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.

Page 264 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Hush, Bone.” Her voice sounded just like Raylene’s had. “Just hush, baby. It’s all right.” Still terrified, I clung to her. Thudding, crashing sounds were coming from the front. They had gone out on the porch. Raylene stood with her back to the bedroom door, her arms crossed over her breasts, as if she expected us to try and fight her to get out. Mama just held me and whispered again, “It’s all right.” After a few minutes, Raylene came over and sat beside us. “Anney.” Her voice was husky. “Anney, did he beat you too? Tell me, did he hurt you?” “Glen would never hurt me, Raylene. You know that.” Mama pressed her mouth to the top of my head. “He’d never raise a hand to me.” She sighed and hung her head. “Oh, Anney.” Raylene reached for Mama’s hands, but Mama pulled away. “Don’t touch me. Don’t.” Mama almost spit. She drew me closer to her. I was shaking in her arms, and she was shaking too. “Oh God, Raylene. I’m so ashamed. I couldn’t stop him, and then…I don’t know.” Her head bobbed up and down. When she spoke again her voice was fierce, desperate. “He loves her. He does. He loves us all. I don’t know. I don’t know. Oh God. Raylene, I love him. I know you’ll hate me. Sometimes I hate myself, but I love him. I love him.” I looked up. Mama’s eyes were deep and glittery. Her mouth was open, her lips drawn back from her teeth, her neck muscles high and rigid. Her chin went up and down as if she wanted to cry but couldn’t. “I’ve just wanted it to be all right,” she whispered. “For so long, I’ve just hoped and prayed, dreamed and pretended. I’ve hung on, just hung on.” “Mama,” I whimpered, and tried to push up to her. “I made him mad. I did.” “Bone.” Raylene reached for me. “No!” I jerked away and pressed my face against Mama’s arm. “Hush. Hush.” Mama breathed. I held still and heard Raylene’s hand drop. We listened to the noises from the porch. Those thuds were Daddy Glen hitting the wall. Those grunts were his. Those curses were my uncles’. I put my fingers in my mouth and bit down. I looked up. Above me Mama’s face and Raylene’s were almost touching, both of them trembling and holding on as if their lives depended on each other.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Raylene looked at me as if my rage hurt her, but she said nothing, just climbed heavily out of the truck. She moved slowly, hugging her old purse to her bosom and stopping only to give the panting dog a quick pat on the head before she went up and laid the purse on the steps. She came back and took me up again as easily as if I weighed no more than that purse. She carried me inside the house, the dog following, and put me in her bed. The dog settled himself on the rug, comfortably. I lay still, ignoring Aunt Raylene’s movements but thinking even so about the woman she had loved, the woman who had loved her child more. It was too much for me. I’d have to think about it some other time. The dog turned to me with hopeful brown eyes, his tongue hanging down as if he wanted me to invite him up on the bed. Big dumb sad eyes waited on me. I wanted to beat my fists until bones splintered, kick my heels into raw meat, scream until my tongue pulled loose and split at the root, but everything was slow, words and feelings just moved across my brain. I was slow, numb, and stupid. The pain in my arm was comforting, the throbbing at my temple was a music I needed in order to keep breathing. Everything hurt me: my arm in its cotton sling; the memory of the nurse’s careful fingers; the light that glinted into my eyes from the flawed glass of Raylene’s window; my hip where it pressed against the mattress. Most of all my heart hurt me, a huge swollen obstruction in my chest. Every time I closed my eyes there was a flash of Glen’s face as he had looked above me. I kept turning my head as if Mama’s prayers still echoed in my ears, and even the slow drag of that dog’s eyes raked over my skin like a pitchfork cutting furrows in dust. I had seen my whole life in Sheriff Cole’s eyes, contemptible, small, meaningless. My mama had abandoned me, and that was the only thing that mattered. When Raylene brought me some soup later, I refused to eat. “I hate her,” I whispered through torn lips. “I hate her.” “You’ll forgive her,” Raylene said. I pulled the sheet up over my mouth.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] “I want another baby,” Aunt Alma was saying in a slurred tone. We had her in Patsy Ruth’s bed, bundled in blankets, with bandages on her hands. Alma’s big old bed was broken in half, though we couldn’t figure out how she had managed to smash that oak headboard so completely. She lay there murmuring softly, groggy from the toddy Mama had made for her with whiskey, hot water, honey, and lemon. “I told him that. Told him I wanted another little girl. Told him it wasn’t gonna be all right until I had another baby.” She paused. She still had the razor in her hand, closed now but gripped too tight to get away from her. We’d cleaned up a good bit, got the kids off to Aunt Raylene’s, and made sure Uncle Wade wouldn’t be coming home until someone went to get him. We hadn’t done anything with the yard, just picked most of the broken glass and ripped clothes off the floor, put the kitchen back together more or less, and cleaned and bandaged Aunt Alma. None of the kids had been hurt, just scared to death. The only casualty was one of the puppies, whose neck had been broken when something or someone fell on him. Grey and Garvey had showed up just before sundown to work on the yard a little and help round up the various animals. Mama wouldn’t let them come in the house. I watched them for a while as they wandered around shaking their heads and exclaiming in awe over how much destruction Aunt Alma had managed to do. Mama had stayed right beside Alma, keeping her hands on her, steadying and quieting her, and keeping between me and that razor that never left Aunt Alma’s hand. She talked as if nothing had happened, and in fact most of it was about me, about how slow I answered, how daydreamy I was, how much I looked like my great-aunt Malvena. I’d been surprised to hear all that, more surprised when she said I would stay here with Alma, give her a hand now that spring was warming up. “You need some help around this place, Alma,” Mama told her. “You’ll like having Bone around. Maybe you can even get her to sing for you now and then.” My mouth had fallen open, and I’d stood transfixed, as close to the bed as I dared. Did she mean that? Did Mama think I was reliable? Did I look like my great-aunt Malvena? Did she really think I could sing? Aunt Alma barely acknowledged what Mama said, just went on with her complaints about Uncle Wade. “I said, ‘Give me a baby, Wade. Just give me a baby.’” She tried to sit up, and Mama leaned over to soothe her, climbing in bed with her.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  How do you forgive somebody when you cannot even speak her name, when you cannot stand to close your eyes and see her face? I did not understand. If I thought of Mama, I thought of her with her head thrown back and her mouth open, Glen’s bloody face pressed to her belly. I could not stand to remember that, could not watch it again. I turned away, closed my eyes, and prayed for the darkness to come back. I wanted to die. I refused to eat, refused to speak, covered my face, and would not let Aunt Raylene coax me out of bed. She left me alone, and I woke up with my eyes wet and my mouth open, but with no memory of dreaming. The only sound was the yellow dog’s tail thumping the rug. My heart, the pulse that pounded in my head, beat to that rhythm. Everything in me said no, repeated it, drummed it, hummed and sang it. I had no more spirit of meanness than a bug had. I was just a whisper in the dark saying no and hoping to die. Raylene came in the morning and fed me grits with a spoon. She let me be quiet that day, but the next, she picked me up and carried me out to the porch to sit on her rocker in the sun. I wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t speak, but she didn’t seem to care. She watered her plants, fed her dogs and chickens, and stood smoking on the steps until the cool air came up from the river. Then she carried me back to bed. The next day, grudgingly, I dragged myself up, ate a little on my own, and went out to the rocker on the porch. But it was not a surrender. I was willing to eat and sit up, but not to speak. [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] I stayed on the porch and would not talk to anyone, not to Raylene and not to Earle when he brought me his battered record player and tried to make me laugh. He played some of the same records I had listened to with Aunt Ruth, but I sat unmoving, dry-eyed and distant. Eventually he left me alone. Raylene didn’t try to talk to me. She brought me beans to pick over, which I did with no interest. She also asked me to rip out the hem on some old curtains, but that I refused to do. Not that I argued with her. I just left them lying untouched on the dusty boards by the rocker. I would have slept in the rocker, but Raylene threatened to drag me out of it kicking and screaming.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  She watered her plants, fed her dogs and chickens, and stood smoking on the steps until the cool air came up from the river. Then she carried me back to bed. The next day, grudgingly, I dragged myself up, ate a little on my own, and went out to the rocker on the porch. But it was not a surrender. I was willing to eat and sit up, but not to speak. I stayed on the porch and would not talk to anyone, not to Raylene and not to Earle when he brought me his battered record player and tried to make me laugh. He played some of the same records I had listened to with Aunt Ruth, but I sat unmoving, dry-eyed and distant. Eventually he left me alone. Raylene didn’t try to talk to me. She brought me beans to pick over, which I did with no interest. She also asked me to rip out the hem on some old curtains, but that I refused to do. Not that I argued with her. I just left them lying untouched on the dusty boards by the rocker. I would have slept in the rocker, but Raylene threatened to drag me out of it kicking and screaming. “I an’t gonna have you sleeping on the porch,” she fumed. So I pulled myself up painfully and crept off to bed like an old lady, bent over and cramped. I did what I had to do so they would leave me alone. I heard Raylene talking to Earle about Mama. They were worried. No one knew where she had gone. No one knew where Glen was either, though the uncles were talking about paying a bounty to anyone who found him. Earle was adamant, Beau had bought a new shotgun, but it was Nevil who scared Raylene. Nevil came out to Raylene’s one evening and stood silently in front of me. He touched my bruised chin with one outstretched finger, traced my hairline, and leaned forward to kiss my left cheekbone with dry chapped lips. I wanted to speak to him but instead held my breath, looking into his dark hooded eyes. “I promise,” he said, and I saw Raylene cover her mouth with one hand. I knew what he meant, and I smiled. He turned and went down the steps abruptly, stomping with his bootheels. Raylene called his name, but he didn’t pause. Fay told Raylene that Nevil had stopped sleeping at home. He was living in his truck, driving the county roads at night, searching. “He’ll get himself killed,” Raylene told me, but I refused to say anything. I didn’t care anymore who got killed. The night Mama came, Raylene was at the record player, listening to every record Earle had brought over. That music seemed to echo off the porch ceiling, the silvery river surface, and the night sky.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  What was it, then, I wondered, and flopped over on my belly. Pain. My shoulder, my knees, my thighs, my face—everything hurt but none of it mattered. It was all far off. Rubbery and numb, my arm was under my face. “You!” Mama screamed. There was more crashing, but I didn’t look up. Would she think I wanted him to do that? Would she think I asked for it? What would he tell her? I had to tell her that I had fought him, that I had never wanted him to touch me, never. But the blood running out of me was stealing all my energy, all my air. I could not talk, could not think. For a moment then I wanted to be dead already, not to have to look into Mama’s face ever again, and not his. Never his, never again. Please, God, let him die, let me die, let someone die. Don’t let him hurt my mama. “You bastard! You monster!” “Anney, please!” “Don’t you touch me. Don’t you touch her!” I tasted tears, snot, blood that had run down from my ear. I spat and tried to push myself up. I had to get up, do something, get Mama out of there. Mama’s hands were on me now, feeling for the damage. My head cleared a little, and I looked up. He was across the room, face white and stricken, and she was down on her knees with me. A roar went up through me, and I gritted my teeth. We had to get out of there, get away from him. I got to my knees. “Come on, honey,” she cooed like I was a baby again. “I’m gonna get you to a doctor.” Her hands smoothed my blouse, knotted the torn pieces together over my belly, dragged my pants up my legs a little at a time, covering me up. “Anney, no, wait,” he was saying, but she wasn’t listening. That’s good, don’t stop. Keep moving, Mama. Get us out of here. “Come on, baby,” she said, and pulled me to my feet. I swayed on rubber-band knees, an empty bowl of pain for a belly. Those dots were floating everywhere. I looked over at Daddy Glen. His face was as empty as my belly. Icy terror rode up my legs to my heart. Get out, we’ve got to get out of here. You don’t know, Mama, you don’t understand. She was whispering, “Baby, baby,” holding me tight to her hip as she started for the door. A terrible clarity seized me. I was thinking way ahead of myself. Uncle Travis’s shotgun was at his house, in Aunt Ruth’s bedroom closet. If I could get there, get it in my hands, I’d hide it until he was there, right there, as he would be, certainly.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  The boys would quit school and sooner or later go to jail for something silly. I might not quit school, not while Mama had any say in the matter, but what difference would that make? What was I going to do in five years? Work in the textile mill? Join Mama at the diner? It all looked bleak to me. No wonder people got crazy as they grew up. No matter what Mama said, I knew that it wasn’t just because of where she lived that I had never spent much time with Aunt Raylene. For all she was a Boatwright woman, there were ways Raylene had always been different from her sisters. She was quieter, more private, living alone with her dogs and fishing lines, and seemingly happy that way. She had always lived out past the city limits, and her house was where the older boy cousins tended to go. Out at Raylene’s they could smoke and curse and roughhouse without interference. She let kids do pretty much anything they wanted. With none of her own, Raylene was convinced that the best way to raise children was to give them their head. “There’s no evil in them,” she’d always say. “They’re just like puppies. They need to wear themselves out now and then.” Raylene’s place was easy to get to on the Eustis Highway but set off by itself on a little rise of land. The Greenville River curved around the outcropping where her weathered old shotgun house stood, and from the porch that went around three sides, you could watch the river and the highway that skirted it. Raylene kept the trees cut back and the shrubs low to the ground. “I don’t like surprises,” she always said. “I like to see who’s coming up on me.” When Raylene was young, Uncle Earle told me, she had been kind of wild. At seventeen she had run off with a guy who drove for the carnival, but she never married him. She came home two years later to take a job in the textile mill and rent the house where she still lived. Before he went off to Oklahoma, Butch told me that Raylene had worked for the carnival like a man, cutting off her hair and dressing in overalls. She’d called herself Ray, and with her short, stocky build, big shoulders, and small breasts, I could easily see how no one had questioned her. It was astonishing to imagine running off like that, and I would think about it with wistful longing.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Sometimes I hate myself, but I love him. I love him.” I looked up. Mama’s eyes were deep and glittery. Her mouth was open, her lips drawn back from her teeth, her neck muscles high and rigid. Her chin went up and down as if she wanted to cry but couldn’t. “I’ve just wanted it to be all right,” she whispered. “For so long, I’ve just hoped and prayed, dreamed and pretended. I’ve hung on, just hung on.” “Mama,” I whimpered, and tried to push up to her. “I made him mad. I did.” “Bone.” Raylene reached for me. “ No !” I jerked away and pressed my face against Mama’s arm. “Hush. Hush.” Mama breathed. I held still and heard Raylene’s hand drop. We listened to the noises from the porch. Those thuds were Daddy Glen hitting the wall. Those grunts were his. Those curses were my uncles’. I put my fingers in my mouth and bit down. I looked up. Above me Mama’s face and Raylene’s were almost touching, both of them trembling and holding on as if their lives depended on each other. Bastard Out of Carolina 18 T hings come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies. It was that way with Mama and Daddy Glen. Aunt Raylene offered to let us all come stay with her, but Mama wouldn’t consider it. The one day Daddy Glen spent in the hospital, she moved us into an apartment over the Fish Market just a few blocks from the boarded-up windows of Woolworth’s. Every morning, I had to walk past those windows to get to the intersection where the bus picked us up for school. I saw the workmen replacing the shattered display windows with new plate glass panels, and one day I saw a very harassed-looking Tyler Highgarden supervising while box after box of dimestore notions was carried through the repaired doors. He never even looked in my direction, but I still felt the hair on the back of my neck rise up stiff and electrical. If everything hadn’t been so confused, I might have told Mama what I’d done. But Mama and I did not talk at all. It was a two-room apartment, one bedroom and a larger room that served for everything else. The kitchen was a stove, icebox, and sink in a little alcove to the side of the bedroom door. The bathroom smelled of damp, mildew, and fish, the latter seeping up from the shop below.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I picked my way across to the refrigerator, surprised that it wasn’t standing open, more surprised to find that the contents were intact and there was ice in the freezer. There was a gallon jug of tea ready-made. I turned back toward the porch, seeing Mama and Aunt Alma still sitting together on the steps. “You want a glass of tea too, Mama?” I asked slowly. “Yes, honey, that would be nice.” She put her arm all the way across Aunt Alma’s shoulders and hugged her close. “Your aunt and I just want to sit here a while before we start cleaning all this up.” “I want another baby,” Aunt Alma was saying in a slurred tone. We had her in Patsy Ruth’s bed, bundled in blankets, with bandages on her hands. Alma’s big old bed was broken in half, though we couldn’t figure out how she had managed to smash that oak headboard so completely. She lay there murmuring softly, groggy from the toddy Mama had made for her with whiskey, hot water, honey, and lemon. “I told him that. Told him I wanted another little girl. Told him it wasn’t gonna be all right until I had another baby.” She paused. She still had the razor in her hand, closed now but gripped too tight to get away from her. We’d cleaned up a good bit, got the kids off to Aunt Raylene’s, and made sure Uncle Wade wouldn’t be coming home until someone went to get him. We hadn’t done anything with the yard, just picked most of the broken glass and ripped clothes off the floor, put the kitchen back together more or less, and cleaned and bandaged Aunt Alma. None of the kids had been hurt, just scared to death. The only casualty was one of the puppies, whose neck had been broken when something or someone fell on him. Grey and Garvey had showed up just before sundown to work on the yard a little and help round up the various animals. Mama wouldn’t let them come in the house. I watched them for a while as they wandered around shaking their heads and exclaiming in awe over how much destruction Aunt Alma had managed to do. Mama had stayed right beside Alma, keeping her hands on her, steadying and quieting her, and keeping between me and that razor that never left Aunt Alma’s hand.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Mama hadn’t talked to him. I felt suddenly so tired I could barely draw breath. “They call you Bone, don’t they?” I said nothing. “Bone, I want you to know that no one is gonna hurt you. No one is gonna be allowed to hurt you. We can see that you’ve been through enough. Just tell me who beat you, girl. Tell me.” His voice was calm, careful, friendly. He was Daddy Glen in a uniform. The world was full of Daddy Glens, and I didn’t want to be in the world anymore. “Honey,” the sheriff said again. I hated him for calling me that. He didn’t know me. “We’re gonna have to know everything that happened.” No. My tongue swelled in my mouth. I didn’t want anyone to know anything. Mama, I almost whispered, but clamped my teeth together. I couldn’t tell this man anything. He didn’t care about me. No one cared about me. I didn’t even care about myself anymore. “Ruth Anne.” He leaned forward, his face close to mine, his whispery voice too big in my ear. “I want to help you. I want you to tell me what happened, girl. I’ll take care of everything. I promise you. You’ll be all right.” No. He thought he knew everything. Son of a bitch in his smug uniform could talk like Santa Claus, promise anything, but I was alone. “I want to go home,” I said. “I want my mama.” Sheriff Cole put his hand on mine and sighed. “All right. All right, girl.” I looked at him, remembering what Raylene had said that night on the landing when I told her how much I hated people who looked at us like trash. What must it be like to be Sheriff Cole? What made him who he was? I’d think about that sometime, but not now. I didn’t want to think at all right now. The double door swung open. I turned eagerly, but the struggling angry figure there wasn’t Mama. Raylene was wrestling with a nurse, pushing the woman away and almost losing her black pea coat in the process. “Let me go,” she said in a voice bigger than the room. “You let me go.” She shoved the woman away and came forward like a tree falling, massive, inevitable, and reassuringly familiar. “Bone. Baby.” Her words echoed hollowly against the stark white walls. “Oh, my girl, what’d they do to you?” Raylene leaned over me, and the smell of her wrapped me around. I opened my mouth like a baby bird, cried out, and reached up to her with my good arm. I said her name twice and lay against her breasts.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  She opened the door, eased me down onto the front seat, lifted my legs. He was still crying her name. I was thinking fast and slow at the same time. How could I do it? No shotgun here, not even a butter knife. “Anney, please. Talk to me. Love, please. Please, Anney.” She dodged him, ran around to the other side of the car, and got the door open. He was right beside her, sobbing and wringing his hands. He pushed the door almost shut while she struggled to open it again. “Anney, you know how I love you. I wouldn’t have hurt her, darling, but I went crazy. I just went crazy!” I pulled myself across the seat, trying to reach her and help, but it was back to being hard to move. The air had become thick as jelly. I had to push through it. I gritted my teeth and inched forward until I was leaning against the steering wheel, watching them struggle with the door. “Mama.” She looked toward me, her face empty and strange. I said it again. “Mama.” Mama slapped Glen again, with her open hand and then with her cupped fist. The sound of her blows was dull and horrible, but not so horrible as the mewling grunts he made as she struck him. “Let go,” she said. He staggered, sweat streaming into his eyes. His mouth worked uselessly, all his features seemed realigned. “Let go,” she said again. He wailed and dropped to his knees, his hands still clinging to Mama and the door. He bowed his head and whispered, “Kill me, Anney. Go on. I can’t live without you. I won’t. Kill me! Kill me!” Mama jerked away from him, and the door slammed shut. “Oh, no,” she whimpered. Her face became the mirror of his, her mouth as wide, her neck as rigid. “Kill me,” he said again, louder. “Kill me.” He butted his head into the metal door, pulled back, and rammed again. He shouted every time his head hit, the thuds punctuating the cries. “Kill me. Kill me.” Mama was so close I could have touched her, but her head was turned away, turned to Glen. I could not reach her. “Oh, God,” she cried, and I let go of the steering wheel. “No,” I whispered, but Mama didn’t hear me. “Glen!” she said. “Glen!” She moaned and covered her face with her hands. Her body shook as she sobbed. Mine shook as I watched her. “Glen, stop,” she said. “Stop.” She grabbed his head, wrapping her fingers over his forehead to block the impact of his blows. “Stop.” There was blood on her fingers. She was crying. He was still. I closed my eyes. “No,” I said again. He spoke once more, drowning me out. His voice was very calm, very soft. “Kill me, Anney. Kill me.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Big dumb sad eyes waited on me. I wanted to beat my fists until bones splintered, kick my heels into raw meat, scream until my tongue pulled loose and split at the root, but everything was slow, words and feelings just moved across my brain. I was slow, numb, and stupid. The pain in my arm was comforting, the throbbing at my temple was a music I needed in order to keep breathing. Everything hurt me: my arm in its cotton sling; the memory of the nurse’s careful fingers; the light that glinted into my eyes from the flawed glass of Raylene’s window; my hip where it pressed against the mattress. Most of all my heart hurt me, a huge swollen obstruction in my chest. Every time I closed my eyes there was a flash of Glen’s face as he had looked above me. I kept turning my head as if Mama’s prayers still echoed in my ears, and even the slow drag of that dog’s eyes raked over my skin like a pitchfork cutting furrows in dust. I had seen my whole life in Sheriff Cole’s eyes, contemptible, small, meaningless. My mama had abandoned me, and that was the only thing that mattered. When Raylene brought me some soup later, I refused to eat. “I hate her,” I whispered through torn lips. “I hate her.” “You’ll forgive her,” Raylene said. I pulled the sheet up over my mouth. How do you forgive somebody when you cannot even speak her name, when you cannot stand to close your eyes and see her face? I did not understand. If I thought of Mama, I thought of her with her head thrown back and her mouth open, Glen’s bloody face pressed to her belly. I could not stand to remember that, could not watch it again. I turned away, closed my eyes, and prayed for the darkness to come back. I wanted to die. I refused to eat, refused to speak, covered my face, and would not let Aunt Raylene coax me out of bed. She left me alone, and I woke up with my eyes wet and my mouth open, but with no memory of dreaming. The only sound was the yellow dog’s tail thumping the rug. My heart, the pulse that pounded in my head, beat to that rhythm. Everything in me said no, repeated it, drummed it, hummed and sang it. I had no more spirit of meanness than a bug had. I was just a whisper in the dark saying no and hoping to die. Raylene came in the morning and fed me grits with a spoon. She let me be quiet that day, but the next, she picked me up and carried me out to the porch to sit on her rocker in the sun. I wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t speak, but she didn’t seem to care.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  I held the envelope and watched her shoulders. They were shaking, but she made no sound. “Do you know where she’s going?” I asked. “No.” The word was a whisper. Raylene lifted her hands slightly, dropped them again. She did not turn to me, and I knew she did not want me to see her face. “California,” I said. “Or Florida, maybe. He always talked about taking us off there sometime, someplace where they grew oranges and a man could find decent work.” My voice sounded so rough and mean I barely recognized it. I felt old and chilled, though I knew the night was warm. I looked down my bandaged arm to the envelope. It was oversized, yellow, official-looking, and unsealed. I opened it. Folded into thirds was a certificate, RUTH ANNE BOATWRIGHT. Mother: ANNEY BOATWRIGHT. Father: UNKNOWN. I almost laughed, reading down the page. Greenville General Hospital and the embossed seal of the county, the family legend on imitation parchment. I had never seen it before, but had heard all about it. I unfolded the bottom third. It was blank, unmarked, unstamped. I looked out into the dark night, past Raylene’s hip and the porch railing. What had she done? I shook my head and swallowed. I knew nothing, understood nothing. Maybe I never would. Who had Mama been, what had she wanted to be or do before I was born? Once I was born, her hopes had turned, and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun. Fourteen and terrified, fifteen and a mother, just past twenty-one when she married Glen. Her life had folded into mine. What would I be like when I was fifteen, twenty, thirty? Would I be as strong as she had been, as hungry for love, as desperate, determined, and ashamed? My eyes were dry, the night a blanket that covered me. I wasn’t old. I would be thirteen in a few weeks. I was already who I was going to be. I tucked the envelope inside my pocket. When Raylene came to me, I let her touch my shoulder, let my head tilt to lean against her, trusting her arm and her love. I was who I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a Boatwright woman. I wrapped my fingers in Raylene’s and watched the night close in around us. Bastard Out of Carolina Afterword “Y ou told my story,” the man in the Peterbilt cap said to me. His face was stern, the skin worn and lined, his eyes implacable and black under the brim of that cap. “Oh. I am sorry.” He nodded. “I wanted you to know,” he said, “you made sense of what did not make sense.” I breathed in as slowly as I could, trying to think what to say.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 17—Jeremiah on Anguish and Compassion 117 ‹ Jeremiah puts his pathos into the poetic form of a lament (Jer. 20:7–13), taking people on a journey from despair into hope. The opening lines here are a seething expression of anger and despair directed at God, because God has made Jeremiah’s life miserable. Jeremiah appears to say that God has deceived him into serving as a prophet. ‹ In verses 8 and 9, Jeremiah says that he has dutifully spoken out against destructive social and religious practices, but people think he’s laughable. He no longer wants to be a prophet. The problem is that his internal sense of calling persists. ‹ T o be true to his convictions, he must overcome his shame. He needs a sense of purpose that comes from something higher than public opinion. And for Jeremiah, that’s where God comes in. The poem pictures God as a warrior, doing battle for the prophet. It’s Jeremiah’s sense that God’s truth will win out that enables him to continue speaking. ‹ However, there’s another lament in verses 14 to 18, and it begins, “Cursed be the day that I was born.” In this lament, there is no movement toward hope, only a relentless march into despair. Here, there is no word of praise at the end, only the haunting question: “Why did I ever come out of the womb, to see trouble and grief, and end my days in shame?” This poem gives no answer. It voices only the pathos. ‹ The juxtaposition of these two laments in chapter 20 shows us a life in which grief and hope exist side by side. The hopeful conclusion of the first lament does not silence the grief expressed in the second. But neither does the grief mean that hope has no place. Jeremiah’s ability to engage both of them together marks the pathos of this prophet. Hope Rising from Collapse ‹ This kind of tension persists in the final section of the book, which narrates the country’s collapse yet asks how hope might rise from the ashes. In 597 B.C., the Babylonians raided the temple in Jerusalem and carried off sacred objects. They also deported some of the leading citizens, including the king, and replaced him with a king of their own choosing.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  SECOND STORY Gostanza, in love with Martuccio Gomito, hears that he has died, and in her despair she puts to sea alone in a small boat, which is carried by the wind to Susa; she finds him, alive and well, in Tunis, and makes herself known to him, whereupon Martuccio, who stands high in the King’s esteem on account of certain advice he had offered him, marries her and brings her back with a rich fortune to Lipari. 1 Perceiving that Panfilo’s story was at an end, the queen, having warmly commended it, directed Emilia to proceed with one of hers, and Emilia began as follows: It is only natural that we should rejoice on seeing an enterprise crowned with rewards appropriate to the sentiments that inspired it. And since it is proper for true love to be rewarded in the long run with joy rather than suffering, it gives me far greater pleasure to obey the queen, and speak upon the present topic, than it gave me yesterday to address myself to the one prescribed for us by the king. You are to know then, dainty ladies, that near Sicily there is a small island called Lipari, on which, not very long ago, there lived a most beautiful girl, Gostanza by name, who belonged to one of the noblest families on the island. With this girl, a young man called Martuccio Gomito, who also lived on the island, and who, apart from being an outstanding craftsman, was exceedingly handsome and well-mannered, fell in love. And Gostanza reciprocated his love so wholeheartedly that she was never happy when he was out of her sight. Desiring to make her his wife, Martuccio requested her father’s consent, but was told that since he was too poor he couldn’t have her. Martuccio, indignant at seeing himself rejected on the grounds of his poverty, commissioned a small sailing-ship with certain friends and relatives of his, and vowed never to return to Lipari until he was a rich man. Having put to sea, he began to play the pirate along the Barbary coast, plundering every vessel that was weaker than his own. He had all the luck that was going for as long as he kept his ambition within reasonable bounds. But it was not enough that Martuccio and his companions should have quickly amassed a small fortune for themselves; their appetite for riches was enormous, and in trying to assuage it they encountered a flotilla of Saracen ships, by which, after lengthy resistance, they were captured and plundered. Most of Martuccio’s men were dumped into the sea, and their ship was sunk, but Martuccio himself was hauled off to Tunis, where he was left to languish in a prison-cell. Word was meanwhile brought to Lipari, not merely by one or two but by several different people, that Martuccio and all the men aboard his ship had drowned.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  ‘Yes, I am glad that you have come here,’ he repeated. ‘In this little room, to-night, every night, there is so much misery, so much despair, that the walls seem almost too narrow to contain it—many have grown callous, many have grown vile, but these things in themselves are despair, Miss Gordon. Yet outside there are happy people who sleep the sleep of the so-called just and righteous. When they wake it will be to persecute those who, through no known fault of their own, have been set apart from the day of their birth, deprived of all sympathy, all understanding. They are thoughtless, these happy people who sleep—and who is there to make them think, Miss Gordon?’ ‘They can read,’ she stammered, ‘there are many books. . . .’ But he shook his head. ‘Do you think they are students? Ah, but no, they will not read medical books; what do such people care for the doctors? And what doctor can know the entire truth? Many times they meet only the neurasthenics, those of us for whom life has proved too bitter. They are good, these doctors—some of them very good; they work hard trying to solve our problem, but half the time they must work in the dark—the whole truth is known only to the normal invert. The doctors cannot make the ignorant think, cannot hope to bring home the sufferings of millions; only one of ourselves can some day do that. . . . It will need great courage but it will be done, because all things must work toward ultimate good; there is no real wastage and no destruction.’ He lit a cigarette and stared thoughtfully at her for a moment or two. Then he touched her hand. ‘Do you comprehend? There is no destruction.’ She said: ‘When one comes to a place like this, one feels horribly sad and humiliated. One feels that the odds are too heavily against any real success, any real achievement. Where so many have failed who can hope to succeed? Perhaps this is the end.’ Adolphe Blanc met her eyes. ‘You are wrong, very wrong—this is only the beginning. Many die, many kill their bodies and souls, but they cannot kill the justice of God, even they cannot kill the eternal spirit. From their very degradation that spirit will rise up to demand of the world compassion and justice.’ Strange—this man was actually speaking her thoughts, yet again she fell silent, unable to answer. Dickie and Pat came back to the table, and Adolphe Blanc slipped quietly away; when Stephen glanced round his place was empty, nor could she perceive him crossing the room through the press and maze of those terrible dancers. 5Dickie went sound asleep in the car with her head against Pat’s inhospitable shoulder. When they got to her hotel she wriggled and stretched. ‘Is it . . . is it time to get up?’ she murmured.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  No one was moving about any more — there was only a dog, a dog called David. Something had to be done. Go into the bed- room, Stephen Gordon’s bedroom that faced on the courtyard - + « Just a few short steps and then the window. A girl, hatless, with the sun falling full on her hair . . . she was almost runa ning .. . she stumbled a little. But now there were two people down in the courtyard — a man had his hands on the girl’s bowed shoulders. He questioned her, yes, that was it, he questioned; and THE WELL OF LONELINESS 505. > the girl was telling him why she was there, why she had fled from that thick, awful darkness. He was looking at the house, in- credulous, amazed; hesitating as though he were coming in; but the girl went on and the man turned to follow . . . They were side by side, he was gripping her arm . . . They were gone; they had passed out under the archway. Then all in a moment the stillness was shattered: ‘ Mary, come back! Come back to me, Mary!’ David crouched and trembled. He had crawled to the bed, and he lay there watching with his eyes of amber; trembling be- cause such an anguish as this struck across him like the lash of a whip, and what could he do, the poor beast, in his dumbness? She turned and saw him, but only for a moment, for now the room seemed to be thronging with people. Who were they, these strangers with the miserable eyes? And yet, were they all strangers? Surely that was Wanda? And some one with a neat little hole in her side — Jamie clasping Barbara by the hand; Bar- bara with the white flowers of death on her bosom. Oh, but they were many, these unbidden guests, and they called very softly at first and then louder. They were calling her by name, saying: “Stephen, Stephen! ’ The quick, the dead, and the yet unborn — all calling her, softly at first and then louder. Aye, and those lost and terrible brothers from Alec’s, they were here, and they also were calling: ‘ Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken!’ She could see their marred and reproachful faces with the haunted, melancholy eyes of the invert — eyes that had looked too long on a world that lacked all pity and all understanding: ‘ Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken! ’ And these ter- rible ones started pointing at her with their shaking, white- skinned, effeminate fingers: * You and your kind have stolen our birthright; you have taken our strength and have given us your weakness!’ They were pointing at her with white, shaking fingers.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then Anna made her daughter sit down beside her, while she talked of how this thing might be accomplished in a way that would cause the least possible scandal: ‘For the sake of your father’s honourable name, I must ask you to help me, Stephen.’ It was better, she said, that Stephen should take Puddle with her, if Puddle would consent to go. They might live in London or somewhere abroad, on the pretext that Stephen wished to study. From time to time Stephen would come back to Morton and visit her mother, and during those visits, they two would take care to be seen together for appearances’ sake, for the sake of her father. She could take from Morton whatever she needed, the horses, and anything else she wished. Certain of the rent-rolls would be paid over to her, should her own income prove insufficient. All things must be done in a way that was seemly—no undue haste, no suspicion of a breach between mother and daughter: ‘For the sake of your father I ask this of you, not for your sake or mine, but for his. Do you consent to this, Stephen?’ And Stephen answered: ‘Yes, I consent.’ Then Anna said: ‘I’d like you to leave me now—I feel tired and I want to be alone for a little—but presently I shall send for Puddle to discuss her living with you in the future.’ So Stephen got up, and she went away, leaving Anna Gordon alone. 2As though drawn there by some strong natal instinct, Stephen went straight to her father’s study; and she sat in the old arm-chair that had survived him; then she buried her face in her hands. All the loneliness that had gone before was as nothing to this new loneliness of spirit. An immense desolation swept down upon her, an immense need to cry out and claim understanding for herself, an immense need to find an answer to the riddle of her unwanted being. All around her were grey and crumbling ruins, and under those ruins her love lay bleeding; shamefully wounded by Angela Crossby, shamefully soiled and defiled by her mother—a piteous, suffering, defenceless thing, it lay bleeding under the ruins. She felt blind when she tried to look into the future, stupefied when she tried to look back on the past. She must go—she was going away from Morton: ‘From Morton—I’m going away from Morton,’ the words thudded drearily in her brain: ‘I’m going away from Morton.’

• From Trash (1988)

  “I’m getting out of here, and I’m never coming back,” she told me the first morning of that week. By the end of the week, she had done it, though the apartment was half a mile up the highway, and even smaller than Jo’s. I saw it only once, a place devoid of furniture or grace, but built like a fortress. “Mine,” Arlene had said, a world of rage compressed into the word. Lying on the old narrow Hollywood bed again, I remembered the look on Arlene’s face. It was identical to the expression I had seen on Jo when I was packing my boxes to drive to Louisville. “We’ll never see your ass again,” Jo had said. Her mouth pulled down in a mock frown, then crooked up into a grin. “Not in this lifetime.” All these years later I could look back and it was exactly as if I were watching a movie of it, a scene that closed in on Jo’s black eyes and the bitter pleasure she took in saying “your ass.” I know my mouth had twisted to match hers. We had thought ourselves free, finally away and gone. But none of it had come out the way we had thought it would. I hadn’t lasted two years in Louisville, and Arlene had never gotten more than three miles from the Frito Lay plant. Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama. “Take me shopping,” Mama begged me every afternoon, as if no time at all had passed. I had looked at her neck and seen how gray and sweaty the skin had gone and known in that moment that the chemo had not worked out as we hoped. “Tomorrow,” I had promised Mama, and talked her into lying down early. Then gone back to curl up in bed and pretend to read so that I could be left alone. Every night for the two weeks I stayed there I would listen to Jack’s hacking through the bedroom wall. Every time he coughed, my back pulled tight. I tried to shut him out, listening past him for Mama lying on the couch in the living room. She talked to herself once she thought we were asleep. It sounded as if she were retelling stories. Little snatches would drift down the hall. “Oh James, God that James . . .” Her voice went soft. I listened to unintelligible whispers till she said, “When Arlene was born . . .” Then she faded out again. In the background, Jack’s snoring grated low and steady. I curled my fists under the sheets until I fell asleep.

• From Trash (1988)

  After my childhood, after all that long terrible struggle to simply survive, to escape my stepfather, uncles, speeding Pontiacs, broken glass, and rotten floorboards, or that inevitable death by misadventure that claimed so many of my cousins; after watching so many die around me, I had not imagined that I would ever need to make such a choice. I had imagined the hunger for life in me insatiable, endless, and unshakable. I became an escape—one of the ones others talked about. I became the one who got away, who got glasses from the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and finally went away to college on scholarship. There I met the people I always read about: girls whose fathers loved them—innocently; boys who drove cars they had not stolen; whole armies of the upper and middle classes I had not truly believed to be real; the children to whom I could not help but compare myself. I matched their innocence, their confidence, their capacity to trust, to love, to be generous against the bitterness, the rage, the pure and terrible hatred that consumed me. Like so many others who had gone before me, I began to dream longingly of my own death. I began to court it. Cowardly, traditionally—that is, in the tradition of all those others like me, through drugs and drinking and stubbornly putting myself in the way of other people’s violence. Even now, I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die. But one morning, I limped into my mama’s kitchen and sat alone at her dining table. I was limping because I had pulled a muscle in my thigh and cracked two ribs in a fight with a woman I thought I loved. I remember that morning in all its details, the scratches on my wrists from my lover’s fingernails, the look on Mama’s face as she got ready to go to work—how she tried not to fuss over me, and the way I could not meet her eyes. It was in my mama’s face that I saw myself, in my mama’s silence, for she behaved as if I were only remotely the daughter she had loved and prayed for. She treated me as if I were in a way already dead, or about to die—as unreachable, as dangerous as one of my uncles on a three-day toot. That was so humiliating it broke my pride. My mouth opened to cry out, but I shut it stubbornly. It was in that moment I made my decision—not actually the decision to live, but the decision not to die on her. I shut my mouth on my grief and my rage, and began to pretend as if I would live, as if there were reason enough to fight my way out of the trap I had made for myself—though I had not yet figured out what that reason was.