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 The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  My mind reeled in a drunk waltz back and forth between my cock and his, between getting and spending. Then he said, “Why don’t you stick it in me.” I said, “Okay ...,” with a trace of hesitation. “I’ve never done this before,” he said. “Neither have I,” I lied. “But maybe it’s done like this,” and I folded his strong legs back, plowing into them as a lineman digs into his opponent’s shoulder. His calves hooked over my shoulders. His legs, long and firm in their black stockings of fur, felt cool. He was like a trick bottle that must be turned at a queer angle for it to pour, but then it pours freely. Since he had been built to stand perfectly still at attention under a general’s glance, he knew how to take orders, even silent ones. For once he wasn’t keeping up his stream of self-encouraging comments. Nor was he smiling. When I started to enter him, he said “Jesus Christ” out loud and grimaced with pain. The closest roommate stirred. I pulled out and he dashed for the toilet. I followed him. He sat on the toilet, door open, and said in a loud voice, “You’re really a pain in the ass,” and smiled that big unveiled smile. I stood there while he winced and talked and looked down into the toilet to see if anything had come out. His body had been tanned so often it retained a permanent swimsuit line. We didn’t go back to bed, neither then nor ever, but the next semester I had a room of my own in a boardinghouse and Mick would borrow it every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon when I was in class. He used it as a place where he could sleep with his girlfriend. Once I found a single drop of blood on my sheets. Often I could smell the scent of his clean but athletic and unperfumed body. By that time he’d been teased so much for his smile—and had even had a caricature drawn in which he was all teeth—that he’d lost his naturalness. The next year he dropped out of school and joined the paratroopers. Two days after the bachelor dinner, William Everett Hunton called me at three in the afternoon and begged me to hurry over to the law quad. When I arrived, there was Annie slumped outside his door, barefoot, wearing a pretty rose silk slip and nothing else, her beehive collapsed. She looked up at me with huge muddy eyes, but the clinch of recognition quickly relaxed and she glanced away, hopeless. “For God’s sake, Annie, get up!” I shouted, as concerned about the scandal she was making as the pain she was suffering. The minute I spoke, the door flew open and framed William. “Thank heavens you’ve come.” He looked with fear and loathing at Annie. “I see you’ve met my little doggie. Don’t pet her. We’re leaving her out here to punish her. She barked all night.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  “I think Lou is so intelligent. He’s really the most intelligent person I’ve ever known,” Sean said with a curious agitation, as though something were at stake. Then, to cover his embarrassment, he sang three deep notes to himself, “Oom pah pah.” After a short silence he said, “I don’t know why he dropped me.” “Maybe you were too butch for him. Have you met Misty?” “I bore Lou. I called him Monday and he sounded like he was falling asleep. I waited three days for him to call me—he said he would. Oom pah pah.” I received an odd sensation when it dawned on me that this deep voice, with its overly clear, penetrating salesman’s diction, was telling the truth and conveying an emotion. “He’s been very busy this week,” I said. “Don’t.” “You seem to be afraid of me,” I said, suddenly intuitive. Until this second, when he’d disclosed his feelings about Lou, I hadn’t imagined he might be insecure. “I am.” “Why?” “Lou told me you were very intelligent.” “But you’re far more intelligent than I. You read books in several languages; you know all about the pastoral tradition and the medieval allegory.” To my way of looking at things, of course, knowledge wasn’t intelligence. I believed in that pure, radiant isotope called “general intelligence,” something so abstract that any concrete knowledge would only diminish it. “Strange you could admit that so easily,” Sean said. While we spoke I couldn’t forget his beauty, which seemed eucharistic. “Aren’t you ever insecure?” he asked. “I can’t endure suspense,” I said. “What are you talking about?” “Well, once I’m into a friendship I’m really very relaxed and—well, I’m a good friend, I think. But in the beginning, when you don’t know whether the other person likes you or not ...” “Oh, I see.” Sean smeared the ring his cup had made on the table. He said very softly, “I like you very much. Dee-dee-dee dum.” I wanted to tell him right away that I didn’t even expect that much. I was so afraid of appearing greedy. And I knew I had the capacity to wait. I recognized that he was too good for me. I was sure medieval knights knew they were unworthy of their lady, and that’s why they welcomed trials, proofs, labors. The idea that he might like me radically revised my version of who we were. I was suddenly one of those funny, nutty, brainy guys welcomed precisely because he relieves the heavenly tedium of excessive beauty. Or we were buddies, and our camaraderie erased the difference between us; who could judge the looks of a childhood friend? Who would want to? Or he thought I was the brain, he the slow learner ... No matter which scenario the next few minutes or years would confirm, at least I was in all of them. I walked him back to his door.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  The wind blew a shelf of snow off a low eave. “Are you jealous?” she asked. I glanced over and I could see from her reined-in smile and nearly crossed eyes that she wanted me to say yes. I ducked out by taking a higher philosophical line: “I’m not sure what jealousy is.” Then, bearing down on her as O’Reilly might: “Why are you so eager to wound me? Have I become a substitute father for you, someone who tortures you (in my case by not sleeping with you) and whom you must punish because you could never punish your real father?” And we were off. She and I ascribed the most appalling motives to each other out of some seemingly scientific zeal, but unlike a real scientific proposition, which can be verified or at least negated, ours submitted to no proof, since the very things being discussed were unconscious, hence unknowable. I say “things” because I hesitate to speak of them as feelings. An “unconscious feeling” strikes me as an impossibility; the one thing we know for sure is what we are feeling. At least now I believe that no one else can correct our feelings; they are pure, incorrigible. Always, at the onset of such a conversation, I had the half-thrilling, half-dreadful sensation of being cranked up to the first, highest hill of a roller coaster. We were scaring each other (“You want to castrate me,” or, “Have you looked at your incestuous feelings toward me?”), but the mutual attention was flattering, as when a lovely palm reader holds your hand, looks into your eyes, and predicts tragic eventualities. There was also a Talmudic fascination about the exercise. If the real horror of living is its failure to mean, to accumulate, then our constant decoding was a comfort, for it found design everywhere—still better, a design of one’s own making. It was easier for us to accept that we were sick than to acknowledge that we were powerless and life vapid. Of course, we would have been insulted if someone had accused us of cheating on an exam or confounding lie and lay , but we smiled charmingly when charged with wanting to murder our father—smiled and shrugged our shoulders. The attribution of Sophoclean passions to ditherers could only be heartening. William Everett Hunton was one of the first handsome homosexuals I’d ever met, a small, neatly made little guy who would flounce and languish around me but turn gravely masculine around the other law students. Even though he was hoping to reform himself and was quite optimistic about a cure, at least for a while he had been gay, and could still be considered at least a transitional case. Annie and I would sit around his room in the law quad and listen to his adventures, presented as evidence of his depravity but with a suggestion that his scarlet sins, at least, had been mink-lined. We were alone, he and I, for a moment.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  6 “When you have completed these [days for Israel], lie down again, but on your right side (toward the south), and you shall bear the wickedness and punishment of the b house of Judah forty days. I have assigned you one day for each year. 7 “Then you shall set your face toward the siege of Jerusalem with your arm bared and prophesy against it. 8 “Now behold, I will put ropes on you so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have completed the days of your siege. Defiled Bread 9 “But as for you, take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt, and put them into one vessel and make them into bread for yourself. You shall eat it according to the number of the days that you lie on your side, three hundred and ninety days. 10 “The food you eat each day shall be [measured] by weight, c twenty shekels, to be eaten daily at a set time. 11 “You shall drink water by measure also, d the sixth part of a hin; you shall drink daily at a set time. 12 “You shall eat your food as barley cakes, having baked it in their sight over human dung.” 13 Then the LORD said, “Thus the children of Israel will eat their bread unclean and defiled among the nations where I will banish them.” [Hos 9:3 ] 14 But I said, “Ah, Lord GOD ! Behold (hear me), I have never been defiled; for from my youth until now I have never eaten what died on its own or was torn by beasts, nor has any unclean meat ever entered my mouth.” [Acts 10:14 ] 15 Then He said to me, “See, I will let you use cow’s dung instead of human dung over which you shall prepare your food.” 16 Moreover, He said to me, “Son of man, behold (listen carefully), I am going to break the staff of bread [that supports life] in Jerusalem; and they shall eat bread [rationed] by weight and [eat it] with anxiety and fear, and drink water by measure and [drink it] in horror [of the impending starvation], [Lev 26:26 ; Ps 105:16 ; Is 3:1 ] 17 because bread and water will be scarce; and they will look at one another in dismay and waste away [in punishment] for their wickedness. Ezekiel 5 Jerusalem’s Desolation Foretold 1 “A ND YOU [Ezekiel], son of man, take a sharp sword and use it as a barber’s razor and shave your head and your beard. Then take scales for weighing and divide the hair [into three parts]. 2 “You shall burn one third with fire in the center of the city, when the days of the siege are completed. Then you shall take one third and strike it with the sword all around the city, and one third you shall scatter to the wind; and I will unsheathe a sword behind them.

• From Vox (1992)

  149 Mmmm-forces are flowing from, I park in a place that is sure to get me a ticket, and I leave my flashers on, and I go into the foyer. There's a row of buttons with names beside them: I hold the detector to each one until one, the third one down, makes the Mmmm-Detector glow with strange colors, and I hesitate, I know that I am interrupting you, and I don't want to do that, that's the last thing I want to do, but it seems so clear to me, reading the force waves, that there is a strong possibility that you would want me to interrupt you, if you knew me, and the conviction that this is true grows in me, and my finger trembles at your button, and there is a huge interior war between reticence and attraction, between the fear that I will inspire fear and the certainty that I should not inspire fear and that we would like each other if I could simply push that button, and I look down at the Mmmm-Detector and I see that you are going to come in less than four minutes if you keep on at that rate, you're really moving, the colors are increasingly intense, and I'm trembling, I'm shivering, but I'm compelled, and I push the button, bzzzzt. You're on your bed, and you're wearing a blue long-sleeved pullover sort of shirt, and black pants and black sneakers, but your black pants are around your ankles, and you've got that tattered, disin tegrating issue of Forum in your left hand, and you're reading about a job interview in which the woman in terviewer is sucking the interviewee's cock, and you're right in the middle of things, when bzzzzt, the doorbell. Who could that be?"

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  has been so normatively entrenched in the study of Black women’s lives that there has been very little sustained public dialogue about the lack of traditional heterosexual relationships in the lives of race women like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary McLeod Bethune, or Ella Baker, all of whom were widowed or divorced, and apparently disinterested in remarrying. 61 Acknowledging the complicated and inextricable relationship between race and sexuality is critical to understanding Murray’s conflicts and the ways it informed her public and private personas. Candice Jenkins argues that “in fact the ‘political’ and the ‘intimate’ may be mutually constitutive signs for the Black subject,” so much so, that “it may not be possible, or sensible, to think about racial identity without thinking, simultaneously, of intimate subjectivity for African Americans.” The larger implication is that “the ‘public’ and ‘private’ faces of Blackness cannot and perhaps should not, be distinguished with any great ease.” 62 Murray had become a victim of a racial ideology that Candice Jenkins refers to as the salvific wish, an iteration of the politics of respectability, which is “best defined as the desire to rescue the Black community from racist accusations of sexual and domestic pathology through the embrace of bourgeois propriety.” 63 The salvific wish is a “response to the peculiar vulnerability of the Black subject with regard to intimate conduct,” which leaves “Black bodies, understood as sites of sexual excess ... [as] doubly vulnerable in the intimate arena—to intimacy itself as well as to the violence of social misperceptions surrounding Black intimate character.” 64 Murray’s own stated allegiances to heterosexuality might therefore more appropriately be read in the context of the salvific wish and its beguiling possibilities for combating Black social ills. 65 But if intimacy itself has such potential for violence—here understood as denial and exclusion—then it might be more useful to consider Murray’s struggles with queer identity in terms of the exclusions for various breaches of racial conduct that respectability mandated within Black communities. More specifically, we might read the generalized Black female subject of her 1947 manifesto as a kind of stand-in for Murray’s own struggles with the gender politics of Black communities. This leads to two questions that I want to spend the final section of this chapter answering: What does it mean if “the salvific wish, with its attempts to repress and discipline Black intimate conduct [by] limiting that conduct to patterns of respectability” becomes a site for the repression of Black intimacy and subjectivity? And, more importantly, how do Black female race leaders negotiate these exclusionary and repressive cultural politics? Irreconcilable Differences: Toward Multiracial Peculiarity Bested by the recalcitrance of social discourses on sex and gender, Pauli Murray turned her attention to the question of racial identity. As mentioned earlier, she published Proud Shoes in 1956, the first of two autobiographies.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  The organized anxiety of women placed Black women’s own racial struggles and aspirations at the center of Black public life. These women became not only builders of Black social and brick-and-mortar institutions, but also knowledge creators and shapers of public opinion. Their organized anxiety was rooted in the recognition that Black women’s lived realities are deeply tied to the set of ideas circulating about them in the social world. At the same time, however, Williams’s notion of racial sociality suggests the need for a less superficial form of racial recognition, one less concerned with shifting race public opinion and more concerned with allowing Black women to both see and be seen by each other as subjects worthy of social protections and possibilities. Fannie Barrier Williams and Mary Church Terrell combined intellectual and political resources (and class access) to shape the NACW into a formidable intellectual and political force driving Black politics in the early twentieth century. Mary Church Terrell managed to steer the critical terrain of her life beyond her initial involvement with NACW into a larger and more prominent leadership role that lasted through several decades. In the next chapter, I consider the creative ways that Terrell carried the influence of the NACW School of Thought into a whole new generation of Black politics. CHAPTER 2 “Proper, Dignified Agitation”The Evolution of Mary Church Terrell Because there are blatant, rattle-brained people who tear passion to tatters about wrongs, both real and fancied, in season and out, it is unreasonable to condemn the proper, dignified agitation which is the only way to arouse the conscience of the public against evils and injustice. —Mary Church Terrell, ca. 1913 In early November 1950, the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of D.C. Anti-Discrimination Laws (CCEDADL), under the chairship of eighty-seven-year-old Mary Church Terrell, launched an eight-week campaign to stop discrimination at the Kresge’s Five and Dime Store at the corner of 7th Avenue and E Street in the Nation’s Capital.1 Over the course of two months, they picketed and boycotted Kresge’s because store policy would not allow Black patrons to sit down to eat at the store’s lunch counters; instead Black customers were forced to stand and wait in long lines. After forcing the store to change its policy, the Coordinating Committee sent a letter on January 15, 1951, to supporters declaring victory. The Committee asked African Americans to begin patronizing Kresge’s again “so that the victory won will not be lost through lack of exercise of a new-won right.” The letter urged patrons and their friends: “SIT DOWN, DON’T STAND UP!”2 This particular victory fit within an effort begun in 1944 by Howard University students to desegregate the restaurants on U Street that flanked the Howard campus. Terrell lived in the center of the social upheaval on T Street in LeDroit Park, located between U Street and Howard University.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Murray, then in her twenties and thirties, was repeatedly hospitalized with bouts of depression. She wondered about her lifelong struggles with anxiety, which for her seemed connected to a series of romances and romantic attractions to young women.7 The deceptively simple answer would have been for Murray to accept her identity as a lesbian. However, in her questionnaire she indicated that other homosexuals irritated her. She acknowledged a clear attraction to straight, feminine women, but simply could not accept that “homosexuality” was the proper label for her feelings. She insisted and resolved that her ultimate romantic goal was a heterosexual, monogamous partnership.8 Today, we would understand Murray’s rejection of the conflation of her sexual attraction and her gender identity in terms of transgender identity. Because Murray identified as a male, who was attracted to women, she understood herself to be heterosexual, not homosexual. But she was born in a female body, during a time where there was not yet language to articulate the distinctions between sexuality and gender, and to name the possibility of being transgender. Murray’s struggle was made more difficult by her acceptance of deeply entrenched and societally imposed heteronormative assumptions that made it nearly impossible for her to consider expressions of sexuality and gender that we would today call queer or gender nonconforming. Hospitalized again on March 8, 1940, she noted that she had been having severe bouts of emotional crisis since the age of nineteen. They usually emerged, she wrote, after she had fallen in love with a woman without having any acceptable social outlet to express her romantic attractions to women. She lamented that she could not publicly fall in love, or date, or share expressions of affection with members of the same sex.9 Because the explanations doctors offered were unsatisfactory, Murray proposed—in her characteristic take-charge fashion and often to the great aggravation of her doctors—her own set of theories regarding her sexuality. She believed that she would have to turn to experimental treatments rather than to psychiatry for answers to her questions. But even then, she questioned her own investment in a scientific solution, because she considered herself a deeply religious person.10 After concluding that science was still, indeed, her best bet, she asked doctors whether or not she might have intersex characteristics, such as undescended testicles.11 Murray was so convinced of the possibility that she was an intersex person that for the next three years she asked doctors to administer hormone treatments, possibly injections of testosterone, that would allow her to become a normally functioning male. Despite her doctors’ attempts to steer her away from male hormone treatments, she insisted that she would like to experiment with a hormone regimen that could affirm her masculine gender identity.12

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Moreover, her speech, given just as McCarthyism and the Red Scare were set to reach a fevered pitch, connected African American struggles in the U.S. to the struggles of “four-fifths of the world’s population [who] are colored people.”93 “Russia,” she told the audience, “is assiduously cultivating the friendship of colored people all over the world.” Fanning the flames of anticommunist, anti-Russian sentiment and attempting to use that sentiment for her argument, she insinuated that communism would become an increasingly attractive option to “these colored people,” who “are dominated by the great white countries through the medium of Colonialism which the colored people of the world hate and are determined to throw off just as fast as they can.” “And,” she warned with even more foreboding, “I believe they will succeed.”94 These colonized peoples, including Black people in the U.S., whom she implicitly connected to those struggles, were paying close attention to the racial politics of the U.S. The blatant and unrepentant racial discrimination at the hands of a “Law Enforcement Officer of the Capital of the United States” had great symbolic import around the world. “It was hard to understand,” Terrell argued, “how anybody who loves his country can deliberately do something which will cause four-fifths of the world’s population to hate it.”95 Terrell offered a sophisticated analysis of the ways that radical left social movements would come to appeal to people of color in global anticolonial struggles over the next decade. She believed that “making democracy” more inclusive would halt the forward march of communism. She thus attempted to co-opt the rhetoric of the Cold War to advocate for racial freedom in the U.S.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  No one respected them for their labor in a country where the idea of honorable poverty had vanished. And yet we had done something, we’d loaded transcontinental trucks. More than most fuckin’ men did in a night. But mostly I just ached. The pain of work, real labor, had driven splinters into my muscles, into the crouching muscles, the climbing muscles, the bending-over muscles, the lifting muscles, the just-standing-there muscles. My upper body had rusted shut in its basin of pelvic bones and couldn’t turn anymore. I was a tired animal, and I tied a feedbag of milk and cereal over my nose. I couldn’t tell if I was big or small. In some ways I felt big, because the men said I was strong and could get stronger, but the boy in me was skinny and losing weight fast in that sweatbox. I couldn’t figure out my size, because in my mind I kept modeling a wax effigy of myself, now puny, now a big bear of a worker, now a supple girl without breasts or vagina although responsively female: treat me as a woman and you can rule me. The wax was soft and getting softer, nearly fluid, and as it melted its color became milkier. It would flow out of the chubby cool forms of a child, his sturdy legs, big head, lips lucent as fruit jellies, into lanky adolescence. A moment later it had set into a thick neck, barrel chest, thickening biceps, and even my penis, a moment ago nothing but a tiny urine spout, would thicken and grow, the river god’s sex in a bed of ropey moss. On my day off I went to the Oak Street beach. Luxury apartment buildings lined the lakefront and the six-lane Outer Drive. On one side of the drive strolled businessmen in coats and ties and women in dresses and big summer hats. On the other was a wide, white-sand beach and bathers in swimsuits surveyed by lifeguards. Between these two worlds, one formal, the other nearly nude, the traffic streamed ceaselessly. I felt my grip on this, the “nice” part of town, was slipping. I had no confidence I’d ever land a decent job after school. Would I be condemned to loading trucks? My shoulders thickened brutishly. On the beach I saw a group of older gay guys, and I spread my towel beside them. They quieted down as I stripped to my swimsuit, and one of them even put on his glasses. I couldn’t tell what the verdict was. But Midwesterners are friendly people who chat and joke easily with strangers, and soon enough I was talking with one of my neighbors, a rosy-cheeked countertenor with a haze of silky hair unexpectedly covering his back and shoulders. His nose and the bald top of his head were painfully red. He put on a shirt and baseball cap.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  36 “But of that [exact] day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son [in His humanity], but the Father alone. 37 “For the coming of the Son of Man (the Messiah) will be just like the days of Noah. 38 “For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the [very] day when Noah entered the ark, 39 and they did not know or understand until the flood came and swept them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be [unexpected judgment]. [Gen 6:5–8 ; 7:6–24 ] 40 “At that time two men will be in the field; one will be h taken [for judgment] and one will be left. 41 “Two women will be grinding at the mill; one will be taken [for judgment] and one will be left. Be Ready for His Coming 42 “So be alert [give strict attention, be cautious and active in faith], for you do not know which day [whether near or far] your Lord is coming. 43 “But understand this: If the head of the house had known what time of the night the thief was coming, he would have been on the alert and would not have allowed his house to be broken into. [Luke 12:39 , 40 ] 44 “Therefore, you [who follow Me] must also be ready; because the Son of Man is coming at an hour when you do not expect Him. 45 “Who then is the faithful and wise servant whom his master has put in charge of his household to give the others [in the house] their food and supplies at the proper time? [Luke 12:42–46 ] 46 “Blessed is that [faithful] servant when his master returns and finds him doing so. 47 “I assure you and most solemnly say to you that he will put him in charge of all his possessions. 48 “But if that servant is evil and says in his heart, ‘My master is taking his time [he will not return for a long while],’ 49 and begins to beat his fellow servants and to eat and drink with drunkards; 50 the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour of which he is not aware, 51 and will cut him in two and put him with the hypocrites; in that place there will be weeping [over sorrow and pain] and grinding of teeth [over distress and anger]. Matthew 25 Parable of Ten Virgins 1 “T hen the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins, who took their lamps and went to a meet the bridegroom. 2 “Five of them were foolish [thoughtless, silly, and careless], and five were wise [far-sighted, practical, and sensible].

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  This kind of cultural discombobulation over the role of intellectuals in racial leadership dramatizes a continuing crisis of racial manhood, and of the construction of Black gender identities more generally, that underwrites most of the major shifts in Black leadership throughout the twentieth century. However, I am less interested in what such dramas mean for Black men and more interested in the ways that Black women responded to these accusations. In this chapter, I consider how political movements, specifically Civil Rights and Black Power, and Black women’s responses to them have shaped the intellectual geography of Black thought and influenced the intellectual genealogies that are bequeathed to us. Through close readings of a range of cultural texts—the Ebony article, the civil rights autobiographies of Anna Arnold Hedgeman and Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara’s edited volume Black Woman—I map the broad cultural debates about Black women’s role in race leadership. Unlike more recent works in Civil Rights and Black Power Studies that are concerned with recovering Black women’s contributions to the struggle, I examine the ways that debates over the conceptual category of the intellectual illumine the gender politics of the shift from Civil Rights to Black Power. These cultural anxieties over the meaning of the intellectual also dovetail cultural anxiety about the ways Black men and women performed gender identity. Thus, such debates restage earlier twentieth-century debates within Black communities and Black organizations about the meanings of race womanhood and race manhood. Because these debates were not merely tactical, Black women not only responded politically but also intellectually, by conceptually reframing the terms of race womanhood. Toni Cade Bambara’s preface and essay, “On the Issue of Roles,” in her 1970 book, Black Woman, played a lead role in Black women’s attempts to articulate a coherent narrative about Black female identity and Black women’s leadership against the angst-ridden backdrop of Cruse’s proclamation of crisis. My examination reveals the ways in which battles over race leadership are always deeply tied to contestations over gender and demonstrates that these moments of cultural upheaval frequently urge a refiguring of existing categories of gender within Black communities. This chapter concludes the intellectual genealogy and geography of Black women’s public intellectual work that I have been mapping throughout Beyond Respectability. I argue that the kinds of Black feminist intellectual projects that emerge during the 1970s are, by and large, products of Black women’s public work rather than, for instance, traditional academic theorizing. By the 1980s, with the ascent of women like Mary Helen Washington, bell hooks, Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Patricia Hill Collins, Black feminism moved solidly into the academy, benefiting from a newly available and unprecedented set of institutional resources for Black women to professionalize public intellectual work. But the work of literary and creative intellectuals in the 1970s retained what Farah Jasmine Griffin has called an “extra-academic” tenor that allowed for a range of conversations and contestations about the nature of Black womanhood in the public sphere.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The lady was mightily concerned at this, fearing to lose him altogether, and considering how she should do, so he might not go to Monaco, said, 'God knoweth I am sore concerned for the love of thee; but what availeth it to afflict oneself thus? If I had the monies, God knoweth I would lend them to thee incontinent; but I have them not. True, there is a certain person here who obliged me the other day with the five hundred florins that I lacked; but he will have heavy usance for his monies; nay, he requireth no less than thirty in the hundred, and if thou wilt borrow of him, needs must he be made secure with a good pledge. For my part, I am ready to engage for thee all these my goods and my person, to boot, for as much as he will lend thereon; but how wilt thou assure him of the rest?' Salabaetto readily apprehended the reason that moved her to do him this service and divined that it was she herself who was to lend him the money; wherewith he was well pleased and thanking her, answered that he would not be put off for exorbitant usance, need constraining him. Moreover, he said that he would give assurance of the merchandise he had in the customhouse, letting inscribe it to him who should lend him the money; but that needs must be kept the key of the magazines, as well that he might be able to show his wares, an it were required of him, as that nothing might be touched or changed or tampered withal. The lady answered that it was well said and that this was good enough assurance; wherefore, as soon as the day was come, she sent for a broker, in whom she trusted greatly, and taking order with him of the matter, gave him a thousand gold florins, which he lent to Salabaetto, letting inscribe in his own name at the customhouse that which the latter had there; then, having made their writings and counter-writings together and being come to an accord,[421] they occupied themselves with their other affairs. Salabaetto, as soonest he might, embarked, with the fifteen hundred gold florins, on board a little ship and returned to Pietro dello Canigiano at Naples, whence he remitted to his masters, who had despatched him with the stuffs, a good and entire account thereof. Then, having repaid Pietro and every other to whom he owed aught, he made merry several days with Canigiano over the cheat he had put upon the Sicilian trickstress; after which, resolved to be no more a merchant, he betook himself to Ferrara. [Footnote 421: _i.e._ having executed and exchanged the necessary legal documents for the proper carrying out of the transaction and completed the matter to their mutual satisfaction.]

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  17 Indeed, it is useless to spread the baited net In the sight of any bird; 18 But [when these people set a trap for others] they lie in wait for their own blood; They set an ambush for their own lives [and rush to their destruction]. 19 So are the ways of everyone who is greedy for gain; Greed takes away the lives of its possessors. [Prov 15:27 ; 1 Tim 6:10 ] Wisdom Warns 20 b Wisdom shouts in the street, She raises her voice in the markets; 21 She calls out at the head of the noisy streets [where large crowds gather]; At the entrance of the city gates she speaks her words: 22 “How long, O naive ones [you who are easily misled], will you love being simple-minded and undiscerning? How long will scoffers [who ridicule and deride] delight in scoffing, How long will fools [who obstinately mock truth] hate knowledge? 23 “If you will turn and pay attention to my rebuke, Behold, I [Wisdom] will pour out my spirit on you; I will make my words known to you. [Is 11:2 ; Eph 1:17–20 ] 24 “Because I called and you refused [to answer], I stretched out my hand and no one has paid attention [to my offer]; [Is 65:11 , 12 ; 66:4 ; Jer 7:13 , 14 ; Zech 7:11–13 ] 25 And you treated all my counsel as nothing And would not accept my reprimand, 26 I also will laugh at your disaster; I will mock when your dread and panic come, 27 When your dread and panic come like a storm, And your disaster comes like a whirlwind, When anxiety and distress come upon you [as retribution]. 28 “Then they will call upon me (Wisdom), but I will not answer; They will seek me eagerly but they will not find me, [Job 27:9 ; 35:12 , 13 ; Is 1:15 , 16 ; Jer 11:11 ; Mic 3:4 ; James 4:3 ] 29 Because they hated knowledge And did not choose the fear of the LORD [that is, obeying Him with reverence and awe-filled respect], [Prov 8:13 ] 30 They would not accept my counsel, And they spurned all my rebuke. 31 “Therefore they shall eat of the fruit of their own [wicked] way And be satiated with [the penalty of] their own devices. 32 “For the turning away of the c naive will kill them, And the careless ease of [self-righteous] fools will destroy them.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Her naming of Black women’s anxiety and her theorization of it as an emotion integral to race women’s politics is rooted in an intrinsic bodily awareness about Black women’s corporeal vulnerability. Social discourses about Black women’s sexuality made oblique the ways that Black female bodies were affected by the systemic violences of Jim Crow. Yes, reclaiming and renaming the terms upon which Black women’s sexuality was made legible in the broader American public shaped a great deal of the social and political work of the NACW. However, the intellectual project of situating Black women as knowledge producers and human entities worthy of political consideration cannot be reduced to a conversation about Black women’s obsession with systems of sexual representation. Race women had to comb through a morass of sexual misrepresentations in order to make Black women visible on more socially sustainable terms. They sought to construct the race woman intellectual as a foil to the sexually deviant Black female specter that haunted the American political imagination. For these women, the fictive social narratives of Black women’s sexuality intruded upon the facticity of Black women’s intellectual ability and interests. But the fact that race women deployed a combination of strategies of respectability, dissemblance, and embodied discourse suggests that they were less interested in evacuating all modes of sexual expression from the social terrain of the Black female body and more interested in making sure that ideas of sexuality did not overdetermine and limit the scope of Black women’s social possibilities. Thus, they concerned themselves with creating a body of thought and a series of social strategies that would shift the public discourse about Black women’s bodies. Matthews, one of the featured speakers at the Congress, felt that this shift could occur through the creation of what she called “Race Literature.” Thematically, her speech on “The Value of Race Literature” took up where Williams had left off, systematically laying out a call for the intellectual development of the race. She anchored her talk conceptually by framing what she meant by the terms race and literature. “By race literature we mean ordinarily all the writings emanating from a distinct class—not necessarily race matter, but a general collection of what has been written by the men and women of the race.”29 This collection of literature could include every conceivable genre from “history, biographies, scientific treatises, sermons, addresses, novels, poems, books of travel, miscellaneous essays and the contributions to magazines and newspapers.”30 She addressed critics who might find a notion of distinct “race literature” separate from American literature objectionable. The “conditions, which govern the people of African Descent in the United States” created a “marked difference in the limitations, characteristics, aspirations and ambitions of this class of people.”31 In other words, Matthews believed “all this impious wrong has made a Race Literature a possibility, even a necessity.”32 Thus, in her view there existed both the potential and the necessity for a distinctive African American literary tradition.33

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Wherefore, in order that we may not, through wilfulness or nonchalance, fall into that wherefrom we may, peradventure, an we but will, by some means or other escape, I know not if it seem to you as it doth to me, but methinketh it were excellently well done that we, such as we are, depart this city, as many have done before us, and eschewing, as we would death, the dishonourable example of others, betake ourselves quietly to our places in the country, whereof each of us hath great plenty, and there take such diversion, such delight and such pleasance as we may, without anywise overpassing the bounds of reason. There may we hear the small birds sing, there may we see the hills and plains clad all in green and the fields full of corn wave even as doth the sea; there may we see trees, a thousand sorts, and there is the face of heaven more open to view, the which, angered against us though it be, nevertheless denieth not unto us its eternal beauties, far goodlier to look upon than the empty walls of our city. Moreover, there is the air far fresher[18] and there at this season is more plenty of that which behoveth unto life and less is the sum of annoys, for that, albeit the husbandmen die there, even as do the townsfolk here, the displeasance is there the less, insomuch as houses and inhabitants are rarer than in the city. [Footnote 18: Syn. cooler.] Here, on the other hand, if I deem aright, we abandon no one; nay, we may far rather say with truth that we ourselves are abandoned, seeing that our kinsfolk, either dying or fleeing from death, have left us alone in this great tribulation, as it were we pertained not unto them. No blame can therefore befall the ensuing of this counsel; nay, dolour and chagrin and belike death may betide us, an we ensue it not. Wherefore, an it please you, methinketh we should do well to take our maids and letting follow after us with the necessary gear, sojourn to-day in this place and to-morrow in that, taking such pleasance and diversion as the season may afford, and on this wise abide till such time (an we be not earlier overtaken of death) as we shall see what issue Heaven reserveth unto these things. And I would remind you that it is no more forbidden unto us honourably to depart than it is unto many others of our sex to abide in dishonour."

• From The Decameron (1353)

  By this time it seemed to Calandrino that he had the fevers, when, lo, up came Bruno and the first thing he said was, 'Calandrino, what manner of face is this?' Calandrino, hearing them all in the same tale, held it for certain that he was in an ill way and asked them, all aghast, 'what shall I do?' Quoth Bruno, 'Methinketh thou wert best return home and get thee to bed and cover thyself well and send thy water to Master Simone the doctor, who is, as thou knowest, as our very creature and will tell thee incontinent what thou must do. We will go with thee and if it behoveth to do aught, we will do it.' Accordingly, Nello having joined himself to them, they returned home with Calandrino, who betook himself, all dejected, into the bedchamber and said to his wife, 'Come, cover me well, for I feel myself sore disordered.' Then, laying himself down, he despatched his water by a little maid to Master Simone, who then kept shop in the Old Market, at the sign of the Pumpkin, whilst Bruno said to his comrades, 'Abide you here with him, whilst I go hear what the doctor saith and bring him hither, if need be.' 'Ay, for God's sake, comrade mine,' cried Calandrino, 'go thither and bring me back word how the case standeth, for I feel I know not what within me.'

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  She said, ‘I don’t know whether I can accept that.’ ” “How appalling.” “I’m not sure I can accept her daughter as my wife.” “How was the trip otherwise?” “Fine except I went blind in one eye, got so doubled over with anxiety I couldn’t eat or walk, was knocked over by a taxi after I heard my drunken father lecture me about what perverted creatures out of hell my brother and I had been as children.” “Oh no! Always such a mistake to leave New York.” “Ava, can I have some nice soup?” Ava made some remark and Lou muttered, “Ava’s soup burned. This apartment is a dump. We haven’t had heat in a month. Stupid spic super. Today I was held at the office and then I was half an hour late for my shrink. So I rushed over on my bike and had my hour, now fifteen minutes, and then I asked the nigger elevator operator if I could use the john in the building but—” “Do you have to use those pejorative—” I said. “Don’t give me that sobsister shit: Kike analysts, nigger elevator men, spic supers.... You know we talk this liberal bullshit, but do we ever stop to

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Toni Cade Bambara’s preface and essay, “On the Issue of Roles,” in her 1970 book, Black Woman, played a lead role in Black women’s attempts to articulate a coherent narrative about Black female identity and Black women’s leadership against the angst-ridden backdrop of Cruse’s proclamation of crisis. My examination reveals the ways in which battles over race leadership are always deeply tied to contestations over gender and demonstrates that these moments of cultural upheaval frequently urge a refiguring of existing categories of gender within Black communities. This chapter concludes the intellectual genealogy and geography of Black women’s public intellectual work that I have been mapping throughout Beyond Respectability. I argue that the kinds of Black feminist intellectual projects that emerge during the 1970s are, by and large, products of Black women’s public work rather than, for instance, traditional academic theorizing. By the 1980s, with the ascent of women like Mary Helen Washington, bell hooks, Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Patricia Hill Collins, Black feminism moved solidly into the academy, benefiting from a newly available and unprecedented set of institutional resources for Black women to professionalize public intellectual work. But the work of literary and creative intellectuals in the 1970s retained what Farah Jasmine Griffin has called an “extra-academic” tenor that allowed for a range of conversations and contestations about the nature of Black womanhood in the public sphere. We Have a Dream: The Masculinist Politics of the Big Six The only woman to serve on the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom organizing committee, Anna Arnold Hedgeman was a reluctant Black intellectual. In 1933, Hedgeman was invited, as part a new generation of “young Negro intellectuals,” to Joel Spingarn’s Second Amenia Conference in Troutbeck, New York. 5 She recalled being both “flattered and disturbed to be called an intellectual because,” as she reflected, “my recent experience with the problems of the masses of people made me fear words which might separate us.” 6 Though a few women were invited to Amenia II, she mostly

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  “It’s all there, in invisible … I mean indelible … ink.” “Are you going, to tell the truth—about us? ” “I certainly am. About everyone, not just us.” “And you think there’ll be a publisher for such a book?” “I haven’t thought about that,” I replied. “First I’ve got to write it.” “You’ll finish the novel first, I hope?” “Absolutely. Maybe the play too.” “The play? Oh Val, that would be wonderful.” That ended the conversation. Once again the disturbing thought arose: how long will this peace and quiet last? It was almost too good, the way things were going. I thought of Hokusai, his ups and downs, his 947 changes of address, his perseverance, his incredible production. What a life! And I, I was only on the threshold. Only if I lived to be ninety or a hundred would I have something to show for my labors. Another almost equally disturbing thought entered my head. Would I ever write anything acceptable? The answer which came at once to my lips was: “Fuck a duck! ” Still another thought now came to mind. Why was I so obsessed about truth? And the answer to that also came clear and clean. Because there is only the truth and nothing but the truth . But a wee small voice objected, saying: “Literature is something else again .” Then to hell with literature! The book of life , that’s what I would write. And whose name will you sign to it? The Creator’s . That seemed to settle the matter. The thought of one day tackling such a book—the book of life —kept me tossing all night. It was there before my closed eyes, like the Fata Morgana of legend. Now that I had vowed to make it a reality, it loomed far bigger, far more difficult of accomplishment than when I had spoken about it. It seemed overwhelming, indeed. Nevertheless, I was certain of one thing—it would flow once I began it. It wouldn’t be a matter of squeezing out drops and trickles. I thought of that first book I had written, about the twelve messengers. What a miscarriage! I had made a little progress since then, even if no one but myself knew it. But what a waste of material that was! My theme should have been the whole eighty or a hundred thousand whom I had hired and fired during those sizzling cosmococcic years. No wonder I was constantly losing my voice. Merely to talk to that many people was a feat.