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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  M., the chief surgeon at the hospital’s Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) Center, walks past me. He is very tired but still he recognizes me and says hello. He has been in the operating room all day. His first patient, a paraplegic from D ward, had to have a flap put on his rear end for a bedsore that wouldn’t heal. There are a lot of them in here with that problem and sometimes the flap doesn’t take and they have to do it all over again. It can be very frustrating. Dr. M.’s second patient was not as lucky and had to have his gangrenous left foot removed. The nurses did all they could to save the foot but in the end they just weren’t able to. There are a lot of paralyzed guys around here with amputated legs. You can get a really bad burn and not even know it. I remember hearing a story once about a guy who came home drunk one night with his girlfriend and she filled the bathtub and placed him in it, not realizing the water was scalding hot. He got burned really badly and died the following week. There are a lot of stories like that and you try to never forget them. These are important lessons, and as horrible as it may seem, remembering them is crucial to our survival. For nearly three months last year I was a patient here at the Long Beach VA hospital, healing a terrible bedsore on my rear end after a fall in the bathtub at my apartment. The accident happened not long after I had broken up with a woman named Carol who I first met at an antiwar demonstration in Los Angeles in the spring of 1972. Carol was the first woman I loved and the very first woman to break my heart. After we broke up I felt as if my whole world had fallen apart. I was depressed and hardly getting any sleep at night. I remember putting a bandage over the bruise but it just kept getting worse. After a while the bruise became a sore and the sore an open wound, until finally I had to turn myself in to the hospital. The last place I wanted to be was back in the Long Beach VA hospital. I hated the place. The conditions were atrocious, as bad if not worse than the Bronx VA in New York where I had been after I first came home from the war. The wards were overcrowded and terribly understaffed. The aides would sit in their little room at the end of the hall drinking coffee and cackling away as men on the wards cried out for help that never came. All the windows were tightly shut. The air was rancid, and I would push my call button again and again but no one would come to help.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I have given it for democracy. It is okay now. It is all right. Yes it is all right. I have given my dead swinging dick for America. I have given my numb young dick for democracy. It is gone and numb, lost somewhere out there by the river where the artillery is screaming in. Oh God oh God I want it back! I gave it for the whole country, I gave it for every one of them. Yes, I gave my dead dick for John Wayne and Howdy Doody, for Castiglia and Sparky the barber. Nobody ever told me I was going to come back from this war without a penis. But I am back and my head is screaming now and I don’t know what to do. * * * Every night after he had been to Arthur’s Bar, he would push up his old man’s wooden ramp. He would stop at the top in his chair, knocking the big blue milk can into the bushes, cursing under his breath and opening the screen door that his old man would leave unbolted. It was always two or three in the morning by then and he would try to slip into the house without waking anybody even though he could barely push the chair. Every night he stopped next to the crucifix and stuck his fingers into the holy water. Oh Jesus, he mumbled to himself, you gotta help me, you gotta find me a woman, someone to love this broken body of mine. He would make the sign of the cross with the holy water just as he had done when he was a kid. Oh Jesus, please Jesus, you gotta help me, you gotta give me strength. This broken body ain’t gonna mend and it’s gonna be this way for a long time and you gotta help me now Jesus you gotta help me somehow. Sometimes the dog would come up to him and he would tap it softly on the head. Well, here’s a real friend, someone I can count on. He would turn the chair and push it down the narrow hallway, past the bookshelf, banging his hand against the wall, cursing, then pushing the chair angrily into his room. He would stay up all night sometimes, sitting by the typewriter, trying to forget the war, the wound, by putting words down on paper. there was a soldier tapdancing softly in the rain above the coffin six feet above, the people praying They had to carry him out of Arthur’s Bar one night. The people were still dancing and the band was blasting really loud and he was screaming. There was a girl. He wanted to dance with her and squeeze her, kiss her soft face and take her home. Here, don’t worry about the chair, we can leave it here, we can go to your apartment and I can take your clothes off. I can lie with you and stroke your long slim body.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Of course in a way it helped being a Lord—the English have such a superstitious awe of the aristocracy. But it also had its disadvantages, in terms of gossip and what-have-you—the English having such prurient and priggish minds. As you will find out, my dear, when you succeed’—words which seemed to anticipate not only my succession but my success. ‘I suppose black people were comparatively rare then—in England.’ Charles half suppressed a burp of agreement. ‘There were a few seamen—they had a hostel out at Limehouse. I had some good friends there, brave, reckless fellows, many of them. There were jazz players in London, of course, who had quite a following. But I suppose most people in the country didn’t see a black person in all their lives. It was impossible to imagine the hatred that would be unleashed against them later on.’ ‘You’ve seen a lot of that.’ ‘You could say so.’ Charles nodded, staring fiercely at the carpet as if caught by some bitter and ironic memory. I started to speak but he cut across me: ‘There are times when I can’t think of my country without a kind of despairing shame. Something literally inexpressible, so I won’t bother to try and speechify about it.’ ‘I know what you mean.’ ‘Only last year out at Stepney there were hateful scenes—precisely hateful. Oh—National Front and their like, spraying their slogans all over the Boys’ Club, where, as you know, a lot of … non-whites go. Every day there were leaflets, just full of mindless hatred—I’m sorry to keep saying it. The horrific thing was that several of those boys were boys who used to come to the Club themselves. It’s the only time I’ve seen our excellent friend Bill get truly angry. He threw out a boy by main force, simply picked him up, carried him to the door and hurled him into the street. He’s as strong as an ox, old Bill. I remember the boy—but boy is too beautiful a word—had a Union Jack pinned to the back of his sort of coat, and Bill had torn it off, accidentally I think, as he ejected him, and was left scowling absolute thunder and holding it in his hand. I was very frightened as I’m not the man I was in a fight, but all being cowards in the bone these louts sidled away when they saw they had met their match. And I wondered to myself what on earth that flag could mean now.’

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

  549 Albert Camus Lecture 82 [Camus] began his life in the inland Algerian village of Mondovi, where he was born in November 1913, just a few months before the outbreak of World War I. His father was a winery worker of French extraction; his mother, whose grandparents had come from the Spanish island of Majorca, was illiterate. L ess than a year after his birth, his father died of wounds suffered in the fi rst battle of the Marne. By then Albert and his older brother Lucien had moved with their mother to Algiers, where she worked as a cleaning woman and where all three of them lived with her own mother and her two brothers in a three-room apartment with no electricity, no running water, not a single book, and just one toilet shared with two other apartments. Raised and educated in Algeria, Camus, by his mid-20s, was already displaying his talents in drama, philosophy, journalism, literature, and political action. After publishing a novel called The Stranger at the age of 28 and soon after, a philosophic essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” he spent the years of the Second World War writing his next novel, The Plague, published in 1947. In this novel, the plague—which may be taken to symbolize war—is a relentlessly murderous force that attacks the Algerian port city of Oran for 10 months in the 1940s. The novel is narrated by a 35-year-old doctor named Bernard Rieux, who leads the fi ght against the plague. The city is invaded by rats from ships docked just outside it. They enter the city and die. Before dying, they transmit a highly contagious bacillus that strikes human beings with buboes: the mark of bubonic plague. Recognizing the plague as such, Dr. Bernard Rieux convinces the authorities to close the town. Because many people in Oran consider pestilence “a mere bogy of the mind,” they can’t believe it has struck their town. But when Rieux shows that the disease could kill off half the town in two months, the authorities close the gates so that no one can leave. By this means, the town becomes a prison of infection from which no one can be sure of escaping alive.

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

  552 Lecture 82: Albert Camus Rambert fi nally agrees to stay and help the doctor. “This business,” he says, “is everybody’s business.” Rieux cannot accept the plague as the will of an inscrutable God. When a child dies of the plague after a getting a serum that merely prolongs its fi nal agony, a priest tries to explain the death as the will of a God whose wisdom passes human understanding. Refusing to believe in a God who would torture children to death, the doctor struggles only to save lives by fi ghting disease. If providence in this novel works through disease, its hand becomes a brutal fi st. Though we might be tempted to see the hand of providence in the survival of Rambert, many other good people die. The plague kills a number of people who worked hard to help others. In spite of all his labor and devotion, the doctor learns at the end that his wife—though safely removed from the city—has died of an illness. Even though the plague ends after 10 months, it may come again. Its deadly bacillus may rise again. In this respect, too, it resembles war. Striving to heal in a time of plague, the doctor stands for the novel itself, which attempts to show that a common affl iction can lead us to work together against plagues of all kinds and recognize all that we share. ■ Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays , translated by Justin O’Brien. ———, The Plague, translated by Stuart Gilbert. ———, The Stranger, translated by Stuart Gilbert. Kellman, The Plague: Fiction and Resistance. Todd, Albert Camus: A Life, translated by Benjamin Ivry. Supplementary Reading Essential Reading 553 1. Does Camus’ interpretation of the myth of Sisyphus convince you that Sisyphus’s task is anything more than an infi nite exercise in futility? 2. To what extent can The Plague be read as a symbolic story of the war against terrorism? Questions to Consider

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The light wasn't good, the rain still thrashed into the street below, and I stepped forward to see myself in the mirror, the flushed impersonator. There were long gold strands in the teeth of Luc's comb, which must have come out as I drew it through my rain-sleeked hair and stayed there, like the first fine threads of age among the black. His clothes hugged me tightly, exactingly, like sports gear; I felt the little heart-weight of dread that preceded sports at school, looking out down the relentless track. And yet it didn't seem to matter—I stroked my thighs and somehow they were his, this was what it felt like to have a medallist's legs, to carry the tape with you and have it flutter down about your waist as you reined and jogged loosely on. The churches were striking noon, but in the glass it was dusk. I hovered and peered and glowed there, his inhabitant. Then I saw I had accepted his mother's intuition—I wasn't expecting him to come springing up the stairs and catch me in his things. I saw my own face sicken in the mirror. Each second that I gave up to becoming him only took him further from me. I pictured him hurtling away through the rain, faster than any runner, in a car hidden from pursuers by a twirling wall of spray, or in a train that seemed to cross in seconds from one side of this little country to the other. And why stop there? He disappeared into France, or Holland, or Germany, he was among the youthful detritus of Paris or Hamburg. And then the questions were asked. Patrick and Sibylle said how they'd left him in my care, a red-eyed slanderous snapshot, like that of Rose, was passed around the bar. No one from among the stooped churchgoers and cleaners of the winter daybreak came forward to remember him in the street, after he left me. I was the last person to have seen him alive. There was a knock and his mother came straight in. I saw her troubled for a moment by my rueful grimace. "I've just had a phone-call", she said, "from Kristien de Taeye, the wife of the Minister of Culture." And already it had happened. I felt the accusing finger quiver and jab and fence me back—the finger was an epee—shielding my face into the corner of the room. "Oh yes," I said, feigning a search for a shoe. "Her daughter Sibylle is a very close friend of my Luc. Apparently she was with him last night. Up to a certain point." "Aha." "Well, she's gone too."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  When I got back to the room, they were fucking Luc one after the other, the inside of his thighs was slimed with sperm and spit. A line had formed, and when one had finished he pulled out and stumbled back to the end of the queue, briefly stroked and kissed by his friends as he passed them. I kept trying to join the queue—I explained to them that Luc was my lover, and made extravagant claims about his Wordsworth essay, but they thought that was a bit of a joke and pushed me away. Each time I came back they repulsed me more roughly, till I was thrown to the floor, and then kicked at as I crawled back, gazing up at their sweating naked buttocks and slicked cocks, not hearing their whispered jokes as they jostled and practice-fucked each other and edged forward towards the splayed, stoned, leering boy. "But why?" I kept pleading, sobbing. "He's mine, I'm sharing him with You, because I want you to be my friends." But they sneered and punched me and told me to piss off. I woke shaken and convinced. I lay there panting, almost grateful to find myself in a cold, smelly car in the bleak twilight of a foreign roadside. I stretched and looked at my watch's faint hands: 5.45—it made me groan for my big high bed. Above me rose the back of Marcel's seat, and his head hung sideways as he slept, never quite rolling off the edge and waking him. I sat up, hardly surprised, sorry for the kid. Each forceful breath of his misted the windscreen in a circle that shrank and cleared before the next one fleetingly condensed there.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I had never before seen this machinery at such close quarters, and I confess that I was both fascinated and chal lenged. Near the end of my Hollywood sentence, the studio assigned me a "technical" expert, who was, in fact, to act as my collaborator. This fact was more or less disguised at first, but I was aware of it, and far fr om enthusiastic; still, by the time the studio and I had arrived at this impasse, there was no ground on which I could "reasonably" refuse. I liked the man well enough-! had no grounds, certainly, on which to dislike him. I didn't contest his "track record" as a screen writer, and I reassured myself that he might be helpful: he was signed, anyway, and went to work. Each week, I would deliver two or three scenes, which he would take home, breaking them-translating them-into cinematic language, shot by shot, camera angle by camera 55 2 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK angle. This seemed to me a somewhat strangling way to make a film. My sense of the matter was that the screenwriter de livered as clear a blueprint as possible, which then became the point of departure for all the other clements involved in the making of a film. For example, surely it was the director's province to decide where to place the camera; and he would be guided in his decision by the dynamic of the scene. How ever: as the weeks wore on, and my scenes were returned to me, "translated," it began to be despairingly clear (to me) that all meaning was being siphoned out of them. It is very hard to describe this, but it is important that I try. For example: there is a very short scene in my screenplay in which the central character, a young boy from the country, walks into a very quiet, very special Harlem bar, in the late afternoon. The scene is important because the "country" boy is Malcolm X, the bar is Small's Paradise, and the purpose of the scene is to dramatize Malcolm's first meeting with West Indian Archie-the numbers man who introduced Malcolm to the rackets. The interior evidence of Malcolm's book very strongly suggests a kind of father-son relationship between Archie and Malcolm: my problem was how to suggest this as briefly and effectively as possible. So, in my scene, as written, Malcolm walks into the bar, dressed in the zoot-suit of the times, and orders a drink. He does not know how outrageously young and vulnerable he looks. Archie is sitting at a table with his friends, and they watch Malcolm, making jokes about him benveen themselves. But their jokes contain an oblique confession: they see them selves in Malcolm. They have all been Malcolm once. He does not know what is about to happen to him, but they do, be cause it has already happened to them.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Lonely Crusade is an ugly story but the story of American Negroes and white America's relation to them is a far uglier story and with more sinister implications than have yet found their way into print. It is no longer just a Negro's story, we have no longer the convenient symbol of a minstrel man and his wild guitar, or the Negro rapist, or the brave, black college student battling upward against all odds. Time moves too fast, human beings are too complex, yester day's benevolence is more dangerous than a time bomb now. On that low ground where Negroes live something is hap pening: something which can be measured in decades and generations and which may spell our doom as a republic and almost certainly implies a cataclysm. Unlike Bigger Thomas, gone to his death cell, inarticulate and destroyed by his need for identification and for revenge, and with only the faintest intimation in that twilight of what had destroyed him and of what his life might have been, Mr. Himes' protagonist, Lee Gordon, sees what has happened and what is happening and watches helplessly the progress of his own disease. And there is no path out. In a group so pressed down, terrified and at bay and carrying generations of constricted, subterranean hos tility, no real group identification is possible. Nor is there a Negro tradition to cling to in the sense that Jews may be said to have a tradition; this was left in Africa long ago and no one remembers it now. Lee Gordon is forced back on himself, not even bitterness can serve him as a weapon any more. The impact of rejection and continual indignity on his personality is a personal one and this impact, multiplied, can destroy, not only himself, but an entire nation. The minstrel man is gone and Uncle Tom is no longer to be trusted. Even Bigger Thomas is becoming irrelevant; we are faced with a black man as many faceted as we ourselves are, as individual, with our ambivalences and insecurities and our struggles to be loved. He is now an American and we cannot change that; it is our attitudes which must change both towards ourselves and him. "History," says Joyce, "is a night mare fr om which I am struggling to awaken." We have all heard what happened to those who slept too long. The New Leader, October 25, 1947 Th e Image of the Negro ALBERT SEARS. By Millen Brand. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1947 . 273 pp. $2. 75 . KlNGSBLOOD RoYAL. By Sinclair Lewis. New York, Ran dom House, 1947 . 348 pp. $ 3 .00. THE PATH OF THUNDER. By Peter Abrahams. New York, Harper, 1 94 8. 27 8 pp. $2. 75 . Gon IS FOR WHITE FOLKS. By Will Thomas. New York, Creative Age, 1947 . 3 0 5 pp. $ 3 .00. QUALITY. By Cid Ricketts Sumner.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The assumptions of The Last of the Mohicans and The Birth of a Nation are very present here, and, if even the wonder doctor must undergo such trials in order to be able to touch his lady love, heaven help the high-school dropouts: so many of whom found themselves in Attica, for example, not impossibly for trying to be men. Heaven did not help those among the blacks who failed to master their pre-med courses on the day that the Republic, responsive to the will of heaven, decided to uphold what Rockefeller, in one of his nobler statements, described as "the impartial application of the law": he, too, clearly, is a movie fan. The film does make one despairing attempt to suggest, after Galileo, that the earth may be turning: in that lamentable scene in the city when Tracy tastes a new flavor of ice cream and discovers that he likes it. This scene occurs in a drive-in, and is punctuated by Tracy's backing his car into the car of a young black boy. The black boy's resulting tantrum is im pressive-and also entirely false, due to no fault of the actor (D'Urville Martin). The moral of the scene is They're here now, and we have to deal with them: or, The natives are restless. What shall we do? Ah. What indeed-short, that is, of bombing them back into the stone age. As concerns Guess Who's Coming to Din ner, we can conclude that people have the right to marry whom they choose, especially if we know that they are leaving town as soon as dinner is over. In Sol Stein's The Childkeeper, a short and remarkable novel, a fc:>rty-eight-year-old bank vice-president, and his wife, and three of their four children, spend a long weekend to gether in their country house. The children, who are adoles cents, invite some of their adolescent fr iends, and, among these, is a black boy of nineteen, named Greco. The father CHAPTER TWO 537 finds himself paralyzed by his liberal, or, more accurately, hu manitarian presumptions (presumptions by which he does not live) and by his apprehension that he really knows nothing about his children, nor (he both hopes and fears) they about him. The presence of the black boy, an exceedingly rude and dangerous visitor, drags to the surface the buried terrors of his life, and, helplessly, he kills the boy. He does not mean to kill him, but Eden has a price: and the death of the black boy brings about his own. The question of identity is a question involving the most profound panic-a terror as primary as the nightmare of the mortal fall.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  New York, Bobbs Mcrrill, 19 +7 · 2 7 8 pp. $2. 75 . (Bantam Reprint, 1 947 . $.2 5 .) P ERHAPS the measure of the really stupendous inadequacy of the five novels under consideration here is the fact that, of them all, the most impressive and the most valid is Millen Brand's quite unremarkable Albert Sears. Reading these novels I was struck by an almost paralyzing desperation: What could one possibly say about them? What, in these days, is a novel? If it is conceded that KinlJsblood Royal is a new low, even for the American liberal middlebrow, what then is one to say about Albert Sears, a resolutely undistinguished novel which, by virtue of its present company, seems graceful and percep tive and quite thoroughly worthwhile? The line between what might be called the personal or creative intellectual and that vast culture of the masses with which we arc, willy-nilly, in volved, is a precarious one: on the one hand there is corrup tion and on the other a remote vista closdy resembling No Man' s Land. Granting the initial debasement of literary standards, the arrival of the protest novel was inevitable. The question fix ever posed by the existence of the protest novel-a kind of writing becoming nearly as formalized as those delicate vi gnettes written for the women's magazines-is whether or not its power as a corrective social force is sufficient to override its deficiencies as literature. It is better, it is said, to have a KinJTSblnod Royal or a Gentleman's Agreement, shoddy as they 5 82 THE IMAGE OF THE NEGRO are, than nothing at all; it is an improvement over the un realistic, hush-hush attitude of preceding generations. At least, the existence of these novels keeps urgent social questions in the public mind; no one can hide �r om them. But this attractive and optimistic analysis poses questions of its own : How closely do these novels reflect the social ques tions which-since, admittedly, they are not, by and large, good novels-are their sole reason for being? With what reality are they concerned, how is it probed, how translated, exactly what message is being brought to this amorphous pub lic mind? Finally: is the "great work" these novels arc presum ably doing in the world quite worth the torture they are to read? Albert Sears comes under the heading of a protest novel somewhat arbitrarily. Much, but not all, of the story is con cerned with the efforts of a Negro family to move into a white neighborhood.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  But to my bafflement all the men did was inspect him, closely but politely, as if they might have him but hadn't decided, and didn't want to mark him and be obliged to pay. Or almost like doctors, whose interest was scientific and excited by other invisible symptoms. I saw them push his legs apart, run their hands lightly, testingly up and down his thighs, and over his chest and stomach. One of them weighed his balls noncommittally in the palm of his hand, while another slipped back his foreskin and pinched open the little goldfish mouth of his swollen cock-head. They turned him over and one of them pressed his cheeks apart while the rest appraised his other hidden orifice; I saw it clench and gape with anticipation and delay. I was in the bathroom, confused by the back corridors of Mr Croy's, the pantries and stairways overhung by dripping cisterns. I knew I wanted to get back to the main room—I had left it with the repressed anxiety with which one leaves luggage briefly unattended or asks a stranger to keep one's place in a long and hungry queue. I trotted round in confusion, sometimes hearing a shout or a slap from behind locked doors, through walls. I caught just a glimpse of Mr Croy himself, in a curtained back parlour—gross, brilliantined, with a gin and tonic, listening to "Beggars in Spats". A sense of misery and wasted money began to weigh in my chest. When I got back to the room, they were fucking Luc one after the other, the inside of his thighs was slimed with sperm and spit. A line had formed, and when one had finished he pulled out and stumbled back to the end of the queue, briefly stroked and kissed by his friends as he passed them. I kept trying to join the queue—I explained to them that Luc was my lover, and made extravagant claims about his Wordsworth essay, but they thought that was a bit of a joke and pushed me away. Each time I came back they repulsed me more roughly, till I was thrown to the floor, and then kicked at as I crawled back, gazing up at their sweating naked buttocks and slicked cocks, not hearing their whispered jokes as they jostled and practice-fucked each other and edged forward towards the splayed, stoned, leering boy. "But why?" I kept pleading, sobbing. "He's mine, I'm sharing him with You, because I want you to be my friends." But they sneered and punched me and told me to piss off. I woke shaken and convinced. I lay there panting, almost grateful to find myself in a cold, smelly car in the bleak twilight of a foreign roadside.

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

  (The nickname sounded vaguely familiar, and then I remembered that Racer was the name of her beloved pet rabbit.) Paula’s marriage had been filled with nightly partying and alcohol abuse. “Brad didn’t want kids. He was against me going to college. He basically wanted me to stay messed up. That was our marriage. Nine years of being high on alcohol. Yeah, and a lot of fighting. I hit him as much as he hit me. We would party all night, get two hours of sleep, and be chronically late to work. I wanted to stop but I couldn’t—not with everyone else into that scene. I tried going to Alcoholics Anonymous, but Brad wouldn’t go. So I quit going. We were all out of control. I got more and more desperate. I wanted somebody to see what we were doing but nobody saw.” “Was there nothing happy or good for you in this marriage?” “If you mean like loving or caring, not much. Maybe six months at most. There was sex but even that got old pretty soon. I wasn’t exactly an amateur at that and his performance went way down with drinking. I know you’re thinking why didn’t I leave right away if I really hated it.” “Yes, I was thinking that. What kept you?” “I probably thought about leaving every day after the first year, but,” she said with great earnestness, “the last thing I wanted to do was divorce. I know all about divorce. I know my mom’s life like the palm of my hand. I didn’t want that for me. Especially after I discovered that I was pregnant. Brad wanted me to have an abortion but I refused. I’d already had three abortions and didn’t want another. I stayed for two years after Racer was born. I knew it wasn’t good for Racer or me but I wimped out every time I tried to think about leaving. I’d immediately go to how angry and unhappy I’d been growing up in a divorced family. I didn’t want Racer’s life to be that and then I’d get paralyzed. I stayed because I was so afraid. Also I had no place to go.” She couldn’t stay and she couldn’t leave. “What happened so that you did leave?” Paula looked down, then squared her jaw and looked directly at me. “Here’s the whole story. I’m not proud of it but it’s really what happened. I went right back to drinking after Racer was born. Of course, Brad had never stopped. There were times, more than once, when I just lost track of Racer when we were partying. Then I’d remember through the haze that I had a baby and I’d sober up fast and try to figure out where Racer was and what he needed. But it wasn’t pretty. I was getting more and more upset at myself and Brad.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I waited for Paul in the portraits room. The women and children there were strangers to me still, waiting themselves, it seemed, pink-cheeked from the outside world, in the vestibule of the dark laboratory. I had hardly been to see them since that first half-conscious visit, stumbling from the early shock of Luc. They were the beginning of the tour, spirits of the happy region the painter had left behind. They looked out, from their background of indecipherable old tapestry, like figures from a sunlit ante-bellum, suspecting nothing. The children especially, girl-cousins and long-legged boys, were stirring and faunal, for all their blue-ribboned hats and courtly knee-breeches. Orst captured their restlessness, the brevity of the repose he had exacted from them, penned in a deep corner of the sofa, or in a fur-edged coat and hat as if just returned from a winter walk alive with new knowledge, hands behind back pressing the door to, the attention barely held. He discovered the girl in his mother, also, though the swept-back hair was grey, the skin silvery-soft above the high white collar. Her eyes were cast down Memling-like on an open book, her cheek flushed as if by a first compliment. Paul came in with his briefcase and trilby. We were going up to Brussels together, where we would see on Orst sculpture that was due to be auctioned, and I would go on to a chat with Martin Altidore that filled me with apprehension laced with furtive eagerness. Paul handed me the catalogue with the place marked, and I looked at the photo of the naked plaster torso, disingenuously called "Printemps", and the high-class patter beneath, "une de ses très rares uvres plastiques". I went out to the car wondering if I could possibly have converted the estimate rightly. For a minute or so I found something inexplicably comic in the sight of Paul at the wheel of his desirable little Alfa Giulietta—upright and circumspect, as though he still remembered his lessons. I'm afraid it communicated itself in some way and sharpened his edginess. I did what I could, admired the car, then talked blandly about the town in the winter morning light—though once we were free of the outskirts I saw how little I missed it, what a ghost city it was, now Luc had gone. I felt a dread of living on there without him, the pointless months, the paralysis of ingrown failure. "No news of the Altidore boy?" said Paul, out of some subtle and forgiving sympathy. I turned my head and watched the slow wheeling-past of the farmlands, each shed and bungalow and leafless poplar bald and staring with his absence. "Nothing at all." I was aware of Paul watching me for a moment. "You're very in love with him, aren't you?" Poplars, a windmill, a level-crossing. "Yes—yes, I am." A slowing, waiting, then overtaking. "I'm so sorry—sorry, that is, that you must be going through hell."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The film is quite another matter, having, for one thing, no viewpoint whatever except that fr om the window of the Stock Exchange. The film takes place, so we are endlessly informed, in Trenton: which is, in the film, a small, unbelievably unat tractive town, just outside of Paris, on the road to New Or leans. In fact, it begins in (I guess) New Orleans, with a black boy, playing a harmonica, sitting on an immense bale of cot ton which is being hoisted to the dock. The boy jumps off the bale of cotton, still playing his harmonica, starts walking; is grabbed around the neck by his affectionate, older, light white brother; and, alas, the film begins. The young black boy, who would appear to be about thirteen, seems to have been playing around with a white girl. (We do not, thank heaven, meet her.) His older brother warns him to be careful. Har monica says that he will be . The brothers separate, and we next see and hear Harmonica in the cool of the evening (not yet in the heat of the night) unconcernedly walking along a deserted country road. Headlights flash behind him; white men leap out of their cars, the boy turns to face them; and the next time we see him, he is hanging from a tree. 508 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK His older light white brother cuts him down and carries him to where the darkics arc assembled, beginning to moan the darkics, that is. The older light white brother vows ven geance, over the Christian plea tor forgiveness of the old black preacher, to whom he appears-though certainly not physi cally-to be related. He puts his brother's body on a table in the cabin, while the darkics watch; douses it with kerosene, while the darkics watch, and moan; lights a match, setting his brother, the cabin, and, presumably, the entire neighborhood aflame, while the darkics keep moaning; and, sensibly enough, leaves.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This rigid refusal to look at ourselves may well destroy us; particularly now, since if we cannot understand ourselves we will not be able to understand anything. Mr. Lockridge's death is an inconceivable end for the hero of Raintree County. He, who lived his zestful life through, was not slated, in the Lockridge scheme, to meet death at his own hand. This is the ultimate negation, antithetical to every thing John Wyck.liff Shawnessy so thoroughly believed in, whose initials, at the book's end, are written in the air. "What is America?" Mr. Shawnessy asks the question and except to call it a noble dream the question is not answered. Since the book at every point evades the riddle of the human being the question is never really asked. The death of the hero of Raintree County admits an uncertainty and desperation the entire county would conspire to deny. Rut if America is a dream it is also a reality; a small dream is not enough to live by. We are not unlike the audience which assembled to hear the only political speech made by Mr. Shawnessy when he was running for office: they liked him, they knew it was a good speech. But they could not remember nor repeat a single word of it. 1he Nell' Leade1·, April 10, 1948 Preservation of In nocence T HE PROBLEM of the homosexual, so vociferously involved with good and evil, the unnatural as opposed to the nat ural, has its roots in the nature of man and woman and their relationship to one another. While at one time we speak of nature and at another of the nature of man, we speak on both occasions of something of which we know very little and we make the tacit admission that they are not one and the same. Between nature and man there is a difference; there is, indeed, perpetual war. It develops when we think about it that not only is a natural state perversely indefinable outside of the womb or before the grave but that it is not on the whole a state which is altogether desirable. It is just as well that we cook our food and are not balled by water-closets and do not copulate in the public thoroughfare. People who have not learned this are not admired as natural but are feared as prim itive or incarcerated as insane.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Leaving aside my friends, the people I love, who cannot, usefully, be described as either black or white, they are, like life itself, thank God, many many colors, I do not feel, alas, that my country has any reason for self-congratulation. If I were still in the pulpit which some people (and they may be ri ght) claim I never left, I would counsel mv country men to the self-confrontation of prayer, the cleansing breaki�g of the heart which precedes atonement. This is, of course, impossible. Multitudes are capable of many things, but atone ment is not one of them. OTHER ESSAYS A multitude is, I suppose, by definition, an anonymous group of people bound or driven together by fears (I wrote "tears") and hopes and needs which no individual member could face or articulate alone. On the one hand, for example, mass conversions are no toriously transitory: within days, the reformed-"saved" whore, whoremonger, thief, drunkard, have ventilated their fears and dried their tears and returned to their former ways. Nor do the quite spectacularly repentant "born again" of the present hour give up this world to follow Jesus. No, they take Jesus with them into the marketplace where He is used as proof of their acumen and as their Real Estate Broker, now, and, as it were, forever. But it does not demand a mass conversion to persuade a mob to lynch a nigger or stone a Jew or mutilate a sexual heretic. It demands no conversion at all: in the very same way that the act demands no courage at all. That not one member of the mob could or would accomplish the deed alone is not merely, I think, due to physical cowardice but to cowardice of another order. To destroy a nigger, a kike, a dyke, or a faggot, by one's own act alone is to have committed a com munion and, above all, to have made a public confession more personal, more total, and more devastating than any act of love: whereas the orgasm of the mob is drenched in the blood of the lamb.

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

  An overpowering stench of burnt flesh and clothing began pervading the witness room. Two doctors examined Mr. Evans and declared that he was not dead. The electrode on the left leg was refastened. At 8:30 P.M. [ sic ] Mr. Evans was administered a second thirty-second jolt of electricity. The stench of burning flesh was nauseating. More smoke emanated from his leg and head. Again, the doctors examined Mr. Evans. The doctors reported that his heart was still beating, and that he was still alive. At that time, I asked the prison commissioner, who was communicating on an open telephone line to Governor George Wallace to grant clemency on the grounds that Mr. Evans was being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. The request for clemency was denied. At 8:40 P.M ., a third charge of electricity, thirty seconds in duration, was passed through Mr. Evans’s body. At 8:44, the doctors pronounced him dead. The execution of John Evans took fourteen minutes. — Walter McMillian knew nothing about any of this before he arrived at Holman. But with another scheduled execution fast approaching, condemned prisoners were talking about the electric chair constantly when Walter arrived. For his first three weeks on Alabama’s death row, the horrific execution of John Evans was pretty much all he heard about. The surreal whirlwind of the preceding weeks had left Walter devastated. After living his whole life free and unrestrained by anyone or anything, he found himself confined and threatened in a way he could never have imagined. The intense rage of the arresting officers and the racist taunts and threats from uniformed police officers who did not know him were shocking. He saw in the people who arrested him and processed him at the courthouse, even in other inmates at the jail, a contempt that he’d never experienced before. He had always been well liked and gotten along with just about everybody. He genuinely believed the accusations against him had been a serious misunderstanding and that once officials talked to his family to confirm his alibi, he’d be released in a couple of days. When the days turned into weeks, Walter began to sink into deep despair. His family assured him that the police would soon let him go, but nothing happened. His body reacted to the shock of his situation. A lifelong smoker, Walter tried to smoke to calm his nerves, but at Holman he found the experience of smoking nauseating and quit immediately. For days he couldn’t taste anything he ate. He couldn’t orient or calm himself. When he woke each morning, he would feel normal for a few minutes and then sink into terror upon remembering where he was. Prison officials had shaved his head and all the hair from his face. Looking in a mirror, he didn’t recognize himself. The county jails where Walter had been housed before his transfer were awful.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Furthermore, he did all of these things in the space of a single city block, and simultaneously. The salesman's name is Frank Stafford. At the time all this happened, he was 3 1 years old. And all of this happened, all 730 OTHER ESSAYS of this and a great deal more, just before the "long, hot sum mer" of 1 9 6 4 which, to the astonishment of nearly all New Yorkers and nearly all Americans, to the extremely verbal an guish of The New York Times, and to the bewilderment of the rest of the world, eventually erupted into a race riot. It was the killing of a 1 5 -year-old Negro boy by a white policeman which overflowed the unimaginably bitter cup. As a result of the events of April 1 7, and of the police per formance that day, and because Harlem is policed like occu pied territory, six young Negro men, the oldest of whom is 20, arc now in prison, facing life sentences for murder. Their names are Wallace Baker, Daniel Hamm, Walter Thomas, Willie Craig, Ronald Felder and Robert Rice. Perhaps their names don't matter. They might be my brothers: they might also be yours. My report is based, in part, on Truman Nelson's The Torture of Mothers (The Garrison Press, 1 5 Olive Street, Newburyport, Mass., with an introduction by Maxwell Geismar). The To1·ture of Mothers is a detailed account of the case which is now known as the case ofThe Harlem Six. Mr. Nelson is not, as I have earlier misled certain people into be lieving, a white Southern novelist, but a white Northern one. It is a rather melancholy comment, I think, on the Northern intellectual community, and it reveals, rather to my despair, how little I have come to expect of it that I should have been led so irresistibly into this error. In a way, though, I certainly have no wish to blame Mr. Nelson for my errors; he is, nev ertheless, somewhat himself to blame. His tone makes it clear that he means what he says and he knows what he means. The tone is rare. I have come to expect it only of Southerners or mainly fr om Southerners-since Southerners must pay so high a price for their private and their public liberation. But Mr. Nelson actually comes fr om New England, and is what another age would have called an abolitionist. No Northern liberal would have been capable of it because the Northern liberal considers himself as already saved, whereas the white Southerner has to pay the price for his soul's salvation out of his own anguish and in his own flesh and in the only time he has. Mr. Nelson wrote the book in an attempt to create pub licity and public indignation; whatever money the book makes goes into the ctli:>rt to fr ee The Harlem Six.

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

  He knew he was screaming and that it wasn’t going to make any difference. “I’m going to sue all of y’all!” he repeated. The officers paid him no attention. “Loose these chains. Loose these chains.” He couldn’t remember when he’d last lost control, but he felt himself falling apart. With some struggle he became silent. Thoughts of the trial flew back into his mind. It had been short, methodical, and clinical. Jury selection lasted just a few hours. Pearson used his peremptory strikes to exclude all but one of the handful of African Americans who had been summoned to serve on the jury. His lawyers objected, but the judge summarily dismissed their complaints. The State put Myers on the stand to tell his absurd story about Walter forcing him to drive to Jackson Cleaners because his arm hurt. This version had Myers going into the cleaners where he saw Walter standing over the dead body of Ronda Morrison. Bizarrely, he also claimed that a third person was present and involved in the murder, a mysterious white man with salt and pepper hair who was clearly in charge of the crime and who directed Walter to kill Myers too, but Walter couldn’t because he was out of bullets. Walter thought the testimony was so nonsensical he couldn’t believe that people were taking it seriously. Why wasn’t everyone laughing? Chestnut’s cross-examination of Myers made it clear that the witness was lying. When Chestnut finished, Walter was sure that the State would simply announce that they had made a mistake. Instead, the prosecutor brought Myers back up to repeat his accusations as if the logic and contradictions in the testimony were completely irrelevant, as if repeating his lies enough times in this quiet room would make them true. Bill Hooks testified that he’d seen Walter’s truck pull out of the cleaners at the time of the murder and that he recognized the truck because it had been modified as a “low-rider.” Walter instantly whispered to his lawyers that he hadn’t turned his truck into a “low-rider” until several months after Morrison was murdered. His lawyers didn’t do much with that information, which frustrated Walter. Then another white man Walter had never heard of, Joe Hightower, took the stand and said that he had seen the truck at the cleaners, too. There were a dozen people who could talk about the fish fry and insist that Walter was at home when Ronda Morrison was killed. His lawyers called only three of them.