened. When I finished, he apologized to me, but I suspected that he just wanted me to leave. He promised that the officers would be required to do some “extra homework on community relations.” I didn’t feel vindicated. My caseload was getting crazy. The lawyers defending the Gadsden City Jail finally acknowledged that Mr. Ruffin’s rights had been violated and that he had been illegally denied his asthma medicine. We won a decent settlement for Mr. Ruffin’s family, so they would at least receive some financial help. I turned the other police misconduct cases over to other lawyers because my death penalty docket was so full. I had no time to make war with the Atlanta Police when I had clients facing execution. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about how dangerous and unfair the situation was and how I’d done nothing wrong. And what if I had had drugs in my car? I would have been arrested and then would have needed to convince my attorney to believe me when I explained that the police had entered the car illegally. Would I get an attorney who would take such a claim seriously? Would a judge believe that I’d done nothing wrong? Would they believe someone who was just like me but happened not to be a lawyer? Someone like me who was unemployed or had a prior criminal record? I decided to talk to youth groups, churches, and community organizations about the challenges posed by the presumption of guilt assigned to the poor and people of color. I spoke at local meetings and tried to sensitize people to the need to insist on accountability from law enforcement. I argued that police could improve public safety without abusing people.

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

  He sometimes complained of nightmares. A friend or a relative might say something about how they supported the death penalty—just not for Walter—and he would find himself shaken. All I could tell him was that it would get better. — After a few months, Walter very much wanted to return to the place he’d spent his whole life. It made me nervous, but he went ahead and put a trailer on property he owned in Monroe County and resettled there. He returned to logging work while we made plans to file a civil lawsuit against everyone involved in his wrongful prosecution and conviction. Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling—nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them. At the time of Walter’s release, only ten states and the District of Columbia had laws authorizing compensation to people who have been wrongly incarcerated. The number has since grown, but even today almost half of all states (twenty-two) offer no compensation to the wrongly imprisoned. Many of the states that do authorize some monetary aid severely limit the amount of compensation. No matter how many years an innocent person has been wrongly incarcerated, New Hampshire caps compensation at $20,000; Wisconsin has a $25,000 cap; Oklahoma and Illinois limit the total amount an innocent person can recover to under $200,000, even if the person has spent decades in prison. While other states have caps of more than a million dollars, and many have no cap at all, several states impose onerous eligibility requirements. In some jurisdictions, if the person lacks the support of the prosecuting attorney who wrongly convicted him, compensation will be denied. At the time Walter was set free, Alabama was not among the handful of states that provided aid to innocent people released from prison. The Alabama legislature could pass a special bill granting compensation to a person wrongly convicted, but that almost never happened. A local legislator introduced a bill seeking compensation on Walter’s behalf that prompted the local press to report that Walter was seeking $9 million. The proposed legislation, of which Walter had no prior knowledge, went nowhere. But the news coverage about the possible $9 million payoff outraged people in Monroeville who still questioned his innocence and titillated some of Walter’s friends and family, a few of whom started soliciting him aggressively for financial help. One woman even filed a paternity suit falsely claiming that Walter was the father of her child, a child that was born less than eight months after Walter’s release. DNA tests confirmed that he was not the father.

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

  466 Lecture 70: Mark Twain telling her to reclaim her property. But then he tears up the note, telling himself that he’ll “go to hell.” Learning that Jim has been captured, Tom conceives a wildly dangerous plan to set him free. Tom’s chief aim is to have as much excitement as possible. In the process, he doesn’t care at all how much he frightens or humiliates Jim or endangers the boys themselves. When Tom reveals that Jim has been legally free for months, he makes us realize that not even the liberal northern conscience is entirely perfect. Since the book was published almost 20 years after slavery was abolished, it gives readers the pleasure of witnessing a moral battle that has already been won by northern morality. But because northern morality required a war that took three-quarters of a million lives, it may not be entirely humane. Beneath the humor of this book lies its merciless revelation of all the harm we may do in the name of good. ■ Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 3 rd ed., edited by Thomas Cooley. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. 1. How does Twain’s portrayal of Huck and Jim complicate or revise your conception of the relation between whites and blacks during the time of slavery? 2. If you could change the ending of Huckleberry Finn, how would you end it? Essential Reading Supplementary Reading Questions to Consider

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

  518 Lecture 76: Marcel Proust Marcel Proust Lecture 76 Born in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil and raised in Paris, he was the literary equivalent of a hothouse fl ower. Like Flaubert, he was the son of a distinguished doctor; his father made his name as a champion in the war against cholera and pioneered in the fi eld of epidemiology. B ut the single most important in fl uence on Proust came from his mother. Born Jeanne Weil, daughter of a wealthy Jewish Parisian family, she doted on both of her sons, especially the fi rst one, Marcel. Exceptionally sensitive to the value of literature and skilled as a pianist, she and her own mother—Adele Weil, Proust’s grandmother—took personal charge of his early education. Besides hiring tutors and arranging piano lessons for him and his brother, she and her mother taught them languages— chiefl y German and Latin—and nurtured them on what they thought was the best kind of music and literature. With this kind of encouragement, Marcel quickly learned to love reading. Marcel Proust started writing in his teens and at 24 produced his fi rst book, Pleasures and Days (1896). But not until he was nearly 40 did he start work on his semi-autobiographical masterwork of fi ction, In Search of Lost Time. In Swann’ s Way, the fi rst of its many volumes, the deeply introspective narrator—based on Proust himself—meditates at length on memories of his childhood, especially on his sojourns at the house of his grandparents in the fi ctional town of Combray. There, he remembers, he spent evenings waiting anxiously in his bedroom for his mother to come up and kiss him goodnight; there too he fi rst encountered a seemingly inconsequential friend of his grandparents named Charles Swann, who would later be known to the narrator as one of the most elegant members of Parisian high society. But for all his social success, Swann will also prove to be a man of deep sympathy and sensitivity, which will endear him to the narrator even as it distinguishes him from the grand, aristocratic family of the Guermantes. Swann’s way, therefore, will sharply diverge from the Guermantes way.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The lift arrived as I went into the hall, and a very old man with a hat and all his buttons done up shuffled out, looking at me apprehensively. It was a big, functional lift, like a goods-lift, with a battered door that shuddered shut and metal walls sprayed thickly with graffiti, and with the menacing, urchin monogram of the National Front scratched over and over in the paint. It was only when I got out at the ninth floor that I began to feel anxious. The door closed behind me at once and left me alone. I could hear a television from within one of the flats, and the sound of a police siren outside came from very far off, from some other transgression in the hot summer world below. The flats opened off the corridor where I stood in electric light; transverse corridors, with windows at each end, formed an H plan, and I went along very cautiously till I found the right number. By the door there was a bell and under it a little plastic window showing a card with ‘HOPE’ written on it in blue ink. I nodded my head mirthlessly over this, my heart raced as I lifted my finger and held it in the air, wincing with trepidation, before stepping back and slipping quickly round the corner and looking out of the window. I saw the suburban sprawl, the tall windows of a Victorian school, gothic spires rising over housetops, and then immediately below the yellowing grass, the children skateboarding, surprisingly quiet. I wanted to see Arthur, and make sure he was all right. I wanted to touch him, support him, see again how attractive he was and know he still thought the world of me. I stood very still, hearing the racing on television from inside the flat I was nearest to. I had hardly allowed myself to think what I would actually say, if his mother wanted to know who I was, or his drug-dealing brother; or if he had never returned home since the day of the fight, and had disappeared from their lives as completely as he now had from mine. Perhaps I should abandon the whole thing, the pains I was taking. Perhaps I could see him from a distance, coming across the grass below with friends, and know that he was all right, and slide away. It is horrible to be cowed by circumstances. I crept back to the Hopes’ door, mechanically obedient to my original plan. The doorbell was shrill. I massaged my face into a plausible, friendly expression and stood back. Oh, the relief as the seconds pounded by … and nothing happened.

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

  I spoke with Herbert regularly during the day by phone to let him know there was no news. I couldn’t rely on the prison to get a message to him if the Court ruled, so I asked him to call me every two hours. Whatever the news, I wanted him to hear it from someone who cared about him. Herbert had met a woman from Mobile with whom he had corresponded over the years. They had decided to get married a week before the execution. Herbert had no money, nothing to offer her if he was executed. But he was a military veteran, so his survivors were entitled to receive an American flag upon his death. He designated his new wife as the person to whom the flag should be presented. In the days leading up to the execution, it seemed that Herbert was more concerned about his flag than his impending execution. He kept asking me to check with the government about how his flag would be delivered and urging me to get a commitment in writing. His new wife’s family had agreed to spend the last few hours with Herbert before the execution. The prison allowed family members to stay until about 10:00 P.M., when they would begin to prepare the condemned for execution. I was still in my office waiting to receive word from the Supreme Court. When the clock passed 5:00 P.M. without any news, I allowed myself to become cautiously hopeful. If the Court wasn’t troubled by anything we’d presented, I expected an earlier ruling on our motion for a stay. So the later it got, the more encouraged I became. At 6:00 P.M. I was pacing in my small office, nervously running through the possibilities of what the Court might be debating so close to the execution hour. Eva and our new investigator, Brenda Lewis, waited with me. Finally, a little before 7:00 P.M., the phone rang. The clerk of the Court was on the line. “Mr. Stevenson, I’m calling to let you know that the Court has just entered an order in Case No. 89-5395; the motion for a stay of execution and petition for writ of certiorari have been denied. We’ll fax copies of the order to your office shortly.” And with that, the conversation ended. When I hung up, all I could think was, why would I need a copy of the order? To whom did the clerk think I would show it? In a matter of hours, Herbert would be dead. There would be no more appeals, no more records to keep. I’m not sure why I was struck by these peculiar details. Maybe thinking about the procedural absurdities of the Court’s order was less overwhelming than thinking about its meaning. I had promised Herbert I would be with him during the execution, and it took me a few minutes to realize I needed to move quickly to get to the prison two hours away.

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

  The constant wave of tropical storms and hurricanes that menaced coastal Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida in the summer of 2004 turned their relaxed Southern coastal life into an apocalyptic struggle for survival. Marsha and Glen Colbey were living in a crowded trailer with their children, and they knew they were at risk when the hurricane warnings were announced. They weren’t alone; plenty of other families shared their situation, which offered some consolation. But when Ivan destroyed the Colbey home in September, there was little comfort in finding herself in line with thousands of other people seeking assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Aid eventually came. The Colbeys were given a FEMA camper trailer as temporary housing, and they put it on their property so the kids could stay in their nearby schools. Marsha and Glen had found construction work and roofing jobs at the start of the summer, but now it would be weeks before rebuilding jobs would be available. Marsha could also tell that she was pregnant. She was forty-three years old and hadn’t planned on having another child. All she could think about was how in a few months the pregnancy would limit her ability to do construction work. Her worry sometimes tipped over into a deeper anxiety that triggered an old temptation: drugs. But there were too many people depending on her, and there was too much to manage to give in. Five years earlier, police were called after nurses had found cocaine in her system when she was pregnant with her youngest son, Joshua, and the authorities had terrified her with accusations and threats of criminal prosecution, imprisonment, and the seizure of her children. She was not going to risk that again. She and Glen were dirt poor, but Marsha had always compensated for the things she couldn’t give her kids by giving them all of her heart. She read to them, talked to them, played with them, hugged and kissed them constantly, and kept them close at all times. Against all odds, she nurtured a precious family bonded by an intense love. Her older boys, even her nineteen-year-old, stayed close to her at home despite the many distractions that emerged as they finished high school. Marsha liked being a mom. It’s why she didn’t worry about having so many kids. Getting pregnant with a seventh was not what she had expected or preferred, but she would love this child as she had loved each one before. By winter, things in Baldwin County had settled down. Jobs had returned, and Glen finally found more steady work. The family was still struggling financially, but most of the kids were back in school, and it seemed as if they had survived the worst of the destruction.

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

  At each developmental stage children of divorce reassess their understanding of the divorce. They rehash it when they’re grown and have children of their own and face their own crises. Conversations done fully and well will protect your child, just as Gary’s father protected his son. If these discussions are done poorly or don’t happen at all, the child is left to figure everything out on his own. Being left in the dark with a problem that is too big to understand increases a child’s anxiety profoundly . In my many years of working with divorced families, I’m sorry to say that few parents have such conversations with their children. Most youngsters are told essentially nothing about the parents’ struggle and reasons to decide on divorce—no explanations of the inner struggle, no mention of the reluctance, sorrow, and inability to tolerate any more. It’s as if the divorce came out of the blue. No one says a word. This means that the child, especially the preschool child, often learns about the divorce in the most traumatic way possible when she wakes up one morning to find that her father and his belongings have vanished into thin air. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it takes thoughtfulness and time for divorcing parents to help their children. Let’s assume for the moment that you are the one getting divorced. What should you do? First, gather the children together and tell them that you have decided to separate and what that means and when it will happen. Talk simply, slowly, and keep in mind that they will remember forever what you are saying. They’ll also remember what you don’t say. Choose a quiet time when you and the children have plenty of time, that is, not when homework is pending or when you are flying off in the morning on a business trip. Turn off the TV and the computer and make clear that you expect to stay home and be available for the rest of the day and evening. Tell them why this is happening and how sorry you both are for you and for them. Explain that when you got married you loved each other and hoped to live together for your whole lives. Go out of your way to talk about the dream you had when you married and how happy you were when the children were born. Why? Because you want the children to feel that they were born into a loving family and that they were wanted. You want to offset their notion, which can gnaw at them over time, that they were born in anger and are leftovers from a marriage no one wanted.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The white boy denied it but a tcw days later, while G. and the principal were together, he came over and said, "I'm sorry I tripped you; I won't do it again," and they shook hands. But it doesn't seem that this boy has as yet developed into a friend. And it is clear that G. will not allow himself to expect this. I asked Mrs. R. what had prompted her to have her son reassigned to a previously all-white high school. She sighed, paused; then , sharply, "Well, it's not because I'm so anxious to have him around white people." Then she laughed. "I really don't know how I'd feel if I was to carry a white baby around who was calling me Grandma." G. laughed, too, for the first time. "v Vhitc people say," the mother went on, "that that's all a Negro wants. I don't think they believe that them sckes ." Then we switched from the mysterious question of what white folks believe to the relatively solid ground of what she, herself� knows and fears. "You sec that boy? Well, he's always been a straight-A stu dent. He didn't hardly have to work at it. You sec the way he's so quiet now on the sota, with his books? Well, when he was going to -- High School, he didn't have no homework or if he did, he could get it done in five minutes. Then, there he was, out in the streets, getting into mischief, and all he did all day in school was just keep clowning to make the other boys laugh. He wasn't learning nothing and didn't nobody care if he never learned nothing and I could just see what was going to happen to him if he kept on like that." The boy was very quiet. "What were you learning in -- High?" I asked him. "� othing!" he exploded, with a very un-b oyish laugh. asked him to tell me about it. "\Ve il, the teacher comes in," he said, "and she gives you something to read and she goes out. She leaves some other student in charge ... " (" You can just imagine how much reading gets done," Mrs. R. interposed.) "At the end of the A FLY IN BUTTERMIL K 191 period," G. continued, "she comes back and tells you some thing to read tor the next day." So, having nothing else to do, G. began amusing his class mates and his mother began to be afraid.

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

  When Paula’s father reappeared, both the children and their mother were surprised. Their lives had been based on his absence, and now, like Lazarus, he was back. The children missed him but they had given up expecting him to be an important part of their daily lives ever again. In some families, the father returns after the mother has remarried—and this poses a threat to the emerging role of the stepfather. Whatever the circumstances, the father’s reentry opens a new chapter in family life, which is plagued by an unhappy question in the children’s minds: since he disappeared once, will he disappear again? Paula’s father was now managing a large variety store and living in one of his family’s apartment buildings in Santa Rosa, a city about an hour to the north. Almost immediately the two parents resumed fighting. They could not agree on a visiting schedule, and years of unpaid or poorly paid child support remained a bitter, unresolved issue. Anger arose with new vigor. When Paula’s mom threatened to block their visits Paula’s dad took her to court, whereupon a judge set child support and a visitation schedule. Paula’s dad was to have the children for two weekends each month, from Friday after school until Sunday night at six o’clock. Holidays would be rotated every other year. The children would reside with the father during the full month of July. For the next three years Paula and Joan, despite their many protests, were held to this schedule as if they were factory workers punching a time clock. The visiting schedule was set up on the basis of a compromise meeting the demands of both parents. The wishes and needs of each child—now eight and thirteen years old—were never consulted or considered. It’s shocking to realize how often this goes on throughout the country. Typically children are not asked to participate in formulating court-ordered or mediated plans that make for radical changes in their lives. Neither parent asked either Joan or Paula how they felt about it. After their day in court, each parent retreated into an entrenched position, rigidly adhering to court orders and communicating with each other as little as possible. After his long absence, the children hardly knew their father. Paula, in her characteristic blunt manner, retreated into a sulky silence. For her part, Joan wailed, “Where is he going to take us? What will I do there? What should I tell my friends? Why do I have to go?” Joan and Paula were excited at the prospect of having a real-life dad like other children but they couldn’t understand where he had been the last few years. They didn’t know how to ask this and he did not explain. They were also frightened of being left alone with a strange man in an unfamiliar place. Joan, as a young adolescent, was especially embarrassed about having her first menstrual period at her father’s home. She worried sick about how she would tell him.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  Next morning, while Girlfriend’s in the shower, I’m nursing a coffee at the kitchen table. The sun’s first rays cast a pleasing light across most of the room, and Fleshlight, which stands tall and majestic on the table, casts a shadow like a sundial. Maybe I will do it tonight. After work I feel indecisive. Instead of racing home to fuck the gooey-pink eye, I find myself at one of those bars with a million different beers. It’s midway between my house and Girlfriend’s. Three connoisseurs to my left are talking fruity bouquets. I flirt with the idea of admitting defeat. Somehow my groin is not amused by Fleshlight. Could be the vanilla, could be the slime, could be the coin-slot eye. I order a Boddingtons and watch Bartender-Girl build it the way you build a Guinness. The head rises to the top of the glass, then shrinks as the golden liquid emerges underneath in beer’s more drinkable transparent form. I mean, it’s not like I’m afraid of Fleshlight, is it? When the head settles, she pours another shot from the tap, slices off my foamy head with a but ter knife, and slides the beer in front of me. Looking down into my head of my beer, I see a coin-slot eye. I raise the glass to my lips and it smells somewhat vanilla, and when I set it down I’m acutely aware that a thin slime remains on my upper lip. I admit: I’m afraid. And once I realize I’m afraid, over the next couple of days, Fleshlight looms larger than life. It’s my mother’s disapproval, my third-grade teacher’s declaration that I’ll never amount to anything, my ex’s aunt from Borough Park asking me why I’m not Jewish. It even argues politics and tells me to fine-tune my career in a more adult manner. It’s not like I’d go out and buy Juggs magazine, but they published one of my stories, and my contributor’s copy came in the mail. As you may have guessed, they’re into gooey, big breasts. In fact, they’re into lactating mothers. Like a good egomaniac, I’m checking for typos over my morning coffee. Girlfriend’s in the shower and I’m sitting at the table with Fleshlight. Today is my day off—my so-called writing day. It dawns on me that today is . . . the day. I pack my notebook, Juggs, and Fleshlight lovingly in my backpack and crack the bathroom door to kiss Girlfriend good-bye. “You think you could put the toilet seat back down every once in a while?” she complains. “Women,” I mutter as I struggle with my bike down the steps of her building, hoping it doesn’t snow before I get to my place.