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 Collected Essays (1998)

  His father can no longer tell him anything because his past has disappeared. I In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with ev<.;rybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to sec Gary Cooper killing ofT the Indians 714 AM ERIC AN DR EAM AND AM ERIC AN NEGR O 7I5 and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the In dians are you. It comes as a great sho_£� to discover that th<: co_�_Jptry_\_: �hich is_ }'Ql1Lbirthlilace ancLto whh;b_yQu Qwe �o_ur lif e ami_ identity has not, iiLits_whu l�� te_ m of real_i_ur,_eyolved any place for y� The disaffection and the gap between peopl e,-o nfyon the basis of their skins, begins there and accelerates through out your whole lif etime. You realize that you are 30 and you are having a terrible time. You have been through a certain kind of mill and the most serious effect is again not the cat alogue of disaster-the policeman, the taxi driver, the waiters, the landlady, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details 24-hours of every day which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. By that time you have begun to see it happening in your daughter, your son or your niece or your nephew. You arc 30 by now an9 llQ!bing you hav.e _done bas helped you. . ..e.scap_e_t l1 � ap. But what is worse is that nothing you have done, and as far as you can tell nothing you can do, will save your son or your daugh ter from having the same disaster and from coming to the same end. We speak about expense. There are several ways of ad dressing oneself to some attempt to find out what that word means here. From a very lit eral point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the coun try-the econ omy, especially in the South-could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been (and this is still so) for cheap labor. I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing. The Southern oligarchy which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This in the land of the free, the home of the brave. None can challenge that statement.

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

  “I’m sorry, I know you’ll do everything you can to help me,” he said, his voice quieter. My instinct was to comfort him; his pain seemed so sincere. But there wasn’t much I could do, and after several hours on the row talking to so many people, I could muster only enough energy to reassure him that I would look at everything carefully. — I had several transcripts piled up in my small Atlanta office ready to move to Tuscaloosa once the office opened. With Judge Robert E. Lee Key’s peculiar comments still running through my head, I went through the mound of records until I found the transcripts from Walter McMillian’s trial. There were only four volumes of trial proceedings, which meant that the trial had been short. The judge’s dramatic warnings now made Mr. McMillian’s emotional claim of innocence too intriguing to put off any longer. I started reading. — Even though he had lived in Monroe County his whole life, Walter McMillian had never heard of Harper Lee or To Kill a Mockingbird. Monroeville, Alabama, celebrated its native daughter Lee shamelessly after her award-winning book became a national bestseller in the 1960s. She returned to Monroe County but secluded herself and was rarely seen in public. Her reclusiveness proved no barrier to the county’s continued efforts to market her literary classic—or to market itself by using the book’s celebrity. Production of the film adaptation brought Gregory Peck to town for the infamous courtroom scenes; his performance won him an Academy Award. Local leaders later turned the old courthouse into a “Mockingbird” museum. A group of locals formed “The Mockingbird Players of Monroeville” to present a stage version of the story. The production was so popular that national and international tours were organized to provide an authentic presentation of the fictional story to audiences everywhere. Sentimentality about Lee’s story grew even as the harder truths of the book took no root. The story of an innocent black man bravely defended by a white lawyer in the 1930s fascinated millions of readers, despite its uncomfortable exploration of false accusations of rape involving a white woman. Lee’s endearing characters, Atticus Finch and his precocious daughter, Scout, captivated readers while confronting them with some of the realities of race and justice in the South. A generation of future lawyers grew up hoping to become the courageous Atticus, who at one point arms himself to protect the defenseless black suspect from an angry mob of white men looking to lynch him.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The figure fr om whom the novel takes its name, Uncle Tom, \\'ho is a figure of controversy yet, is jet-black, wooly-haired, illiterate; and he is phenomenally forbearing. He has to be; he is black; only through this forbearance can he survive or tri umph. ( Cf Faulkner's preface to The Sound and the Fury. These others were not Compsons. They were black:-They endured.) His triumph is metaphysical, unearthly; since he is black, born without the light, it is only through humility, the incessant mortification of the flesh, that he can enter into communion with God or man. The virtuous rage of Mrs. Stowe is motivated by nothing so temporal as a concern for the relationship of men to one another-or, even, as she would ha\'C claimed, by a concern for their relationship to God-but merely by a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being caught in traffic with the devil. She embraced this merciless doctrine with all her heart, bargaining shamelessly before the throne of grace: God and salvation becoming her personal property, purchased with the coin of her virtue. Here, black equates with evil and white with grace; if, being mindful of the necessity of good works, she could not cast out the blacks-a wretched, huddled mass, apparently, claim ing, like an obsession, her inner eye-she could not embrace them either without purifYing them of sin. She must cover their intimidating nakedness, robe them in white, the gar ments of salvation; only thus could she herself be delivered fr om C\'cr-prcscnt sin, only thus could she bury, as St. Paul demanded, "the carnal man, the man of the flesh." Tom, therefore, her only black man, has been robbed of his hu manity and divested of his sex. It is the price for that darkness \\'ith which he has been branded. Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, is activated by what might be called a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is EVERYBODY ' S PROTEST NOVEL 15 not different fr om that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch mob. One need not, in deed, search for examples so historic or so gaudy; this is a warfare waged daily in the heart, a warfare so vast, so relentless and so powerful that the interracial handshake or the inter racial marriage can be as crucifying as the public hanging or the secret rape. This panic motivates our cruelty, this fear of the dark makes it impossible that our lives shall be other than superficial; this, interlocked with and feeding our glittering, mechanical, inescapable civilization which has put to death our fr eedom.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He is trying to save "whatever good remains in those white people." The time he pleads for is the time in which the Southerner will come to terms with himself, will cease fleeing from his con science, and achieve, in the words of Ro bert Penn Warren, "moral identity." And he surely believes, with Warren, that "Then in a country where moral identity is hard to come by, the South, because it has had to deal concretely with a moral problem, may offer some leadership. And we need any we can get. If we arc to break out of the national rhythm, the rhythm between complacency and panic." But the time Faulkner asks for docs not exist-and he is not the only Southerner who knows it. There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The chal lenge is in the moment, the time is always now. 8. In Search of a Majority: - An Address I AM supposed to speak this evening on the goals of American society as they involve mi nority rights, but what I am really going to do is to invite you to join me in a series of speculations. Some of them arc dangerous, some of them painful, all of them arc reckless. It seems to me that before we can begin to speak of minor ity rights in this country, we've got to make some attempt to isolate or to define the majority. Presumably the society in which we live is an expression in some way-o f the majority will. But it is not so easy to locate this majority. The moment one attempts to define this majority one is faced with several conundrums. Majority is not an expression of numbe rs, of numer ical strength, for example. You may far outnumber your opposition and not be able to imp ose your will on them or even to modifY the rigor with which they impose their will on you, i.e., the Negroes in South Africa or in some counties, some sections, of the Amer ican South. You may have beneath your hand all the apparatus of power, political, milit ary, state, and still be unable to usc these things to achieve your ends, which is the problem faced by de Gaulle in Algeria and the problem which faced Eisen hower when, largely because of his own inaction, he was forced to send paratroopers into Little Roc k. Again, the most trenchant observers of the scene in the South, those who arc em battled there, feel that the Southern mobs arc not an ex pression of the Southern majority will. Their impression is that these mobs fill, so to speak, a moral vacuum and that the people who form these mobs would be very happy to be re leased from their pain, and their ignorance, if someone arrived to show them the way.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  In other words, it is not possible for the human being to be as simple as a stallion or a marc, because the human imagination is perpetually required to examine, control and redefine reality, 8!4 FREAKS AND AM ERIC AN IDE AL OF MAN HOOD 81 5 of which we must assume ourselves to be the center and the key. Nature and revelation are perpetually challenging each other; this relentless tension is one of the keys to human his tory and to what is known as the human condition. Now, I can speak only of the Western world and must rely on my own experience, but the simple truth of this universal duality, this perpetual possibility of communion and comple tion, seems so alarming that I have watched it lead to addic tion, despair, death and madness. Nowhere have I seen this panic more vividly than in my country and in my generation. The American idea of sexualit y appears to be rooted in the American idea of masculinity. Idea may not be the precise word, for the idea of one's sexuality can only with great vio lence be divorced or distanced from the idea of the self . Yet something resembling this rupture has certainly occurred (and is occurring) in American lif e, and violence has been the American daily bread since we have heard of America. This violence, furthermore, is not merely literal and actual but ap pears to be admired and lusted after, and the key to the Amer ican imagination. All countries or groups make of their trials a legend or, as in the case of Europe, a dubious romance called "his tory." But no other country has ever made so successful and glam orous a romance out of genocide and slavery; therefore, per haps the word I am searching for is not idea but ideal. The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and In dians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden-as an unpatriotic act-that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood. The exigencies created by the triumph of the In dustrial Revolution--or, in other terms, the rise of Europe to global dominance-had, among many mighty effects, that of com mercializing the roles of men and women. Men became the propagators, or perpetrators, of property, and women became the means by which that property was protected and handed down. One may say that this was nothing more than the an cient and universal division of labor-wo men nurtured the 816 OTH ER ESS AYS tribe, men battled for it-but the concept of property had undergone a change.

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

  You get three showers a week and are allowed forty-five minutes in a small caged area for exercise a few times a week. Otherwise you are alone, hidden away in your concrete box, week after week, month after month. In solitary, Ian became a self-described “cutter”; he would take anything sharp on his food tray to cut his wrists and arms just to watch himself bleed. His mental health unraveled, and he attempted suicide several times. Each time he hurt himself or acted out, his time in isolation was extended. Ian spent eighteen years in uninterrupted solitary confinement. Once a month, Ian was allowed to make a phone call. Soon after he arrived in prison, on Christmas Eve in 1992, he used his call to reach out to Debbie Baigre, the woman he shot. When she answered the phone, Ian spilled out an emotional apology, expressing his deep regret and remorse. Ms. Baigre was stunned to hear from the boy who had shot her, but she was moved by his call. She had physically recovered from the shooting and was working to become a successful bodybuilder and had started a magazine focused on women’s health. She was a determined woman who didn’t let the shooting derail her from her goals. That first surprising phone call led to a regular correspondence. Ian had been neglected by his family before the crime took place. He’d been left to wander the streets with little parental or family support. In solitary, he met few prisoners or correctional staff. As he sank deeper into despair, Debbie Baigre became one of the few people in Ian’s life who encouraged him to remain strong. After communicating with Ian for several years, Baigre wrote the court and told the judge who sentenced Ian of her conviction that his sentence was too harsh and that his conditions of confinement were inhumane. She tried to talk to prison officials and gave interviews to the press to draw attention to Ian’s plight. “No one knows more than I do how destructive and reckless Ian’s crime was. But what we’re currently doing to him is mean and irresponsible,” she told one reporter. “When this crime was committed, he was a child, a thirteen-year-old boy with a lot of problems, no supervision, and no help available. We are not children.” The courts ignored Debbie Baigre’s call for a reduced sentence. By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses, several of whom were thirteen years old at the time of the crime.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He is seeking to exorcise a history which is also a curse. He wants the old order, which came into existence through unchecked greed and wanton murder, to redeem itself without further bloodshed-without, that is, any further menacing itself-and without coercion. This, old orders never do, less because they would not than because they cannot. They cannot because they have always existed in relation to a force which they have had to subdue. This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this contin ued subjugation that their material well-being depends. One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oncsclt� has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history-one self-has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave. It is not so easy to sec that, t( >r millions of people, life itself depends on the speediest possible demolition of this history, even if this means the leveling, or the destruction of its heirs. And whatever this history may have given to the subjugated is of absolutely no value, since they have never been free to reject it; they will never even be able to assess it until they are fr ee to take fr om it what they need, and to add to history the monumental fact of their pres ence. The South Mrican coal miner, or the African digging for roots in the bush, or the Algerian mason working in Paris, not only have no reason to bow down before Shakespeare, or Descartes, or Westminster Abbey, or the cathedral at Chartres: they have, once these monuments intrude on their attention, no honorable access to them. Their apprehension of this his tory cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history's arrogant and unjust judgment. This is why, ultimately, all attempts at dialogue between the subdued and subduer, between those placed within history and those dispersed outside, break down. One may say, in deed, that until this hour such a dialogue has scarcely been atte mpted: the subdued and the subduer do not speak the same language.

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

  “I’m not sure there is anything that we can do to block this, given where things are,” I told him somberly. “But we’ll try.” “If you could do something, anything…well, I’d be very grateful.” — Herbert Richardson was a Vietnam War veteran whose nightmarish experiences in brutal conditions left him traumatized and scarred. He enlisted in the Army in 1964 at the age of eighteen, at a time when America was heavily involved in combat. He was assigned to the 11th Aviation Group, 1st Cavalry Division, and was sent to Camp Radcliff in An Khe, Vietnam. The camp was near Pleiku, an area known for extremely heavy fighting in the mid-1960s. Herbert endured perilous missions in which he saw friends get killed or seriously injured. On one mission, his entire platoon was killed in an ambush, and he was severely injured. He regained consciousness coated in the blood of his fellow soldiers; he was disoriented and unable to move. It didn’t take long before he experienced a complete mental breakdown. He attempted suicide after suffering severe headaches. Despite multiple referrals from commanding officers for psychiatric evaluation, he remained in combat for seven months before his “crying outbursts” and “uncommunicative withdrawal” resulted in an honorable discharge in December 1966. Not surprisingly, his trauma followed him home to Brooklyn, New York, where he had nightmares, suffered disabling headaches, and sometimes ran out of his house screaming “Incoming!” He married and had children, but his post-traumatic stress disorder continued to undermine his ability to manage his behavior. He ended up in a veterans hospital in New York City, where he had a slow, difficult recovery from severe head pain associated with his war injuries. Herbert became one of thousands of combat veterans who end up in jail or prison after completing their military service. One of the country’s least-discussed postwar problems is how frequently combat veterans bring the traumas of war back with them and are incarcerated after returning to their communities. By the mid-1980s, nearly 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military. While the rate declined in the 1990s as the shadows cast by the Vietnam War began to recede, it has picked up again as a result of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Herbert’s care at the veterans hospital in New York City slowly allowed him to recover. He eventually met a nurse there, a woman from Dothan, Alabama, whose compassionate care made him feel comfortable and hopeful for the first time, perhaps, in his entire life. When she was around, he felt alive and believed things would be all right. She had saved his life. When she moved back home to Alabama, Herbert followed.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  His father can n o longer tell him anything because his past has disappeared. I In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5 , 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with ev<.;rybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to sec Gary Cooper killing ofT the Indians 7 14 AMERICAN DREAM AND AMERICAN NEGRO 7I 5 and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the In dians are you. It comes as a great sho_£� to discover that th<: c o_�_Jp try_\_:�hich is_ }'Ql1Lbirthlilace ancLto whh;b_yQu Qwe �o_ur life ami_ ide nt ity has not, iiLits_whul��te_m of real_i_ur,_eyolved any place for y � The disaffection and the gap between peopl e , -o nfyon the basis of their skins, begins there and accelerates through out your whole lifetime. You realize that you are 3 0 and you are having a terrible ti me. You have been through a certain kind of mill and the most serious effect is again not the cat alogue of disaster-the policeman, the taxi driver, the waiters, the landlady, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details 24-hours of every day which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. By that time you have begun to see it happening in your daughter, your son or your niece or your nephew. You arc 30 by now a n9 llQ!bing you hav.e _done bas helped you. . ..e.scap_e_tl1 �ap. But what is worse is that nothing you have done, and as far as you can tell nothing you can do, will save your son or your daugh ter from having the same disaster and from coming to the same end. We speak about expense. There are several ways of ad dressing oneself to some attempt to find out what that word means here. From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country-the econ omy, especially in the South-could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been (and this is still so) for cheap labor. I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing. The Southern oligarchy which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This in the land of the free, the home of the brave. None can challenge that statement.

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

  They taught her to play “invisible” when she was a small child to shield her from their father when he was drunk and prowling their apartment with his belt, stripping the children naked, and beating them randomly. Trina was taught to hide under the bed or in a closet and remain as quiet as possible. Trina showed signs of intellectual disabilities and other troubles at a young age. When she was a toddler, she became seriously ill after ingesting lighter fluid when she was left unattended. At the age of five, she accidently set herself on fire, resulting in severe burns over her chest, stomach, and back. She spent weeks in a hospital enduring painful skin grafts that left her terribly scarred. Edith died when Trina was just nine. Trina’s older sisters tried to take care of her, but when Walter began sexually abusing them, they fled. After the older siblings left home, Walter’s abuse focused on Trina, Lynn, and Lynda. The girls ran away from home and began roaming the streets of Chester. Trina and her sisters would eat out of garbage cans; sometimes they would not eat for days. They slept in parks and public bathrooms. The girls stayed with their older sister Edy until Edy’s husband began sexually abusing them. Their older siblings and aunts would sometimes provide temporary shelter, but the living situation would get disrupted by violence or death, and so Trina would find herself wandering the streets again. Her mother’s death, the abuse, and the desperate circumstances all exacerbated Trina’s emotional and mental health problems. She would sometimes become so distraught and ill that her sisters would have to find a relative to take her to the hospital. But she was penniless and was never allowed to stay long enough to become stable or recover. Late at night in August 1976, fourteen-year-old Trina and her friend, sixteen-year-old Francis Newsome, climbed through the window of a row house in Chester. The girls wanted to talk to the boys who lived there. The mother of these boys had forbidden her children from playing with Trina, but Trina wanted to see them. Once she’d climbed into the house, Trina lit matches to find her way to the boys’ room. The house caught fire. It spread quickly, and two boys who were sleeping in the home died from smoke asphyxiation. Their mother accused Trina of starting the fire intentionally, but Trina and her friend insisted that it was an accident. Trina was traumatized by the boys’ deaths and could barely speak when the police arrested her. She was so nonfunctional and listless that her appointed lawyer thought she was incompetent to stand trial. Defendants who are deemed incompetent can’t be tried in adversarial criminal proceedings—meaning that the State can’t prosecute them unless they become well enough to defend themselves. Criminally accused people facing trial are entitled to treatment and services.

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

  Along with his other challenges, Mr. Dill had enormous difficulty speaking. He had a speech impediment that caused him to stutter badly. When he became excited or agitated, it got worse. Because he had not previously had a lawyer who would see him or speak to him, Mr. Dill saw our intervention as something of a miracle. I sent my young lawyers to meet with him regularly after we got involved, and Mr. Dill called me frequently. We tried frantically to get the Courts to issue a stay based on the new issues we’d uncovered, to no avail. Courts are deeply resistant to reviewing claims once a condemned prisoner has completed the appeals process the first time. Even the claim of mental retardation was thwarted because no court would grant a hearing at such a late stage. Although I knew the odds were against us, Mr. Dill’s severe disabilities had made me privately hopeful that maybe a judge would be concerned and at least let us present additional evidence. But every court told us, “Too late.” On the day of the scheduled execution, I once again found myself talking to a man who was about to be strapped down and killed. I had asked Mr. Dill to call throughout the day because we were waiting to hear the outcome of our final stay request at the U.S. Supreme Court. Early in the day he had sounded anxious, but he kept insisting that things would work out, and he told me he wasn’t going to give up hope. He tried to express his gratitude for what we had done in the weeks leading up to his execution. He thanked me for sending staff down to visit him regularly. We had located family members with whom he had reconnected. We told him that we believed that he had been unfairly convicted and sentenced. Even though we hadn’t yet persuaded a court to stay his execution, our efforts seemed to help him cope. But then the Supreme Court denied our final request for a stay of execution, and there was nothing else to do. He would be executed in less than an hour, and I had to tell him that the Court would not grant him a stay. I felt overwhelmed. We spoke on the phone shortly before he was taken into the execution chamber. Listening to him was hard. He was stuttering worse than usual and having great difficulty getting his words out. The imminent execution had unnerved him, but he was trying valiantly to express his gratitude for our efforts. I sat for a long time holding the phone while he strained to speak. It was heartbreaking. At one point, I remembered something I had completely forgotten until that moment.

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

  THEOPHYLACT. Or, He says that there must arise many obstacles to preaching and to the truth, as the Pharisees hindered the preaching of Christ. But some ask, If it needs be that offences should come, why does our Lord rebuke the author of the offences? for it follows, But woe to him through whom they come. For whatsoever necessity engenders is pardonable, or deserving of pardon. But observe, that necessity itself derives its birth from free-will. For our Lord, seeing how men cling to evil, and put forward nothing good, spoke with reference to the consequence of those things which are seen, that offences must needs come; just as if a physician, seeing a man using an unwholesome diet, should say, It is impossible but that such a one should be sick. And therefore to him that causes offences He denounces woe, and threatens punishment, saying, It were better for him that a mill-stone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, &c. BEDE. This is spoken according to the custom of the province of Palestine; for among the ancient Jews the punishment of those who were guilty of the greater crimes was that they should be sunk into the deep with a stone tied to them; and in truth it were better for a guilty man to finish his bodily life by a punishment however barbarous, yet temporal, than for his innocent brother to deserve the eternal death of his soul. Now he who can be offended is rightly called a little one; for he who is great, whatsoever he is witness of, and how great soever his sufferings, swerves not from the faith. As far then as we can without sin, we ought to avoid giving offence to our neighbours. But if an offence is taken at the truth, it is better to let the offence be, than that truth should be abandoned. CHRYSOSTOM. But by the punishment of the man who offends, learn the reward of him who saves. For had not the salvation of one soul been of such exceeding care to Christ, He would not threaten with such a punishment the offender. 17:3–43. Take heed to yourselves: If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him. 4. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him. AMBROSE. After the parable of the rich man who is tormented in punishment, Christ added a commandment to give forgiveness to those who turn themselves from their trespasses, lest any one through despair should not be reclaimed from his fault; and hence it is said, Take heed to yourselves.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  How does any child know that? I knew it from watching my father's f.. 1ce, my father's hours, days, and nights. I knew it from scrubbing the floors of the tenements in which we lived, knew it from the eviction no tices, knew it from the bitter winters when the landlords gave us no heat, knew it from my mother's f..1ce when a new child was bom, knew it by contrasting the kitchens in which my DARK DAYS 795 mother was employed with our kitchen, knew it from the kind of desperate miasma in which you grow up learning that you have been born to be despised. Forever. It remains impossible to describe the Byzantine labyrinth black people find themselves in when they attempt to save their children. A high school diploma, which had almost no meaning in my day, nevertheless suggested that you had been to school. But today it operates merely as a credential for jobs-f or the most part nonex istent-that demand virtually nothing in the way of education. And the attendance certifi cate merely states that you have been through school without having managed to learn anything. The educational system of this country is, in short, designed to destroy the black child. It does not matter whether it de stroys him by stoning him in the ghetto or by driving him mad in the isolation of Harvard. And whoever has survived this crucible is a witness to the power of the Republic's edu cational system. It is an absolute wonder and an overwhelming witness to the power of the hu man spirit that any black person in this country has managed to become, in any way whatever, edu cated. The miracle is that some have stepped out of the rags of the Republic's definitions to assume the great burden and glory of their hu manity and of their responsibility for one an other. It is an extraordinary achievement to be trapped in the dun geon of color and to dare to shake down its walls and to step out of it, leaving the jailhouse keeper in the rubble. But for the black man with the attache case, or for the black boy on the needle, it has always been the intention of the Republic to promulgate and guarantee his dependence on this Republic. For although one cannot really be educated to be lieve a lie, one can be forced to surrender to it. And there is, after all, no reason not to be dependent on one's country or, at least, to maintain a viable and fruitful relationship with it. But this is not possible if you see your country and your country does not sec you. It is not possible if the entire effort of your countrymen is an attempt to destroy your sense of reality. * 796 OTH ER ESS AYS This is an election year, I am standing in the streets of Har lem, Newark, or Watts, and I have been asked a question.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The child would either rise up into a seeming responsibility and respect ability, one step ahead of paranoia, or drop down to the nee dle and the prison. And since there is not a single institution in this country that is not a racist institution-begi nning with the churches, and by no means ignoring the unions-blacks were unable to seize the tools with which they could forge a genuine autonomy. The new prosperity also brought in the blight of housing projects to keep the nigger in his place. Whites, thinking "If you can't beat them, stone them," dumped drugs into the ghetto, and what had once been a community began to frag ment. The space between people grew wider. The question of identity became a paralyzing one. Being "accepted" could cause even greater anguish, and was a more deadly danger, than being spat on as a nigger. I was luckier in school than the children arc today. My sit- DARK DAYS 793 uation, however grim, was relatively coherent. I was not yet lost. Though most of my teachers were white, many were black. And some of the white teachers were very definitely on the Left. They opposed Franco's Spain, and Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Third Reich. For these extreme opinions, several were placed on blacklists and drummed out of the academic community-to the everlasting shame of that community. The black teachers, paradoxically, were another matter. They were laconic about politics but single-minded about the future of black students. Many of them were survivors of the Harlem Renaissance and wanted us black students to know that we could do, become, anything. We were not, in any way whatever, to be limited by the Republic's estimation of black people. They had refused to be defined that way, and they had, after all, paid some dues. I did not, then, obviously, really know who some of these people were. Gertrude E. Ayers, for example, my principal at P.S. 24, was the first black principal in the history of New York City schools. I did not know, then, what this meant. Dr. Kenneth Clark informed me in the early Sixties that Ayers was the only one until 196 3. And there was the never-to-be-f or gotten Mr. Porter, my black math teacher, who soon gave up any attempt to teach me math. I had been born, apparently, with some kind of deformity that resulted in a total inability to count. From arithmetic to geometry, I never passed a single test. Porter took his failure very well and compensated for it by helping me run the school magazine. He assigned me a story about Harlem for this magazine, a story that he insisted demanded serious research.

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

  32 Lecture 6: Job failing to answer Job properly. Elihu rebukes Job for questioning God’s justice; this is, in itself, a sin. No human can be truly “righteous” or innocent. Furthermore, suffering is a form of discipline that God uses to teach humans. Elihu’s recommendation is that Job (and everyone) submit to God. This section, in which Elihu tries to answer Job’s objections, is probably a late addition to the original text. Job remains uncomforted; he cannot accept that he is sinful in some way unknown to himself. In his responses to his comforters, he calls out to and challenges God. Job wants an explanation for his suffering. He challenges God, using legal terminology; in effect, he wants to bring his case into court and force God to defend his own position. Finally, immediately after Elihu’s speech, God appears and responds to Job. God speaks to Job out of a whirlwind in a series of rhetorical questions. In one of the most famous passages of the Bible, God asks Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth?” Interestingly, God does not mention the “testing” aspect of Job’s sufferings. God thus seems to ratify Elihu’s contention that humans are too small to dispute the ways of creation. But this leaves many questions unanswered. The statement that humans cannot understand the complexity of creation does not address the problem of theodicy; if God is just, why does undeserved suffering occur? If God is implying that he himself was somehow bound by rules of creation that made suffering inevitable even when not deserved, then God is no longer omnipotent. If God is all-powerful and permits undeserved suffering, he is not just. If God is just but cannot prevent undeserved suffering, he is not all-powerful. The Book of Job, then, although a powerful discussion of the problems of theodicy, ultimately offers no explanation for undeserved suffering. In effect, it says, “There is no point in asking these questions.” There are many compositional and textual diffi culties in the Book of Job. The book’s author is anonymous, and its date of composition is debated. The bulk of the Book of Job probably dates to between the 7 th and 4th centuries B.C., but the text reveals a complex history of composition. The philosophical and theological discussions of the middle section apparently were grafted into an

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  (C onsider the history of labor in a country in which, spiritually speaking, there are no workers, only candidates for the hand of the boss's daughter. ) Furthermore, I have met only a very few people-and most of these were not Americans-who had any real desire to be free. Freedom is hard to bear. It can be ob jected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has theref ore become something much more closely res embling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Private ly, we can not stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestical ly, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally , for many millions of peo ple, we are an unmitigated disaster. Whoever doubts this last statement has only to open his ears, his heart, his mind, to the testimony of-for example-any Cuban peasant or any Spanish poet, and ask himself what he would feel about us if he were the victim of our performance in pre-Castro Cuba or in Spain. We def end our curious role in Spain by ref erring to the Russian menace and the necessit y of protecting the free world. It has not occu rred to us that we have simply been THE FIR E NE XT TI ME mesmerized by Russia, and that the only real advantage Russia has in what we think of as a struggle between the East and the West is the moral history of the Western world. Russia's secret weapon is the bewilderment and despair and hung er of millions of people of whose existence we arc scarcely aware. The Russian Communists arc not in the least concerned about these people. But our ignorance and indecision have had the effect, if not of delivering them into Russian hands, of plung ing them very deeply in the Russian shadow, for which ef fect-and it is hard· to blame them-the most articula te among them, and the most oppressed as well, distrust us all the more. Our power and our fear of change help bind these people to their misery and bewilderment, and insofar as they find this state intolerable we arc intolerably menaced.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This seemed to be the opin ion of the judge, who scarcely looked at the prisoners or lis tened to them; it seemed to be the opinion of the prisoners, who scarcely bothered to speak in their own behalf; it seemed to be the opinion of the lawyers, state lawyers for the most part, who were defending them. The great impulse of the 114 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON courtroom seemed to be to put these people where they could not be seen-and not because they were otfended at the crimes, unless, indeed, they were offended that the crimes were so petty, but because they did not wish to know that their society could be counted on to produce, probably in greater and greater numbers, a whole body of people for whom crime was the only possible career. Any society in evitably produces its criminals, but a society at once rigid and unstable can do nothing whatever to alleviate the poverty of its lowest members, cannot present to the hypothetical young man at the crucial moment that so-well-advertised right path. And the fact, perhaps, that the French are the earth's least sentimental people and must also be numbered among the most proud aggravates the plight of their lowest, youngest, and unluckiest members, fi>r it means that the idea of reha bilitation is scarcely real to them. I confess that this attitude on their part raises in me sentiments of exasperation, ad miration, and despair, revealing as it does, in both the best and the worst sense, their renowned and spectacular hard headedness. Finally our case was called and we rose. We gave our names. At the point that it developed that we were American the proceedings ceased, a hurried consultation took place between the judge and what I took to be several lawyers. Someone called out for an interpreter. The arresting officer had forgot ten to mention our nationalities and there was, therefore, no interpreter in the court. Even if our French had been better than it was we would not have been allowed to stand trial without an interpreter. Before I clearly understood what was happening, I was handcuffed again and led out of the court room. The trial had been set back for the 2 7 th of December. I have sometimes wondered if I would ever have got out of prison if it had not been for the older man who had been arrested for the mysterious petty larceny. He was acquitted that day and when he returned to the cell-for he could not be released until morning-he found me sitting numbly on the floor, having just been prevented, by the sight of a man, all blood, being carried back to his cell on a stretcher, fr om seizing the bars and screaming until they let me out. The sight of the man on the stretcher proved, however, that screaming EQUAL IN PARIS 11 5 would not do much for me.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Virgil's continued pres ence on the case is due entirely to the reaction of the widow of the murdered man; this man, conveniently enough (as con cerns the necessities of the plot) was in the process of bringing new industry to the town when he was murdered. As the man's widow, she now has the power to transfer this potential wealth to another town, which she will do if Virgil is not allowed to continue his investigation of her husband's murder. This convol ution of the plot really demands a separate essay: it contains so many oblique and unconscious confessions con cerning the roles of money, sex, marriage, greed, and guilt and power. In any case, the widow, having done her bit, dis appears, and the town is stuck with Virgil. So is the Sheriff: and the Sheriffj ust don't know, now, if he glad or if he bad: but he got to do his best to look bad. What kind of people are you? the widow cries out at one point in the fil m: as well she might. There is something really stunning--cunning is too loaded a word-i n the casting of this fil m. Poitier's presence gives the film its only real virility, and so emphatically indeed that the emotional climate of the film is that of a mysteriously choked and baffied-and yet compulsive-act of contrition. This virility is not in the least compromised by the fact that he has no woman, visibly: on the contrary, it is thus reinforced, since we know that he is saving himself for Philadelphia, where athey call me Mr. Tibbs!)) The wealth of his health is presented in very powerful contrast to the poverty and infirmity of the white men by whom he is surrounded, and is the only genuinely positive element the film contains. It coats the film lightly, so to speak, with a kind of desperately boyish, unadmitted anguish. But that the film cannot or dare not pursue the implications of this sorrow is made very clear in that choked and opaque scene between the black detective and the Sheriff, in the latter's living room, over bourbon.

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

  Richardson, I’m so sorry, but I don’t have books, staff, computers, or anything we need to take on new cases yet. I haven’t even hired lawyers. I’m trying to get things set up—” “But I have an execution date. You have to represent me. What’s the point of all that other stuff if you’re not going to help people like me?” I could hear his breath growing ragged. “They’re going to kill me,” he said. “I know what you’re saying, and I’m trying to figure out how to help. We’re just so overextended—” I didn’t know what to say, and a long silence fell between us. I could hear him breathing heavily on the phone, and I could imagine how frustrated he must be. I was bracing myself for him to say something angry or bitter, steeling myself to absorb his understandable rage. But then the phone suddenly went silent. He’d hung up. I was unnerved by the call for the rest of the day and couldn’t find sleep that night. I was haunted by my helpless bureaucratic demurrals in the face of his desperation and the silence of his response. The next day he called again, to my relief. “Mr. Stevenson, I’m sorry, but you have to represent me. I don’t need you to tell me that you can stop this execution; I don’t need you to say you can get a stay. But I have twenty-nine days left, and I don’t think I can make it if there is no hope at all. Just say you’ll do something and let me have some hope.” It was impossible for me to say no, so I said yes. “I’m not sure there is anything that we can do to block this, given where things are,” I told him somberly. “But we’ll try.” “If you could do something, anything...well, I’d be very grateful.” — Herbert Richardson was a Vietnam War veteran whose nightmarish experiences in brutal conditions left him traumatized and scarred. He enlisted in the Army in 1964 at the age of eighteen, at a time when America was heavily involved in combat. He was assigned to the 11th Aviation Group, 1st Cavalry Division, and was sent to Camp Radcliff in An Khe, Vietnam. The camp was near Pleiku, an area known for extremely heavy fighting in the mid-1960s. Herbert endured perilous missions in which he saw friends get killed or seriously injured. On one mission, his entire platoon was killed in an ambush, and he was severely injured. He regained consciousness coated in the blood of his fellow soldiers; he was disoriented and unable to move. It didn’t take long before he experienced a complete mental breakdown. He attempted suicide after suffering severe headaches. Despite multiple referrals from commanding officers for psychiatric evaluation, he remained in combat for seven months before his “crying outbursts” and “uncommunicative withdrawal” resulted in an honorable discharge in December 1966.

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

  Proximity to the condemned, to people unfairly judged; that was what guided me back to something that felt like home. — This book is about getting closer to mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America. It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us. It’s also about a dramatic period in our recent history, a period that indelibly marked the lives of millions of Americans—of all races, ages, and sexes— and the American psyche as a whole. When I first went to death row in December 1983, America was in the early stages of a radical transformation that would turn us into an unprecedentedly harsh and punitive nation and result in mass imprisonment that has no historical parallel. Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole. One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated. We have shot, hanged, gassed, electrocuted, and lethally injected hundreds of people to carry out legally sanctioned executions. Thousands more await their execution on death row. Some states have no minimum age for prosecuting children as adults; we’ve sent a quarter million kids to adult jails and prisons to serve long prison terms, some under the age of twelve. For years, we’ve been the only country in the world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole; nearly three thousand juveniles have been sentenced to die in prison. Hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders have been forced to spend decades in prison. We’ve created laws that make writing a bad check or committing a petty theft or minor property crime an offense that can result in life imprisonment. We have declared a costly war on people with substance abuse problems. There are more than a half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980. We have abolished parole in many states. We have invented slogans like “Three strikes and you’re out” to communicate our toughness. We’ve given up on rehabilitation, education, and services for the imprisoned because providing assistance to the incarcerated is apparently too kind and compassionate. We’ve institutionalized policies that reduce people to their worst acts and permanently label them “criminal,” “murderer,” “rapist,” “thief,” “drug dealer,” “sex offender,” “felon”—identities they cannot change regardless of the circumstances of their crimes or any improvements they might make in their lives.