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 69 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Collected Essays (1998)

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

• From Collected Essays (1998)

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

• From The Folding Star (1994)

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

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

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

• From The Folding Star (1994)

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

• From Collected Essays (1998)

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

• From Collected Essays (1998)

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

• From Collected Essays (1998)

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

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

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

• From Collected Essays (1998)

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

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

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

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I had the feeling of taking that father's grief to myself much as I had taken on the sorrow of Hercules, of Alexander, of Plato, each of whom wept for a dead friend. I sent a few gold pieces to this poor fellow; one could do nothing more. Two or three days later I saw him again; he was contentedly picking at lice as he lay in the sun at the doorway. Messages flooded in; Pancrates sent me his poem, finished at last; it was only a mediocre assemblage of Homeric hexameters, but the name which figured in almost every line made it more moving for me than many a masterpiece. Numenius sent me a Consolation written according to the usual formulas for such works; I passed a night reading it, although it contained every possible platitude. These feeble defenses raised by man against death were developed along two lines: the first consisted in presenting death to us as an inevitable evil, and in reminding us that neither beauty, youth, nor love escapes decay; life and its train of ills are thus proved even more horrible than death itself, and it is better, accordingly, to die than to grow old. Such truths are cited to incline us toward resignation, but they justify chiefly despair. The second line of argument contradicts the first, but our philosophers care little for such niceties: the theme was no longer resignation to death but negation of it. Only the soul was important, they said, arrogantly positing as a fact the immortality of that vague entity which we have never seen function in the absence of the body, and the existence of which they had not yet taken the trouble to prove. I was not so certain: since the smile, the expression of the eyes, the voice, these imponderable realities, had ceased to be, then why not the soul, too? Was it necessarily more immaterial than the body's heat? They attached no importance to those remains wherein the soul no longer dwelt; that body, however, was the only thing left to me, my sole proof that the living boy had existed.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  When she saw the true nature of his love she shrank from him, and kept apart, and met with him only at the hours of their daily devotions. But the Chaplain's fever burned all the more fiercely for her spurning. And as the weeks turned into months, he found ways of being with her, banishing her women with terrible threats of God's vengeance, and ordering the Castle as if it were his own. He visited great humiliations on her, but always she prayed, for her husband, for herself, and for the Chaplain too, that he might repent; and always she turned him away. Then for days he would deny her food, or keep her in a guard-room without light, saying it was God's will that she should mortify herself. And he would put wild animals with her at night, snakes and toads that the local children trapped in the woods. And still she said no. And still she prayed. And at the day's end he would make her come to him to confess her sins. Then, when a year had passed and another spring had come, word reached the Castle of the Knight's return. He had ridden to Jerusalem and prayed for God's forgiveness at the Holy Sepulchre itself. Within the day he would greet his Lady, and their union would be blessed with children. When he heard this the Chaplain was filled with fear: his heart was so eaten up with his love for the Lady, however wicked it might be, that he had never given thought to the day when the Knight should come back. But the Lady was joyful and filled with God's blessing, and rose up proudly, for she knew that when her husband returned not only would her womb flower but her heart too be lightened of all her sufferings at the hands of the false Chaplain, and the Chaplain would be banished for ever. Now the Chaplain came to her humbly and begged her for God's love to say nothing of the treatment she had had of him. But she said that in God's eyes no sin was hidden, and that all should be known. He fell upon his knees as though he were praying to the Mother of Christ Herself and implored her with tears in his eyes to keep tight the secret of his great love. But all she said, as she had said to him a thousand times, was "No", and "I cannot".

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  For, in the years that 1-we-were growing up in Harlem, Harlem was still, essentially, a southern community, but lately, and violently, driven north. The people had dragged the South with them, in them, to the northern ghetto, and one of the results of this was that all of the children belonged to all of the elders. If, for example, a grown-up, even a very young grown-up, caught me doing something I should not have been doing, blocks fr om my house, he, or she, would 773 774 OTHER ESSAYS whip my behind and carry me, howling, to my house, to tell my mother or father why I had been whipped. Mama or Daddy would thank the person, and then whip my behind again. It is a hard way to learn, perhaps, but there are no easy ways, and so I learned that I was supposed to be an "exam ple." That didn't make sense to me in the beginning-! hated what seemed to me to be an injustice-but it made sense to me later. We were all expected to be examples to each other. The eldest was expected to do his best to protect those behind him fr om being destroyed by the bloody discoveries the eldest had already made. The price for this was astronomical: that the eldest did not allow himselfto be destroyed. This was quite an assignment for a black, defenseless-look ing high school graduate who-to remain within the confines of the mentionable-had had feet, fists, tables, clubs, and chairs bounced off his only head, and who, by the time of November, 1948, trusted no one, and knew that he trusted no one, knew that this distrust was suicidal, and also knew that there was no question any longer of his life in America: his violent destruction could be taken as given; it was a matter of ti me. By the time I was 22, I was a survivor-a survivor, fur thermore, with murder in his heart. A man with murder in his heart will murder, or be mur dered-it comes to the same thing-and so I knew I had to leave. Somewhere else, anywhere else, the question of my life might still be open, but in my own country that question was closed. Well, I was lucky-the black people I grew up with would say I was blessed. Some things had happened to me because I was black, and some things had happened to me because I was me, and I had to discover the demarcation line, if there was one. It seemed to me that such a demarcation line must certainly exist, but it was also beginning to be borne in on me that it was certainly not easy to find: and perhaps, indeed, when t( >Und, not to be trusted.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  “I brought you some apple pie,” Betty said. She had bright yellow calico in her hands. “I thought I’d make some curtains for this window, if that’s OK?” Td lived without curtains since I’d moved in more than six months ago. I nodded. Betty began to sew. From time to time she glanced up at me. I knew she had probably been sewing in my room for several houts when she stood to iton the curtains, but it seemed like seconds. The curtains were really pretty, but my face wouldn’t move, even to smile. Betty came over and sat down near me. “You should eat something,” she said. I looked up to acknowledge Id heard her. She moved toward the door to leave and then stopped. “T know,” she said. “You don’t think anyone knows. You can’t believe anyone would understand. But I do know.” I shook my head slowly—she didn’t know. Betty knelt down in front of me. As we made eye contact I felt a sudden jolt of emotional electricity. I saw everything I was feeling in Betty’s eyes, as though I were looking at my own reflection. I looked away in horror. Betty nodded and squeezed my knee. “I do know,” she said, getting up to leave. “I do understand.” I didn’t move from the couch. Darkness settled over the room. There was another knock at the door. I wished everyone would go away and leave me alone. Peaches came in, dressed to kill. “My date was a dud,” she said, and went into the kitchen. A moment later she brought out two pints of vanilla ice cream 68 Leslie Feinberg with a spoon sticking out of each. She sat down next to me on the couch and offered me one. The ice cream tasted so sweet and cool going down my throat it made my eyes sting with tears. Peaches stroked my hair. I was thinking about how the world looks when it’s buried in deep snow drifts—every twig and telephone line outlined with inches of snow, sparkling in the moonlight. Silent and still. Muffled. That’s how the world seemed to me now. I wished I could tell Peaches or Betty how peaceful I felt, but I couldn’t speak. “You're afraid to sleep, aren’t you child?” Peaches’ voice was so soft. “But Miss Peaches is here with you now. You gonna sleep safe in her arms tonight. I won’t let anything hurt you.” She disappeared into the bedroom. A moment later she came out and led me to my bed. She’d changed the sheets; they were fresh and clean. She put me down like a child and lay next to me. I could taste vomit rise in my throat, but she gently pulled me to her body. My lips found the curve of her breast. “That’s hormones made them swell up like that, but they’re mine now.” She kissed my hair.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  He was holding her against the kitchen counter, and she was flailing and biting at him. When she dropped to the ground, I ran to her lap. When Bob moved closer, I stood up and punched him in the face. He reared back (to return the blow, I figured), and I collapsed on the ground with my arms over my head in anticipation. The blow never came—Bob never was physically abusive—and my intervention somehow ended the fight. He walked over to the couch and sat down silently, staring at the wall; Mom and I meekly walked upstairs to bed. Mom and Bob’s problems were my first introduction to marital conflict resolution. Here were the takeaways: Never speak at a reasonable volume when screaming will do; if the fight gets a little too intense, it’s okay to slap and punch, so long as the man doesn’t hit first; always express your feelings in a way that’s insulting and hurtful to your partner; if all else fails, take the kids and the dog to a local motel, and don’t tell your spouse where to find you—if he or she knows where the children are, he or she won’t worry as much, and your departure won’t be as effective. I began to do poorly in school. Many nights I’d lie in bed, unable to sleep because of the noise—the furniture rocking, heavy stomping, yelling, sometimes glass shattering. The next morning I’d wake up tired and depressed, meandering through the school day, thinking constantly about what awaited at home. I just wanted to retreat to a place where I could sit in silence. I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on, as that was far too embarrassing. And though I hated school, I hated home more. When the teacher announced that we had only a few minutes to clear our desks before the bell rang, my heart sank. I’d stare at the clock as if it were a ticking bomb. Not even Mamaw understood how terrible things had become. My slipping grades were the first indication. Not every day was like that, of course. But even when the house was ostensibly peaceful, our lives were so charged that I was constantly on guard. Mom and Bob never smiled at each other or said nice things to Lindsay and me anymore. You never knew when the wrong word would turn a quiet dinner into a terrible fight, or when a minor childhood transgression would send a plate or book flying across the room. It was like we were living among land mines—one wrong step, and kaboom . Up to that point in my life, I was a perfectly fit and healthy child. I exercised constantly, and though I didn’t exactly watch what I ate, I didn’t have to. But I began to put on weight, and I was positively chubby by the time I started the fifth grade. I often felt sick and would complain of severe stomachaches to the school nurse.

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

  Many parents come to believe that without that child, they have no one. Their only remaining important life relationship and loyal support lies with that child. Thus the legal battle often has its roots in adult despair and not, as many people think, in the parents’ simple desire to spend more time with the child. Men and women tell me that when the child is with the other parent they become seriously depressed and wander restlessly from room to room unable to bear their loneliness. Sometimes this behavior occurs only during the months following the breakup. But it can also endure, providing the basis for endless litigation over custody and visiting. Such battles may distract parents from their personal misery but they hardly resolve it. As these relationships develop, parents and children often become more like peers than separate generations, which in turn can make the children more independent and responsible. They are justifiably proud of their achievement. Many of our efforts to understand the impact of divorce on children have assumed incorrectly that the child is a passive vessel who is shaped by the changes ushered in by a divorce. But the child is an active agent. (This is a theme I will develop in depth in a later chapter.) No one asked Karen to step forward. She did it on her own. Her role in the postdivorce family was entirely different from her role in the predivorce family. In some homes, everyone benefits from the child’s new role. Adults gain needed help. Children gain maturity and self-confidence. They also show a moral sensibility and compassion for others far beyond their years, which they can draw upon later in their adult relationships and often in their career choices. Karen’s decision to study public health and to develop programs for crippled children was by her own account rooted in the early responsibility she took as a child. For the fortunate parent who is able to rely on the child to get through the extended divorce crisis, the child’s availability may tip the balance between chronic dysfunction and recovery. Of course, caregiving by a child can occur in intact families when a parent is ill or troubled. I recall one little girl, Martha, the oldest of three siblings, who took over running the household for a year when her mother was recovering from a serious car accident. Martha and her father shared in parenting the younger children and in taking care of Martha’s mother. The difference was that although the mother was in a wheelchair for many months, she maintained close touch with what was going on in the home.

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

  Larry shows us how divorce can provide a window of opportunity through which the child can climb to freedom—with the proviso that the growing child must provide his or her own energy, resourcefulness, and courage to make it happen. The divorce by itself won’t do it. Larry’s moral and emotional evolution from delinquent boy to loving husband, father, and responsible citizen captures the psychological steps needed. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who relies on the help of the Scarecrow in search of a brain, the Tin Woodsman in want of a heart, and the Cowardly Lion in search of courage, a child growing up in a violent family needs the full use of his intelligence, capacity to love, and courage to climb out of the lower depths to which he has been exposed. He has to put together for himself a value system that rejects violence, respects women, and places decency and human kindness at the core. In his personal relationships, he has to achieve the capacity for love and intimacy without exploitation, loyalty to his family and friends, and responsibility to his professional community and society. Counter to the system in vogue in family courts that emphasizes the importance of continuity in parent-child relationships after the divorce, the child has to find the strength within himself to reject the violent parent and the values and attitudes that that person represents. If the child continues to embrace those values, he will repeat the ugliness that he was exposed to during his most impressionable years. Although Larry rescued himself, he was helped by his mother’s decision to divorce and her love for him and her dignity during the postdivorce years. She set an example of courage and faithfulness to her children that strengthened her son’s ability to leave. The divorce that she undertook despite her fears and misgivings showed him that getting out was a better, braver way, and he learned from her example and found within himself the power to follow her lead and to leave behind the identity that he might very well have embraced had she remained trapped. An Escape Hatch Blocked W HAT ABOUT THE Carols of this world? Without one parent to help her escape the craziness of her family, what’s in store for her? At the end of our interview, Carol eagerly told me how she’d met Tom, a pilot for a major airline company. She recalled in great detail how their acquaintance progressed from smiles and nods to short conversations, to dates in New York and San Francisco, to their present arrangement in which Tom stays with Carol whenever he has layovers in San Francisco. Then, as Carol chatted on, sounding for all the world like an enamored twenty-three-year-old instead of a forty-year-old who’d slept with over fifty men, my newly optimistic mood took a nosedive. “The thing is that he’s married and he has two children.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  And I went further back, prone and defenceless, to Oxford and Winchester, shrinking from the world, curling up in the warm leaf-mould of earlier and earlier times, drawing some wan, nostalgic sustenance from those dead days. My life seemed to go into reverse, and for a month, two months, I was a thing of shadows. It was in vain to tell myself that this was not my way: I was impotent with misery and deprivation. Then, as the end came in sight—it was the dead of winter—something hardened in me. I saw the imaginary verdure beyond the frosted glass. I began to think of the world I must go back to, with its brutal hurry and indifference. I would have to take on a new man. I would have to move again in the company of my captors and humiliators and be glanced at critically for signs of the scars they had inflicted. I would have to do something for others like myself, and for those more defenceless still. I would have to abandon this mortal introspection and instead steel myself. I would even have to hate a little. I see in The Times today that Sir Denis Beckwith, following calls in the House for the reform of sexual offence law, is to leave the DPP’s office and take a peerage. Oddly typical of the British way of getting rid of troublemakers by moving them up—implying as it does too some reward for the appalling things he has done. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to argue with him over law reform in the House—perhaps the only occasion in Hansard when a Noble Lord will have challenged another such who more or less sent him to prison. And he is a man I could hate, the one who more than anybody has been the inspiration of this ‘purge’ as he calls it, this crusade to eradicate male vice. Though one always treated him with contempt, he will now be a powerful voice in the Lords, with others like Winterton and Ammon—though beside their ninnyish rant he will be the more powerful in his cultured, bureaucratic smoothness. I have the image of him before me now in the courtroom at my sentencing, to which he had come out of pure vindictiveness, and of his handsome suaveté in the gallery, his flush and thrill of pride as I went down … It was Graham who answered the phone. ‘Oh Graham, it’s Will Beckwith—is Lord Nantwich there?’ ‘I’m sorry, sir, he’s dining at his Club this evening.’ ‘At Wicks’s? When will he be back?’ ‘I don’t expect him until late, sir.’ ‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’ But tomorrow was too far away. I was so confused by this digest of disasters, I felt so stupid and so ashamed that I walked around the flat talking out loud, getting up and sitting down, scratching my crew-cut head as if I had lice.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Multiple friends warned others about this threat via social media.From the popular website WorldNetDaily, an editorial suggesting that the Newtown gun massacre was engineered by the federal government to turn public opinion on gun control measures. From multiple Internet sources, suggestions that Obama will soon implement martial law in order to secure power for a third presidential term.The list goes on. It’s impossible to know how many people believe one or many of these stories. But if a third of our community questions the president’s origin—despite all evidence to the contrary—it’s a good bet that the other conspiracies have broader currency than we’d like. This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault.