Disgust

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is the story of a Ne gro beggar-cripple and his prostitute-addict sweetheart and it takes place in a Charleston ghetto; and it owes its vitality to the fact that DuBose Heyward loved the people he was writ ing about. (By which I do not mean to imply that he loved all Negroes; he was a far better man than that.) Just the same, it is a white man's vision of Negro life. This means that when it should be most concrete and searching it veers off into the melodramatic and the exotic. It seems to me that the author knew more about Bess than he understood and more about Porgy than he could face-than any of us, so tar, can tace. The idea of a Negro beggar-cripple who yet has enough tc.>rce in his hands to kill a man and enough force in his body-to say nothing of his spirit-to possess a woman is surely an arresting one; as is the notion that this woman is, herselt� because of her own uncontrollable drives, at the mercy of two whore masters, one of whom is a murderer and both of whom arc dope addicts. And Heyward was not inventing all this but describing things that he had seen. What has always been missing fr om George Gershwin's ON CATFISH ROW 619 opera is what the situation of Porgy and Bess says about the white world. It is because of this omission that Americans are so proud of the opera. It assuages their guilt about Negroes and it attacks none of their fantasies. Since Catfish Row is clearly such a charming place to live, there is no need for them to trouble their consciences about the fact that the people who live there are still not allowed to move anywhere else. Neither need they probe within their own lives to discover what the Negroes of Catfish Row really mean to them. But I am certainly not the first person to suggest that these Negroes seem to speak to them of a better life-better in the sense of being more honest, more open, and more free: in a word, more sexual. This is the cruelest fantasy of all, hard to forgive. It means that Negroes arc penalized, and hideously, for what the general guilty imagination makes of them. This fantasy is at the bottom of almost all violence against Negroes; it is the reason they arc not to be mixed in buses, houses, schools, jobs; they arc to remain instead in Catfish Row, to have fish fries and make love. It is a fantasy which is tearing the nation to pieces and it is surely time we snapped out of it.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Amongst whom there was one more mad then the rest, that let many deepe sighes from the bottome of his heart, as though he had beene ravished in spirite, or replenished with divine power. And after that, he somewhat returning to himselfe, invented and forged a great lye, saying, that he had displeased the divine majesty of the goddesse, by doing of some thing which was not convenable to the order of their holy religion, wherefore he would doe vengeance of himselfe: and therewithall he tooke a whip, and scourged his owne body, that the bloud issued out aboundantly, which thing caused me greatly to feare, to see such wounds and effusion of bloud, least the same goddesse desiring so much the bloud of men, should likewise desire the bloud of an Asse. After they were wearie with hurling and beating themselves, they sate downe, and behold, the inhabitants came in, and offered gold, silver, vessels of wine, milke, cheese, flower, wheate and other things: amongst whom there was one, that brought barly to the Asse that carried the goddesse, but the greedie whoresons thrust all into their sacke, which they brought for the purpose and put it upon my backe, to the end I might serve for two purposes, that is to say, for the barne by reason of my corne, and for the Temple by reason of the goddesse. In this sort, they went from place to place, robbing all the Countrey over. At length they came to a certaine Castle where under colour of divination, they brought to passe that they obtained a fat sheepe of a poore husbandman for the goddesse supper and to make sacrifice withall. After that the banket was prepared, they washed their bodies, and brought in a tall young man of the village, to sup with them, who had scarce tasted a few pottage, when hee began to discover their beastly customes and inordinate desire of luxury. For they compassed him round about, sitting at the table, and abused the young man, contrary to all nature and reason. When I beheld this horrible fact, I could not but attempt to utter my mind and say, O masters, but I could pronounce no more but the first letter O, which I roared out so valiantly, that the young men of the towne seeking for a straie Asse, that they had lost the same night, and hearing my voice, whereby they judged that I had beene theirs, entred into the house unwares, and found these persons committing their vile abhomination, which when they saw, they declared to all the inhabitants by, their unnatural villany, mocking and laughing at this the pure and cleane chastity of their religion. In the meane season, Phelibus and his company, (by reason of the bruit which was dispersed throughout all the region there of their beastly wickednesse) put all their trumpery upon my backe, and departed away about midnight.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  A few dayes after, when the young man was buried and the funerall ended, the Physitians wife demanded of her the fifty peeces of gold which she promised her husband for the drinke, whereat the ill disposed woman, with resemblance of honesty, answered her with gentle words, and promised to give her the fifty peeces of gold, if she would fetch her a little of that same drinke, to proceed and make an end of all her enterprise. The Physitians wife partly to winne the further favour of this rich woman, and partly to gaine the money, ranne incontinently home, and brought her a whole roote of poyson, which when she saw, having now occasion to execute her further malice, and to finish the damnable plot, began to stretch out her bloody hands to murther. She had a daughter by her husband (that was poysoned) who according to order of law, was appointed heire of all the lands and goods of her father: but this woman knowing that the mothers succoured their children, and received all their goods after their death, purposed to shew her selfe a like parent to her child, as she was a wife to her husband, whereupon she prepared a dinner with her owne hands, and empoysoned both the wife of the Physitian and her owne daughter: The child being young and tender dyed incontinently by force of the drinke, but the Physitians wife being stout and strong of complexion, feeling the poison to trill down into her body, doubted the matter, and thereupon knowing of certainty that she had received her bane, ran forthwith to the judges house, that what with her cryes, and exclamations, she raised up the people of the towne, and promising them to shew divers wicked and mischievous acts, caused that the doores and gates were opened. When she came in she declared from the beginning to the end the abhomination of this woman: but shee had scarce ended her tale, when opening her falling lips, and grinding her teeth together, she fell downe dead before the face of the Judge, who incontinently to try the truth of the matter, caused the cursed woman, and her servants to be pulled out of the house, and enforced by paine of torment to confesse the verity, which being knowne, this mischievous woman farre lesse then she deserved, but because there could be no more cruell a death invented for the quality of her offence, was condemned to be eaten with wild beasts.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Furniture is mysteriously moved about . Her daughter's personality changes, and obscenities she has never used before become a part of her speech. (Though she over hears the mother using some of them: over the trans-Atlantic telephone, to her father, who is estranged from her mother. ) The daughter also plays around with a ouija board, and has made a friend in the spirit world, called Captain Howdy. The mother worries over all these manifestations, both worldly and other-worldly, of the mysteries now being confronted by her growing daughter with all of the really dreadful apathy of the American middle class, reassuring herself that nothing she has done, or left undone, has irreparably damaged her child; who will certainly grow up, therefore, to be as healthy as her mother and to make as much money. But, eventually, at a very posh Georgetown party, of which her mother is the host ess, this daughter comes downstairs in her nightgown, and, while urinating on the floor, tells a member of the party that he is going to die. After this, her affliction, or possession, develops apace. 570 THE DEVIL FIND S WORK The plot now compels us to consider a Jesuit priest, young, healthy, athletic, intelligent, presumably celibate, \vith a dying mother, and in trouble with his faith. His mother dies, alone, in a dingy flat in New York, where he has been compelled to leave her, and he is unable to forgive himself for this. There is the film director, a drunken, cursing agnostic, other priests, psychiatrists, doctors, a detective- well: all people we have met before, and there is very little to be said about them. One of the psychiatrists is nearly castrated by Regan, the daughter, who has abnormal strength while in the grip of Satan. Along with the mumbo-jumbo of levitating beds and discontented furniture and Wuthering Heights tempests, there is the mo ment when the daughter is compelled by Satan to masturbate with a crucifix, af ter which she demands that her mother lick her, after which she throws her mother across the room, after which the mother screams, after which she faints. It develops that the film director, dead in a mysterious accident, has ac tually been pushed, by Regan, through her bedroom \vindow, to his death: again, while in the grip of Satan.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Both knew why the white audience was there, and to watch white audiences being reassured by a minstrel show can be grotesque and sor rowful beyond belief . But the minstrel show is really no dif ferent from the TV screen which celebrates, night after night and year after year and decade after decade, the slaughter of 8o6 OTH ER ES SAYS the Native American and pretends (in spite of Roots, which demands a separate assessment) that the black enslavement never occurred. Well. It did occur, and is occurring all up and down Amer ica, as I write, and is crossing borders and being exported to various "underdeveloped" portions of the globe. But this en deavor cannot succeed, with force or without it, because the center of the earth has shifted. The British Prime Minister, for example, is a grotesque anachronism, and the world is not holding its breath waiting to see what will happen in England; England's future will be determined by what is happening in the world. I am speaking of the breakup-the end-of the so-overex tended Western empire. I am thinking of the black and non white peoples who are shattering, redefining and re-creating history-making all things new- simply by declaring their presence, by delivering their testimony. The empire never in tended that this testimony should be heard, but, if I hold my peace, the very stones JVill cr y out. One can speak, then, of the fall of an empire at that moment when, though all of the paraphernalia of power remain intact and visible and seem to function, neither the citizen-sub ject within the gates nor the indescribable hordes outside it believe in the morality or the reality of the kingdom anymore-wh en no one, any longer, anywhere, aspires to the empire's stan dards. This is the charged, the dangerous, moment, when every thing must be re-examined, must be made new; when nothing at all can be taken for granted. One look s again at the word "f amine." At this hour of the world's history, famine must be considered a man- made phenomenon and one looks at who is starving. There is nothing even faintly ridiculous, or unfair, in these apprehensions, which arc produced by nothing less than Western history. Our former guides and masters are among the most ruthless creatures in mankind's history, slaughtering and starving one another to death long before they discovered the blacks. If the British were willing to starve Ireland to death-wh ich they did, in order to protect the prof· its of British merchants-why would the West be reluctant to starve Af rica out of existence?

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Carmen has come a long way from the auction block, but Joe, of course, cannot be far behind. This Joe is a good, fine looking boy who loves his Maw, has studied hard, and is going to be sent to fly ing school, and who is engaged to a girl who rather resembles his Maw, named Cindy Lou. His indifference to Carmen, who has all the other males in sight quivering with a passion never seen on land or sea, sets her ablaze; in a series of scenes which it is difficult to call erotic without adding that they are also infantile, she goes after him and he falls. Here the technicolored bodies of Dandridge and Belaf onte, while the movie is being glum about the ruin of Joe's career and impending doom, are used for the maximum erotic effect. It is a sterile and distressing eroticism, however, because it is occurring in a vacuum between two mannequins who clearly NO TES OF A NA TIVE SON arc not in\'olved in anything more serious than giving the cus tomers a run for their money. One is not watching either tenderness or love, and one is certainly not watching the com plex and consuming passion which leads to lif e or death-one is watching a timorous and vulgar misrepresentation of these things. And it must be said that one of the reasons for this is that, while the movie-makers are pleased to have Miss Dandridge flouncing about in tight skirts and plunging neckli nes-which is not exactly sexuality, either-the Negro male is still too loaded a quantity for them to know quite how to handle. The result is that Mr. Bel afonte is really not allowed to do anything more than walk around looking like a spaniel: his sexuality is really taken as given because Miss Dandridge wants him. It does not, otherwise, exist and he is not destroyed by his own sexual aggressiveness, which he is not allowed to have, but by the sexual aggressiveness of the girl-or, as it turns out, not even really by that, but by tea leaves. The only reason, finally, that the eroticism of Carmen Jo nes is more potent than, say, the eroticism of a Lana Turner vehicle is that Carmen Jones has Negro bodies before the camera and Negroes are associ ated in the public mind with sex . Since darker races always seem to have for lighter races an aura of sexuality, this fact is not distressing in itself.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This may be the only way to watch TV: I certainly saw some remarkable sights. Blondes and brunettes and, possibly, redheads-my screen was color less-washing their hair, relentlessly smiling, teeth gleaming like the grillwork of automobiles, breasts firmly, chillingly en cased-packaged, as it were-and brilliantly uplifted, forever, all sagging corrected, forever, all middle age bulge-middle age bu(!J'e!-defeated, eyes as sensuous and mysterious as jelly beans, lips covered with cellophane, hair sprayed to the con sistency of aluminum, girdles forbidden to slide up, stockings defeated in their subversive tendencies to slide down, to turn crooked, to snag, to run, to tear, hands prevented fr om aging by incredibly soft detergents, fingernails forbidden to break by superbly smooth enamels, teeth forbidden to decay by mys terious chemical formulas, all conceivable body odor, under no matter what contingency, prevented for twenty-four hours of every day, forever and forever and forever, children's bones knit strong by the foresight of vast bakeries, tobacco robbed of any harmful effects by the addition of mint, the removal of nicotine, the presence of filters and the length of the cigarette, tires which cannot betray you, automobiles which will make you feel proud, doors which cannot slam on those precious fingers or fingernails, diagrams illustrating-proving-how swiftly impertinent pain can be driven away, square-jawed youngsters dancing, other square-jawed youngsters, armed with guitars, or backed by bands, howling; all of this-and so much more!-punctuated by the roar of great automobiles, overtaking gangsters, the spatter of tommy-guns mowing them down, the rise of the organ as the Heroine braces herself to Tell All, the moving smile of the housewife who has just won a fortune in metal and crockery; news-news? fr om where?-dropping into this sea with the alertness and ir relevancy of pebbles, sex wearing an aspect so implacably dispiriting that even masturbation (by no means mutual) seems one of the possibilities that vanished in Eden, and 6 92 NOTHING PERSONAL 693 murder one's last, best hope-sex of an appalling coyness, of ten in the form of a prophylactic cigarette being extended by the virile male toward the aluminum and cellophane girl. They happily blow smoke into each other's face, jelly beans, brilliant with desire, grillwork gleaming; perhaps-poor, betrayed ex iles-they are trying to discover if, behind all that grillwork, all those barriers, either of them has a tongue. Subsequently, in the longer and less explicit commercials in which these images are encased, the male certainly doesn't seem to have a tongue-perhaps one may say that the eat's got it; father knows best, these days, only in politics, which is the only place we ever find him, and where he proves to be-alas!-absolutely indistinguishable fr om the American boy.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  All of this, needless to say, in color, on a screen a block wide, and in stereophonic sound-which last means that one is not allowed to listen to the music but is beaten over the head with it. The camera takes an interest in the proceedings which can best be described as discreet: trun dling lamely behind Diahann Carroll, for example, while she mauls someone's heroically patient infant and waits for her man to be lost at sea. This event, like everything else in the movie, is so tastelessly overdone, so heavily telegraphed rolling chords, dark sky, wind, ominous talk about hurri cane bells, etc.-that there is really nothing left for the actors to do. It is always necessary to suppose that the director knows more than his actors, knows, that is, how to get the best out of them, as individual performers and as an ensemble. This is a supposition which the facts do not always support. In the case of a white director called upon to direct a Negro cast, the supposition ceases-with very rare exceptions-to have any validity at all. The director cannot know anything about his company if he knows nothing about the life that produced them. We still live, alas, in a society mainly divided into black and white. Black people still do not, by and large, tell white people the truth and white people still do not want to hear it. By the time the cameras start rolling or rehearsals begin, 618 OTHER ESSAYS the director is entirely at the mercy of his ignorance and of whatever system of theories or evasions he has evolved to cm·er his ignorance. So is his company, which knows very well that, as he has no way of understanding the range of the Negro personality, he cannot possibly assess any given performer's potential. They know, in short, that in this limited sense, as in so many others, they are going to be ill-used and they resign them sciYes to it with as much sardonic good nature as they can muster. They are working, at least, and they will be seen; this part may lead to a better part or even better parts for others. So the disaster proceeds and the miracle is that even in so thoroughgoing a disaster as Pm;gy and Bess a couple of very etfectiYe moments are achieved. This is partly by virtue of the material. For we have not even mentioned the probable qual ity of the script on which the Negro performer will be working or the reasons that this script finds itself in production. I like Pm;gy and Bess but I do not think it is a great American opera. We do not have one yet. It is-or it was, until Mr. Preminger got his hands on it-an extraordinarily vivid, good natured, and sometimes moving show.

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

  AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xci. 1) The sin of not believing Him, notwithstanding His doctrine and His miracles. But why does He add, Which none other man did? Christ did no work greater than the raising of the dead, which we know the ancient Prophets did before Him. Is it that He did some things which no one else did? But others also did what neither He nor any one else did. True: yet none of the ancient prophets, that we read of, healed so many bodily defects, sicknesses, infirmities. For to say nothing of single cases, Mark says, that whithersoever He entered, into villages, or cities, or country, they laid the sick in the streets, and besought Him that they might touch if it were but the border of His garment: and as many as touched Him were made whole. (Mark 6:56) Such works as these no one else had done in them. In them, meaning, not amongst them, or before them, but within them. But even where particular works, like some of these, had been done before, whoever worked such did not really do them; for He did them through them; whereas He performs these miracles by His own power. For even if the Father or the Holy Spirit did them, yet it was none other than He; for the Three Persons are of one substance. For these benefits then they ought to have returned Him not hatred, but love. And this He reproaches them with; But now they have both seen and hated both Me and My Father. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. lxxvii. 1) And that the disciples may not say, Why then hast Thou brought us into such difficulties? Couldest not thou foresee the resistance and hatred we should meet with, He quotes the prophecy: But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law, They hated Me without a cause. AUGUSTINE. (xv. de Trin. c. xvii) Under the name of the Law, the whole of the Old Testament is included: and therefore our Lord says here, That is written in their law; the passage being in the Psalms. AUGUSTINE. (Tr. xci. 4) Their law, He says, not as made by them, but as given to them. A man hates without a cause, who seeks no advantage from his hatred. Thus the ungodly hate God; the righteous love Him, i. e. looking for no other good but Him: He is their all in all.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  There tallows a somewhat opaque episode, involving the french idea of a drunken, cowardly Southerner-an idea which is not absolutely inaccurate, bearing in mind that New Orleans is tound in the state of Louisiana, for very precise reasons, and leaving aside the Haitian adventure, and to go, tor the moment, no funhcr than that-from whom our hero, indisputably evolue, needs credentials for Trenton: a city to be found, he has been told, in the North. For he is going Nonh, he is going to "cross the line," and he is, in effect, black mailing the Southern drunkard into being his accomplice. There is a great deal of unsuspcnseful business with a loaded shotgun, but our hero gets the letter, throws the loaded shot gun toward the arms of his drunken fr iend, gets into his car, and drives otr (None of this paranoia is in Vi an's book.) Our hero takes what is, in effect, his letter of racial credit to an aging bookstore owner in Trenton, and so we meet the far fr om merry maidens of our hero's grim desire. Vian's book has a certain weary, misogynistic humor-the chicks fuck like rabbits, or minks, and our hero gets a certain charge, or arrives at the mercy of a nearly unbearable ecstasy, out of his private knowledge that they arc being fucked by a nigger: he is committing the crime for which his brother was murdered, he is fucking these cunts with his brother's prick. And he comes three times, so to speak, each time he comes, once fc >r his brother, and once for the "little death" of the orgasms to which he always brings the ladies, and, uncon trollably, tor the real death to which he is determined to bring them. This intersection, where life disputes with death, is very vivid in the book: and it does not, of course, exist in the film. CHAPTER TWO 50 9 In the book, one believes that the hero loved his brother, and to such a depth indeed that he is deliberately destroying his own sexuality-his hope of love-in order to keep faith with his destroyed brother: the mortification of the flesh. One may object that this is not exactly what Paul or Peter or The Bank of the Holy Ghost meant to say, but, incontestably, this is what has been accomplished: that the usc of one's own body in the act oflove is considered a crime against the Holy Ghost.

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

  But there was another industry in town—incarceration. The Florida Department of Corrections built the prison to house 1,600 people in the 1990s, when America was opening prisons at a pace never before seen in human history. Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States. When I arrived at Santa Rosa, I didn’t encounter any staff who were people of color, although 70 percent of the men incarcerated there were black or brown. This was a bit unusual; I frequently saw black and brown correctional officers at other prisons. I was subjected to an elaborate admission process and given a beeper to activate if I was ever threatened or distressed while inside the prison. I was escorted to a forty-by-forty-foot room where more than two dozen incarcerated men sat sadly while uniformed correctional staff buzzed in and out. There were three six-foot-tall metal cages in the corner that couldn’t have been more than four feet by four feet. In all my years of visiting prisons, I had never seen such small cages used to hold a prisoner inside a secure prison. I wondered what danger the caged men presented that they couldn’t sit with the other incarcerated men on the benches. Two young men stood in each of the first two cages. In the third cage, which was wedged into the corner, sat a small man in a wheelchair. His wheelchair faced the back of the cage, so he could not look out into the room. I couldn’t see his face, but I was certain it was Joe. A correctional officer was constantly walking into the room and calling out a name, prompting one of the men to get up from his bench and follow the officer down a hallway where he would meet with an assistant warden or whomever they were scheduled to see. Finally, the officer called out, “Joe Sullivan, legal visit.” I walked over to the man and said that I was the attorney for the legal visit.

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

  Inmates at some facilities would be chained to “hitching posts,” their arms fastened above their heads in a painful position where they’d be forced to stand for hours. The practice, which wasn’t declared unconstitutional until 2002, was one of many degrading and dangerous punishments imposed on incarcerated people. Terrible food and living conditions were widespread. The death of forty-two people at the end of the Attica standoff exposed the danger of prison abuse and inhumane conditions. The increased attention also led to several Supreme Court rulings that provided basic due process protections for imprisoned people. Wary of potential violence, several states implemented reforms to eliminate the most abusive practices. But a decade later, the rapidly growing prison population inevitably led to a deterioration in the conditions of confinement. We were getting scores of letters from prisoners who continued to complain about horrible conditions. Prisoners reported that they were still being beaten by correctional staff and subjected to humiliation in stockades and other degrading punishments. An alarming number of cases came to our office involving prisoners who had been found dead in their cells. I was working on several of these cases, including one in Gadsden, Alabama, where jail officials denied severely beating a thirty-nine- year-old black man after he was arrested for traffic violations. His family maintained that he was beaten by police and jail officials who then denied him his asthma inhaler and medication despite his begging for it. I met Lourida Ruffin after he was released and was immediately struck by what an affectionate father he was. At six feet tall and 250 pounds, he could seem a little intimidating, but as I spoke with him his small children joyfully jumped off and on his lap. He sadly recounted how people make assumptions about him but that he's teased more for being too sweet and gentle than being any kind of threat. Gadsden police had stopped Mr. Ruffin one night because they said his car was swerving. Police discovered that his license had expired a few weeks earlier, so he was taken into custody. When he arrived at the city jail badly bruised and bleeding, Mr. Ruffin told the other inmates that he had been beaten terribly and was desperately in need of his inhaler and asthma medication. When I started investigating the case, inmates at the jail told me they saw officers beating Mr. Ruffin before taking him to an isolation cell. I heard from other families about loved ones who had died or been killed at the jail. Despite the reforms of the 1970s and early 1980s, inmate death in jails and prisons was still a serious problem.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  This is not exactly the way blacks looked, of course, as they entered America, nor were they yet covered by European clothes. Blacks got here nearly as naked as the day they were born, and were sold that way, every inch of their anatomy exposed and examined, teeth to testicles, breast to bottom. That's how darkies were born: more to the point, here, it is certainly how mulattoes were born. For, the most striking thing about the merciless plot on which The Birth of a Nation depends is that, although the legend of the nigger controls it the way the day may be con trolled by threat of rain, there are really no niggers in it. The plot is entirely controlled by the image of the mulatto, and there are two of them, one male and one female. All of the energy of the film is siphoned off into these two dreadful and improbable creatures. It might have made sense-that is, might have made a story-if these two mulattoes had been related to each other, or to the renegade politician, whose wards they are: but, no, he seems to have dreamed them up (they are like creatures in a nightmare someone is having) and they are related to each other only by their envy of white people. The renegade politician, I should already have told you-but this is one of the difficulties of trying to follow a plot-is also the heroine's father. This fact brings about his belated enlightenment, the final victory of the Klan, the film's denouement, and a double wedding. I am leaving a great deal out, but, in any case, the renegade politician is brought brutally to his senses when his mulatto ward, now a rising congressman, so far forgets himself as to offer himself in marriage to the renegade politician's beautiful daughter, Miss Lillian Gish. The Klan rides out in fury, mak ing short work of the ruffian, and others like him. The niggers are last seen, heads averted and eyes down, returning to their THE DEVI L FIND S WO RK cabins-none of which have been burned, apparently, there being no point in burning empty cabins-and the South rises triumphantly to its feet. It is not clear what happens to the one presumably remain ing mulatto, the female. Neither of the two mulattoes had any sexual interest in the other; given what we sec of their charms, this is quite understandable. Both arc driven by a hideous lust for whites, she for the master, he for the maid: they arc, at least, thank heaven, heterosexual, due, probably, to their lack of imagination. Their lust for the whites, however, is of such a nature that it suffers from all the manifestations of hysterical hatred.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On the other hand, the movie cannot possibly avoid depending very heavily on a certain quaintness, a certain lack of inhibition taken to be typical of Negroes, and further, the exigencies of the story-to say nothing of the images, which we will discuss in a moment-make it necessary to watch this movie, holding in the mind three disparate ideas: ( 1) that this is an opera having nothing to do with the present day, hence, nothing, really, to do with Negroes; but (2 ) the greater pas sion, that winning warmth (of which the movie exhibits not a trace), so typical of Negroes makes Carmen an ideal vehicle for their graduation into An; and (3) these are exceptional Negroes, as American, that is, as you and me, interpreting ;8 NO TES OF A NATIVE SON lowe r-cla ss Negroes of whom they, also, arc very fond, an affection which is proven perhaps by the fact that everyone appears to undergo a tiny, strangling death before resolutely substituting "de" for "the." A movie is, lit erally, a series of images, and what one sees in a movie can really be taken, beyond its stammering or mis leading dialogue, as the key to what the movie is actually in \'oh·cd in saying. Carmen Jones is one of the first and most explic it-and far and away the most self -consci ous-w eddings of sex and color which Hol lywood has yet turned out. (It will most certainly not be the last .) From this point of view the color wheel in Carmen Jones is very important. Dorothy Dandridge-Carmen-is a sort of taflY-co lorcd girl, very ob \'iously and vividly dressed, but really in herself rather more sweet than vivid. One feels-perhaps one is meant to feel that here is a very nice girl making her way in movies by means of a bad-girl part; and the glow thus caused, especially since she is a colored girl, really must make up for the glow which is missing from the performance she is clearly working very hard at. Ha rry Bclaf ontc is just a little darker and just as blankly handsome and fares very badly opposite her in a really offensive version of an already unendurable role. Olga James is Micaela, here called Cindy Lou, a much paler girl than Miss Dandridge but also much plainer, who is compelled to go through the entire movie in a kind of tearful stoop.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I rolled over and sat up and spoke in a strange tone of voice which I seemed to have invented for the occasion. ‘Look, pal, I’d need more than poppers to take that thing.’ It was all very well to be violated as I had been last night by Abdul, but I did not like the idea of inanimate objects being forced up my delicate inner passages. He turned and walked across the room—angry, hurt, careless, I couldn’t tell—and threw the great plastic phallus into the bathroom. I imagined the maid finding it there when she came to tidy up and turn down the bedclothes. ‘Okay, so you don’t like me that much,’ he said, thickly from inside the leather. ‘I like you very much. It’s just the moving toyshop I can’t be doing with.’ And I decided I had better go, and reached for my jeans. ‘I could whip you,’ he suggested, ‘for what you did to my country in the war.’ He seemed to think this was a final expedient which might really appeal to me; and I had no doubt he could have provided a pretty fearsome lash from one of his many items of luggage. ‘I think that might be to take the sex and politics metaphor a bit too seriously, old chap,’ I said. And I could see the whole thing deteriorating into a scene from some poker-faced left-wing European film. When I was dressed and had my bag again slung over my shoulder Gabriel was wandering around the sitting-room, his huge erection barely flagging, but somehow no longer of interest to me. I stood and looked at him and he grasped and grunted and writhed out of his mask. His hair was moist and standing up, and his clear olive complexion was primed with pink—as it might have been if we had just simply made love. I went over to him and kissed him, but he closed his teeth against me, kept his hands at his sides. I left the room without saying goodbye. Well, it served me right, I thought, as I wandered with a vague sense of direction along uniform carpeted corridors—Phil’s terrain, where he did his job. All this had certainly got me in the mood and now I would be too late to catch him and the uncomplicated solace he could give. Surely hotels must be hotbeds of this kind of carry-on, easy encounters at the bar or unlocking the doors of adjacent rooms.

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

  Witnessing violence may have a particularly malignant effect on the emotional development of girls.5 In comparing the young men and women who witnessed violence within this group, I found the effects on women lasted longer and were still evident in their relationships in their thirties. This is very different from the young men who hit their girlfriends in late adolescence but who years later were not violent with their wives. Many of the daughters appeared to have internalized the father’s denigration of women and accepted the view that women are inferior, ugly, stupid, and deserving of suffering. These women were surprisingly similar in how they viewed their parents, themselves, and their own adult relationships. One after another they entered into exploitative relationships in which they supported the man emotionally and sometimes economically, in which they nursed him tenderly during periods of drunkenness, drug addiction, or depression, and in which they were hit and insulted for their pains. And then they went back. One of the most vivid and chilling images in this study is of a woman in her thirties who grew up in a family in which the father got drunk every weekend and hit the mother but did not hurt his children. I will always remember her standing with her three young children, planning her escape to her mother’s home while her husband who had been arrested for battering her was temporarily out of the way. She looked exactly like her mother had looked twenty-five years earlier when she was on the lam from her husband with her three children. She said to me, unforgettably, “Now for the first time I understand what happened to my mom. And I was so angry at her then.” There are numerous roots to domestic violence. In many families, the perpetrator suffers from paranoid jealousy. We have many Othellos in modern America. In others, violence is a brutal method of establishing and maintaining control. A common pattern in the marriages and divorces that I have seen is for a man to hit his wife while desperately needing her and despising her and himself at the same time. These dynamics are more visible during times of unemployment, when violence, alcoholism, and divorce typically rise. The man’s threatening stance and raised fists often reflect his own underlying insecurity and almost childish dependence on the woman to hold him together. Many a woman becomes trapped by the vain and foolish hope that she can rescue the man from himself and uncover the prince in the frog’s skin. Some women are able to escape this trap when they divorce. It may take them many years to extricate themselves from their rescue fantasy as they gradually and reluctantly give up the hope of changing the man. It often takes them years after divorce to regain their perspective and to overcome the stark fear and humiliation they lived with.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was bewildered to think anyone could watch this for pleasure, it seemed to mock any thought of sexual happiness. Then at last we were round the front, where the man was kneeling, the boy's limp cock in his mouth. He went at it and went at it; sometimes he took it in his hand and pistoned it into a semblance of life, but then it died again. We never saw the young man's face, only the strong, lean body; but he began to generate a vague sense of apology, his hands reluctantly caressed his fellator's thinning scalp, and lingered there long enough for us to see the skull charm of a ring that bit into his finger and the tattooed letters R, O, S, E. At the end the older man shot off up Rose's leg and you saw the milky drops hang and trickle among the thick hairs of his calf. Rose himself didn't come, and the camera drifted off in a cliche pan to distance that went out of the open window. It was night now, and for a few seconds we saw from above the shadow and flare of a city, the walkway lights of high-rise housing echoed further off by the ribbons of light on ships in dock, and between them a network of streets, pulsating and nameless. I felt the greatest reluctance to take my clothes off and hurried into bed in shirt and trousers. I pulled the blankets around me and when Matt got in, shivering and excited, I hugged him like an old wrestler, so that he could hardly breathe. By the time he had started snoring I was boiling hot and had to get out of bed to strip. I stood there wretchedly, eyes half-closed with fatigue, unbuttoning my shirt. As I fumbled with my jeans there was a clatter that made me jump and fall over, and a voice close behind me, intimate and unwelcome. "Hi, you've reached Chad Masters, I guess you've seen me around . . ." I strolled across the empty arena of the Grote Markt and stood to admire, or at least acknowledge, its weathered self-acclaim. I felt alone, like a survivor in a city visited by a curse—and nervous about how long I could hope to carry on myself, pitted and limping as I was. I turned up the collar of Cherif’s coat and raised my head to scan the belfry, which seemed to curve and topple against fast-moving cloud.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The lif e of Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poirier) is en dangered precisely to the extent that we are concerned about the salvation of the SherifFs soul. One ought, indeed, I sup pose, to be concerned about the soul of any descendant of The Birth of a Nation, and the Sheriff is certainly such a de scendant, as is the film itself . On the other hand, it is difficult to sustain such a concern when the concern is not reciprocal, and if this concern demands one's complicity in a lie: which state of affairs, having gone beyond progress, is sometimes called brotherhood, the achievement of which state of grace is exactly what In the Heat of the Night imagines itself to be about. The film is breathtaking, not to say vertiginous, in the speed with which it moves from one preposterous proposition to another. We are asked to believe that a grown black man, who knows the South, and who, being a policeman, must know something about his colleagues, both South and North, would elect to change trains in a Southern backwater at that hour of the early morning and sit alone in the waiting room; that the Sheriff imagines that he needs a confession from this black Northern vagrant, and so elects to converse with him before locking him up, turning him over to his deputies, and closing the case. (Of course, it is suggested, at that moment and quite helpl essly, the truth of the white and black male meeting living far beneath the moment of this manipulated scene-that the Sheritl is being something of a sadist, and is playing cat and mouse.) And the film betrays itself , in the early sequences, in quite a curious way. One might suppose, after all, since the film was made after the 1 964 Civil Rights Act, that the Sheritl might be concerned about the pressure which might be brought to bear by the Federal Government: but this possibility, astoundingly enough, docs not appear to enter CHAPTER TWO 517 his mind. He reacts to the fact that the black man makes more money than he does: which has the effect of eliciting our sym pathy for this doubly poor white man.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sherifT and the deputy, the landlord, the housewife, the t()ot ball player: in the eyes of some junkies, the eyes of some preachers, the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror. It is that moment when no other human being is real tor you, nor are you real tor yourself. This devil has no need of any dogma-though he can use them all-nor does he need any historical justification, history being so largely his invention. He docs not levitate beds, or t()ol around with little girls: JVe do. The mindless and hysterical banality of the evil presented in The Exorcist is the most terrifying thing about the film. The Americans should certainly know more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying, and any black man, and not only blacks-many, many others, including white chil dren-can call them on this lie; he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet. At the end of The Exorcist, the demon-racked little girl murderess kisses the Holy Father, and she remembers nothing: she is departing 572 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK with her mother, who will, presumably, soon make another film. The grapes of wrath are stored in the cotton fields and migrant shacks and ghettoes of this nation, and in the schools and prisons, and in the eyes and hearts and perceptions of the wretched everywhere, and in the ruined earth ofV ietnam, and in the orphans and the widows, and in the old men, seeing visions, and in the young men, dreaming dreams: these have already kissed the bloody cross and will not bow down before it again: and have tl xgotten nothing. St. Paul de Vence July 29, 1975 OT HER ESSAYS Contents Smaller Than Life (R eview: There Was Once a Sla ve: The Heroic Story of Frederick Dozt._qlass, by Shirley Graham; July 19, 1947) . 577 History as Nightmare (R eview: Lonc(y Cmsndc, by Chester Himes; October 25, 1947) 579 The Image of the Negro (R eview: Albert Sea rs, by Millen Brand; Kingsblood Royal, by Sinclair Lewis; The Pat!J of Thunder, by Peter Abrahams; God is for White Follls, by Will Thomas; QJttJ lity, by Cid Ricketts Sumner; April 1948 ) . 582 Lockridge: 'The American Myth' (R eview: Rai mrce County, by Ross Lockridge, Jr.; April 10, 1948 ) .

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I rolled over and sat up and spoke in a strange tone of voice which I seemed to have invented for the occasion. ‘Look, pal, I’d need more than poppers to take that thing.’ It was all very well to be violated as I had been last night by Abdul, but I did not like the idea of inanimate objects being forced up my delicate inner passages. He turned and walked across the room—angry, hurt, careless, I couldn’t tell—and threw the great plastic phallus into the bathroom. I imagined the maid finding it there when she came to tidy up and turn down the bedclothes. ‘Okay, so you don’t like me that much,’ he said, thickly from inside the leather. ‘I like you very much. It’s just the moving toyshop I can’t be doing with.’ And I decided I had better go, and reached for my jeans. ‘I could whip you,’ he suggested, ‘for what you did to my country in the war.’ He seemed to think this was a final expedient which might really appeal to me; and I had no doubt he could have provided a pretty fearsome lash from one of his many items of luggage. ‘I think that might be to take the sex and politics metaphor a bit too seriously, old chap,’ I said. And I could see the whole thing deteriorating into a scene from some poker-faced left-wing European film. When I was dressed and had my bag again slung over my shoulder Gabriel was wandering around the sitting-room, his huge erection barely flagging, but somehow no longer of interest to me. I stood and looked at him and he grasped and grunted and writhed out of his mask. His hair was moist and standing up, and his clear olive complexion was primed with pink—as it might have been if we had just simply made love. I went over to him and kissed him, but he closed his teeth against me, kept his hands at his sides. I left the room without saying goodbye. Well, it served me right, I thought, as I wandered with a vague sense of direction along uniform carpeted corridors—Phil’s terrain, where he did his job. All this had certainly got me in the mood and now I would be too late to catch him and the uncomplicated solace he could give. Surely hotels must be hotbeds of this kind of carry-on, easy encounters at the bar or unlocking the doors of adjacent rooms. My little Philanderer could make a fortune out of escorting truly glamorous men—and not all of them would turn out to be as weird as the eye-catching Gabriel. It was quite likely, wasn’t it, that Phil had already caught Gabriel’s eye?