Despair

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 I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  And when it did, I could feel the weight of the world bearing down on his shoulders. “What’s on your mind, Dad?” I gently asked. “I’m setting goals to help me hang on as long as I can,” he responded. “A small Super Bowl party with my friends this winter, a new car for Mom, great little trips like this with you guys. But I don’t know how many goals to make. I’m just not ready to go yet.” Tears gathered in his sunken eyes. Change the subject. Lighten the mood. Be reassuring. I quickly searched for what to say or do to help him feel even the slightest bit better. My mind flashed to all the times he’d comforted me. He always had the right words at the right time. “I’m not ready for you to go yet, either, Dad, and I’m so sorry we can’t fix what we desperately want to fix. This really sucks,” I said, reaching for his hand. “But let’s make life a little easier where we can. . . . How are your symptoms today?” I was referring to the little hemorrhoidal bastards that had flared during our trip. His gut was ravaged by treatments, and while I was helpless against his mortality, hemorrhoids gave me something to do. “Well, they suck, too,” he replied with a hint of laughter. “ That I can fix, Dad! I’m heading to CVS to get a sitz bath and some Epsom salt. Let’s at least get you some relief downtown,” I said with a wink. “I love that I can talk about anything with you, Kristin,” he said. “Me, too, Dad,” I said reflexively. When I thought about it, though, I wasn’t sure if it was true. In order to really be able to talk about “anything,” I’d have to learn how to talk about dying. Why was this so hard? I bought books on Buddhism, listened to the meditations, took the classes, and hired the professionals. But nothing prepared me for this. We learn so many important skills for navigating life. Essential hygiene practices: check. Don’t take rides from strangers: check. How to use jumper cables: check (or just call AAA). Supporting someone we love through their last breath: crickets. Even with all the preparation in the world—even when we think we know what we’re doing—practicing it is a whole other skill. Dad had opened a big door, one he needed to explore, but I wasn’t capable of accompanying him through it yet, so I hid behind anal prolapses as an escape from my own discomfort. The next night, we celebrated his birthday at a beautiful restaurant with a gorgeous view of the water. The air was warm, salty, and slightly breezy—the temperature just right. The ocean shimmered like a Monet painting sparkling with magic-hour light.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  To survive. Survive. Sacrifice The only hungers left are the hungers allowed us. By the light of our sacred street lamps by whatever maps we are sworn to follow pleasure will betray us unless we do what we must do without wanting to do it feel the enemy stone give way in retreat without pleasure or satisfaction we look the other way as our dreams come true as our bloody hands move over history writing we have come we have done what we came to do. Pulling down statues of rock from their high places we must level the expectation upon which they stand waiting for us to fulfill their image waiting for our feet to replace them. Unless we refuse to sleep even one night in houses of marble the sight of our children’s false pleasure will undo us for our children have grown in the shadow of what was the shape of marble between their eyes and the sun but we do not wish to stand like great marble statues between our children’s eyes and their sun. Learning all we can use only what is vital The only sacrifice of worth is the sacrifice of desire. from Between Our Selves (1976) for Frances for the embattled there is no place that cannot be home. nor is. Power The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker. A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and there are tapes to prove it. At his trial this policeman said in his own defense “I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else only the color”. And there are tapes to prove that, too.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Despair weighs down her voice like Pearl River mud caked around the edges her pale eyes scanning the camera for help or explanation unanswered she shifts her search across the watered street, dry-eyed “hard, but not this hard.” Two tow-headed children hurl themselves against her hanging upon her coat like mirrors until a man with ham-like hands pulls her aside snarling “She ain’t got nothing more to say!” and that lie hangs in his mouth like a shred of rotting meat. III I inherited Jackson, Mississippi. For my majority it gave me Emmett Till his 15 years puffed out like bruises on plump boy-cheeks his only Mississippi summer whistling a 21 gun salute to Dixie as a white girl passed him in the street and he was baptized my son forever in the midnight waters of the Pearl. [image file=image_rsrc6HF.jpg] His broken body is the afterimage of my 21st year when I walked through a northern summer my eyes averted from each corner’s photographies newspapers protest posters magazines Police Story, Confidential, True the avid insistence of detail pretending insight or information the length of gash across the dead boy’s loins his grieving mother’s lamentation the severed lips, how many burns his gouged out eyes sewed shut upon the screaming covers louder than life all over the veiled warning, the secret relish of a black child’s mutilated body fingered by street-corner eyes bruise upon livid bruise and wherever I looked that summer I learned to be at home with children’s blood with savored violence with pictures of black broken flesh used, crumpled, and discarded lying amid the sidewalk refuse like a raped woman’s face. A black boy from Chicago whistled on the streets of Jackson, Mississippi testing what he’d been taught was a manly thing to do his teachers ripped his eyes out his sex his tongue and flung him to the Pearl weighted with stone in the name of white womanhood they took their aroused honor back to Jackson and celebrated in a whorehouse the double ritual of white manhood confirmed. IV “If earth and air and water do not judge them who are we to refuse a crust of bread?” Emmett Till rides the crest of the Pearl, whistling 24 years his ghost lay like the shade of a raped woman and a white girl has grown older in costly honor (what did she pay to never know its price?) now the Pearl River speaks its muddy judgment and I can withhold my pity and my bread. “Hard, but not this hard.” Her face is flat with resignation and despair with ancient and familiar sorrows a woman surveying her crumpled future as the white girl besmirched by Emmett’s whistle never allowed her own tongue without power or conclusion unvoiced she stands adrift in the ruins of her honor and a man with an executioner’s face pulls her away. Within my eyes the flickering afterimages of a nightmare rain a woman wrings her hands beneath the weight of agonies remembered

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  There, after he takes a job in a telegraph office, technology shapes his destiny, and his dreamy nature blossoms into what the reader recognizes as good old-fashioned American ingenuity. He invents a series of machines, the most successful of which is the McIvey Corn-Cutter. Transformed into a hero in his adoptive industrializing town, Hugh meets the rebellious Clara Butterfield, a college-educated, feminist-leaning woman. She chooses him for a husband, in an act of eugenic marital selection, preferring what she describes as a “kind horse” to a “wolf or wolfhound.” 75 It is the force of reproduction that ultimately saves the couple from the tensions that arise amid the surge of modern life. After facing various dangers, Hugh becomes dark and brooding when he starts to see the machine age as nihilistic and futile. His wife pulls him back from the brink of insanity by reminding him of the son she carries in her belly. Feeling a primitive, animal impulse to reproduce allows him to carry on. 76 Anderson’s novel rejected the jingoistic optimism of the nineteenth century, but it also pointed to the eugenic idea that poor whites suffered from “childish impotence” or “arrested development,” requiring the reactivation of their better Saxon qualities. Facing challenges, Hugh never reaches the level of hopelessness that infuses Erskine Caldwell’s first novel, The Bastard (1929). Caldwell was the son of a minister in Georgia, and his father was sympathetic to eugenics. The Bastard seeks to prove that no human can hide from his “inborn” traits, from the imprint of his ancestors. 77 Caldwell’s protagonist is Gene Morgan (“Eugene” comes from the same root of wellborn as “eugenic”). Our ironically named hero is a bastard. He learns that his harlot mother was murdered in Louisiana, her belly slit open like a “swamp” —an allusion to the polluted wasteland inside her, from which he was spawned. Gene is a vicious white, a wanderer, and his only pleasure comes from violence. Raised by an old Negro woman and sexually attracted to a mulatto girl, he thoughtlessly transgresses the color line. 78 Gene is lost until he meets Myra Morgan, a “clean . . . feminine woman.” They marry and move to Philadelphia, where he works hard to support his new wife and the baby that soon comes along. The parents watch, to their horror, as their child transforms into a freak. His body is covered with black hair, like that of a wild animal, proving that the taint of the swamp is still present in his blood, despite Myra’s purity. The doctor tells her that she can expect all of her children to be degenerate, leaving a clear message: the bastard Gene is congenitally cursed. There are hints of inbreeding, since Gene and Myra have the same last name. He contemplates murdering his son, but doesn’t go through with it.

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

  But since Dad had a series of heart operations, he had to curtail his drinking and Mom followed suit. They still have cocktails but they stop at one or maybe two. And there’s no more violence, although they still get into heated arguments about nothing. They still call each other nasty names. Go figure.” She shook her head. “It’s simply how they relate.” “What if your parents had divorced? What would have happened to you and your brother and sister?” “I remember wishing they’d divorce. My sister and I would talk every night about escaping. But when we talked about divorce we couldn’t figure out where she and I would go. How would things be better if we were with my mom or with my dad? They were both such bad parents. I spent eighty percent of my time imagining that I’d have a magic button that I could press and make both of them disappear.” She smiled wanly as she sat back and remembered. “I never played much with other kids on my block because I was so lost in my fantasies. I’d watch them but not join in. Instead, my sister and I had our own private games. Our favorite was that we lived on top of a high steep mountain and saw our parents once a month, maybe less. All we had was magic, a fantasy, a dream. From the time I was very small I knew that they would never divorce. I knew I could not make them disappear. And I knew that I was trapped with them forever. I spent a lot of my childhood thinking, When will I be old enough, when will I be big enough, when will I be strong enough to leave? Those were my wishes.” As we sat in silence, I thought to myself, “go figure” indeed. According to our demographic questionnaire, Carol’s father had made it big in the corporate world, rising to vice president in one of the largest West Coast engineering firms. Carol’s mother was a successful fund-raiser and had been on the board of numerous nonprofit organizations. They had a nice house, good clothes, expensive cars. The children had been sent to the best private schools. Yet life at home had been one long nightmare for Carol and her siblings. When did she begin to question the normalcy of her family life? “All through my growing up, I knew in my bones that I was supposed to keep what happened a secret,” she said. “Had you interviewed me then, I would never have told you about our rituals, about what was going on. I had no one to talk to. Only my brother and sister and I knew and we didn’t dare let it seep out. Maybe the hardest thing of all, which I still haven’t told you, is that we kept our secret so hidden, making sure no one found out.

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

  They support their opinion by the statute of the Council of Toledo, where (Dist. XLV, cap. De Judaeis) we find hese words: “Not unwilling, but willing souls, will be saved. For justice must be preserved intact. Man, of his own choice, obeyed the will of the serpent and perished. Therefore, each man must be saved by the response of his own soul in believing, when the grace of God calls him to do so. Therefore men are to be converted, not by force, but by their own free will and choice. Now these words apply far more forcibly to entrance into religious life, which is less necessary to salvation than is faith in the Christian religion. But those who enter religion on account of a vow or an oath do so not freely, but under constraint. Therefore such an obligation is not to be commended. The decree of Pope Urban (XIX, quaest. II, cap. Duae sunt) is considered au argument in support of this opinion. The Pope says that they who enter religious life are led by a private law, which is the law of the Holy Spirit. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor. 3:17). Now necessity, which constrains men by the obligation of a vow or oath, is opposed to liberty. Therefore, it is not seemly that men should be obliged to embrace religious life, on account of any oath or vow. Another argument is drawn from the fall of those, who, having entered religion under the constraint of some obligation, have not persevered therein, but have returned to the world and abandoned themselves, in despair, to vice of every kind. In them is fulfilled what our Lord said to the Pharisees (Mt 23:15): “You go round about the sea and the land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, you make him the child of hell twofold more than yourselves.” It is further maintained that some men who were under vow to go into religion, have not fulfilled their obligation, and have nevertheless become good bishops er archdeacons. Had they kept their vow, these good results would not have been obtained. It is also urged that men must not be persuaded to embrace the religious state for the sake of any temporal advantages, such as gifts. The decree of Pope Boniface (I, quest. II, cap. Quam pio) is quoted in confirmation of this proposition, for the Pope says: “Nowhere do we read that the disciples of the Lord or their followers were converted to the worship of God by gifts.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  In the deathland my lover’s voice fades like the roar of a train derailed on the other side of a river every white woman’s face I love and distrust is upon it eating green grapes from a paper bag marking yellow exam-books tucked into a manilla folder orderly as the last thought before death I throw the switch. Through screams of crumpled steel I search the wreckage for a ticket of hatred my lover’s voice calling a knife at her throat. In this steaming aisle of the dead I am weeping to learn the names of those streets my feet have worn thin with running and why they will never serve me nor ever lead me home. “Don’t touch it!” she cries I straighten myself in confusion a drunken woman is running away down the Westside street my lover’s voice moves me to a shadowy clearing. Corralled in fantasy the woman with white eyes has vanished to become her own nightmare a french butcher blade hangs in my house love’s token I remember this knife it carved its message into my sleeping she only read its warning written upon my face. [1981] from Our Dead Behind Us (1986) to Gloria I. Joseph tikoro nnko agyina * * Ashanti proverb: “One head cannot go into counsel” To the Poet Who Happens to Be Black and the Black Poet Who Happens to Be a Woman I I was born in the gut of Blackness from between my mother’s particular thighs her waters broke upon blue-flowered lineoleum and turned to slush in the Harlem cold 10 PM on a full moon’s night my head crested round as a clock “You were so dark,” my mother said “I thought you were a boy.” II The first time I touched my sister ​ alive I was sure ​ the earth took note but we were not new false skin peeled off like gloves of fire yoked flame ​ I was stripped to the tips of my fingers her song written into my palms my nostrils my belly welcome home in a language ​ I was pleased to relearn. III No cold spirit ever strolled through my bones on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue no dog mistook me for a bench nor a tree ​ nor a bone no lover envisioned my plump brown arms as wings ​ nor misnamed me condor but I can recall without counting eyes cancelling me out like an unpleasant appointment postage due stamped in yellow ​ red ​ purple any color except Black ​ and choice and woman alive. IV I cannot recall the words of my first poem but I remember a promise I made my pen never to leave it lying in somebody else’s blood.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I want some truth good hard truth a sign of youth we were all young once we had a good thing going now I’m making a plan for a dead rabbit a rare rabbit. I am dying goddammit dying am I Dying? Death is a word you can say now pain is mortal I am dying dying for god’s sake won’t someone please get me a doctor PLEASE your screams beat against our faces as you yell begging relief from the blank cruelty of a thousand nurses. A moment of silence breaks as you accumulate fresh sorrows then through your pain-fired face you slip me a wink Martha Winked. Your face straightens into impatience with the loads of shit you are handed ‘You’re doing just fine Martha what time is it Martha’ ‘What did you have for supper tonight Martha’ testing testing whoever passes for Martha you weary of it. All the people you must straighten out pass your bedside in the utility room bringing you cookies and hoping you will be kinder than they were. Go away Mama and Bubie for 30 years you made me believe I was shit you shat out for the asking but I’m not and you’d better believe it right now would you kindly stop rubbing my legs and GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE. Next week the Bubie brings Teglach your old favorite and will you be kinder Martha than we were to the shell the cocoon out of which the you is emerging? IV No one you were can come so close to death without dying into another Martha. I await you as we all await her fearing her honesty fearing we may neither love nor dismiss Martha with the dross burned away fearing condemnation from the essential. You cannot get closer to death than this Martha the nearest you’ve come to living yourself Prose Index Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text. Aboriginal people, 100, 103–4, 120, 140–41 Aboriginal women, 100, 103–4, 140–41 academic feminism, 39–43 action, 42, 77 anger translated into, 57 guilt as a way of avoiding, 61 silence transformed into, 9–14 actions, responsibility for, 85 African-Americans, 99–100 African-American women writers, 106. See also Black Women writers African diaspora, 99–100 Afro-German women of, 88–89 Black women writers of, 105, 106–7, 129–30 hyphenated people of, 90 African National Congress (ANC), 91–92, 136 Africanness, 85, 98, 103. See also Blackness Africans, Black, 103 Afro-Americans, 89, 98. See also Black women Afro-Asians, 89 Afro-Dutch, 98 Afro-Europeans, 89 Afro-French, 99 Afro-Germans, 89, 98–99 ageism, 175 Alexis, 111 Alice, 140.

• From Henry Miller on Writing (1964)

  Like all my compatriots who come to see me he asked quite naturally what it was that had kept me here so long. (It is seven years since I am living in Paris.) I felt that it was useless to answer him in words. I suggested instead that we take a stroll through the streets. We started out from the corner of the Rue de la Gaîté and the Avenue du Maine where we had been sitting; I walked him down the Rue de l’Ouest to the Rue du Château, then over the railroad bridge back of the Gare Montparnasse down the Boulevard Pasteur to the Avenue de Breteuil and thence to a little café facing the Invalides where we sat in silence for a long while. Perhaps that silence which one finds in the streets of Paris at night, perhaps that alone was a sufficient answer to his query. It is something difficult to find in a big American city. At any rate, it was not chance which had directed my footsteps. Walking with my friend through the deserted streets I was reliving my first days in Paris, for it was in the Rue de Vanves that my new life really began. Night after night without money, without friends, without a language I had walked these streets in despair and anguish. The streets were everything to me, as they must be to every man who is lost in a big city. Walking through them again with my countryman I congratulated myself silently that I had begun my life in Paris behind the scenes, as it were. If I had led a Bohemian life, as some imagine, it was through bitter necessity. A Bohemian life! What a strange phrase that is when you think of it! There is so little that is Bohemian about it. In any case, the important thing is that in the Rue de Vanves I touched bottom. Like it or not, I was obliged to create a new life for myself. And this new life I feel is mine, absolutely mine, to use or to smash, as I see fit. In this life I am God, and like God I am indifferent to my own fate. I am everything there is—so why worry? Just as a piece of matter detaches itself from the sun to live as a wholly new creation so I have come to feel about my detachment from America. Once the separation is made a new orbit is established, and there is no turning back. For me the sun had ceased to exist; I had myself become a blazing sun. And like all the other suns of the universe I had to nourish myself from within .

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Seeing usually was a matter of what was in front of my eyes matching what was behind my brain. Now my eyes have become a part of me exposed quick risky and open to all the same dangers. I see much better now and my eyes hurt. But What Can You Teach My Daughter What do you mean no no no no you don’t have the right to know how often have we built each other as shelters against the cold and even my daughter knows what you know can hurt you she says her nos and it hurts she says when she talks of liberation she means freedom from that pain she knows what you know can hurt but what you do not know can kill. From Inside an Empty Purse Money cannot buy you what you want standing flatfooted and lying like a grounded chestnut unlovable and suspect I am trying to reach you on whatever levels you flow from treacherous growing water in a blind tongueless pond. I am the thread of your woman’s cloth the sexy prison that protects you deep and unspoken flesh around your freedom I am your enemy’s face. The money doesn’t matter so much as the lie telling you don’t know why in a dream I am trying to reach you before you fall in to me. A Small Slaughter Day breaks without thanks or caution past a night without satisfaction or pain. My words are blind children I have armed against the casual insolence of morning without you I am scarred and marketed like a streetcorner in Harlem a woman whose face in the tiles your feet have not yet regarded I am the stream past which you will never step the woman you can not deal with I am the mouth of your scorn. Sister Outsider We were born in a poor time never touching each other’s hunger never sharing our crusts in fear the bread became enemy. Now we raise our children to respect themselves as well as each other. Now you have made loneliness holy and useful and no longer needed now your light shines very brightly but I want you to know your darkness also rich and beyond fear. “Never Take Fire from a Woman” My sister and I have been raised to hate genteelly each other’s silences sear up our tongues like flame we greet each other with respect meaning from a watchful distance while we dream of lying in the tender of passion to drink from a woman who smells like love.

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

  I answer that, Not to be may be considered in two ways. First, in itself, and thus it can nowise be desirable, since it has no aspect of good, but is pure privation of good. Secondly, it may be considered as a relief from a painful life or from some unhappiness: and thus “not to be” takes on the aspect of good, since “to lack an evil is a kind of good” as the Philosopher says (Ethic. v, 1). In this way it is better for the damned not to be than to be unhappy. Hence it is said (Mat. 26:24): “It were better for him, if that man had not been born,” and (Jer. 20:14): “Cursed be the day wherein I was born,” where a gloss of Jerome observes: “It is better not to be than to be evilly.” In this sense the damned can prefer “not to be” according to their deliberate reason [*Cf. [5162]FP, Q[5], A[2], ad 3]. Reply to Objection 1: The saying of Augustine is to be understood in the sense that “not to be” is eligible, not in itself but accidentally, as putting an end to unhappiness. For when it is stated that “to be” and “to live” are desired by all naturally, we are not to take this as referable to an evil and corrupt life, and a life of unhappiness, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. ix, 4), but absolutely. Reply to Objection 2: Non-existence is eligible, not in itself, but only accidentally, as stated already. Reply to Objection 3: Although “not to be” is very evil, in so far as it removes being, it is very good, in so far as it removes unhappiness, which is the greatest of evils, and thus it is preferred “not to be.” Whether in hell the damned would wish others were damned who are not damned?Objection 1: It would seem that in hell the damned would not wish others were damned who are not damned. For it is said (Lk. 16:27, 28) of the rich man that he prayed for his brethren, lest they should come “into the place of torments.” Therefore in like manner the other damned would not wish, at least their friends in the flesh to be damned in hell. Objection 2: Further, the damned are not deprived of their inordinate affections. Now some of the damned loved inordinately some who are not damned. Therefore they would not desire their evil, i.e. that they should be damned. Objection 3: Further, the damned do not desire the increase of their punishment. Now if more were damned, their punishment would be greater, even as the joy of the blessed is increased by an increase in their number. Therefore the damned desire not the damnation of those who are saved. On the contrary, A gloss on Is. 14:9, “are risen up from their thrones,” says: “The wicked are comforted by having many companions in their punishment.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I do not need to make war nor peace with these prancing and murderous deacons who refuse to recognize their role in this covenant we live upon and so have come to fear and despise even their own children; but I condemn myself, and my loves past and present and the blessed enthusiasms of all my children to this city without reason or future without hope to be tried as the new steel is tried before trusted to slaughter. I walk down the withering limbs of my last discarded house and there is nothing worth salvage left in this city but the faint reedy voices like echoes of once beautiful children. A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem Or I’m A Stranger Here Myself When Does The Next Swan Leave How is the word made flesh made steel made shit by ramming it into No Exit like a homemade bomb until it explodes smearing itself made real against our already filthy windows or by flushing it out in a verbal fountain? Meanwhile the editorial They— who are no less powerful— prepare to smother the actual Us with a processed flow of all our shit non-verbal. Have you ever risen in the night bursting with knowledge and the world dissolves toward any listening ear into which you can pour whatever it was you knew before waking Only to find all ears asleep or drugged perhaps by a dream of words because as you scream into them over and over nothing stirs and the mind you have reached is not a working mind please hang up and die again? The mind you have reached is not a working mind Please hang up And die again. Talking to some people is like talking to a toilet. One Year To Life On The Grand Central Shuttle If we hate the rush hour subways who ride them every day why hasn’t there been a New York City Subway Riot some bloody rush-hour revolution where a snarl goes on from push to a shove that does not stop at the platform’s edge the whining of automated trains will drown out the screams of our bloody and releasing testament to a last chance or hope of change.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  will drown out the screams of our bloody and releasing testament to a last chance or hope of change. But hope is counter-revolutionary. Pressure cooks but we have not exploded flowing in and out instead each day like a half-digested mass for a final stake impales our dreams and watering down each trip’s fury is the someday foolish hope that at the next stop some door will open for us to fresh air and light and home. When we realize how much of us is spent in rush hour subways underground no real exit it will matter less what token we pay for change. The Workers Rose On May Day Or Postscript To Karl Marx Down Wall Street the students marched for peace Above, construction workers looking on remembered how it was for them in the old days before their closed shop white security and daddy pays the bills so they climbed down the girders and taught their sons a lesson called Marx is a victim of the generation gap called I grew up the hard way so will you called the limits of a sentimental vision. When the passion play was over and the dust had cleared on Wall Street 500 Union workers together with police had mopped up Foley Square with 2000 of their striking sons who broke and ran before their fathers chains. Look here Karl Marx the apocalyptic vision of amerika! Workers rise and win and have not lost their chains but swing them side by side with the billyclubs in blue securing Wall Street against the striking students. Cables to Rage or I’ve Been Talking on This Street Corner a Hell of a Long Time This is how I came to be loved by loving myself loveless. One day I slipped in the snowy gutter of Brighton Beach and the booted feet passing me by on the curb squished my laundry ticket into the slush and I thought oh fuck it now I’ll never get my clean sheet and I cried bitter tears into the snow under my cheek in that gutter in Brighton Beach Brooklyn where I was living because it was cheap In a furnished room with cooking privileges and there was an old thrown-away mama who lived down the hall a yente who sat all day long in our common kitchen weeping because her children made her live with a schwartze and while she wept she drank up all my Cream Soda every day before I came home. Then she sat and watched me watching my chicken feet stewing on the Fridays when I got paid and she taught me to boil old corn in the husk to make it taste green and fresh. There were not many pleasures in that winter and I loved Cream Soda there were not many people in that winter and I came to hate that old woman. The winter I got fat on stale corn on the cob

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

  The enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath brought down my life to the earth. He hath made me dwell in darkness, as those that have been dead of old; my spirit is in anguish within me, and my heart within me is troubled. Ps. 142:3, 4. 2. Sensuality, or the fuel of sin; Walk in the spirit, and you shall not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. For the flesh lusteth against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary to one another, so that you do not the things that you would. Gal. 5:16, 17. I find, then, a law, that when I have a will to do good evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin that is in my members. Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God by Jesus Christ our Lord. Rom. 7:21–25. 3. The stain on the heart; Though thou wash thyself with nitre, and heap up to thyself the herb borith, thou art stained in thy iniquity before Me, saith the Lord God. How canst thou say, I am not polluted? Jerem. 2:22, 23. Who can say, My heart is clean, I am pure from sin? Prov. 20:9. There is no just man upon earth that doeth good and sinneth not. Eccles. 7:21. 4. The anger of God; Remember and forget not how thou didst provoke the Lord thy God to wrath in the wilderness.… In Horeb also thou didst provoke Him; and He was angry and would have destroyed thee.… Again the Lord said to me, I see that this people is stiffnecked; let Me alone, that I may destroy them. Deut. 9:7, 8, 13, 14. I am angry with a great anger. Zach. 1:15. (i.) The fruits of our Lord’s Body: As to chains of guilt; 1. It drives away the devil; The Angel answering said to him, If thou put a little piece of its heart on coals the smoke thereof driveth away all kinds of devils, either from man or from woman, that they come to them no more. Tob. 6:8. Let God arise and let His enemies be scattered, and let them that hate Him flee before His face. As smoke vanisheth so let them vanish away, and as wax melteth before the fire so let the wicked perish at the presence of God. Ps. 67:2, 3. 2. It cools desire; When He that is in Heaven appointeth kings over her, they shall be whited with snow in Selmon. The mountain of God is a fat mountain. Ps. 67:15, 16. The Angel answering said to her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee. St. Luke 1:35.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Wallace stressed the importance of understanding class insecurity. Over time, he warned, economic benefits accrued to the stronger, shrewder people in society, and if unrestrained by government, conditions would lead to “economic autocracy” and “political despotism.” Sounding a lot like the critics in our present who deplore the concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent of Americans, Wallace in 1936 argued that liberty was impossible if “36 thousand families at the top of the economic pyramid get as much income as 12 million families at the bottom.” 25 The Depression revealed that liberty for some—for the select, the privileged —was not liberty for all. In a remarkable article of 1933, titled “The New Deal and the Constitution,” a popular writer named John Corbin questioned the claims of Americans to an exclusive quality of freedom. He posed a rhetorical question: “Can a nation call itself free if it finds itself periodically on the verge of bankruptcy and starvation in the face of the fact that it possesses all the materials of the good life?” He meant that freedom was compromised when a nation allowed the majority of its people to suffer devastating poverty and enduring economic insecurity. Regulation, regional planning, and readjustment (the last a favorite New Deal term) were needed to correct market abuses, control the exploitation of natural resources, and adjust class imbalance, and to do so, in President Roosevelt’s phrase, “not to destroy individualism but to protect it.” Wilson, Wallace, and Corbin all agreed that the old laissez-faire doctrines could no longer be sustained, and that the frontier thesis—which presumed that western migration had alleviated poverty—no longer worked. For Wilson, the “great disorganizing force of the depression” was “a great, magic dark hand.” Unlike Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the free market, Wilson’s dark hand represented the dangers of an unregulated economy: downward mobility and the ruin of countless lives. 26 If for poor rural tenants and sharecroppers class was an inescapable cage or a prison, it was equally a source of what Henry Wallace labeled “human erosion.” Human erosion was the reason for soil erosion, and not the other way around, he contended. Tenant farming was a perfect example of this process: the tenants had little reason to care for the soil as they attempted to eke out a living from it, while the landowners remained unwilling to invest in soil conservation. The willingness of Americans to tolerate waste was the real cause of human erosion. It reflected the larger social problem of devaluing human labor and human worth.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have come to believe in death and renewal by fire. Past questioning the necessities of blood or why it must be mine or my children’s time that will see the grim city quake to be reborn perhaps blackened again but this time with a sense of purpose; tired of the past tense forever, of assertion and repetition of the ego-trips through an incomplete self where two years ago proud rang for promise but now it is time for fruit and all the agonies are barren— only the children are growing: For how else can the self become whole save by making self into its own new religion? I am bound like an old lover—a true believer— to this city’s death by accretion and slow ritual, and I submit to its penance for a trial as new steel is tried I submit my children also to its death throes and agony and they are not even the city’s past lovers. But I submit them to the harshness and growing cold to the brutalizations which if survived will teach them strength or an understanding of how strength is gotten and will not be forgotten: It will be their city then: I submit them loving them above all others save myself to the fire to the rage to the ritual scarifications to be tried as new steel is tried; and in its wasting the city shall try them as the blood-splash of a royal victim tries the hand of the destroyer. II I hide behind tenements and subways in fluorescent alleys watching as flames walk the streets of an empire’s altar raging through the veins of the sacrificial stenchpot smeared upon the east shore of a continent’s insanity conceived in the psychic twilight of murderers and pilgrims rank with money and nightmare and too many useless people who will not move over nor die, who cannot bend even before the winds of their own preservation even under the weight of their own hates Who cannot amend nor conceive nor even learn to share their own visions who bomb my children into mortar in churches and work plastic offal and metal and the flesh of their enemies into subway rush-hour temples where obscene priests finger and worship each other in secret and think they are praying when they squat to shit money-pebbles shaped like their parents’ brains— who exist to go into dust to exist again grosser and more swollen and without ever relinquishing space or breath or energy from their private hoard. I do not need to make war nor peace with these prancing and murderous deacons who refuse to recognize their role in this covenant we live upon and so have come to fear and despise even their own children; but I condemn myself, and my loves past and present and the blessed enthusiasms of all my children to this city without reason or future without hope to be tried as the new steel is tried before trusted to slaughter.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  the young men next door with their loud midnight parties and fishy rings left in the bathtub no longer arouse them from midnight to mealtime no stops inbetween light breaking to pass through jumbled up windows and who was it who married the widow that Buzzie’s son messed with? To Welfare and insult from the slow shuffle from dayswork to shopping bags heavy with leftovers Rooming houses are old women waiting searching through their darkening windows the end or beginning of agony old women seen through half-ajar doors hoping they are not waiting but being an entrance to somewhere unknown and desired and not new. Bloodbirth That which is inside of me screaming beating about for exit or entry names the wind, wanting winds’ voice wanting winds’ power it is not my heart and I am trying to tell this without art or embellishment with bits of me flying out in all directions screams memories old pieces of flesh struck off like dry bark from a felled tree, bearing up or out holding or bring forth child or demon is this birth or exorcism or the beginning machinery of myself outlining recalling my father’s business—what I must be about—my own business minding. Shall I split or be cut down by a word’s complexion or the lack of it and from what direction will the opening be made to show the true face of me lying exposed and together my children your children their children bent on our conjugating business. Martha I Martha this is a catalog of days passing before you looked again. Someday you will browse and order them at will, or in your necessities. I have taken a house at the Jersey shore this summer. It is not my house. Today the lightning bugs came. On the first day you were dead. With each breath the skin of your face moved falling in like crumpled muslin. We scraped together the smashed image of flesh preparing a memory. No words. No words. On the eighth day you startled the doctors speaking from your deathplace to reassure us that you were trying. Martha these are replacement days should you ever need them given for those you once demanded and never found. May this trip be rewarding; no one can fault you again Martha for answering necessity too well and the gods who honor hard work will keep this second coming free from that lack of choice which hindered your first journey to this Tarot house. They said no hope no dreaming accept this case of flesh as evidence of life without fire and wrapped you in an electric blanket kept ten degrees below life. Fetal hands curled inward on the icy sheets your bed was so cold the bruises could not appear. On the second day I knew you were alive because the grey flesh of your face suffered. I love you and cannot feel you less than Martha I love you and cannot split this shaved head

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  the queen was more pleased in mortifying her than grieved to find her in fault, she replied, with an air as calm and composed as that of the queen was agitated and passionate, " If you did not know your own heart, madam, I would set before you the bad feeling you have long en- tertained towards my father and me ; but you know it so well, that you will not be surprised to hear that it is not a secret for anybody. For my part, madam, I have seen and felt it to my cost. If you had been as kind to me as to those who are not so nearly related co you, I should now be married in a manner that would do honour both to you and to me ; but you have forsaken me, and not shown me the least mark of favour, so that I have massed all the good offers I have had through n.y father's negli- gence and the little account you have made of me. This unkind treatment threw me into such despair that, if my health had been strong enough to endure the austerities of a convent, I would gladly have enter'^d one to escape from the continual vexations which your harshness caused me. In the midst of this despondency I became acquainted with one who would be of as good a house as myself, if the love of two persons was as much esteemed as the matrimonial ring; for you know that his father would take precedence of mine. He has long loved and cheered me : but you, madam, who have never forgiven me the least fault, or praised any good act I may have done, though you knew by experience it was not my wont to talk of love and mundane vanities, and that I lived a more religious life than any other of your servants, you have not hesitated from the first to take offence at my speaking to a gentleman as unfortunate as myself, and in whose friendship I sought nothing else than con- solation of mind. When I saw that I was entirely de- prived of this, my despair was so great that I resolved to Third day. ] Q UEEN OF NA VA RRE. 205

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  By the light of our sacred street lamps by whatever maps we are sworn to follow pleasure will betray us unless we do what we must do without wanting to do it feel the enemy stone give way in retreat without pleasure or satisfaction we look the other way as our dreams come true as our bloody hands move over history writing we have come we have done what we came to do. Pulling down statues of rock from their high places we must level the expectation upon which they stand waiting for us to fulfill their image waiting for our feet to replace them. Unless we refuse to sleep even one night in houses of marble the sight of our children’s false pleasure will undo us for our children have grown in the shadow of what was the shape of marble between their eyes and the sun but we do not wish to stand like great marble statues between our children’s eyes and their sun. Learning all we can use only what is vital The only sacrifice of worth is the sacrifice of desire. from Between Our Selves (1976) for Frances for the embattled there is no place that cannot be home. nor is. Power The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds and a dead child dragging his shattered black face off the edge of my sleep blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders is the only liquid for miles and my stomach churns at the imagined taste while my mouth splits into dry lips without loyalty or reason thirsting for the wetness of his blood as it sinks into the whiteness of the desert where I am lost without imagery or magic trying to make power out of hatred and destruction trying to heal my dying son with kisses only the sun will bleach his bones quicker. A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said “Die you little motherfucker” and there are tapes to prove it. At his trial this policeman said in his own defense “I didn’t notice the size nor nothing else only the color”.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  It is important that we understand Bacon’s Rebellion for what it revealed: the most promising land was never equally available to all. The “Parasites” who encircled Governor Berkeley held a decided advantage. Inherited station was mediated by political connections or the good fortune of marrying into a profitable inheritance. By 1700, indentured servants no longer had much of a chance to own land. They had to move elsewhere or become tenants. The royal surveyors made sure that large planters had first bids on new, undeveloped land, and so the larger tracts were increasingly concentrated in fewer hands. Then, as more shipments of slaves arrived in the colony, these too were monopolized by the major landholding families. 76 For all their talk of loving the land, Virginians were less skilled in the art of husbandry than their English counterparts. Few ploughs were used in seventeenth-century Virginia. The simple hoe was the principal tool in the raising of tobacco, an implement that demanded considerable human labor. The majority of those who landed on American shores did not live long enough to own land, let alone to master it. Slavery was thus a logical outgrowth of the colonial class system imagined by Hakluyt. It emerged from three interrelated phenomena: harsh labor conditions, the treatment of indentures as commodities, and, most of all, the deliberate choice to breed children so that they should become an exploitable pool of workers. Waste men and waste women (and especially waste children, the adolescent boys who comprised a majority of the indentured servants) were an expendable class of laborers who made colonization possible. The so-called wasteland of colonial America might have had the makings of a New Canaan. Instead, waste people wasted away, fertilizing the soil with their labor while finding it impossible to harvest any social mobility. CHAPTER TWO John Locke’s Lubberland W The Settlements of Carolina and Georgia Surely there is no place in the World where the Inhabitants live with less Labour than in N[orth] Carolina. It approaches nearer to the Description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity of the Climate, the easiness of raising Provisions, and the Slothfulness of the People. —William Byrd II, “History of the Dividing Line” (1728) hen Americans think of the renowned English Enlightenment thinker John Locke, what comes to mind is how Thomas Jefferson tacitly borrowed his words and ideas for the Declaration of Independence. Locke’s well-known phrase “Life, Liberty and Estate” was transformed by the Virginian into “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Locke was the must-read of every educated man, woman, and child in the British American colonies.