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 Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

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

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

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

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

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

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

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

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

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

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

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

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

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

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

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

• From Trash (1988)

  I made the women beautiful, wounded but courageous, while the men disappeared into the background. I put hope in the children and passion in the landscape while my neck ached and tightened, and I wanted nothing so much as a glass of whiskey or a woman’s anger to distract me. None of it was worth the pain it caused me. None of it made my people or me more understandable. None it told the truth, and every lie I wrote proved to me I wasn’t worth my mother’s grief at what she thought was my wasted life, or my sister’s cold fear of what I might tell other people about them. I put it all away. I began to live my life as if nothing I did would survive the day in which I did it. I used my grief and hatred to wall off my childhood, my history, my sense of being part of anything greater than myself. I used women and liquor, constant righteous political work, and a series of grimly endured ordeals to convince myself that I had nothing to decide, that I needed nothing more than what other people considered important to sustain me. I worked on a feminist journal. I read political theory, history, psychology, and got a degree in anthropology as if that would quiet the roar in my own head. I watched other women love each other, war with each other, and take each other apart while never acknowledging the damage we all did to each other. I went through books and conferences, CR groups and study groups, organizing committees and pragmatic coalition fronts. I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself. That was all part of deciding to live, though I didn’t know it. Just as I did not know that what I needed had to come up from inside me, not be laid over the top of my head. The bitterness with which I had been born, that had been nurtured in me, could not be eased with a lover or a fight or any number of late-night meetings and clumsily written manifestos. It may never be eased. The decision to live when everything inside and out shouts death is not a matter of moments but years, and no one has ever told me how you know when it is accomplished. But a night finally came when I woke up sweaty and angry and afraid I’d never go back to sleep again.

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

  Reply to Objection 3: The damned are outside the pale of hope on account of the impossibility of returning to happiness: hence it is not imputed to them that they hope not, but it is a part of their damnation. Even so, it would be no sin for a wayfarer to despair of obtaining that which he had no natural capacity for obtaining, or which was not due to be obtained by him; for instance, if a physician were to despair of healing some sick man, or if anyone were to despair of ever becoming rich. Whether there can be despair without unbelief?Objection 1: It would seem that there can be no despair without unbelief. For the certainty of hope is derived from faith; and so long as the cause remains the effect is not done away. Therefore a man cannot lose the certainty of hope, by despairing, unless his faith be removed. Objection 2: Further, to prefer one’s own guilt to God’s mercy and goodness, is to deny the infinity of God’s goodness and mercy, and so savors of unbelief. But whoever despairs, prefers his own guilt to the Divine mercy and goodness, according to Gn. 4:13: “My iniquity is greater than that I may deserve pardon.” Therefore whoever despairs, is an unbeliever. Objection 3: Further, whoever falls into a condemned heresy, is an unbeliever. But he that despairs seems to fall into a condemned heresy, viz. that of the Novatians, who say that there is no pardon for sins after Baptism. Therefore it seems that whoever despairs, is an unbeliever. On the contrary, If we remove that which follows, that which precedes remains. But hope follows faith, as stated above ([2485]Q[17], A[7]). Therefore when hope is removed, faith can remain; so that, not everyone who despairs, is an unbeliever.

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

  The crime was discovered when Trina became pregnant. As is often the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. Trina remained imprisoned and gave birth to a son. Like hundreds of women who give birth while in prison, Trina was completely unprepared for the stress of childbirth. She delivered her baby while handcuffed to a bed. It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery. Trina’s baby boy was taken away from her and placed in foster care. After this series of events—the fire, the imprisonment, the rape, the traumatic birth, and then the seizure of her son—Trina’s mental health deteriorated further. Over the years, she became less functional and more mentally disabled. Her body began to spasm and quiver uncontrollably, until she required a cane and then a wheelchair. By the time she had turned thirty, prison doctors diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disability, and mental illness related to trauma. Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world. — In 1990, Ian Manuel and two older boys attempted to rob a couple who were out for dinner in Tampa, Florida. Ian was thirteen years old. When Debbie Baigre resisted, Ian shot her with a handgun given to him by the older boys. The bullet went through Baigre’s cheek, shattering several teeth and severely damaging her jaw. All three boys were arrested and charged with armed robbery and attempted homicide.

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

  Most incarcerated women—nearly two-thirds—are in prison for nonviolent, low-level drug crimes or property crimes. Drug laws in particular have had a huge impact on the number of women sent to prison. “Three strikes” laws have also played a considerable role. I started challenging conditions of confinement at Tutwiler in the mid-1980s as a young attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. At the time, I was shocked to find women in prison for such minor offenses. One of the first incarcerated women I ever met was a young mother who was serving a long prison sentence for writing checks to buy her three young children Christmas gifts without sufficient funds in her account. Like a character in a Victor Hugo novel, she tearfully explained her heartbreaking tale to me. I couldn’t accept the truth of what she was saying until I checked her file and discovered that she had, in fact, been convicted and sentenced to over ten years in prison for writing five checks, including three to Toys“R”Us. None of the checks was for more than $150. She was not unique. Thousands of women have been sentenced to lengthy terms in prison for writing bad checks or for minor property crimes that trigger mandatory minimum sentences. The collateral consequences of incarcerating women are significant. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest—children who have become more vulnerable and at-risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home. In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of “untouchables” in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children. Marsha wandered through her first days at Tutwiler in a state of disbelief. She met other women like herself who had been imprisoned after having given birth to stillborn babies. Efernia McClendon, a young black teenager from Opelika, Alabama, got pregnant in high school and didn’t tell her parents. She delivered at just over five months and left the stillborn baby’s remains in a drainage ditch. When they were discovered, she was interrogated by police until she acknowledged that she couldn’t be 100 percent sure the infant hadn’t moved before death, even though the premature delivery made viability extremely unlikely. Threatened with the death penalty, she joined a growing community of women imprisoned for having unplanned pregnancies and bad judgment.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is a black man's newspaper straining for recognition and a foothold in the white man's world . Mat ters are not helped in the least by the fact that the white man's world, intellectually, morally, and spiritually, has the mean ingless ring of a hollow drum and the odor of slow death. Within the body of the Negro press all the wars and f.1lse hoods, all the decay and dislocation and struggle of our so ciety are seen in relief. The Negro press, like the Negro, becomes the scapegoat for our ills. There is no difference, after all, between the Am sterdam's handling of a murder on Lenox Avenue and the Dail y News1 coverage of a murder on Beckman Hill; nor is there any difference between the chauvinism of the two pa pers, except that the News is smug and the Amsterdam is des perate. Negroes live violent lives, unavoidably; a Negro press without violence is therefore not possible; and, further, in every act of violence, particula rly violence against white men, Negroes feel a certain thrill of identification, a wish to have done it themselves, a feeling that old scores are being settled at last. It is no accident that Joe Louis is the most idolized man in Harlem. He has succeeded on a level that white Amer ica indicates is the only level for which it has any respect. We (Americans in general, that is) like to point to Negroes and to most of their activities with a kind of tolerant scorn; but it is ourselves we are watching, ourselves we arc damning, or-co ndescendingly- bending to save. I have written at perhaps excessive length about the Negro press, principally because its many critics have always seemed to me to make the irrational demand that the nation's most oppressed minority behave itself at all times with a skill and foresight no one ever expected of the late Joseph Patterson or ever expected of He arst; and I have tried to give some idea of its tone because it seems to me that it is here that the innate NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON dc�peration is betrayed. As for the question of Negro adver tising, which has caused so much comment, it seems to me quite logical that any minority identified by the color of its skin and the texture of its hair would eventually grow self conscious about these attributes and avoid advertising lotions that made the hair kinkier and soaps that darkened the sk in. The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible .

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

  He tried to date her and even told her he wanted to marry her. At first she resisted because she knew that Herbert was still suffering the effects of his time in combat, but ultimately she gave in. They had a brief intimate relationship, and Herbert had never been happier. He became intensely protective of his girlfriend. But she began to see his desperate and relentless focus on her as something closer to obsessive need than love. She tried to end the relationship. After months of unsuccessfully trying to create distance from Herbert, she finally insisted that he stay away. Instead, Herbert moved even closer to her home in Dothan, which elevated her anxieties. It got to the point where she refused to allow him to see her, talk to her, or get anywhere near her. Herbert was convinced that she was just confused and would eventually come back to him. He was deluded by obsession; his logic and reasoning became corrupted, irrational, and increasingly dangerous. Herbert was not unintelligent—in fact, he was quite smart, with a particular aptitude for electronics and mechanics. And he had a big heart. But he was still recovering from the trauma of the war as well as some serious traumas that preceded his military experience. His mother had died when he was just three years old, and he had struggled with drugs and alcohol before he decided to enlist. The horrors of war had added a new level of distress to an already damaged psyche. He came up with an idea to win back his girlfriend. He decided that if she felt threatened, she would come to him for protection. He concocted a tragically misguided plan: He would construct a small bomb and place it on her front porch. He would detonate the bomb and then run to her aid to save her and then they would live happily ever after. It was the kind of reckless use of explosives that wouldn’t have been sensible in a combat zone, much less in a poor black neighborhood in Dothan, Alabama. One morning, Herbert completed his assembly of the bomb and placed it on his former girlfriend’s porch. The woman’s niece and another little girl came out instead and saw the peculiar package. The ten-year-old niece was drawn to the odd bag with a clock on it and picked up the device. She shook the clock to see if it would tick, which triggered a violent explosion. The child was killed instantly, and her twelve-year-old friend, who was standing next to her, was traumatized. Herbert knew both children. In this community, children were always roaming the streets looking for something to do. Herbert loved kids and would invite them into his yard, pay them to do errands, and talk to them. He started making cereal and cooking for the kids who would wander by. The two girls had come by his house for breakfast.

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

  11. To be incapable of being changed by a corporeal thing after the manner of an alteration, is proper to the soul by reason of its very essence. However, the soul does not suffer in this way through the divine power, but as we have explained above (the body of this article). 12. Fire does not possess the power of acting upon the soul inasmuch as it acts in virtue of its proper power, as those things do which act naturally; it acts only in an instrumental way. Therefore it does not follow that its nature is changed. 13. The soul is not acted upon by corporeal fire in any of these ways, but as we have explained. 14. Although corporeal fire does not make the soul hot, nevertheless it has another operation or relationship to the soul; which relationship bodies are naturally disposed to have toward spirits in order that bodies may be united to them in some way. 15. The soul is not united as a form to the fire which punishes it, because the soul does not give life to fire, as Augustine says; “I but it is united to fire in the way in which spirits are united to corporeal places by contact of power, although they are not the movers of these. 16. The soul is afflicted by corporeal fire inasmuch as the soul apprehends that fire is harmful to it as binding and confining it, as we have already pointed out. Moreover, this apprehension can torment the soul even when it is not actually confined by fire, simply because it sees that it is capable of being so confined; and for this reason the demons are said to bring’hell-fire with them wherever they go. 17. Although the soul is not prevented from performing its intellectual operation by being detained in this way; yet it is deprived of a certain natural liberty whereby it is wholly freed from being physically confined to a corporeal place. 18. The punishment of hell-fire (gehenna) belongs not only to the soul but also to the body. For this reason this fire above all is said to be the punishment of hell, because fire is particularly capable of tormenting bodies. However, there will also be other torments, according to this: “Fire and brimstone and the storms of winds shall be the portion of their cup” (Ps. 10:7). It is also appropriate to that inordinate love which is the principle of sin, so that as the empyrean heaven rewards the fire of charity, so does the fire of hell reward inordinate desire.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Manette, seen the sense of being oppressed, burstin g forth like a fire.) Dickens has not seen it at all. The wretched of the earth do not decide to become extinct, they resolve, on the contrary, to multiply: lif e is their only weapon against lif e, lif e is all that they have. This is why the dispossessed and starving will never be convinced (though some may be coerced) by the popula tion- control programs of the civilized. I have watched the dis possessed and starving laboring in the fields which others own, with their transistor radios at their ear, all day long: so they learn, for example, along with equally weighty matters, that the Pope, one of the heads of the civilized world, torbids to the civilized that abortion which is being, literally, torced on them, the wretched. The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible tor their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wher ever they decide that their "vital interests" are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the "sanctity" of human lif e, or the "conscience" of the civilized world . There is a "sanctity" involved with bringing a child into this +90 THE DEVIL FIND S WORK world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful in deed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child's arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the "vital interest" of the world becomes nothing less than the lif e of the child. How ever-! could not have said any of this then, nor is so absurd a notion about to engulf the world now. But we were all starving children, after all, and none of our fathers, even at their most embittered and enraged, had ever suggested that we "die out." It was not we who were supposed to die out: this was, of all notions, the most forbidden, and we learned this from the cradle. Every trial, every beating, every drop of blood, every tear, were meant to be used by us fi>r a day that was coming-fi>r a day that was certainly coming, absolutely certainly, certainly coming: not fi>r us, perhaps, but for our children. The chil dren of the despised and rejected are men aced from the moment they stir in the womb, and are there fore sacred in a way that the children of the saved are not.

• From What Belongs to You (2016)

  He held my hand quietly for a while, still kneading it in his strange way, grinding the joints of my fingers against one another, so that I had to squeeze back to avoid pain. And then he started speaking, though not to me, exactly, or to anyone; he began to repeat a single phrase, which even though it was short I didn’t catch at first, both because his speech was slurred and because it was so odd, a statement of counterfact, Men me nyama , he said, the three words again and again, men me nyama, men me nyama , I’m gone, it means, or I’m not here, literally there’s no me, an odd construction I can’t quite make work in English. For a moment I thought he was singing a pop song from the previous summer, “Dim da me nyama,” which is impossible to translate but the idea is of disappearing in smoke, like a car spinning its tires before shooting off, maybe, or like the running bird in the cartoon. It was a rap song, and the chorus repeated the title again and again, rhythmically, almost like a chant, which was why I thought Mitko was singing it for a moment, his own words matched it so closely, men me nyama, men me nyama . I almost smiled at his drunkenness before I realized that he wasn’t singing at all, and that his eyes, which hadn’t stopped their weird motions, had welled with tears. What is it, I said then, what does that mean, I don’t understand, and at this Mitko stopped his chant, snapped it off as if he were biting it with his teeth, and almost angrily he said Nishto ne razbirash , you don’t understand anything. Okay, I said soothingly, I don’t understand, tell me, but even before I could soothe him his anger, if it was anger, had melted away, had become a more agitated pressing of my hands. Dnes sum tuk , he said, a utre men me nyama , today I’m here, tomorrow I’m gone, and then he took up his weird chant again.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And the black son says this to his black father in spite of the fact that he, the wonder doctor, has had to become a living freak, a walking encyclopedia of rare medical knowl edge, in order to have the question of his marriage to a white girl discussed. 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 friends, 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 lif e, and, helpless ly, 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.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There arc further retreats, of course, than the TV screen or the bar. There arc those who arc simply sitting on their stoops, "sto ned," ani mated for a moment only, and hideously, by the approach of someone who may lend them the money for a "fi x." Or by the approach of someone from whom they can purchase it, one of the shrewd ones, on the way to prison or just coming out. And the others, who have avoided all of these deaths, get up in the morning and go downtown to meet "the man." They work in the white man's world all day and come home in the evening to this fetid block. They struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child to survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifference, and the cruelty they arc certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patience; nor is patience usually enough. In trying to make their hovels hab itable, they arc perpetually throwing good money after bad. Such frustration, so long endured, is driving many strong, ad mirable men and women whose only crime is color to the very gates of paranoia. One remembers them from another time-playing handball in the pla yground, going to church, wondering if they were going to be promoted at school. One remembers them going off to war- gladly, to escape this block. One remembers their return. Perhaps one remembers their wedding day. And one sees where the girl is now- vainly looking for salvation from some other embittered, trussed, and struggling boy-a nd sees the all-b ut-abandoned children in the streets. Now I am perfectly aware that there arc other slums in which white men arc fighting for their lives, and mainly losing. I know that blood is also flowing through those streets and that the human damage there is incalculable. People arc con tinually pointing out to me the wretchedness of white people in order to console me for the wretchedness of blacks. But an itemized account of the American failure docs not console me FIF TH AVE NUE, UPTOWN 1 73 and it should not console anyone else. That hundreds of thousands of white people are living, in effect, no better than the "niggers" is not a fact to be regarded with complacency.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I didn’t sleep well that night. It was hot enough to sleep without any covering, but I woke in the small hours feeling just perceptibly cold. The day’s spasm of emotion for Phil recurred and recurred, and the prospect of the Nantwich book, which was alluring, was also oppressive; suppressed guilt and helplessness over Arthur, as well, added their weight, and as the first light felt its way around the curtains, all the things which showed promise seemed only troublesome, agitating the white sheet of a future imagined without them. I started to fantasise over Phil, but didn’t have the heart for it, had at last no sensation of sex, somehow, in my person. I dozed off, and dreamt of having tea with him in the British Museum; there was a mood of intense restraint between us, and when I woke I could not believe that we could possibly become friends. Uncharacteristically, though the birds were cheeping from four in the morning, I lay in bed slovenly and indecisive until eleven o’clock. By then I had more or less resolved not to write Charles’s memoirs, and to keep my life clear of interference from the demands and misery of other people. Even so, the vacuity of a whole wasted morning showed me how much I needed demands to be made. Sleepier for having overslept, I shaved as the bath ran, the steam repeatedly obscuring my image in the mirror. At first flushed with the heat of the water, I sprawled in the bath till it cooled. I remembered sharing a bath at school with the house tart Mountjoy (it rhymed with ‘spongy’) and the long talk with my housemaster, Mr Bast, which had ensued. Mr Bast had taken the opportunity, in that zealous, companionable way which housemasters have when they rediscover the pastoral nature of their vocation, to criticise the lack of one in me. ‘You’ve got a good brain, William,’ he said; ‘you’re good at games—and I can see why the other boys find you attractive (oh yes, I know all about that). But you should have better things to do with your spare time than messing around with Mountjoy. You lack vocation, William, that is what troubles me.’ At that disaffected age, I felt it was a lack to be proud of. In the following weeks I messed around with Mountjoy far more than before. ‘This is my vocation,’ I would tell him, as we met up after books and sloped off over to Meads for a quick one. I was nearly asleep when the phone rang; I lurched dripping into the bedroom, sheltering myself in an enormous bath towel. It was James. ‘There are various references in Waugh’s Diaries,’ he said. ‘To Nantwich, you mean?’