Excitement

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 Between the World and Me (2015)

  When I came to Howard, Chancellor Williams’s Destruction of Black Civilization was my Bible. Williams himself had taught at Howard. I read him when I was sixteen, and his work offered a grand theory of multi-millennial European plunder. The theory relieved me of certain troubling questions—this is the point of nationalism—and it gave me my Tolstoy. I read about Queen Nzinga, who ruled in Central Africa in the sixteenth century, resisting the Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the Dutch. When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought, and the story of our own royalty became for me a weapon. My working theory then held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture. Surely this was the message I took from gazing out on the Yard. Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us? I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest collections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where your grandfather once worked. Moorland held archives, papers, collections, and virtually any book ever written by or about black people. For the most significant portion of my time at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for three different works. I would take a seat at one of these long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my black-and-white composition books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences of my own invention. I would arrive in the morning and request, three call slips at a time, the works of every writer I had heard spoken of in classrooms or out on the Yard: Larry Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Sonia Sanchez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable, Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Sterling Brown. I remember believing that the key to all life lay in articulating the precise difference between “the Black Aesthetic” and “Negritude.” How, specifically, did Europe underdevelop Africa? I must know. And if the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs were alive today, would they live in Harlem? I had to inhale all the pages. I went into this investigation imagining history to be a unified narrative, free of debate, which, once uncovered, would simply verify everything I had always suspected. The smokescreen would lift. And the villains who manipulated the schools and the streets would be unmasked. But there was so much to know—so much geography to cover—Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, the United States. And all of these areas had histories, sprawling literary canons, fieldwork, ethnographies. Where should I begin?

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "So proud!" she murmured, uneasy. "And so lordly! Now I know why men are so overbearing! But he's lovely, _really_. Like another being! A bit terrifying! But lovely really! And he comes to _me_!--" She caught her lower lip between her teeth, in fear and excitement. The man looked down in silence at the tense phallus, that did not change.--"Ay!" he said at last, in a little voice. "Ay ma lad! tha'rt theer right enough. Yi, tha mun rear thy head! Theer on thy own, eh? an' ta'es no count o' nob'dy! Tha ma'es nowt o' me, John Thomas. Art boss? of me? Eh well, tha'rt more cocky than me, an' tha says less. John Thomas! Dost want _her_? Does want my Lady Jane? Tha's dipped me in again, tha hast. Ay, an' tha comes up smilin'--Ax 'er then! Ax Lady Jane! Say: Lift up your heads o' ye gates, that the king of glory may come in. Ay, th' cheek on thee! Cunt, that's what tha'rt after. Tell Lady Jane tha wants cunt. John Thomas, an' th' cunt o' Lady Jane!--" "Oh, don't tease him," said Connie, crawling on her knees on the bed towards him and putting her arms round his white slender loins, and drawing him to her so that her hanging, swinging breasts touched the tip of the stirring, erect phallus, and caught the drop of moisture. She held the man fast. "Lie down!" he said. "Lie down! Let me come!" He was in a hurry now. And afterwards, when they had been quite still, the woman had to uncover the man again, to look at the mystery of the phallus. "And now he's tiny, and soft like a little bud of life!" she said, taking the soft small penis in her hand. "Isn't he somehow lovely! so on his own, so strange! And _so_ innocent! And he comes so far into me! You must _never_ insult him, you know. He's mine too. He's not only yours. He's mine! And so lovely and innocent!" And she held the penis soft in her hand. He laughed. "Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in kindred love," he said. "Of course!" she said. "Even when he's soft and little I feel my heart simply tied to him. And how lovely your hair is here! quite, quite different!" "That's John Thomas' hair, not mine!" he said. "John Thomas! John Thomas!" and she quickly kissed the soft penis, that was beginning to stir again. "Ay!" said the man, stretching his body almost painfully. "He's got his root in my soul, has that gentleman! An' sometimes I don' know what ter do wi' him. Ay, he's got a will of his own, an' it's hard to suit him. Yet I wouldn't have him killed." "No wonder men have always been afraid of him!" she said, "He's rather terrible."

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  What a lucky dyke I am, she thought. First I get to star in the most scary porn movie in the world, now I come home and find that my best darling girl is waiting for me, so I won’t have to jerk off before I catch up on my beauty sleep. Fran and I are going to have a little talk later on today, though. Don and I are real good buddies, but I don’t think I told him quite that much about my sexual fantasies. I wonder if I can get his birthdate out of his houseboy the next time Fran and I go over there for brunch. Bet I can if I corner him with a bottle of poppers and pinch his tits off. Why should I be the only one to get a surprise party? The Vampire Purgatory was fairly crowded that night. About sixty men and a score of women had assembled in the tiny club by one o’clock in the morning. Most of the women (other than one who was naked and being led around on a leash) were clad in the high fashion of the bizarre— leather skirts, spike heels, PVC corsets, thigh-high boots, studded wristbands or belts, black latex evening gowns. A handful of scruffy lesbians, dressed like destitute bikers, kept to themselves around a low set of stairs along one wall, covered with carpet and meant to be sat upon. The men (other than a few slumming, well-built leathermen) were in casual, even sloppy street clothes. The mistresses stood by the bar, under track lights, impassive and unapproachable, each one giving out some ominous signal—perhaps toying with a whip around her waist or keeping time to the music with a riding crop in her gloved hand. No one but Teddy, the bartender, spoke to the few expensively attired tourist couples who walked around clinging to one another, wearing fixed, exaggerated smiles which were belied by the tight grip they kept on each other. Solitary male submissives prowled around the dance floor and the two large bondage frames in the corner, up the stairs to the bathroom, down the stairs, toward the back and down the hall which opened into half a dozen tiny cubicles with plywood walls, back to the dance floor and up to the bar, to the well-lit women, and then stood humbly, wistfully, heads down, for long minutes until hope ran out and they moved off again to make another restless circuit of the premises. Occasionally a dominatrix would focus her gaze on a particular man and beckon him forward to kneel, get her a drink, light her cigarette, answer some insulting question, and kneel again.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  toe and smiled. There is just one way,’ he said. ‘There is an extra berth in my cabin, which is usually not available for passengers. But I am prepared to give it to you.’ I thanked him and got the agent to purchase the passage. In April 1893 I set forth full of zest to try my luck in South Africa. The first port of call was Lamu which we reached in about thirteen days. The Captain and I had become great friends by this time. He was fond of playing chess, but as he was quite a novice, he wanted one still more of a beginner for his partner, and so he invited me. I had heard a lot about the game but had never tried my hand at it. Players used to say that this was a game in which there was plenty of scope for the exercise of one’s intelligence. The Captain offered to give me lessons, and he found me a good pupil as I had unlimited patience. Every time I was the loser, and that made him all the more eager to teach me. I liked the game, but never carried my liking beyond the boat or my knowledge beyond the moves of the pieces. At Lamu the ship remained at anchor for some three to four hours, and I landed to see the port. The Captain had also gone ashore, but he had warned me that the harbour was treacherous and that I should return in good time. It was a very small place. I went to the Post Office and was delighted to see the Indian clerks there, and had a talk with them. I also saw the Africans and tried to acquaint myself with their ways of life which interested me very much. This took up some time. There were some deck passengers with whom I had made acquaintance, and who had landed with a view to cooking their food on shore and having a quiet meal. I now found them preparing to return to the steamer, so we all got into the same boat. The tide was high in the harbour and our boat had more than its proper load. The current was so strong that it was impossible to hold the boat to the

• From The Decameron (1353)

  When the young men, who looked for him to say otherwhat, heard this, they all made mock of him and said, 'Thou gullest us, as if we knew not the Cadgers, even as thou dost.' 'By the Evangels,' replied Scalza, 'I gull you not; nay, I speak the truth, and if there be any here who will lay a supper thereon, to be given to the winner and half a dozen companions of his choosing, I will willingly hold the wager; and I will do yet more for you, for I will abide by the judgment of whomsoever you will.' Quoth one of them, called Neri Mannini, 'I am ready to try to win the supper in question'; whereupon, having agreed together to take Piero di Fiorentino, in whose house they were, to judge, they betook themselves to him, followed by all the rest, who looked to see Scalza lose and to make merry over his discomfiture, and recounted to him all that had passed. Piero, who was a discreet young man, having first heard Neri's argument, turned to Scalza and said to him, 'And thou, how canst thou prove this that thou affirmest?' 'How, sayest thou?' answered Scalza. 'Nay, I will prove it by such reasoning that not only thou, but he who denieth it, shall acknowledge that I speak sooth. You know that, the ancienter men are, the nobler they are; and so was it said but now among these. Now the Cadgers are more ancient than any one else, so that they are nobler; and showing you how they are the most ancient, I shall undoubtedly have won the wager. You must know, then, that the Cadgers were made by God the Lord in the days when He first began to learn to draw; but the rest of mankind were made after He knew how to draw. And to assure yourselves that in this I say sooth, do but consider the Cadgers in comparison with other folk; whereas you see all the rest of mankind with faces well composed and duly proportioned, you may see the Cadgers, this with a visnomy very long and strait and with a face out of all measure broad; one hath too long and another too short a nose and a third hath a chin jutting out and turned upward and huge jawbones that show as they were those of an ass, whilst some there be who have one eye bigger than the other and other some who have one set lower than the other, like the faces that children used to make, whenas they first begin to learn to draw. Wherefore, as I have already said, it is abundantly apparent that God the Lord made them, what time He was learning to draw; so that they are more ancient and consequently nobler than the rest of mankind.' At this, both Piero, who was the judge, and Neri, who had wagered the supper, and all the rest, hearing Scalza's comical argument and remembering themselves,[307] fell all a-laughing and affirmed that he was in the right and had won the supper, for that the Cadgers were assuredly the noblest and most ancient gentlemen that were to be found not in Florence alone, but in the world or the Maremma. Wherefore it was very justly said of Pamfilo, seeking to show the foulness of Messer Forese's visnomy, that it would have showed notably ugly on one of the Cadgers."

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  atone for anything. Making money was a righteous pursuit: the Lord smiled on the rich, as well as those who aspired to become rich. And anyone who elected to obey church authorities, receive the testimony of Jesus, and follow a few simple rules could work his way up the ladder until, in the afterlife, he became a full-fledged god—the ruler of his very own world. “Joseph was no hair-shirt prophet,” Fawn Brodie observed. He believed in the good life, with a moderate self-indulgence in food and drink, occasional sport, and good entertainment. And that he succeeded in enjoying himself to the hilt detracted not at all from the semi-deification with which his own people enshrouded him. Any protests of impropriety dissolved before his personal charm. “Man is that he might have joy” had been one of his first significant pronouncements in the Book of Mormon, and from that belief he had never deviated. He was gregarious, expansive, and genuinely fond of people. And it is no accident that his theology in the end discarded all traces of Calvinism and became an ingenious blend of supernaturalism and materialism, which promised in heaven a continuation of all earthly pleasures—work, wealth, sex, and power. Joseph’s budding religion was both a reflection of the era’s Jacksonian ideals and a reactionary retreat from them. On the one hand, Joseph was a champion of the common man and a thorn in the side of the ruling elite. But on the other, he was deeply suspicious of the confusing babble of ideas sweeping the country, and was made nervous by the fickleness of democratic governance. His church was an attempt to erect a wall against modernity’s abundance of freedom, its unbridled celebration of the individual. Mormonism’s strictures and soothing assurances—its veneration of order—beckoned as a refuge from the complexity and manifold uncertainties of nineteenth-century America. Joseph’s fresh take on Christianity excited his followers. Converts were energized by his groundbreaking doctrines—and the innovations didn’t stop: Mormons could watch their church taking form before their very eyes, in all sorts of novel and fantastic ways. By the mid-1840s, when Nauvoo was in full flower, Joseph had received 133 divine commandments that were weighty enough to be recorded for eternity in The Doctrine and Covenants, reflecting a significant evolution in Mormon theology. In several important regards, the religion practiced in Nauvoo was quite different from the religion practiced in Palmyra when the church was initially incorporated. And none of these changes had greater repercussions than the commandment Joseph recorded on July 12, 1843—canonized in D&C as Section 132—which very nearly shattered the church, brought about Joseph’s death at the hands of a lynch mob, and has been reverberating through American society ever since. It was in D&C 132 that God revealed the “new and everlasting covenant” of plural marriage, a custom more commonly known to non-Mormons as polygamy.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Dan had occasion to satisfy his curiosity in 1969 when he returned from his mission and took a construction job in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Among the folks he worked with, he says, were “a lot of people who smoked pot . . . and although I wouldn’t try it myself, I was observant and analytical of them and their practices, and I asked a lot of questions, which soon gave me the impression that there was some big lie being perpetuated about this stuff.” Eventually a girl he had a crush on in Colorado convinced him to sample some high-potency dope, he remembers: “I was launched into my first orbit into the expanded universe inside my head.” Dan smoked pot a few more times during that period of his young adulthood, but he worried that he was committing a sin, and when he moved from Colorado back to Utah County he “repented and became a hundred and ten percent Mormon again.” * Dan didn’t smoke any more marijuana until he met Ricky Knapp in the summer of 1984, at which point, he says, “I felt I was having my heart and mind opened to something much more mysterious and serious than I had ever imagined.” As he reflected on the various references to herbs in Joseph’s published revelations, Dan became convinced that the prophet “must have come across some of the mind-expanding herbs.” Unlike Dan, Ron had never tried marijuana before Ricky Knapp entered their lives, but after hooking up with Dan and Knapp in Wichita, Ron was easily persuaded to smoke some of Knapp’s low-grade cannabis. According to Dan, Ron thereby “got to feel what a mild high was like, and to experience the munchies. It was probably rather fortuitous [that the marijuana was so weak] because he was a little fearful at first, and later on, when we got good stuff to smoke, he tended to get pretty paranoid.” Paranoid or not, Ron quickly adopted Dan’s view that marijuana enhanced one’s “spiritual enlightenment.” When Dan became reacquainted with marijuana through his association with Knapp, he says that because he was no longer under the thumb of the LDS Church, “for the first time I was able to get high with a clear conscience, and perhaps that is why, rather than just experiencing ‘the gladdening of the heart,’ I began to experience the ‘enlivening of the soul.’ I began to have what I would call wonderful spiritual insights.” Getting baked, Dan observed, was “much like becoming a child and being introduced into a whole new world. . . . I’ve concluded that the scripture which says, ‘Unless you become like a little child, you can’t see the Kingdom of Heaven’ is another secret reference to getting high; as is also the mysterious account of Moses seeing God through the burning bush.” *

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  Even Mr. Ohba, whom we had met by appointment at the station, seemed a different person and held his tongue. Everyone had the air of having been taken prisoner by the feeling commonly called "love of one's own flesh and blood"; it was as though the emotions one normally keeps hidden within had been turned inside out and were smarting painfully with rawness. They had met their sons, brothers, grandsons, with a showing of naked hearts—it was all they had to show —and now, on top of this, they probably realized it had all been nothing but a futile outpouring of blood before each other. As for me, I was still pursued by the vision of those pitiful hands. It was almost dusk, almost time for lights to be turned on, when our train reached the station on the outskirts of Tokyo where we were to transfer to the elevated. Here for the first time we were brought face to face with positive evidence of the damage that had been done in the air raid the night before. The passageway over the tracks was filled with victims of the raid. They were wrapped up in blankets until one could see nothing but their eyes or, better said, nothing but their eyeballs, for they were eyes that saw nothing and thought nothing. There was a mother who seemed to intend to rock the child in her lap eternally, never varying by so much as a hairsbreadth the length of the arc through which she swayed her body, back and forth, back and forth. A girl was sleeping, leaning against a piece of wicker luggage, still wearing scorched artificial flowers in her hair. As we went along the passageway we did not receive even so much as a reproachful glance. We were ignored. Our very existence was obliterated by the fact that we had not shared in their misery; for them, we were nothing more than shadows. In spite of this scene something caught fire within me. I was emboldened and strengthened by the parade of misery passing before my eyes. I was experiencing the same excitement that a revolution causes. In the fire these miserable ones had witnessed the total destruction of every evidence that they existed as human beings. Before their eyes they had seen human relationships, loves and hatreds, reason, property, all go up in flame. And at the time it had not been the flames against which they fought, but against human relationships, against loves and hatreds, against reason, against property.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  These truths I heard in the works of other poets around the city. They were made of small hard things—aunts and uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking from mason jars. These truths carried the black body beyond slogans and gave it color and texture and thus reflected the spectrum I saw out on the Yard more than all of my alliterative talk of guns or revolutions or paeans to the lost dynasties of African antiquity. After these readings, I followed as the poets would stand out on U Street or repair to a café and argue about everything—books, politics, boxing. And their arguments reinforced the discordant tradition I’d found in Moorland, and I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power. I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon. It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this. Back then, I knew, for instance, that just outside of Washington, D.C., there was a great enclave of black people who seemed, as much as anyone, to have seized control of their bodies. This enclave was Prince George’s County—“PG County” to the locals—and it was, to my eyes, very rich. Its residents had the same homes, with the same backyards, with the same bathrooms, I’d seen in those televised dispatches. They were black people who elected their own politicians, but these politicians, I learned, superintended a police force as vicious as any in America. I had heard stories about PG County from the same poets who opened my world. These poets assured me that the PG County police were not police at all but privateers, gangsters, gunmen, plunderers operating under the color of law. They told me this because they wanted to protect my body. But there was another lesson here: To be black and beautiful was not a matter for gloating. Being black did not immunize us from history’s logic or the lure of the Dream. The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Chrissie, you ready, Snake-Charmin’ Woman?” Chris uncoiled the bullwhip and playfully snapped the end of it at Joyous Day’s feet. “Willing and able,” she replied. “Just waiting for you to get your jollies so I can get down to some serious sadism.” “White Devil Girl, you think you know serious sadism, you ought to let me do you up in my transcendental clamps sometime. Those clothespins are nothing, honey, they are strictly Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour. I got devices that would have you screaming for mercy in no time. Get you talking to the stars and walkin’ on the moon.” Chris laughed. “Oh, I’m sure you do. Didn’t mean to cast aspersions on your technique. Listen, I’m such a chickenshit, I have to be a top.” Joy nodded, laughed, and took a hit of beer. She handed the bottle back to Alex and walked over to Roxanne. “Hello, stranger,” she said. Roxanne raised her head, smiled a little, and softly said, “Hello.” Once more, Joy handled the pins as if they were the keys of some bizarre musical instrument. Roxanne cried out. Her head fell forward. “I can’t take much more of this,” she warned. “Oh, I think you can,” Joy replied. “I think you got no choice, workin’ girl. We got to get a little music out of you now. You are a dancer. Surely you got music in your soul.” Roxanne cursed her. Joy hit her across the face. The slaps echoed in the black chamber. Finally she gave her the “music” she wanted. The high-pitched screams brought the pack running to witness her pain. “No more,” Roxanne gasped. “Please. I’m sorry, I won’t talk back to you. Please. No more.” “That’s a better attitude,” Joy said. “Do you much better, considerin’ your true situation.” She tweaked at one or two of the clips. “So you want these off, I hear?” Roxanne nodded, eyes closed tightly, her teeth gritted. Joy put her lips close to her ear. While she talked, she touched the clips around Roxanne’s face. They were only gentle taps, punctuating the speech she made. “Roxie, listen here to me. You already have a lotta knowledge. I’m seein’ that you sat in school long enough to know they wasn’t going to tell you what you needed to survive. What is in books is ver’ precious, but you cannot write down everything that you discover. There is all sorts of knowledge. The whole world speaks to us, constantly, but we mus’ listen, not look with the eye that reads, but listen. You and I be not alone, the wise and powerful walk among us, the elder of days, an’ if they want you to know their names, they ain’t gonna write it down. They whisper it in your ear. An’ they say, follow me. Follow me to freedom. “Walk after me.” The clothespin at the top of Roxanne’s left ear was removed. “The flesh itself cannot hold you.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  “Lemme see one of those things, please,” Kay said to Anne-Marie. “No one ever died of pain alone,” Anne-Marie said briskly, handing her a length of rattan with a leather-wrapped handle. “But a good many people have died, or otherwise wasted their lives, because they lacked the discipline that pain alone can inculcate in a stubborn heart. It’s all in the wrist, dear.” Kay hit the padded top of the leather horse. “The idea is to aim for the surface beneath the buttocks, rather than the bottom itself,” Anne-Marie counseled. “Thighs are better, though. They don’t bounce as much, so the cane both crushes and burns. An edifying combination.” “Salutary, even,” Tyre confirmed, putting her own cane back on the rack. “If you mean it hurts like merry hell, I believe you,” Kay said, returning the implement to Anne-Marie. “Yes, but it’s an educational pain. Tidy, controlled, and very directed. The opposite of brutality.” “Oh, bullshit,” Tyre said. “Tell it to the British navy.” “But sailors were never caned,” Anne-Marie protested. “Military flogging and keel-hauling are usually excessive for the schooling of young ladies.” “Keel-hauling?” Kay said. “Now you’re talkin’ something that might bash some sense into EZ’s thick skull. If she survived to remember the lesson.” They all laughed, then turned as the door of the dungeon creaked and gaped wide. EZ, Joy, and Michael (who was, indeed, in Marine Corps dress blues) came in, staggering a little under the weight of a long, leather bag bound with straps and buckles. Alex brought up the rear. Her eyes never left Roxanne’s mummified form. Tyre pulled a robe down from a ceiling pulley and opened the panic snap at the end of it. She gestured for them to bring Roxanne to her, and unzipped the bottom of the bag. Two manacled feet in spike-heeled shoes were revealed. Alex unbuckled a strap that went around the outside of the body-bag at mid-calf height, and the three other women put Roxanne on her feet. After unbuckling the thigh strap, they continued unzipping the bag, up both sides. As soon as the chained wrists were revealed, tucked into the small of the girl’s back, Tyre stopped them and fastened the panic snap midpoint between Roxanne’s wrists. Alex unbuckled the strap that went around the upper arms outside the bag, and EZ and Joy finished unzipping and removing it. Michael rolled it up and stowed it behind the bar.

• From Confessions of a Mask (1958)

  Suddenly Sonoko stopped to retie a shoelace. She seemed to be taking a curiously long time about it, so I walked on to the gate and waited, looking out at the street. I did not yet realize that she had wanted me to walk on a little ahead of her and had employed this charming technique of an eighteen-year-old girl for just that purpose. Suddenly, from behind me, her hand plucked at the sleeve of my uniform. The shock I felt was like being hit by an automobile while walking along absentmindedly. ".. . Please . . . this . ." The corner of a stiff foreign-style envelope touched my palm. I closed my hand upon it so quickly that I all but crushed it, just as one might strangle a baby bird. Somehow I could not believe my senses as I felt the weight of the envelope in my hand. But there it was, an envelope of the kind favored by schoolgirls, held tightly in my own hand; I blinked at it as though it were something a person ought not to look at. "Not now—read it after you're home," she whispered in a voice that was small and choking, as though she had been tickled. "Where shall I send a reply?" I asked. "I wrote it—it's inside—the address in N Village. Write me there?'It is an amusing thing, but suddenly, parting became a delight for me. It was like the pleasure of that moment in a game of hide-and-seek when the person who is "it" counts and everyone runs to hide, each in the direction that pleases him. I had an odd ability to enjoy everything in this way. Because of this perverse talent my cowardice was often mistaken, even in my own eyes, for courage. We parted at the ticket gate of the station, not even shaking hands. I was in ecstasy over having received the first love letter of my life. I could not wait until I was home to read it, and I opened the envelope there in the elevated car, heedless of all eyes. As I did so the contents all but spilled out. There were several silhouette-cards and a sheaf of those imported colored postcards that seem to be the delight of mission-school students. Among them was a doublefold of blue notepaper, decorated with a Disney cartoon of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Under the cartoon her note was written in neat characters that smacked of painstaking penmanship: "I was truly overwhelmed with gratitude for your kindness in lending me the books. Thanks to you, I have been able to read them with very profound interest. I pray with all my heart that you will be well even during the air raids.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  One afternoon your mother and I took you to visit a preschool. Our host took us down to a large gym filled with a bubbling ethnic stew of New York children. The children were running, jumping, and tumbling. You took one look at them, tore away from us, and ran right into the scrum. You have never been afraid of people, of rejection, and I have always admired you for this and always been afraid for you because of this. I watched you leap and laugh with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in me and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back and say, “We don’t know these folks! Be cool!” I did not do this. I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew that there was nothing noble in it. But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing—that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed. — New York was another spectrum unto itself, and the great diversity I’d seen at Howard, solely among black people, now spread across a metropolis. Something different awaited around every corner. Here there were African drummers assembling in Union Square. Here there were dead office towers, brought to life at night by restaurants buried within that served small kegs of beer and Korean fried chicken. Here there were black girls with white boys, and black boys with Chinese-American girls, and Chinese-American girls with Dominican boys, and Dominican boys with Jamaican boys and every other imaginable combination. I would walk through the West Village, marveling at restaurants the size of living rooms, and I could see that the very smallness of these restaurants awarded the patrons a kind of erudite cool, as though they were laughing at a joke, and it would take the rest of the world a decade to catch on. Summer was unreal—whole swaths of the city became fashion shows, and the avenues were nothing but runways for the youth. There was a heat unlike anything I’d ever felt, a heat from the great buildings, compounded by the millions of people jamming themselves into subway cars, into bars, into those same tiny eateries and cafés. I had never seen so much life. And I had never imagined that such life could exist in so much variety. It was everyone’s particular Mecca, packed into one singular city.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Instead, she wound up listening to her driver describe her conquest of Sara. Tyre opened her own door, slammed it, stomped into the house, took off her clothes, laid down on the front hall carpet and masturbated, then went upstairs, changed into her leathers without bothering to take a shower first, and went out to hunt for the wolf-pack of women who would help Alex decide if Roxanne belonged to her or on the streets. Tyre didn’t hear from Alex for three weeks. Out of spite more than anything else, she instituted a once-a-week festival of gay male porn films and was surprised and disappointed when it filled up the house. “No accounting for taste,” she told Georgia, who gave her a strange look and said, “What’s good taste got to do with the price of ben-wa balls in Hong Kong, boss? You need a vacation or a new hat or something?” She thought yeah, I need something, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was until one day the phone rang just as she was about to dump out a mug of cold tea and leave the office. “Tyre? Alex.” Two words, and the edge on that voice ran up and down her spine. Old butterflies came back to life in Tyre’s stomach. “Yes?” The word came out in a whoosh. She was suddenly out of breath. “Things moved along any since I last saw you?” “Well, as a matter of fact, yes.” Tyre smiled at her reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall. She had done a good job with this, she had a right to be a little proud. “We can run that trip for you any time you like.” Alex whistled. “That was fast. Can I get a thumbnail sketch of your crew?” “I know you said you didn’t want anyone there who Roxanne knows. But Anne-Marie has asked for permission to join us. She says she would like to help give Roxanne a going-away party to remember.” “Mmm. I just thought the presence of strangers would make it much more intense. Isn’t Anne-Marie into all that frilly Victorian stuff? The evening I envisioned was more, uh, heavy metal.” “Anne-Marie’s specialty is caning. If anything, Roxanne’s prior experience with her will make her more intimidating, not less. She is also a lady, and a real lady is appropriate in any circumstances. I think she will be an asset. And she promised me she would leave her corsets at home.” “I trust your judgment. You’re the madam.” There was no hint of irony in Alex’s voice. Were they both going to pretend they had never lost their tempers with one another? Well, maybe that was the best strategy. Tyre took a deep breath and went on. “Then there’s Joyous Day, the photographer. You know her? She had a show at Quotidian Gallery last month.” “Yeah, we went to see her stuff. So she does more than take pictures of it, huh?” “Oh, yes.”

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Tyre knew that one of Michael’s favorite things was a blowjob from someone who was being worked over. She smiled and shook her head when her chauffeur, who really was an ex-Marine, climbed up on the table and forced Roxanne to lift her head and watch her unzip her fly. Michael and Anne-Marie were also old friends, and the nurse shot Tyre a look of delight. “Don’t think you got enough of this Marine Corps meat,” Michael said, and shoved it down her throat just as the first stroke of the cane landed in the crack between Roxanne’s buttock and upper thigh. Alex winced, but Roxanne held steady, her head bobbing up and down Michael’s cock, as the characteristic double-weal came up, livid on her fair skin. Anne-Marie bided her time. Tyre walked over to Michael, unbuttoned the high-necked, dark-blue tunic with narrow red piping and began working on her nipples with her sharp nails. Her cruelty was passed on to Roxanne, who found herself choking on the energetic cock in her throat, and Anne-Marie chose just that moment to strike her again. “Alex,” said Joy, putting a hand on her shoulder, “you are not used to lookin’ at this from the outside. So tell me, do you like it?” “I—” “You mus’ remember how good it make you feel to whip her yourself, I think. How good it feels in the muscles of your arm and here.” Joy put a hand between her breasts. “Your heart is poundin’ and poundin’ like a drumhead that’s gonna split. Feel yourself.” She took Alex’s hand and put it on top of her codpiece. “Come on, girl, half the women here playin’ with themselves. Check out your stuff. She gonna hit her soon again I think—yes. You feel your clit jump? Oh, yeah, this is good for you and for her. She like it so much, Alex, see how still she hold herself out of pride for you? That’s a beautiful ass she got. I mus’ say I want another handful of that girl of yours all t’myself.” Joy chuckled and mock-punched Alex on the point of her chin. “You seriously twisted girl, I like that ver’ much, just don’t try to straighten out now, or you break.” Kay was hauling EZ, who had gone AWOL to the bar, back into the circle by her ear. “You got eight hours of music set up at the very least,” she said. “We don’t need you providin’ a sound track for the rest of the fucking decade. Now park your butt here and watch this action with me or go play on the freeway.” She smacked her ass, then slid her hand into EZ’s back pocket. “I thought you said girls just played around with this shit. So far I’m in no danger of fallin’ asleep. Whyncha just admit you don’t know what the fuck you were talkin’ about? Or do you maybe like boys better’n girls after all, dipshit?” “Kiss my ass,” EZ hissed.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Shall I bring it out a little more? So we can tell?” She twisted the nipple a quarter-turn, crushed it. Alex grinned at her and judiciously applied exactly the same amount of pressure to the teat she held, then twisted it past that point. “Gonna tell me you don’t sweat, you glow?” she asked Tyre. “Looks like sweat to me. Looks good on you, like maybe you’re working hard for a change.” “I don’t mind working hard, and I don’t think you mind my being hard on you. You like this,” Tyre accused her, getting a grip on the other nipple and stretching them both out, until Alex saw tiny white stars. “I like this ,” Alex affirmed, and returned the hurt worse, until their hips slid past each other and their thighs interlocked, the long bone of the leg and the muscle over it pressed into the other woman’s mound, pushing the sensitive, swollen tissue back down until it flattened against the pubic bone. Hard and soft, hard and soft, their hands played on each other’s bodies, and they rocked in each other’s arms, seeking advantage, grappling. It was a kind of wrestling with no attempt to throw, but a quest for domination nonetheless. They both yelped at the same moment, but not from the pain of well-manipulated nipples. Their thighs separated momentarily, startled by the intensity of this pleasure, and its brevity. They groped for each other’s crotches. The sound of Tyre’s zipper was a long, continuous wail punctuated with a few sharp snaps as Alex’s studded crotch-piece was pulled off and dropped on the floor. “You’re wet,” Alex said. “Thirsty?” Tyre spit. “Empty, too,” Alex said, and fixed that. But Tyre had already thrust home between her legs, and they were both wet to the wrist. “You can’t keep that up,” Tyre said, fucking her, “you can’t keep it up while you—” “While I make you come? Is that what you were gonna say? Because it’s not gonna take me that long to—” “Lose it, give it up, you can’t help it—” “But I can help you, help you over the edge. Tell me you don’t want it.” Tyre’s entire free hand fell onto Alex’s breast and squeezed it, hard. “Show me how tough you are,” she hissed, “big leather stud, such a goddamn big girl, can you take it, can you?” They could not get away from each other, could barely keep on their feet. As Alex retaliated by flicking Tyre’s nipples, their mouths met and they swallowed the noise of a mutual surrender, predatory but also protective.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  I make the things you play on your itsy-bitsy obsolete tinkertoy tape machine.” “Go for it, champ.” “Yo,” EZ said sullenly. Kay smiled and shoved another can of Crisco under the electric can opener on the bar. She already had a small mountain of cans stacked up and ready for use. “I like that little swirl that’s always left on the top of the can after they fill it up,” she said, tucking a strand of blue-back hair behind her ear. “It’s the simple things in life, you know?” Tyre laughed. When she had first invited them to join in Alex’s scene, she had expected EX (who read like a lesbian to her) to jump at the offer. Instead, it was Kay who seemed eager and EZ who grumbled and held back. “Women don’t like the kind of shit we’re into,” EZ had said. “They’re just playing at it.” “So what?” Kay said. “You’re always tellin’ me I don’t know enough about how to get in your pants. Seems like a perfect opportunity for me to find out if there’s really any difference between the G-spot and a prostate gland.” “Aw, Kay, I’m gonna feel like a fuckin’ faggot.” “If you don’t feel like one now your’re dim, girl, just dim. I wanna see this. An all-girl version of the CMC Carnival. And if you don’t come with me I’m gonna leave you home all tied up with the TV turned to an empty channel.” Since Tyre had approached them and solicited their help with one of the Calyx’s fantasy scenarios, they had come back to the Calyx of Isis more often than any of the other dominatrices Tyre had enlisted. EZ alternated between eagerly helping Kay and getting underfoot until she got slapped down. Kay had acquired a following among the leather dykes, and EZ had acquired a nickname that nobody was going to say to her face unless they were ready to replace her. Kay flashed Tyre a grin as she went by juggling a stack of clean towels and cans of Crisco. “Never know when you might want some of this life-savin’ equipment right at hand,” she explained, and went around the room leaving trick-towels and grease in several strategic locations, singing, “Ur-gent, ur-gent, eee-mergency.” Tyre looked up to see Alex wiggling her eyebrows quizzically. “Shall we get poor Michael off the street before some cop asks her what’s in the body bag on the back seat?” she asked. “Absolutely.” They walked over to the bar together. While Tyre dialed the number, Alex went after another beer. “Where the fuck did you find a black refrigerator?” she wondered. “It was a hell of a lot harder than finding a sling, I can tell you that,” Tyre smiled. “Michael? We are ready. I’m going to send a couple of the thugs here outside to help drag the body in.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  “That’s right,” he said, as if he could read her mind. “I know a good cocksucker from a lousy one. So tuck your teeth in and take a deep breath, because I want to fuck your throat, honey.” He held her head still and bucked his hips, rolling the tip of his hard penis back and forth across the spot in the back of her throat that made her gag. Tears came to her eyes, her nose ran, and her mouth streamed with saliva and coughed-up mucus. Every now and then he let her up for air, but as soon as she had taken a deep breath, he seized her again, and filled her throat and pummeled it. It was deeply and perversely thrilling to be used this way, with just the right amount of cruelty. She found herself wishing she could taste his cock instead of the bland skin of the condom. And she was proud that she had made it hard, not one of the city cops in the front seat. These were dangerous thoughts, but she could not relinquish them. After a while, he let go of her, but she stayed on his dick, slowing down a little and taking it more shallowly, licking the shaft rather than simply swallowing and sucking. He let her, hissing every now and then with pleasure, until he couldn’t stand it anymore, then he grabbed both side of her head and fucked her face again, deeper and deeper until she thought she would strangle. “You’re fighting it,” he said, his dick invading her, provoking her reflexes, shaming and exciting her. “You ought to open your throat and just let it in. I can tell you love it, I can tell you want to do me real good, so just let it happen. Let me use your throat like a pussy. You don’t have to choke like that. You can breathe around it. Of course, it you want to choke—” And he held her extra tight for an especially vicious bout of sword-swallowing.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Tyre rubbed a yellowing bruise high up on her left buttock. “She poses her own models. And there’s Kay and EZ, two women who usually hang out at men’s bars. Bikers.” “Are they into women?” “They’re into each other. When they heard about this, they jumped at the chance. They haven’t met many women who dig their scene. They usually pick on cute little faggots. They get these boys totally wasted and then drag them home and make them earn their red hankies. Think Roxanne will look good in red?” There was a long silence. “Alex? You there?” “Yeah, just counting. So that makes five, with me. I really would like to round up a few more. To make it genuinely scary, you know?” “Oh, I haven’t given you the whole list yet. Do you know Chris— um, Chris what-is-it, yeah, McPherson? She plays drums for Mutilation.” “Great. Then all we need is one more top, and we’re set.” Tyre’s throat was very dry. She took a big swallow of cold tea, gagged, and blurted, “No, we don’t. There’s me.” The laughter she dreaded did not materialize. “No shit?” Alex finally said. “Does that mean you’re not pissed off at my any more?” “There’s no reason to be pissed at you, and I think maybe I owe you an apology.” “Naw. If I let you apologize you’ll be pissed for sure. I’m real glad to hear you’re going to be there. I was planning to keep on saying ‘We need one more top’ until you included yourself in.” “You cocksucker,” Tyre sputtered, laughing. “You should be so lucky. So is this why this whole thing pulled itself together so quickly, ’cause the madam wants to see my girlfriend get thrown to the lions?” “Well, to be truthful, yes. The idea of it excites me tremendously.” And it means I get to see you again, she told herself silently. “Great, great, fabulous. God, I don’t know how I would have come up with another excuse to see you again.” Damn the woman and her ingenuous honesty. But Alex was still talking. “I am so jazzed, I can barely stand still. Best news I’ve had all year. Well, okay, let’s schedule this deal. What about next Saturday? That give you enough time to round everybody up, hey?” “Well, it would be, but Mama Kali, the Denver bike club, has scheduled a run for that weekend. I don’t think you want to string Roxanne up in the middle of that crew.” “Maybe for our first anniversary. If we ever have one. So when is the space available?” Tyre checked her desk calendar. “The first weekend of next month. And after that it isn’t free again until June.” “Okay. That’s it, then.

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  Experience showed that no one paid his subscription for the mere asking. It was impossible to call frequently on members outside Durban. The enthusiasm of one moment seemed to wear away the next. Even the members in Durban had to be considerably dunned before they would pay in their subscriptions. The task of collecting subscriptions lay with me. I being the secretary. And we came to a stage when I had to keep my clerk engaged all day long in the work of collection. The man got tired of the job, and I felt that, if the situation was to be improved, the subscriptions should be made payable annually and not monthly, and that too strictly in advance. So I called a meeting of the Congress. Everyone welcomed the proposal for making the subscription annual instead of monthly and for fixing the minimum at £ 3. Thus the work of collection was considerably facilitated. I had learnt at the outset not to carry on public work with borrowed money. One could rely on people’s promises in most matters except in respect of money. I had never found people quick to pay the amounts they had undertaken to subscribe, and the Natal Indians were no exception to the rule. As, therefore, no work was done unless there were funds on hand, the Natal Indian Congress has never been in debt. My co-workers evinced extraordinary enthusiasm in canvassing members. It was work which interested them and was at the same time an invaluable experience. Large numbers of people gladly came forward with cash subscriptions. Work in the distant villages of the interior was rather difficult. People did not know the nature of public work. And yet we had invitations to visit far away places, leading merchants of every place extending their hospitality. On one occasion during this tour the situation was rather difficult. We expected our host to contribute £ 6, but he refused to give anything more than £ 3. If we