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 White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  From Buffalo to Detroit, and all the way out to Puget Sound, Washington, south to California, and back east by way of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida, she described the people she saw with unsparing detail. Her most disturbing encounters occurred, not surprisingly, in the Deep South. She shone a light on the rows of tents, trailers, and run-down shacks in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama. She bemoaned the “neglected rural areas,” and called the white trash who migrated from there pitiful, ragged, illiterate, and undernourished. They had refused to move into respectable housing projects out of fear of the law—but mostly, Meyer believed, because they feared the “restraint of being members of a decent community.” Overwhelmed by the condition of their lives, by their physical and mental health and lack of prospects, she asked incredulously, “Is this America?” 28 It was the shipyards that brought workers to Pascagoula. Nearly five thousand new workers and their families crowded the small town on the Gulf of Mexico, quickly unleashing a panic among local residents. Many of the workers were backwoods people, and their trailers were quite unsanitary. Meyer met a fifty-one-year-old man who looked eighty—a clear throwback to the 1840s, when clay-eaters were identified in the same way: old before their time. Townspeople denounced them as “vermin.” The manager of the shipyards told the weary female reporter that unless these people were lifted up, “they will pull the rest of the Nation down.” On to Mobile, where she learned that the illegitimacy rate was high and getting higher, and that a black-market trade in babies existed. By the time she reached Florida, she found the poor whites to be handsome on approach, but strange-looking as soon as they smiled and exposed sets of decaying teeth. Still, they were less repulsive to her than “the subnormal swamp and mountain folk” she had already encountered in Mississippi and Alabama. 29 It was the southern war camps that set the tone, but after the war “trailer trash” became a generic term, no longer regionally specific. They appeared on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and Flint, Michigan, as well as in North Carolina and parts of the upper South. In far-off Arizona, trailer trash doubled as “squatters,” photographed in weedy areas and with outhouses in their front yards. To be displaced and poor was to be white trash. 30 Trailer trash as squatters in Arizona (1950).

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As the time drew on to the day when the boat was to start, Sophy grew thoughtful. I got her a pretty corn-colored dress that set off her beauty as golden sunlight a lovely woodland, and when she thanked and hugged me, I wanted to put my hand up her clothes for she had made a mischievous, naughty remark that amused me and reminded me we had driven all the previous day and I had not had her. To my surprise she stopped me: “I’ve not washed since we came in”, she explained. “Do you wash so often?” “Shuah,” she replied, fixing me. “Why?” I asked, searching her regard. “Because I’m afraid of nigger-smell,” she flung out passionately— “What nonsense!” I exclaimed. “’Tain’t either”, she contradicted me angrily, “My mother took me once to negro-church and I near choked: I never went again; I just couldn’t: when they get hot, they stink—pah!” and she shook her head and made a face in utter disgust and contempt. “That’s why you goin’ to leave me”, she added after a long pause, with tears in her voice; “if it wasn’t for that damned nigger blood in me, I’d never leave you: I’d just go on with you as servant or anything: ah God, how I love you and how lonely this Topsy’ll be!” and the tears ran down her quivering face. “If I were only all white or all black,” she sobbed: “I’m so unhappy!” My heart bled for her. If it had not been for the memory of Smith’s disdain, I would have given in and taken her with me. As it was, I could only do my best to console her by saying: “a couple of years, Sophy, and I’ll return; they’ll pass quickly: I’ll write you often, dear!” But Sophy knew better and when the last night came, she surpassed herself. It was warm and we went early to bed: “it’s my night!” she said: “you just let me show you, you dear! I don’t want you to go after any whitish girl in those Islands till you get to China and you won’t go with those yellow, slit-eyed girls—that’s why I love you so, because you keep yourself for those you like:—but you’re naughty to like so many—ma man!” and she kissed me with passion: she let me have her almost without response, but after the first orgasm she gripped my sex and milked me, and afterwards mounting me made me thrill again and again till I was speechless and like children we fell asleep in each other’s arms, weeping for the parting on the morrow.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I walk down the withering limbs of my last discarded house and there is nothing worth salvage left in this city but the faint reedy voices like echoes of once beautiful children. The American Cancer Society Or There Is More Than One Way To Skin A Coon Of all the ways in which this country Prints its death upon me Selling me cigarettes is one of the most certain. Yet every day I watch my son digging ConEdison GeneralMotors GarbageDisposal Out of his nose as he watches a 3 second spot On How To Stop Smoking And it makes me sick to my stomach. For it is not by cigarettes That you intend to destroy my children. Not even by the cold white light of moon-walks While half the boys I knew Are doomed to quicker trips by a different capsule; No, the american cancer destroys By seductive and reluctant admission For instance Black women no longer give birth through their ears And therefore must have A Monthly Need For Iron: For instance Our Pearly teeth are not racially insured And therefore must be Gleemed For Fewer Cavities: For instance Even though all astronauts are white Perhaps Black People can develop Some of those human attributes Requiring Dried dog food frozen coffee instant oatmeal Depilatories deodorants detergents And other assorted plastic. And this is the surest sign I know That the american cancer society is dying— It has started to dump its symbols onto Black People Convincing proof that those symbols are now useless And far more lethal than emphysema. A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem Or I’m A Stranger Here Myself When Does The Next Swan Leave How is the word made flesh made steel made shit by ramming it into No Exit like a homemade bomb until it explodes smearing itself made real against our already filthy windows or by flushing it out in a verbal fountain? Meanwhile the editorial They— who are no less powerful— prepare to smother the actual Us with a processed flow of all our shit non-verbal.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  208 James Baldwin this. Jacques, whowas in constant touch with Giovanni's lawyer and in constant touch with me, had seen Giovannionce. He told me what I knewalready,thatthere wasnothing I,or anyone,coulddofor Giovannianymore. Perhapshe wanted to die. He pleaded guilty, with robbery as the motive.The circumstances under whichGuillaumehadfiredhim received great play inthepress. And fromthepress one received theimpressionthat Guillaumehad been agood-hearted, a perhaps somewhater- ratic philanthropist whohadhad thebadjudg- mentto befriend the hardened andungrateful adventurer, Giovanni.Thenthe case drifted downward from the headlines. Giovanni was taken toprison toawaittrial. And Hella and I camehere. I mayhave thought —IamsureI thoughtinthebegin- ning—that,thoughI could do nothing for Gio- vanni, Imight,perhaps, be able to dosome- thing for Hella.Imust have hopedthat there wouldbe somethingHellacoulddo forme.And thismight havebeenpossibleifthe days had not dragged by, for me, like daysin prison. I could notgetGiovannioutofmymind,Iwas atthemercy of thebulletinswhich sporadically arrivedfrom Jacques. Allthat I rememberof theautumn is waitingfor Giovannito cometo trial. Then,atlast,hecametotrial, was found guilty, andplacedundersentence of death. All winterlongIcountedthedays. Andthenight- mareof thishousebegan. GIOVANNI'SROOM 209 Much has been written oflove turning to hatred,ofthe heartgrowing coldwith thedeath of love.Itisa remarkableprocess.It isfarmore terrible thananythingI haveeverreadaboutit, more terrible thananything I will everbe able to say. I don'tknow,now, when I first looked at Hella andfound herstale, found herbody unin- teresting,her presencegrating.It seemedto hap- pen all at once—Isuppose that only means that it hadbeenhappening fora long time.I trace it to somethingasfleeting as thetip of her breast lightly touchingmy forearmasshe leaned over meto servemysupper. I felt myfleshrecoil. Her underclothes,drying in the bathroom, whichI hadoftenthoughtof as smeUingeven ratherimprobably sweetand asbeingwashed muchtoo often, nowbeganto seemunaesthetic andunclean. A body which had to becovered withsuchcrazy,catty-cornered bitsofstuff began toseemgrotesque. Isometimeswatched her naked bodymove and wishedthat itwere harderandfirmer, Iwasfantasticallyintimi- dated by her breasts, and whenIentered her I began to feel that Iwouldneverget outaUve. Allthathad once dehghted meseemed tohave turnedsour on my stomach. I think —I think thatI have neverbeen more frightened inmylife.When my fingers began,involuntarily, to loosetheir hold on HeUa,I reaUzed that Iwas dangling from ahigh place and thatIhadbeenclinging to her formy

• From Another Country (1962)

  Stupidly, he picked up the glass, afraid that she would cut herself. She was kneeling in the spilt whiskey, which had stained the edges of her skirt. He dropped the broken glass in the brown paper bag they used for garbage. He was afraid to go near her, he was afraid to touch her, it was almost as though she had told him that she had been infected with the plague. His arms trembled with his revulsion, and every act of the body seemed unimaginably vile. And yet, at the same time, as he stood helpless and stupid in the kitchen which had abruptly become immortal, or which, in any case, would surely live as long as he lived, and follow him everywhere, his heart began to beat with a newer, stonier anguish, which destroyed the distance called pity and placed him, very nearly, in her body, beside that table, on the dirty floor. The single yellow light beat terribly down on them both. He went to her, resigned and tender and helpless, her sobs seeming to make his belly sore. And, nevertheless, for a moment, he could not touch her, he did not know how. He thought, unwillingly, of all the whores, black whores, with whom he had coupled, and what he had hoped for from them, and he was gripped in a kind of retrospective nausea. What would they see when they looked into each other’s faces again? “Come on, Ida,” he whispered, “come on, Ida. Get up,” and at last he touched her shoulders, trying to force her to rise. She tried to check her sobs, she put both hands on the table. “I’m all right,” she murmured, “give me a handkerchief.” He knelt beside her and thrust his handkerchief, warm and wadded, but fairly clean, into her hand. She blew her nose. He kept his arm around her shoulder. “Stand up,” he said. “Go wash your face. Would you like some coffee?”

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

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Or, He means that the Jews whenever they were to enter the temple or to offer sacrifice, or on any festivals, used to wash themselves, their clothes, and their vessels, but none cleansed himself from his sins; but God neither commends bodily cleanliness, nor condemns the contrary. But suppose foulness of person or of vessels were offensive to God, which must become foul by being used, how much more does He not abhor foulness of conscience, which we may, if we will, keep ever pure? HILARY. He therefore is reproving those who, pursuing an ostentation of useless scrupulosity, neglected the discharge of useful morality. For it is the inside of the cup that is used; if that be foul, what profit is it to cleanse the outside? And therefore what is needed is purity of the inner conscience, that those things which are of the body may be clean without. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. This He speaks not of the cup and platter of sense, but of that of the understanding, which may be pure before God, though it have never touched water; but if it have sinned, then though the water of the whole ocean and of all rivers have washed it, it is foul and guilty before God. CHRYSOSTOM. Note, that speaking of tithes He said, These things ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone: for tithes are a kind of alms, and what wrong is it to give alms? Yet said He it not to enforce a legal superstition. But here, discoursing of things clean and unclean, He does not add this, but distinguishes and shews that external purity of necessity follows internal; the outside of the cup and platter signifying the body, the inside the soul. ORIGEN. This discourse instructs us that we should hasten to become righteous, not to seem so. For whoso seeks to be thought so, cleanses the outside, and has care of the things that are seen, but neglects the heart and conscience. But he who seeks to cleanse that which is within, that is, the thoughts, makes by that means the things without clean also. All professors of false doctrine are cups cleansed on the outside, because of that show of religion which they affect, but within they are full of extortion and guile, hurrying men into error. The cup is a vessel for liquids, the platter for meat. Every discourse then of which we spiritually drink, and all speech by which we are fed, are vessels for meat and drink. They who study to set forth well wrought discourse rather than such as is full of healthful meaning, are cups cleansed without; but within full of the defilement of vanity. Also the letter of the Law and the Prophets is a cup of spiritual drink, and a platter of necessary food. The Scribes and Pharisees seek to make plain the outward sense; Christ’s disciples labour to exhibit the spiritual sense.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Goddard’s description of the female moron as one lacking forethought, vitality, or any sense of shame perfectly replicated Reconstruction writers’ portrayal of white trash. Davenport felt the best policy was to quarantine dangerous women during their fertile years. How this policy prescription led to sterilization is rather more calculated: interested politicians and eager reformers concluded that it was cheaper to operate on women than to house them in asylums for decades. Southern eugenicists in particular argued that sterilization helped the economy by sending poor women back into the population safely neutered but still able to work at menial jobs. 60 World War I fueled the eugenics campaign. First of all, the army refused to issue soldiers prophylactics. The top brass insisted that sexual control required a degree of internal discipline, which no army program would effectively inculcate. The army, along with local antivice groups, rounded up some thirty thousand prostitutes and placed as many as possible in detention centers and jails where they were kept out of the reach of soldiers. Thus the federal government backed a policy of sexual segregation of tainted women. At the same time, advocates for the draft argued that a volunteer force would be both unfair and uneugenic. Senator John Sharp of Mississippi insisted that without a draft only the “best blood” would go to the front, leaving behind those of an “inferior mold” to “beget the next race.” 61 The war advanced the importance of intelligence testing. Goddard had created the “moron” classification by using the Binet-Simon test, which was succeeded by the IQ (intelligence quotient) scale promoted by Stanford professor Lewis Terman and then used by the U.S. Army. The army’s findings only served to confirm a long-held, unpropitious view of the South, since both poor white and black recruits from southern states had the lowest IQ scores. Overall, the study found that the mean intelligence of the soldier registered at the moron level—the equivalent of a “normal” thirteen-year-old boy. Given the results, observers wondered if poor white men were dragging down the rest of the nation. 62 The lack of public education funding in the South made the army’s intelligence test results inevitable. The gap in education levels matched what had existed between the North and South before the Civil War. Many of the men who took the test had never used a pencil before. Southern white men exhibited stunted bodies—army medical examiners found them to be smaller, weaker, and less physically fit. National campaigns to fight hookworm and pellagra (both associated with clay-eating and identified as white trash diseases) only reinforced this portrait. Beginning in 1909, the New York–based Rockefeller Institute poured massive amounts of money into a philanthropic program aimed at eliminating hookworm, while the U.S. Public Health Service tackled pellagra.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNI'S ROOM 141 has to make much noise or have some very pretty boy or get drunk or have a fight orlook at his dirty pictures/ He paused andstood up and began walkingup and down again. 1 do not know what happened to him today,but when hecame in he tried at first to be very business-Uke — he was trying to find fault with my work. But therewas nothing wrong andhe went upstairs. Then, by and by, hecalled me. I hate going up to that little pied-d-terre hehas up there over the bar, italways meansa scene. ButIhadtogo and Ifound himin his dressing gown, coveredwith perfume.I donot know why,but the momentIsaw himhkethat, I began to be angry. He lookedatmeas though heweresome fabulouscoquette—and he is ugly, ugly, hehas a body just likesourmilk! — andthenhe asked me how you were. I was a little astonished, forhe nevermentionsyou. I saidyouwere fine. He asked meif westilllived together. Ithink perhaps I shouldhave lied to himbut Idid not see any reason tohe to such a disgusting oldfairy, soIsaid, Biensur. Iwas trying tobe calm. Then he asked me terrible questions and I began to get sick watching him andlistening to him. Ithought it was best tobe very quick with him and Isaid that such ques- tions were not asked, even by apriest or a doctor, and I said he should be ashamed. Maybe hehad been waiting forme to say something like that, forthen he became angry and he re- minded me that he had taken me out of the 142 James Baldwin streets, et ila fait cecietil a fait cela, every- thingfor mebecause he thought I was adorable, yarcequ'ilrrCadorait — andonand on and that I had no gratitude and nodecency. Imaybe handled itall verybadly,Iknow how I would have doneitevenafewmonths ago, I would havemade himscream,I would have made him kiss my feet, jetejure! —but Idid not want to dothat,I really did notwanttobe dirty with him. I tried tobe serious. I toldhim that Ihad never told him anyliesand Ihadalways said that I didnotwantto belovers withhim — and—he hadgiven me thejoball the same. I said I worked very hard and was very honest withhimandthat it wasnotmyfault if— if— if I didnot feelfor him as hefeltfor me. Then he remindedme that once —onetime — and I did notwanttosay yes,butI wasweakfrom hungerandhad had troublenot to vomit. I was stilltryingtobecalm and trying to handle it right. So I said, Maisa cemoment Id je n'avais pas uncopain. I amnotalone anymore, jesuisavecungars maintenant I thought he would understandthat, heisvery fondof ro- mance and the dreamof fidelity. Butnot this time.He laughedand said a few moreawful thingsaboutyou, and hesaid thatyou were just an Americanboy, after all, doing things inFrance which you would not daretodo at home,and that you would leave me very soon. Then, at last,I got angry andI saidthat he did not paymea salary for listening to slander and

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  There was another side to Corinth. It had a reputation for commercial prosperity, but it was also a byword for evil living. The very word korinthiazesthai, to live like a Corinthian, had become a part of the Greek language, and meant to live with drunken and immoral debauchery. The word also entered the English language, and, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, in Regency times, a Corinthian was one of the wealthy young men who indulged in reckless and riotous living. Aelian, the third-century Greek writer, tells us that if ever a Corinthian was shown on the stage in a Greek play, he was shown drunk. The very name Corinth was synonymous with debauchery; and there was one source of evil in the city which was known all over the civilized world. Above the isthmus towered the hill of the Acropolis, and on it stood the great temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. To that temple, there were attached i,ooo priestesses who were sacred prostitutes, and in the evenings they came down from the Acropolis and plied their trade on the streets of Corinth. Eventually, it became the subject of a Greek proverb: `It is not every man who can afford a journey to Corinth.' In addition to these cruder sins, there flourished far more subtle and little-known vices which had come in with the traders and the sailors from the ends of the earth, until Corinth became a synonym not only for wealth, luxury, drunkenness and debauchery, but also for filth. The History of Corinth The history of Corinth falls into two parts. It was a very ancient city. Thucydides, the Greek historian, claims that it was in Corinth that the first triremes, the Greek battleships, were built. Legend has it that it was in Corinth that they built the Argo, the ship in which Jason sailed the seas, searching for the golden fleece. But, in 146 BC, disaster befell the city. The Romans were engaged in conquering the world. When they sought to bring down Greece, Corinth was the leader of the opposition. But the Greeks could not stand against the disciplined Romans, and in 146 Bc Lucius Mummius, the Roman general, captured Corinth and left it a desolate heap of ruins. But any place with the geographical situation of Corinth could not remain in that devastated condition. Almost exactly Ioo years later, in 46 BC, Julius Caesar rebuilt the city, and Corinth arose from the ruins. Now Corinth became a Roman colony. More, it became a capital city, the metropolis of the Roman province of Achaea, which included practically all Greece.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  As it so happened, I had gone to the saloon with him on his promise that he would only drink one glass, and though the glass would be full of forty-rod whisky, I knew it would have only a passing effect on Charlie’s superb strength. But it excited him enough to make him call up all the girls for a drink: they all streamed laughing to the bar, all save one. Naturally Charlie went after her and found a very pretty blond girl, who had a strain of Indian blood in her, it was said. At first she didn’t yield to Charlie’s invitation, so he turned away angrily, saying: “You don’t want to drink probably because you want to cure yourself or because you’re ugly where women are usually beautiful.” Answering the challenge the girl sprang to her feet, tore off her jacket and in a moment was naked to her boots and stockings. “Am I ugly?” she cried, pushing out her breasts, “or do I look ill, you fool!” and whirled around to give us the back view! She certainly had a lovely figure with fair youthful breasts and peculiarly full bottom and looked the picture of health. The full cheeks of her behind excited me intensely, I didn’t know why: therefore, it didn’t surprise me when Charlie, with a half-articulate shout of admiration, picked her up bodily in his arms and carried her out of the room. When I remonstrated with him afterwards, he told me he had a sure way of knowing whether the girl, Sue, was diseased or not. I contradicted him and found that this was his infallible test: as soon as he was alone with a girl, he pulled out ten or twenty dollars, as the case might be, and told her to keep the money. “I’ll not give you more in any case”, he would add: “now tell me, dear, if you are ill and we’ll have a last drink and then I’ll go. If she’s ill, she’s sure to tell you—see!” and he laughed triumphantly. “Suppose she doesn’t know she’s ill?” I asked: but he replied: “they always know and they’ll tell the truth when their greed is not against you.” For some time it looked as if Charlie had enjoyed his Beauty without any evil consequences, but a month or so later he noticed a lump in his right groin and soon afterwards a syphilitic sore showed itself just under the head of his penis. We had already started northwards, but I had to tell Charlie the plain truth. “Then it’s serious”, he cried in astonishment, and I replied. “I’m afraid so, but not if you take it in time and go under a rigorous regimen.” Charlie did everything he was told to do and always bragged that gonorrhea was much worse, as it is certainly more painful, than syphilis; but the disease in time had its revenge.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  They talked of `Christ within them', took no notice of the Church or its ministry, and belittled Scripture. One of them, Jacob Bottomley, in a book entitled The Light and Dark Sides of God, wrote: `It is not safe to go to the Bible to see what others have spoken and written of the mind of God as to see what God speaks within me, and to follow the doctrine and leading of it in me.' When the Quaker George Fox rebuked them for their lewd practices, they answered: `We are God.' This may sound very fine; but, as John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was to say, it most often resulted in `a gospel of the flesh'. It was their argument that `swearing, adultery, drunkenness and theft are not sinful unless the person guilty of them apprehends them to be so'. When Fox was a prisoner at Charing Cross, they came to see him and greatly offended him by calling for drink and tobacco. They swore terribly and, when Fox rebuked them, justified themselves by saying that Scripture tells us that Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, the priests and the angel all swore. To this, Fox replied that the one who was before Abraham commanded: `Swear not at all.' The seventeenthcentury Puritan, Richard Baxter, said of them: `They conjoined a cursed doctrine of libertinism, which brought them to all abominable filthiness of life; they taught ... that God regardeth not the actions of the outward man, but of the heart; and that to the pure all things are pure (even things forbidden) and so, as allowed by God, they spoke most hideous words of blasphemy, and many of them committed whoredoms commonly ... The horrid villainies of this sect did speedily extinguish it.' Doubtless, many of the Ranters were insane; doubtless, some of them were pernicious and deliberate pleasure-seekers; but doubtless, too, some of them were earnest but misguided people who had misunderstood the meaning of grace and freedom from the law. Later, John Wesley was to have trouble with the antinomians. He talks of them preaching a gospel of flesh and blood. At Jenninghall, he says that `the antinomians had laboured hard in the Devil's service'. At Birmingham, he says that `the fierce, unclean, brutish, blasphemous antinomians' had utterly destroyed the spiritual life of the congregation. He tells of a certain Roger Ball who worked his way into the life of the congregation at Dublin. At first, he seemed to be so spiritually minded that the congregation welcomed him as being well suited for the service and ministry of the Church. He showed himself in time to be `full of guile and of the most abominable errors, one of which was that a believer had a right to all women'. He would not take communion, for under grace a man must `touch not, taste not, handle not'. He would not preach, and abandoned the church services because, he said, `The dear Lamb is the only preacher.'

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Vicious (mean) whites, like Hundley’s southern bullies, were licentious beings, wallowing in a continual drunken stupor while dreaming of possessing a slave to order around. Beneath the vicious were the white trash who lived as scared animals, objects of disgust. But the most interesting class in Stowe’s book were her half-breeds. The character Miss Sue was one of the Virginia Peytons (“good blood”), whose family “degenerated” as a consequence of losing its wealth. Impetuously, Sue married John Cripps, a poor white, but thanks to pedigree, their children could be saved: they were “pretty” and wore their biological inheritance on their faces, with “none of the pronunciation or manners of wild white children.” After Sue’s death, they were further improved in New England, attending the best schools. A healthy combination of circumstances enabled them to reassert their mother’s superior class lineage. 44 In popular depictions, poor white trash were, above all, “curious” folks whose habits were as “queer” as “any description of Chinese or Indians.” Or, as a New Hampshire schoolteacher observed of clay-eaters in Georgia, the children were prematurely aged. Even at ten years old, “their countenances are stupid and heavy and they often become dropsical and loathsome to sight.” Nothing more dramatically signified a dying breed than the decrepitude of wrinkled and withered children. 45 Commentators repeatedly emphasized the odd skin color: “unnatural complexions” of a “ghastly yellowish white,” or as Hundley observed, skin the color of “yellow parchment.” There were “cotton-headed or flaxen-headed” children, whose unhealthy whiteness resembled the albino. There were poor white, dirt-eating urchins who bore a “cadaverous, bloodless look”; their hair, identified as “crops,” took on the appearance of the soil-depleting cotton that surrounded them. The women were a “wretched specimen of maternity” rather than ideal breeders. Nor did they care properly for their offspring. The “tallow- faced gentry,” as one Kansas newspaper disapprovingly labeled them, routinely stuffed their infants’ mouths with clay. The words describing poor white trash had not been quite so pronounced since the seventeenth century. 46 “Like breeds like” continued to serve as the guiding principle etched into these damning portraits. Diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, of a wealthy South Carolina family, offered one of the most repellent of midcentury snapshots. A woman from her neighborhood, one Milly Trimlin, was thought a witch by poor whites. “Superstitious hordes” had her bones dug up and removed from consecrated ground three times and scattered elsewhere. Despised by her own kind and living off charity, she was, Chesnut wrote, a “perfect specimen of the Sandhill tacky race.” (Tacky was a degenerate breed of horse that lived in the Carolina marshlands.) Trimlin looked the part: “Her skin was yellow and leathery, even the whites of her eyes were bilious in color. She was stumpy, strong, and lean, hard-featured, horny-fisted.”

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The like often happens, ladies, to those who take pleasure in such tricks. If the gentleman had not wanted to eat at another's expense, he would not have had such a nasty draught at his own. It is true that my story is not very decorous, but you gave me permission to speak the truth. I have done so, to show that when a deceiver is deceived no one is sorry for it. " It is commonly said that words do not stink," said Hircan ; "but those who utter them cannct help smell- ing of them." " It is true," said Oisille, " that words of this sort do not stink; but there are others called dirty, which have such a bad odour that the soul suffers from them more than the body would suffer from smelling a sugar-loaf like that you have spoken of." "Do tell me, pray," rejoined Hircan, "what words you know so dirty that they make a woman of honour suffer both in body and soul." " It would be a fine thing," replied Oisille, " if I were to say to you words which I would not advise any woman to say." " I imderstand now what those words are," said Saf- Sixth Jay ] QUEEN OF NA VARRE. ^^35 fredent. " Women like to appear demure, and do not commonly use such language. But I should like to ask those present why they laugh so readily when they are uttered before them, since they will not themselves utter them. I cannot understand their laughing at a thing which is so offensive to them." " It is not at those pretty words we laugh/' said Par- lamente, " but by reason of the natural propensity every- one feels to laugh either when we see some one fall, or when we hear something said out of place, as it often happens to the b&st speakers to say one thing instead of another. But when men talk filth intentionally, and with premeditation, I know no honourable woman but feels intense aversion for such people, and, far from lis- tening to them, shuns their society." " It is true," said Geburon, " that I have seen women cross themselves on hearing that sort of words which seemed more disgusting the more they were repeated." " But," said Simontault, " how often have they put on their masks to laugh behind them as heartily as they pre- tended to be vexed } " " Even that were better than to show that one took pleasure in such language," said Parlamente. " So, then," remarked Dagoucin, " you praise hypoc- risy ill ladies as much as virtue .-•" " Virtue would be much better," replied Longarine ; " but when it is v/anting we must have recourse to hy- pocrisy, as we use high-heeled shoes to hide our little- ness. If we can hide our defects, even that is no little advantage."

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Now and then a recognized patch of historical background aids local identification—and substitutes other bonds for those a personal vision suggests. Our child must have been almost three on that breezy day in Berlin (where, of course, no one could escape familiarity with the ubiquitous picture of the Führer) when we stood, he and I, before a bed of pallid pansies, each of their upturned faces showing a dark mustache-like smudge, and had great fun, at my rather silly prompting, commenting on their resemblance to a crowd of bobbing little Hitlers. Likewise, I can name a blooming garden in Paris as the place where I noticed, in 1938 or 1939, a quiet girl of ten or so, with a deadpan white face, looking, in her dark, shabby, unseasonable clothes, as if she had escaped from an orphanage (congruously, I was granted a later glimpse of her being swept away by two flowing nuns), who had deftly tied a live butterfly to a thread and was promenading the pretty, weakly fluttering, slightly crippled insect on that elfish leash (the by-product, perhaps, of a good deal of dainty needlework in that orphanage). You have often accused me of unnecessary callousness in my matter-of-fact entomological investigations on our trips to the Pyrenees or the Alps; so, if I diverted our child’s attention from that would-be Titania, it was not because I pitied her Red Admirable (Admiral, in vulgar parlance) but because there was some vaguely repulsive symbolism about her sullen sport. I may have been reminded, in fact, of the simple, old-fashioned trick a French policeman had—and no doubt still has—when leading a florid-nosed workman, a Sunday rowdy, away to jail, of turning him into a singularly docile and even alacritous satellite by catching a kind of small fishhook in the man’s uncared-for but sensitive and responsive flesh. You and I did our best to encompass with vigilant tenderness the trustful tenderness of our child but were inevitably confronted by the fact that the filth left by hoodlums in a sandbox on a playground was the least serious of possible offenses, and that the horrors which former generations had mentally dismissed as anachronisms or things occurring only in remote khanates and mandarinates, were all around us.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Somehow, during my secluded years in Germany, I never came across those gentle musicians of yore who, in Turgenev’s novels, played their rhapsodies far into the summer night; or those happy old hunters with their captures pinned to the crown of their hats, of whom the Age of Reason made such fun: La Bruyère’s gentleman who sheds tears over a parasitized caterpillar, Gay’s “philosophers more grave than wise” who, if you please, “hunt science down in butterflies,” and, less insultingly, Pope’s “curious Germans,” who “hold so rare” those “insects fair”; or simply the so-called wholesome and kindly folks that during the last war homesick soldiers from the Middle West seem to have preferred so much to the cagey French farmer and to brisk Madelon II. On the contrary, the most vivid figure I find when sorting out in memory the meager stack of my non-Russian and non-Jewish acquaintances in the years between the two wars is the image of a young German university student, well-bred, quiet, bespectacled, whose hobby was capital punishment. At our second meeting he showed me a collection of photographs among which was a purchased series (“Ein bischen retouchiert,” he said wrinkling his freckled nose) that depicted the successive stages of a routine execution in China; he commented, very expertly, on the splendor of the lethal sword and on the spirit of perfect cooperation between headsman and victim, which culminated in a veritable geyser of mist-gray blood spouting from the very clearly photographed neck of the decapitated party. Being pretty well off, this young collector could afford to travel, and travel he did, in between the humanities he studied for his Ph.D. He complained, however, of continuous ill luck and added that if he did not see something really good soon, he might not stand the strain. He had attended a few passable hangings in the Balkans and a well-advertised, although rather bleak and mechanical guillotinade (he liked to use what he thought was colloquial French) on the Boulevard Arago in Paris; but somehow he never was sufficiently close to observe everything in detail, and the highly expensive teeny-weeny camera in the sleeve of his raincoat did not work as well as he had hoped. Despite a bad cold, he had journeyed to Regensburg where beheading was violently performed with an axe; he had expected great things from that spectacle but, to his intense disappointment, the subject had apparently been drugged and had hardly reacted at all, beyond feebly flopping about on the ground while the masked executioner and his clumsy mate fell all over him. Dietrich (my acquaintance’s first name) hoped some day to go to the States so as to witness a couple of electrocutions; from this word, in his innocence, he derived the adjective “cute,” which he had learned from a cousin of his who had been to America, and with a little frown of wistful worry Dietrich wondered if it were really true that, during the performance, sensational puffs of smoke issued from the natural orifices of the body. At our third and last encounter (there still remained bits of him I wanted to file for possible use) he related to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that he had once spent a whole night patiently watching a good friend of his who had decided to shoot himself and had agreed to do so, in the roof of the mouth, facing the hobbyist in a good light, but having no ambition or sense of honor, had got hopelessly tight instead. Although I have lost track of Dietrich long ago, I can well imagine the look of calm satisfaction in his fish-blue eyes as he shows, nowadays (perhaps at the very minute I am writing this), a never-expected profusion of treasures to his thigh-clapping, guffawing co-veterans—the absolutely wunderbar pictures he took during Hitler’s reign.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  They executed their orders, but unwillingly, and not without remonstrating against the necessity of putting such a scandal upon a good man. The priest was no sooner committed to prison than he confessed his crime, and owned that he had instructed his sister to speak as she had done in order to conceal the intercourse between them, and this not only to bafifle inquiry by so slight a device, but also to secure themselves uni- versal esteem and veneration by this false statement. Being asked how he could carry his wickedness to such an excess as to make his sister swear upon our Lord's body, he replied that his audacity had not reached that length, and that he had used an ordinary wafer, which was neither consecrated nor blessed. All this having been reported to the Count d'An- gouleme, he sent the affair before the courts of justice. Execution was delayed until the sister was delivered of a fine boy. After her delivery the brother and sister were burnt, to the great astonishment of all the people, who had beheld a monster so horrible under such a garb of holiness, and so detestable a crime under the ap- pearances of a life so laudable and regenerate. 2o8 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE iNcwd 33 The good Count d'Angouleme's faith, ladies, was proof against outward signs and miracles. He knew that we had but one Saviour, who, when he said consuni- maUim est, showed thereby that we are not to expect a successor for our salvation. " Truly," said Oisille, " that was a monstrous piece of effrontery covered with unparalleled hypocrisy. It is the height of impiety to cover so enormous a crime with the mantle of God and religion." "I have heard," said Hircan, "that those who com- mit acts of cruelty and tyranny under pretence of hav- ing the king's commission, are doubly punished, the reason being that they make the king's name a cover for their injustice. Likewise, it is seen that although hypocrites prosper for some time under the cloak of godliness, God no sooner unmasks them than they ap- pear such as they are ; and then their nakedness, their filth, and their infamy are the more horrible, the more august and sacred was the wrapper with which they con- cealed them." " There is nothing more agreeable," said Nomerfide, " than to speak frankly and as the heart feels." " It serves to make one fat," replied Longarine, " and I imagine you decide from your own case." " Let me tell you," returned Nomerfide, "I remark that fools live longer than the wise, unless some one kills them ; for which I know but one reason, namely, that fools do not dissemble their passions. If they are angry they strike ; if they are merry, they laugh ; but those who deem themselves wise hide their defects with so much care that their hearts are all poisoned with them."

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Various sounds reached me in my various situations. It might be the dinner gong, or something less usual, such as the foul music of a barrel organ. Somewhere near the stables the old tramp would grind, and on the strength of more direct impressions imbibed in earlier years, I would see him mentally from my perch. Painted on the front of his instrument were Balkan peasants of sorts dancing among palmoid willows. Every now and then he shifted the crank from one hand to the other. I saw the jersey and skirt of his little bald female monkey, her collar, the raw sore on her neck, the chain which she kept plucking at every time the man pulled it, hurting her badly, and the several servants standing around, gaping, grinning—simple folks terribly tickled by a monkey’s “antics.” Only the other day, near the place where I am recording these matters, I came across a farmer and his son (the kind of keen healthy kid you see in breakfast food ads), who were similarly diverted by the sight of a young cat torturing a baby chipmunk—letting him run a few inches and then pouncing upon him again. Most of his tail was gone, the stump was bleeding. As he could not escape by running, the game little fellow tried one last measure: he stopped and lay down on his side in order to merge with a bit of light and shade on the ground, but the too violent heaving of his flank gave him away. The family phonograph, which the advent of the evening set in action, was another musical machine I could hear through my verse. On the veranda where our relatives and friends assembled, it emitted from its brass mouthpiece the so-called tsïganskie romansï beloved of my generation. These were more or less anonymous imitations of gypsy songs—or imitations of such imitations. What constituted their gypsiness was a deep monotonous moan broken by a kind of hiccup, the audible cracking of a lovesick heart. At their best, they were responsible for the raucous note vibrating here and there in the works of true poets (I am thinking especially of Alexander Blok). At their worst, they could be likened to the apache stuff composed by mild men of letters and delivered by thickset ladies in Parisian night clubs. Their natural environment was characterized by nightingales in tears, lilacs in bloom and the alleys of whispering trees that graced the parks of the landed gentry. Those nightingales trilled, and in a pine grove the setting sun banded the trunks at different levels with fiery red. A tambourine, still throbbing, seemed to lie on the darkening moss. For a spell, the last notes of the husky contralto pursued me through the dusk. When silence returned, my first poem was ready.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Somehow, during my secluded years in Germany, I never came across those gentle musicians of yore who, in Turgenev’s novels, played their rhapsodies far into the summer night; or those happy old hunters with their captures pinned to the crown of their hats, of whom the Age of Reason made such fun: La Bruyère’s gentleman who sheds tears over a parasitized caterpillar, Gay’s “philosophers more grave than wise” who, if you please, “hunt science down in butterflies,” and, less insultingly, Pope’s “curious Germans,” who “hold so rare” those “insects fair”; or simply the so-called wholesome and kindly folks that during the last war homesick soldiers from the Middle West seem to have preferred so much to the cagey French farmer and to brisk Madelon II. On the contrary, the most vivid figure I find when sorting out in memory the meager stack of my non-Russian and non-Jewish acquaintances in the years between the two wars is the image of a young German university student, well-bred, quiet, bespectacled, whose hobby was capital punishment. At our second meeting he showed me a collection of photographs among which was a purchased series (“Ein bischen retouchiert,” he said wrinkling his freckled nose) that depicted the successive stages of a routine execution in China; he commented, very expertly, on the splendor of the lethal sword and on the spirit of perfect cooperation between headsman and victim, which culminated in a veritable geyser of mist-gray blood spouting from the very clearly photographed neck of the decapitated party. Being pretty well off, this young collector could afford to travel, and travel he did, in between the humanities he studied for his Ph.D. He complained, however, of continuous ill luck and added that if he did not see something really good soon, he might not stand the strain. He had attended a few passable hangings in the Balkans and a well-advertised, although rather bleak and mechanical guillotinade (he liked to use what he thought was colloquial French) on the Boulevard Arago in Paris; but somehow he never was sufficiently close to observe everything in detail, and the highly expensive teeny-weeny camera in the sleeve of his raincoat did not work as well as he had hoped. Despite a bad cold, he had journeyed to Regensburg where beheading was violently performed with an axe; he had expected great things from that spectacle but, to his intense disappointment, the subject had apparently been drugged and had hardly reacted at all, beyond feebly flopping about on the ground while the masked executioner and his clumsy mate fell all over him. Dietrich (my acquaintance’s first name) hoped some day to go to the States so as to witness a couple of electrocutions; from this word, in his innocence, he derived the adjective “cute,” which he had learned from a cousin of his who had been to America, and with a little frown of wistful worry Dietrich wondered if it were really true that, during the performance, sensational puffs of smoke issued from the natural orifices of the body. At our third and last encounter (there still remained bits of him I wanted to file for possible use) he related to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that he had once spent a whole night patiently watching a good friend of his who had decided to shoot himself and had agreed to do so, in the roof of the mouth, facing the hobbyist in a good light, but having no ambition or sense of honor, had got hopelessly tight instead. Although I have lost track of Dietrich long ago, I can well imagine the look of calm satisfaction in his fish-blue eyes as he shows, nowadays (perhaps at the very minute I am writing this), a never-expected profusion of treasures to his thigh-clapping, guffawing co-veterans—the absolutely wunderbar pictures he took during Hitler’s reign.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  It appeared in the Ranters of the seventeenth century. The Ranters were pantheists and antinomians. A pantheist believes that God is everything; literally all things are Christ's, and Christ is the end of the law. They talked of `Christ within them', took no notice of the Church or its ministry, and belittled Scripture. One of them, Jacob Bottomley, in a book entitled The Light and Dark Sides of God, wrote: `It is not safe to go to the Bible to see what others have spoken and written of the mind of God as to see what God speaks within me, and to follow the doctrine and leading of it in me.' When the Quaker George Fox rebuked them for their lewd practices, they answered: `We are God.' This may sound very fine; but, as John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was to say, it most often resulted in `a gospel of the flesh'. It was their argument that `swearing, adultery, drunkenness and theft are not sinful unless the person guilty of them apprehends them to be so'. When Fox was a prisoner at Charing Cross, they came to see him and greatly offended him by calling for drink and tobacco. They swore terribly and, when Fox rebuked them, justified themselves by saying that Scripture tells us that Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, the priests and the angel all swore. To this, Fox replied that the one who was before Abraham commanded: `Swear not at all.' The seventeenthcentury Puritan, Richard Baxter, said of them: `They conjoined a cursed doctrine of libertinism, which brought them to all abominable filthiness of life; they taught ... that God regardeth not the actions of the outward man, but of the heart; and that to the pure all things are pure (even things forbidden) and so, as allowed by God, they spoke most hideous words of blasphemy, and many of them committed whoredoms commonly ... The horrid villainies of this sect did speedily extinguish it.' Doubtless, many of the Ranters were insane; doubtless, some of them were pernicious and deliberate pleasure-seekers; but doubtless, too, some of them were earnest but misguided people who had misunderstood the meaning of grace and freedom from the law.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The author of the 1868 Putnam’s piece claimed to have discovered a real couple, with an actual name—thus going beyond Daniel Hundley’s more general dismissal of southern rubbish as the heirs of indentured servants dumped in the American colonies. One Bill Simmins was the erstwhile progenitor of this corrupt family tree. A British convict and Virginia squatter, he married a London courtesan turned “wild woman,” who gave birth to a tribe of low-down, dependent people. According to the author, the only cure for white trash had to be a radical one: intervention. Take a child out of his family’s hovel and place him in an asylum, where he might at least learn to work and avoid producing more inbred offspring. The genealogical link had to be cut. As we can see, the line from delinquency to eugenic sterilization was growing shorter. 18 The idea that white trash was a measure of evolutionary progress (or lack thereof) was so pervasive in the nineteenth century that it conditioned the reception of the first federal study of soldiers. The U.S. Sanitary Commission undertook a major statistical study of some 16,000 men who had served in the Union and Confederate armies. Only a small percentage of them were nonwhite (approximately 3,000 black men and 519 Indians). When the study was published in 1869, a surgeon who had served in the Union army queried in the prestigious London Anthropological Review whether it was possible to draw conclusions about racial differences unless researchers actually compared blacks and poor whites. The “low down people” may have come from Anglo-Saxon stock, but they had “degenerated into an idle, ignorant, and physically and mentally degraded people.” It was time to see whether intelligence was a racially specific inherited trait or not. 19 • • • While Republican journalists, Freedmen’s Bureau agents, and Union officers published extensively, in the partisan climate of the postwar years Democrats just as painstakingly worked to rebuild an opposition party and chip away at Republican policies, and they reached for the racial arguments at hand to help. Instead of celebrating the hardworking black man and the promise of social mobility, they fretted about the loss of a “white man’s government.” Unconcerned with inbreeding, they focused obsessively on outbreeding, that is, the supposedly unhealthy combination of distinct races. “Mongrel” became one of the Democrats’ favorite insults in these years. The word called forth numerous potent metaphors. Both defeated Confederates and Democratic journalists in the North predicted that Republican policies would usher in a “mongrel republic.” They drew paranoid comparisons to the Mexican Republic, the nineteenth-century example of racial amalgamation run amok. 20 “Mongrel” was not the only threat Democrats perceived. The emerging cross- sectional opposition party named two more symbolic enemies: “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags.” Here is how the new narrative went: When ill-bred men of suspect origins assumed power, virtue in government declined. The despised mudsill of the Civil War era was succeeded by the postwar Yankee invader.