Confusion

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 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  She carefully folded the paper and slipped it into a drawer in the kitchen. Both she and Gramps fell silent, the way I imagine people react when the doctor tells them they have a serious, but curable, illness. For a moment the air was sucked out of the room, and we stood suspended, alone with our thoughts. “Well,” Toot said finally, “I suppose we better start looking for a place where he can stay.” Gramps took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Should be one hell of a Christmas.” Over lunch, I explained to a group of boys that my father was a prince. “My grandfather, see, he’s a chief. It’s sort of like the king of the tribe, you know … like the Indians. So that makes my father a prince. He’ll take over when my grandfather dies.” “What about after that?” one of my friends asked as we emptied our trays into the trash bin. “I mean, will you go back and be a prince?” “Well … if I want to, I could. It’s sort of complicated, see, ’cause the tribe is full of warriors. Like Obama … that means ‘Burning Spear.’ The men in our tribe all want to be chief, so my father has to settle these feuds before I can come.” As the words tumbled out of my mouth, and I felt the boys readjust to me, more curious and familiar as we bumped into each other in the line back to class, a part of me really began to believe the story. But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie, something I’d constructed from the scraps of information I’d picked up from my mother. After a week of my father in the flesh, I had decided that I preferred his more distant image, an image I could alter on a whim—or ignore when convenient. If my father hadn’t exactly disappointed me, he remained something unknown, something volatile and vaguely threatening. My mother had sensed my apprehension in the days building up to his arrival—I suppose it mirrored her own—and so, in between her efforts to prepare the apartment we’d sublet for him, she would try to assure me that the reunion would go smoothly. She had maintained a correspondence with him throughout the time we had been in Indonesia, she explained, and he knew all about me. Like her, my father had remarried, and I now had five brothers and one sister living in Kenya. He had been in a bad car accident, and this trip was part of his recuperation after a long stay in the hospital. “You two will become great friends,” she decided.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He had joined me at the window, and seemed slowly to have inched his way towards me; now he was really very close indeed - so close that I could feel the warmth of his arm against my own, and smell the soap on him. I didn’t turn to examine his face; I could see that his shoes, however, were highly polished and rather fine.After a minute or two of silence, he spoke: ‘A pleasant evening.’Still I didn’t look round, only agreed - all guilelessly - that it was. There was another silence.‘You are admiring the display, perhaps?’ he went on then. I nodded - now I did turn to glance at him - and he looked pleased. ‘Then we are kindred spirits, I can tell!’ He had the voice of a gentleman, but kept his tone rather low. ‘Now, I’m not a smoker; and yet I find myself quite unable to resist the lure of a really good tobacconist’s. The cigars, the brushes, the nail-clippers ...’ He gestured with his hand. ‘There is something so very masculine about a tobacconist’s shop - don’t you think?’ His voice, at the last, had dipped to little more than a murmur. Now he said in the same tone but very fast: ‘Are you up for it, Private?’His words made me blink.‘Pardon?’He looked about him with an eye that was quick, practised, smooth as a well-oiled castor; then he glanced back to me. ‘Are you up for a lark? Have you a room we might go to?’‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said - although, to be frank, I felt the stirrings of an idea.He, at least, must have thought that I was teasing. He smiled, and licked at his moustaches. ‘Don’t you, now. And I thought all you guardsmen fellows knew the game all right ...’‘Not me,’ I said primly. ‘I only joined up last week.’He smiled again. ‘A raw recruit! And you’ve never done it with another lad, I suppose? A handsome fellow like you?’ I shook my head. ‘Well’ - he swallowed - ‘won’t you do it now, with me?’‘Do what?’ I said. Again there was that swift, well-lubricated glance.‘Put your pretty arse-hole at my service - or your pretty lips, perhaps. Or simply your pretty white hand, through the slit in my breeches. Whatever, soldier, you prefer; only cease your teasing, I beg you. I’m as hard as a broom-handle, and aching for a spend.’Through all this astonishing exchange our outward show of gazing into the tobacconist’s window had barely been disturbed.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Later, when I was alone, I would try to untangle these difficult thoughts. It was obvious that certain whites could be exempted from the general category of our distrust: Ray was always telling me how cool my grandparents were. The term white was simply a shorthand for him, I decided, a tag for what my mother would call a bigot. And although I recognized the risks in his terminology—how easy it was to fall into the same sloppy thinking that my basketball coach had displayed (“There are white folks, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you,” I had finally told the coach before walking off the court that day)—Ray assured me that we would never talk about whites as whites in front of whites without knowing exactly what we were doing. Without knowing that there might be a price to pay. But was that right? Was there still a price to pay? That was the complicated part, the thing that Ray and I never could seem to agree on. There were times when I would listen to him tell some blond girl he’d just met about life on L.A.’s mean streets, or hear him explain the scars of racism to some eager young teacher, and I could swear that just beneath the sober expression Ray was winking at me, letting me in on the score. Our rage at the white world needed no object, he seemed to be telling me, no independent confirmation; it could be switched on and off at our pleasure. Sometimes, after one of his performances, I would question his judgment, if not his sincerity. We weren’t living in the Jim Crow South, I would remind him. We weren’t consigned to some heatless housing project in Harlem or the Bronx. We were in goddamned Hawaii. We said what we pleased, ate where we pleased; we sat at the front of the proverbial bus. None of our white friends, guys like Jeff or Scott from the basketball team, treated us any differently than they treated each other. They loved us, and we loved them back. Shit, seemed like half of ’em wanted to be black themselves—or at least Doctor J. Well, that’s true, Ray would admit. Maybe we could afford to give the bad-assed nigger pose a rest. Save it for when we really needed it. And Ray would shake his head. A pose, huh? Speak for your own self. And I would know that Ray had flashed his trump card, one that, to his credit, he rarely played. I was different, after all, potentially suspect; I had no idea who my own self was. Unwilling to risk exposure, I would quickly retreat to safer ground.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  He had continued to murmur, and made all his lewd proposals in the same swift undertone, his moustaches hardly lifting to let the words out. Any stranger looking on, I thought, would think us two quite unconnected fellows, lost in our own worlds.The thought made me smile. In the same humouring tone as before, I said: ‘How much, then, will you give me for it?’At that, his face took on a cynical expression, as if he had expected no better of me; but behind the hardness, too, I caught a flash of heat - as if he wouldn’t really have wanted me any other way. He said, ‘A sovereign, for a suck or for a Robert’ - he meant, of course, a Robert Browning. ‘Half a guinea for a dubbing.’I made to shake my head - to tilt my cap to him and move away, with the joke quite finished. But in his impatience he half-turned, and I caught a gleam of something at his middle. It was a fat, gold watch-chain. The waistcoat it swung from was striped and rather flash. And when I looked again at the man’s face - there was light upon it, now, from the lamp at the window - I saw that his whiskers and his hair were gingerish and thick. His eyes were brown, his cheeks rather hollow; but for all that, he looked quite unmistakably like Walter. Like Walter, whom Kitty lay with and kissed.The idea had a peculiar effect on me. I spoke - but it was as if someone else were doing the speaking, not me. I said: ‘All right. I’ll do it. I’ll - touch you; for a sov.’He grew business-like. When I stepped away I felt him linger a moment at the window, then follow. I went not to my old knocking-shop - I had only the most confused sense of what I was about, but knew I oughtn’t to get stuck in a room with him, and risk having him opt for the Robert after all - but to a little court nearby, where there was a nook, above a grating, which the gay girls used as a lavatory. As I approached it, indeed, a woman emerged, pressing her skirts between her legs to dry herself: she gave me a wink. When she had gone, I stood waiting; and a moment later the man appeared. He had a newspaper shielding the fork of his trousers, and when he took the paper away I saw a bulge there the size of a bottle. I had a moment of panic; but then he came and stood before me, and looked expectant.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Many people in China were attracted by the Yangist ideal, but others found it disturbing.14 They had always believed that the rituals established the Way of Heaven on earth. Were these li really damaging? If Yangzi was right, virtuous kings who had denied themselves pleasure for the sake of their subjects had been foolish and wrongheaded, while immoral tyrants who simply enjoyed themselves were far closer to Heaven. Were human beings basically selfish? If so, what could be done to make the world a better place? What was the basis for morality? Was the Confucian ideal of self-cultivation perverse? And what exactly was the “human nature” that the Yangists prized so highly? These questions were discussed by the scholars of the Jixia Academy, one of whom wrote a Confucian riposte to Yangism in a mystical essay called Inward Training (Xinshu Shang) for the guidance of a ruler. The author argued that ren was not a distortion of human nature but its fulfillment; indeed, the very word ren was synonymous with humanity. If a prince wanted to become truly “human hearted,” he must discover the core of his own being. Instead of fleeing to the forest to find peace and security, he must cultivate an interior quiet by means of meditation. By learning to check his passions, still his desires, and empty his mind of distracting thoughts, the enlightened prince would find his true and authentic self. He would clarify his mental powers, his physical health would improve, and he would discover that without making any further effort, he had “naturally” become a man of ren. The Chinese had discovered introspection and by the fourth century had developed their own version of yoga. We know very little about these early forms of meditation, but they seem to have involved exercises of concentration and controlled breathing. In the old days, the kings had established the Way by adopting the correct physical orientation. Now, according to Inward Training, a prince could put the world to rights by finding his true center within. Chinese meditation was based on the management of qi, a word that is difficult to translate. Qi was the raw material of life, its basic energy, and its primal spirit. It animated all beings and gave everything its distinctive shape and form. The dynamic, ceaselessly active substructure of reality, qi was not unlike the atoms of Democritus, except that it was more mystical. Under the guidance of the Way, the ultimate controlling force, it periodically accumulated in various combinations to form a rock, a plant, or a human being. But none of these creations was permanent. Eventually the qi would disperse: the person or plant would die, and the rock would disintegrate. But the qi was still alive; it would continue to roil in the cauldron of ceaseless change, and would eventually regroup and take on a different shape. Everything in the universe, therefore, shared the same life, albeit in different degrees of intensity.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Conversation with Socrates was a disturbing experience. Anyone with whom he felt an intellectual affinity “is liable to be drawn into an argument with him; and whatever subject he starts, he will be continually carried round and round by him,” said his friend Niceas, “until at last he finds that he has to give an account of his past and present life; and when he is once entangled, Socrates will not let him go until he has completely and thoroughly sifted him.”36 Socrates’ purpose was not to impart information, but to deconstruct people’s preconceptions and make them realize that in fact they knew nothing at all. The experience was a milder version of the kenosis endured by Oedipus. You did not receive true knowledge at second hand. It was something that you found only after an agonizing struggle that involved your whole self. It was a heroic achievement, a discipline that was not simply a matter of assenting to a few facts or ideas, but that required the student to examine his past and present life to find the truth within. Socrates described himself as a midwife: he was bringing the truth to birth within his interlocutors. They usually began a conversation with clear, fixed ideas about the topic under discussion. Laches, an army general, for example, was convinced that courage was a noble quality. And yet, Socrates pointed out, relentlessly piling up one example after another, a courageous act was often foolhardy and stupid—qualities that they both knew were “base and hurtful to us.” Niceas, another general, entered the conversation and suggested that courage required the intelligence to appreciate terror, so that animals and children, who were too inexperienced to understand the danger of a situation, were not truly brave. Socrates replied that in fact all the terrible things we feared lay in the future, and were, therefore, unknown to us; it was impossible to separate the knowledge of future good or evil from our experience of good and evil in the present and the past. We say that courage was only one of the virtues, but anyone who was truly valiant must also have acquired the qualities of temperance, justice, wisdom, and goodness that were essential to valor. If you wanted to cultivate one virtue, you also needed to master the others. So at base, a single virtue, such as courage, must be identical with all the rest. By the end of the conversation, the three hoplites had to admit that, even though they had all endured the trauma of the battlefield and should be experts on the subject, they were quite unable to define courage. They had not discovered what it was, could not decide what distinguished it from the other virtues, and felt deeply perplexed. They were ignorant and, like children, needed to go back to school.37

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I turned right out of sheer contrariness and set off on my quest, the vast Palladian palace bright on the horizon, everything under metallic sunlight that made the lime-leaves black and the lakewater a deep, painful blue. Water lilies glowed on it in thick constellations. Ink-black shadows underpinned the parkland trees. Swifts pushed through air so thick they hardly beat their wings against the breeze. These were the grounds of the school where White had taught, landscape gardens that had drawn tourists for hundreds of years . After an hour of walking past temples with fluted columns and painted doors, cupolas, obelisks, porticoes and follies, I started to freak out. Nothing made any sense. Greek Temples, Roman Temples, Saxon gods on runic plinths starred with orange lichen. A vast Gothic Temple in rouged ironstone. Palladian bridges, tufa grottoes and Doric arches. Nothing here seemed solid or understandable but the trees. The buildings littered the landscape as if they had been dropped by some crazed time machine, and all of them, I realised, were there to teach me a lesson. This was a landscape of aristocratic moral certainty, designed and built to lecture visitors of the dangers of modern vice and the ways of ancient virtue. It might have been the sun, it might have been incipient heatstroke, but I started to hate it. Here is the temple of British Worthies. Look at them all. Ugh . I turned round and began to walk back to the car. I was feeling extremely sorry for White. This was a very beautiful place, and a marvellous lesson in the exercise of power , but I would have felt unreal here , yes; I would have fled from it too. And I did. I fled from the school grounds. I got back in my car and drove, and parked, and then walked to the place where I had to go. There it was, White’s cottage, Merlyn’s cottage, quiet on the Ridings over the hill. It looked so ordinary; not a magical place at all. Black leaf-shadows moved on its high gables. A grey horse grazed outside. Electric wires chased fenceposts down the grassy slopes. The forest behind the house was still there. But not all of it: the dark wood where the hobbies had been had gone; now it was Silverstone racing circuit, and the chapel where White had walked with Gos was long demolished; as Chapel Corner it is just a curve on the track under which the long-dead sleep. But as I stood there in the hot sunlight there was a buzzing in my ears. It was the strangest sound, as if on that windless day I could hear the marine roar of wind in all the oaks. It was winter history. Time’s receding. Or possibly heatstroke . I wished I had brought some water .

• From Bestiary (2020)

  In the car, I asked my mother if Agong was really her father. In Ama’s last letter, she’d written that my mother was conceived with the river, and Agong didn’t look like a river to me, except when he wet himself, his piss souring the seat, dribbling out of his bladder like the juice of a squeezed fruit. Instead of answering, my mother lowered the window and tossed out her cigarette butts. They dotted the street like acne. She laughed and asked me to define a father. I said it was someone who didn’t have the strength to carry his own name and had to employ others to do it. She laughed again, but this laughter sounded like a recording of the last, too repetitive to be real. I wedged Agong’s head between my knees, stroked the blank spot on his forehead where his eyebrows drifted in opposite directions, where he most resembled my mother: When she slept, the skin between her eyes pleated in two places, and she always told me to stay up by her bedside and iron it down with my fingers so she wouldn’t wake in the morning with wrinkles. But I always fell asleep beside her, and in the morning she asked if she’d aged. Yes, I said, you’re as wrinkled-up as an asshole, and then she’d laugh and roll me off the bed, saying that one day I’d have this face too. When my mother asked if I was begging for another story, I breathed steam onto the backseat window, wrote the word yes on the forehead of night. Turning onto the highway, steering with one hand only, she said the problem with memory was that I turned all of hers into currency, bought my future with forgetting. Keep your memories, then, I said. Give me someone else’s. _ An Abbreviated History of the River and Her Lesbian Lover (My Great-Grandmother Nawi)A NOTE OF CAUTION: All references to water may be slightly exaggerated, but when your agong is pissing all over the backseat, every river feels literal. A SECOND, AND MUCH BROADER, NOTE OF CAUTION: My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you’re in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you’ve been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how many snakes you have known personally.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Say I shouldn’t go through other people’s pockets. Never put your hands where they aren’t getting paid. When the notes dried, I balled them together into a paper onion and put it back in her pocket. Imagined her taking the bus out to another house in the hills, hands in her pockets the whole ride west, the noteball hot and pulsing in her palm, pumping like an organ that keeps her alive until she’s home. _ At the mannequin factory, Jie is part of the arm team: She’s the one who counts the number of fingers on each arm before passing it on to the surgical team. The day after a heat wave, Jie and the other girls walk into the factory and see that all the mannequins have melted together into one body, some linked at the hips, others glued elbow-to-elbow. The girls have to spend three days with handsaws to divide the mannequins from one another, and even after that, most are unidentifiable by the standards of their manual. Jie drags them to the dumpster one by one. One of the mannequins has a belly like it’s pregnant: The head of another mannequin has fused to its stomach. When Jie saws the belly open, she finds a single bullet in its center. We have nothing to shoot it from, so we decide to bury it beneath Ma’s chili shrubs. I am supposed to be watering them and haven’t, so all the chilies are pale as finger-bones. After we bury the bullet, the chilies grow fat as udders. I pick them for Ma, but she says they’ve gone bad. I say they can’t be bad, I just picked them. I pluck the fattest of the chilies and de-stem it with my teeth: She’s right. They taste like rust, like menstrual blood, ripe with shed death. _ I do yard work for an Armenian woman two streets over. Her hose is patched with kiddie Band-Aids, and she only has one tree that requires constant pruning. The tree bears some kind of fruit I have no language for, and when I try to bite into one, the woman slaps it from my hand. She points at her mouth, then mimes gagging. I think she’s telling me they’re poisonous, which only makes me wonder why I’m pruning this tree in the first place. The tree’s branches grow in an upward curve, the shape of a bowl offered up to the sky. The dead branches are black and wax-soft. I climb into the lower branches and amputate the rotten ones, counting each as it drops. The tree one-ups me, rotting two shades blacker when I blink.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I tried to explain some of this to Granny, asking her if our grandfather had ever expressed his feelings about the white man. Just then, Sayid and Bernard emerged, groggy-eyed, from the house, and Zeituni directed them to the plates of food that had been set aside for them. It wasn’t until they had settled down to eat, and Auma and the neighbor’s girl resumed their positions in front of the older women, that Granny returned to her story. I also did not always understand what your grandfather thought. It was difficult, because he did not like people to know him so well. Even when he spoke to you, he would look away for fear that you would know his thoughts. So it was with his attitude towards the white man. One day he would say one thing, and the next day it was as if he was saying something else. I know that he respected the white man for his power, for his machines and weapons and the way he organized his life. He would say that the white man was always improving himself, whereas the African was suspicious of anything new. “The African is thick,” he would sometimes say to me. “For him to do anything, he needs to be beaten.” But despite these words, I don’t think he ever believed that the white man was born superior to the African. In fact, he did not respect many of the white man’s ways or their customs. He thought many things that they did were foolish or unjust. He himself, he would never allow himself to be beaten by a white man. This is how he lost many jobs. If the white man he worked for was abusive, he would tell the man to go to hell and leave to find other work. Once, an employer tried to cane him, and your grandfather grabbed the man’s cane and thrashed him with it. For this he was arrested, but when he explained what had happened, the authorities let him off with a fine and a warning. What your grandfather respected was strength. Discipline. This is why, even though he learned many of the white man’s ways, he always remained strict about Luo traditions. Respect for elders. Respect for authority. Order and custom in all his affairs. This is also why he rejected the Christian religion, I think. For a brief time, he converted, and even changed his name to Johnson. But he could not understand such ideas as mercy towards your enemies, or that this man Jesus could wash away a man’s sins. To your grandfather, this was foolish sentiment, something to comfort women. And so he converted to Islam—he thought its practices conformed more closely to his beliefs.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  That was the truth as Rafiq saw it, and he didn’t waste energy picking that truth apart. His was a Hobbesian world where distrust was a given and loyalties extended from family to mosque to the black race—whereupon notions of loyalty ceased to apply. This narrowing vision, of blood and tribe, had provided him with a clarity of sorts, a means of focusing his attention. Black self-respect had delivered the mayor’s seat, he could argue, just as black self-respect turned around the lives of drug addicts under the tutelage of the Muslims. Progress was within our grasp so long as we didn’t betray ourselves. But what exactly constituted betrayal? Ever since the first time I’d picked up Malcolm X’s autobiography, I had tried to untangle the twin strands of black nationalism, arguing that nationalism’s affirming message—of solidarity and self-reliance, discipline and communal responsibility—need not depend on hatred of whites any more than it depended on white munificence. We could tell this country where it was wrong, I would tell myself and any black friends who would listen, without ceasing to believe in its capacity for change. In talking to self-professed nationalists like Rafiq, though, I came to see how the blanket indictment of everything white served a central function in their message of uplift; how, psychologically, at least, one depended on the other. For when the nationalist spoke of a reawakening of values as the only solution to black poverty, he was expressing an implicit, if not explicit, criticism to black listeners: that we did not have to live as we did. And while there were those who could take such an unadorned message and use it to hew out a new life for themselves—those with the stolid dispositions that Booker T. Washington had once demanded from his followers—in the ears of many blacks such talk smacked of the explanations that whites had always offered for black poverty: that we continued to suffer from, if not genetic inferiority, then cultural weakness. It was a message that ignored causality or fault, a message outside history, without a script or plot that might insist on progression. For a people already stripped of their history, a people often ill equipped to retrieve that history in any form other than what fluttered across the television screen, the testimony of what we saw every day seemed only to confirm our worst suspicions about ourselves.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  We looked at each other, and I tried to picture the basketball courts back in the States. The sound of gunshots nearby, a guy peddling nickel hits in the stairwell—that was one picture. The laughter of boys playing in their suburban backyard, their mother calling them in for lunch. That was true, too. The two pictures collided, leaving me tongue-tied. Satisfied with my silence, Bernard returned to his dribbling. When the sun became too strong, we walked to an ice-cream parlor a few blocks from the university. Bernard ordered a chocolate sundae and began eating methodically, measuring out the ice cream half a teaspoon at a time. I lit a cigarette and leaned back in my chair. “Auma tells me that you’re thinking about trade school,” I said. He nodded, his expression noncommittal. “What kind of courses are you interested in?” “I don’t know.” He dipped his spoon in his sundae and thought for a moment. “Maybe auto mechanics. Yes … I think auto mechanics is good.” “Have you tried to get into some sort of program?” “No. Not really.” He stopped to take another bite. “You must pay fees.” “How old are you now, Bernard?” “Seventeen,” he said cautiously. “Seventeen.” I nodded, blowing smoke at the ceiling. “You know what that means, don’t you? It means you’re almost a man. Somebody with responsibilities. To your family. To yourself. What I’m trying to say is, it’s time you decided on something that interested you. Could be auto mechanics. Could be something else. But whatever it is, you’re gonna have to set some goals and follow through. Auma and I can help you with school fees, but we can’t live your life for you. You’ve got to put in some effort. You understand?” Bernard nodded. “I understand.” We both sat in silence for a while, watching Bernard’s spoon twirl through the now-liquid mess. I began to imagine how hollow my words must be sounding to this brother of mine, whose only fault was having been born on the wrong side of our father’s cloven world. He didn’t resent me for this, it seemed. Not yet. Only he must have been wondering why I was pretending that my rules somehow applied to him. All he wanted was a few tokens of our relationship—Bob Marley cassettes, maybe my basketball shoes once I was gone. So little to ask for, and yet anything else that I offered—advice, scoldings, my ambitions for him—would seem even less. I stamped out my cigarette and suggested we get going. As we stepped into the street, Bernard draped his arm over my shoulder. “It’s good to have a big brother around,” he said before waving good-bye and vanishing into the crowd.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Maybe it was connected to Auma’s visit and the news she had brought of the Old Man. Where once I’d felt the need to live up to his expectations, I now felt as if I had to make up for all his mistakes. Only the nature of those mistakes still wasn’t clear in my mind; I still couldn’t read the signposts that might warn me away from the wrong turns he’d taken. Because of that confusion, because my image of him remained so contradictory—sometimes one thing, sometimes another, but never the two things at once—I would find myself, at random moments in the day, feeling as if I was living out a preordained script, as if I were following him into error, a captive to his tragedy. Then there were my problems with Marty. We had officially separated our respective efforts that spring; since then he’d been spending most of his time with the suburban churches, where it turned out that parishioners, black and white, were less concerned about jobs than they were about the same pattern of white flight and dropping property values that had swept through the South Side a decade before. These were difficult issues, rife with the racialism and delicacy that Marty found so distasteful. So he had decided to move on. He had hired another organizer to do most of the day-to-day work in the suburbs and was now busy starting a new organization in Gary, a city where the economy had long ago collapsed—where things were so bad, Marty said, that no one would care about the color of an organizer. One day, he asked me to come with him. “This is a bad training situation for you,” he explained. “The South Side’s too big. Too many distractions. It’s not your fault. I should have known better.” “I can’t just leave, Marty. I just got here.” He looked at me with infinite patience. “Listen, Barack, your loyalty is admirable. But right now you need to worry about your own development. Stay here and you’re bound to fail. You’ll give up organizing before you gave it a real shot.”

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Zeituni wiped the sweat on her forehead with the back of her hand. “Anyway, after Sarah’s first husband died, she decided that your father should support her and her child, since he had received all the education. That’s why she disliked Kezia and her children. She thought Kezia was just a pretty girl who wanted to take everything. You must understand, Barry—in Luo custom, the male child inherits everything. Sarah feared that once your grandfather died, everything would belong to Barack and his wives, and she would be left with nothing.” I shook my head. “That’s no excuse for lying about who the Old Man’s children are.” “You’re right. But …” “But what?” Zeituni stopped walking and turned to me. She said, “After your father went off to live with his American wife, Ruth … well, he would go to Kezia sometimes. You must understand that traditionally she was still his wife. It was during such a visit that Kezia became pregnant with Abo, the brother you haven’t met. The thing was, Kezia also lived with another man briefly during this time. So when she became pregnant again, with Bernard, no one was sure who—” Zeituni stopped, letting the thought finish itself. “Does Bernard know about this?” “Yes, he knows by now. You understand, such things made no difference to your father. He would say that they were all his children. He drove this other man away, and would give Kezia money for the children whenever he could. But once he died, there was nothing to prove that he’d accepted them in this way.” We turned a corner onto a busier road. In front of us, a pregnant goat bleated as it scuttered out of the path of an oncoming matatu. Across the way, two little girls in dusty red school uniforms, their round heads shaven almost clean, held hands and sang as they skipped across a gutter. An old woman with her head under a faded shawl motioned to us to look at her wares: two margarine tins of dried beans, a neat stack of tomatoes, dried fish hanging from a wire like a chain of silver coins. I looked into the old woman’s face, drawn beneath the shadows. Who was this woman? I wondered. My grandmother? A stranger? And what about Bernard—should my feelings for him somehow be different now? I looked over at a bus stop, where a crowd of young men were streaming out into the road, all of them tall and black and slender, their bones pressing against their shirts. I suddenly imagined Bernard’s face on all of them, multiplied across the landscape, across continents. Hungry, striving, desperate men, all of them my brothers …. “Now you see what your father suffered.” “What?” I rubbed my eyes and looked up to find my aunt staring at me.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I pressed the buzzer repeatedly, but no one answered. The street was empty, the buildings on either side boarded up, a bulk of rectangular shadows. Eventually, a young Puerto Rican woman emerged from the building, throwing a nervous look my way before heading down the street. I rushed to catch the door before it slammed shut, and, pulling my luggage behind me, proceeded upstairs to knock, and then bang, on the apartment door. Again, no answer, just a sound down the hall of a deadbolt thrown into place. New York. Just like I pictured it. I checked my wallet—not enough money for a motel. I knew one person in New York, a guy named Sadik whom I’d met in L.A., but he’d told me that he worked all night at a bar somewhere. With nothing to do but wait, I carried my luggage back downstairs and sat on the stoop. After a while, I reached into my back pocket, pulling out the letter I’d been carrying since leaving L.A. Dear Son, It was such a pleasant surprise to hear from you after so long. I am fine and doing all those things which you know are expected of me in this country. I just came back from London where I was attending to Government business, negotiating finances, etc. In fact it is because of too much travel that I rarely write to you. In any case, I think I shall do better from now on. You will be pleased to know that all your brothers and sisters here are fine, and send their greetings. Like me, they approve of your decision to come home after graduation. When you come, we shall, together, decide on how long you may wish to stay. Barry, even if it is only for a few days, the important thing is that you know your people, and also that you know where you belong. Please look after yourself, and say hallo to your mum, Tutu, and Stanley. I hope to hear from you soon. Love, Dad I folded the letter along its seams and stuffed it back into my pocket. It hadn’t been easy to write him; our correspondence had all but died over the past four years. In fact, I had gone through several drafts, crossing out lines, struggling for the appropriate tone, resisting the impulse to explain too much. “Dear Father.” “Dear Dad.” “Dear Dr. Obama.” And now he had answered me, cheerful and calm. Know where you belong, he advised. He made it sound simple, like calling directory assistance. “Information—what city, please?” “Uh … I’m not sure. I was hoping you could tell me. The name’s Obama. Where do I belong?”

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I would occasionally pick up the paper from these unfailingly polite men, in part out of sympathy to their heavy suits in the summer, their thin coats in winter; or sometimes because my attention was caught by the sensational, tabloid-style headlines (CAUCASIAN WOMAN ADMITS: WHITES ARE THE DEVIL). Inside the front cover, one found reprints of the minister’s speeches, as well as stories that could have been picked straight off the AP news wire were it not for certain editorial embellishments (“Jewish Senator Metzenbaum announced today …”). The paper also carried a health section, complete with Minister Farrakhan’s pork-free recipes; advertisements for Minister Farrakhan’s speeches on videocassette (VISA or MasterCard accepted); and promotions for a line of toiletries—toothpaste and the like—that the Nation had launched under the brand name POWER, part of a strategy to encourage blacks to keep their money within their own community. After a time, the ads for POWER products grew less prominent in The Final Call; it seems that many who enjoyed Minister Farrakhan’s speeches continued to brush their teeth with Crest. That the POWER campaign sputtered said something about the difficulty that faced any black business—the barriers to entry, the lack of finance, the leg up that your competitors possessed after having kept you out of the game for over three hundred years. But I suspected that it also reflected the inevitable tension that arose when Minister Farrakhan’s message was reduced to the mundane realities of buying toothpaste. I tried to imagine POWER’s product manager looking over his sales projections. He might briefly wonder whether it made sense to distribute the brand in national supermarket chains where blacks preferred to shop. If he rejected that idea, he might consider whether any black-owned supermarket trying to compete against the national chains could afford to give shelf space to a product guaranteed to alienate potential white customers. Would black consumers buy toothpaste through the mail? And what of the likelihood that the cheapest supplier of whatever it was that went into making toothpaste was a white man?

• From Cultish (2021)

  Across the board, gaslighting is a way of psychologically manipulating someone (or many people) such that they doubt their own reality, as a way to gain and maintain control. Psychologists agree that while gaslighters appear self-assured, they are typically motivated by extreme insecurity—an inability to self-regulate their own thoughts and emotions. Sometimes gaslighters aren’t even 100% aware that what they’re doing is manipulative. In cultish scenarios, however, it’s often a deliberate method of undermining the fundamentals of truth so followers will come to depend wholly on the leader for what to believe. The term “gaslight” originates from a 1938 British play of the same name, in which an abusive husband convinces his wife she’s gone mad. He does this in part by dimming the gaslights in their house and insisting that she’s delusional every time she points out the change. Since the 1960s, “gaslighting” has been used in everyday conversation to describe one person’s attempts at tricking another into mistrusting their entirely valid experiences. * “Gaslighting sometimes happens when words are used so people can’t quite understand,” explains sociologist Eileen Barker. “They become confused, made to feel fools. Words can sometimes mean the exact opposite of what you think they mean. Satanic groups do this, where evil means good and good means evil.” Loaded language and thought-terminating clichés (like Shambhala’s “why don’t you sit with that”) can prompt followers to disregard their own instincts. “Words,” says Barker, “can make it so you don’t quite know where you are.” In Scientology, by far the most exotic form of gaslighting shows up in a process called Word Clearing. I could not believe my eyes the first time I read about this dizzying exercise, through which a follower strips their vocabulary of what the church calls misunderstood words, or MUs. “According to church doctrine, the reason all of you reading this essay aren’t sitting in a Scientology course room right this minute is because you have MUs,” wrote ex-Scientologist Mike Rinder for his blog. “LRH’s tech is flawless and not to be questioned— everything he wrote is easy to understand and makes perfect sense. If something can’t be grasped, it’s simply because a person bypassed an MU.” While reading Scientology literature during a course or auditing session, a member must demonstrate that they’ve fully understood every word in the text by the church’s standards. You do this by grabbing a Scientology-approved dictionary (they endorse a select few publishers) and looking up each MU you cross. If any new MUs appear in the original MU’s entry, you have to look those up, too—a dreaded process called a word chain—before you can continue reading.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  No, I told her, it wasn’t exactly surprise that I was feeling. Since my first frightening discovery of bleaching creams in Life magazine, I’d become familiar with the lexicon of color consciousness within the black community—good hair, bad hair; thick lips or thin; if you’re light, you’re all right, if you’re black, get back. In college, the politics of black fashion, and the questions of self-esteem that fashion signified, had been a frequent, if delicate, topic of conversation for black students, especially among the women, who would smile bitterly at the sight of the militant brother who always seemed to be dating light-skinned girls—and tongue-lash any black man who was foolish enough to make a remark about black women’s hairstyles. Mostly I had kept quiet when these subjects were broached, privately measuring my own degree of infection. But I noticed that such conversations rarely took place in large groups, and never in front of whites. Later, I would realize that the position of most black students in predominantly white colleges was already too tenuous, our identities too scrambled, to admit to ourselves that our black pride remained incomplete. And to admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred—for there seemed no reason to expect that whites would look at our private struggles as a mirror into their own souls, rather than yet more evidence of black pathology. It was in observing that division, I think, between what we talked about privately and what we addressed publicly, that I’d learned not to put too much stock in those who trumpeted black self-esteem as a cure for all our ills, whether substance abuse or teen pregnancy or black-on-black crime. By the time I reached Chicago, the phrase self-esteem seemed to be on everyone’s lips: activists, talk show hosts, educators, and sociologists. It was a handy catchall to describe our hurt, a sanitized way of talking about the things we’d been keeping to ourselves. But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe?

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  And, too: If Malcolm’s discovery toward the end of his life, that some whites might live beside him as brothers in Islam, seemed to offer some hope of eventual reconciliation, that hope appeared in a distant future, in a far-off land. In the meantime, I looked to see where the people would come from who were willing to work toward this future and populate this new world. After a basketball game at the university gym one day, Ray and I happened to strike up a conversation with a tall, gaunt man named Malik who played with us now and again. Malik mentioned that he was a follower of the Nation of Islam but that since Malcolm had died and he had moved to Hawaii he no longer went to mosque or political meetings, although he still sought comfort in solitary prayer. One of the guys sitting nearby must have overheard us, for he leaned over with a sagacious expression on his face. “You all talking about Malcolm, huh? Malcolm tells it like it is, no doubt about it.” “Yeah,” another guy said. “But I tell you what—you won’t see me moving to no African jungle anytime soon. Or some goddamned desert somewhere, sitting on a carpet with a bunch of Arabs. No sir. And you won’t see me stop eating no ribs.” “Gotta have them ribs.” “And pussy, too. Don’t Malcolm talk about no pussy? Now you know that ain’t gonna work.” I noticed Ray laughing and looked at him sternly. “What are you laughing at?” I said to him. “You’ve never read Malcolm. You don’t even know what he says.” Ray grabbed the basketball out of my hand and headed for the opposite rim. “I don’t need no books to tell me how to be black,” he shouted over his head. I started to answer, then turned to Malik, expecting some words of support. But the Muslim said nothing, his bony face set in a faraway smile. I decided to keep my own counsel after that, learning to disguise my feverish mood. A few weeks later, though, I awoke to the sound of an argument in the kitchen—my grandmother’s voice barely audible, followed by my grandfather’s deep growl. I opened my door to see Toot entering their bedroom to get dressed for work. I asked her what was wrong. “Nothing. Your grandfather just doesn’t want to drive me to work this morning, that’s all.” When I entered the kitchen, Gramps was muttering under his breath. He poured himself a cup of coffee as I told him that I would be willing to give Toot a ride to work if he was tired. It was a bold offer, for I didn’t like to wake up early. He scowled at my suggestion. “That’s not the point. She just wants me to feel bad.” “I’m sure that’s not it, Gramps.”

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

  The only satisfactory solution of this apparent inconsistency is to be found in his own indecision and leaning to a doctrinal latitudinarianism, not unfrequent in historians who become familiar with a vast variety of opinions in different ages and countries. On the important point of the homoousion he never came to a firm and final conviction. He wavered between the older Origenistic subordinationism and the Nicene orthodoxy. He asserted clearly and strongly with Origen the eternity of the Son, and so far was decidedly opposed to Arianism, which made Christ a creature in time; but he recoiled from the homoousion, because it seemed to him to go beyond the Scriptures, and hence he made no use of the term, either in his book against Marcellus, or in his discourses against Sabellius. Religious sentiment compelled him to acknowledge the full deity of Christ; fear of Sabellianism restrained him. He avoided the strictly orthodox formulas, and moved rather in the less definite terms of former times. Theological acumen he constitutionally lacked. He was, in fact, not a man of controversy, but of moderation and peace. He stood upon the border between the ante-Nicene theology and the Nicene. His doctrine shows the color of each by turns, and reflects the unsettled problem of the church in the first stage of the Arian controversy.1899 With his theological indecision is connected his weakness of character. He was an amiable and pliant court-theologian, and suffered himself to be blinded and carried away by the splendor of the first Christian emperor, his patron and friend. Constantine took him often into his counsels, invited him to his table, related to him his vision of the cross, showed him the famous labarum, listened standing to his occasional sermons, wrote him several letters, and intrusted to him the supervision of the copies of the Bible for the use of the churches in Constantinople. At the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of this emperor’s reign (336), Eusebius delivered a panegyric decked with the most pompous hyperbole, and after his death, in literal obedience to the maxim: "De mortuis nihil nisi bonum," he glorified his virtues at the expense of veracity and with intentional omission of his faults. With all this, however, he had noble qualities of mind and heart, which in more quiet times would have been an ornament to any episcopal see. And it must be said, to his honor, that he never claimed the favor of the emperor for private ends.