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.

Page 41 of 182 · 20 per page

• From The Girls (2016)

  should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to “make it home safe.” “See, I wish I’d been like you,” Claude said. “Free and easy. Just traveling around. I always had a job.” He slid his eyes to me before turning them back to the road. The first twinge of discomfort—I’d gotten good at deciphering certain male expressions of desire. Clearing the throat, an assessing nip in the gaze. “None of you people ever work, huh?” he said. He was teasing, probably, but I couldn’t tell for sure. There was sourness in his tone, a sting of real resentment. Maybe I should have been frightened of him. This older man who saw that I was alone, who felt like I owed him something, which was the worst thing a man like that could feel. But I wasn’t afraid. I was protected, a hilarious and untouchable giddiness overtaking me. I was going back to the ranch. I would see Suzanne. Claude seemed barely real to me: a paper clown, innocuous and laughable. — “This good?” Claude said. He’d pulled over near the campus in Berkeley, the clock tower and stair-step houses thickening the hills behind. He turned off the ignition. I felt the heat outside, the close wend of traffic. “Thanks,” I said, gathering my purse and duffel. “Slow down,” he said as I started to open the door. “Just sit with me a second, hm?” I sighed but sat back in the seat. I could see the dry hills above Berkeley and remembered, with a start, that brief time in winter when the hills were green and plump and wet. I hadn’t even known Suzanne then. I could feel Claude looking at me sideways. “Listen.” Claude scratched at his neck. “If you need some money—” “I don’t need money.” I was unafraid, shrugging a quick goodbye and opening the door. “Thanks again,” I said. “For the ride.” “Wait,” he said, grabbing my wrist.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “LBJ,” he said. “Now there was a president.” He had a large family, I learned, and a dog named Sister, and too much homework: he was in summer school, trying to get through prereqs. He’d asked me what my major was. His mistake excited me—he must have thought I was eighteen, at least. “I don’t go to college,” I said. I was about to explain I was only in high school, but Tom immediately got defensive. “I was thinking of doing that, too,” he said, “dropping out, but I’m gonna finish the summer classes. I already paid fees. I mean, I wish I hadn’t, but—” He trailed off. Gazing at me until I realized he wanted my forgiveness. “That’s a bummer,” I said, and this seemed like enough. He cleared his throat. “So do you have a job or something? If you’re not in school?” he said. “Gee, unless that’s a rude question. You don’t have to answer.” I shrugged, affecting ease. Though maybe I was feeling easy on that car ride, like my occupation of the world could be seamless. These simple ways I could meet needs. Talking to strangers, dealing with situations. “The place I’m going now—I’ve been staying there,” I said. “It’s a big group. We take care of each other.” His eyes were on the road, but he was listening closely as I explained the ranch. The funny old house, the kids. The plumbing system Guy had rigged in the yard, a knotty mess of pipes. “Sounds like the International House,” he said. “Where I live. There are fifteen of us. There’s a chore board in the hall, we all take turns with the bad ones.” “Yeah, maybe,” I said, though I knew the ranch was nothing like the International House, the squinty philosophy majors arguing over who’d left the dinner dishes unwashed, a girl from Poland nibbling black bread and crying for a faraway boyfriend. “Who owns the house?” he said. “Is it like a center or something?” It was odd to explain Russell to someone, to remember that there were whole realms in which Russell or Suzanne did not figure. “His album’s gonna come out around Christmas, probably,” I remember saying.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  mountainside toward Calexico, some fifty miles away. It is hard to understand why my vivid imagination and tendency toward scariness didn't provide me with gory scenes of bloody crashes on a risco de Mexico. I can only think that my every sense was concentrated on steering the bucking car. When it became totally dark, I fumbled over knobs, twisting and pulling until I succeeded in finding the lights. The car slowed down as I centered on that search, and I forgot to step on the pedals, and the motor gurgled, the car pitched and the engine stopped. A bumbling sound from the back told me that Dad had fallen off the seat (I had been expecting this to happen for miles). I pulled the hand brake and carefully considered my next move. It was useless to think of asking Dad. The fall on the floor had failed to stir him, and I would be unable to do so. No car was likely to pass us—I hadn't seen any motor vehicles since we passed the guard's house early in the day. We were headed downhill, so I reasoned that with any luck we might coast right up to Calexico —or at least to the guard. I waited until I formulated an approach to him before releasing the brake. I would stop the car when we reached the kiosk and put on my siddity air. I would speak to him like the peasant he was. I would order him to start the car and then tip him a quarter or even a dollar from Dad's pocket before driving on. With my plans solidly made, I released the brake and we began coasting down the slope. I also pumped the clutch and the accelerator, hoping that the action would speed our descent, and wonder of wonders the motor started again. The Hudson went crazy on the hill. It was rebelling and would have leaped over the side of the mountain, to all our destruction, in its attempt to unseat me had I relaxed control for a single second. The challenge was exhilarating. It was me, Marguerite, against the elemental opposition. As I twisted the steering wheel and forced the accelerator to the floor I was controlling Mexico, and might and aloneness and inexperienced youth and Bailey Johnson, Sr., and death and insecurity, and even gravity. After what seemed like one thousand and one nights of challenge the mountain began to level off and we started passing scattered lights on either side of the road. No matter what happened after that I had won. The car began to slow down as if it had been tamed and was going to give up without grace. I pumped even harder and we finally reached the guard's box. I pulled on the hand brake and came to a stop.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Eventually, having other people gender me as female became demystified. While I still enjoyed it (as I did with the mirror moments), it was no longer enough in and of itself to ease the gender dissonance that I felt. It was at this point that I moved into the “interactive stage,” when I began to go out with other people while I was crossdressed. While I had come out to a number of friends as a crossdresser during my public stage, I now began cultivating relationships with people who primarily or solely knew me when I was in girl-mode. More often than not, these were people who I met via personal ads and who were aware that I was a crossdresser from the start. Over an extremely intense two-year period of my life, I sort of lived a dual life, where I was in boy-mode most of the time, but about one or two times per week I would go out and interact with others (often on dates) as a woman. Some of the people I saw during this period were men who might be described as admirers of MTF spectrum people. With them, I primarily engaged in role-playing relationships in which we would create sexually charged scenarios based on exaggerations of gender stereotypes. While many people assume that male “tranny-chasers” are closeted homosexuals who are turned on by the “guy” (or the “penis”) under the dress, all of the men who I role-played with were primarily attracted to women and, in particular, to femininity. In conversations I had with them, each said that what attracted them to MTF spectrum people was the extreme femininity that many of us (including myself at the time) sometimes displayed. For me, these role-playing experiences were important in helping me demystify the connection between femininity and sexuality. As with previous phases of my crossdressing, acting out my submissive feminine fantasies felt exciting and empowering early on. But over time, once they had become demystified, I found that they began to lose both their erotic and experiential potential. What played an even greater role in demystifying femaleness and femininity for me were the relationships I cultivated with women around this same time. Most of these women were bisexual or bi-curious, and our relationships involved me being in girl-mode some or most of the times we got together. While I was quite feminine when I was with them and crossdressed, I did not engage in the exaggerated femininity that I had during my role-playing experiences with men. In retrospect, what was most important for me about these experiences with women was that they allowed me to begin to integrate my personality (i.e., the person I was when in boy-mode) with my femme self. In a sense, this represented a merging of boy-mode and girl-mode for me, a sort of mending of the fracture in my psyche that had developed in response to the effemimania and enforced ignorance I’d experienced as a child.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  But Reverend Thomas shrugged off Sister Monroe's weakening clutch, pulled out an extra-large white handkerchief and spread it over his nasty little teeth. Putting them in his pocket, he gummed, “Naked I came into the world, and naked I shall go out.” Bailey's laugh had worked its way up through his body and was escaping through his nose in short hoarse snorts. I didn't try any longer to hold back the laugh, I just opened my mouth and released sound. I heard the first titter jump up in the air over my head, over the pulpit and out the window. Momma said out loud, “Sister!” but the bench was greasy and I slid off onto the floor. There was more laughter in me trying to get out. I didn't know there was that much in the whole world. It pressed at all my body openings, forcing everything in its path. I cried and hollered, passed gas and urine. I didn't see Bailey descend to the floor, but I rolled over once and he was kicking and screaming too. Each time we looked at each other we howled louder than before, and though he tried to say something, the laughter attacked him and he was only able to get out “I say, preach.” And then I rolled over onto Uncle Willie's rubber-tipped cane. My eyes followed the cane up to his good brown hand on the curve and up the long, long white sleeve to his face. The one side pulled down as it usually did when he cried (it also pulled down when he laughed). He stuttered, “I'm gonna whip you this time myself.” I have no memory of how we got out of church and into the parsonage next door, but in that overstuffed parlor, Bailey and I received the whipping of our lives. Uncle Willie ordered us between licks to stop crying. I tried to, but Bailey refused to cooperate. Later he explained that when a person is beating you

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  30 Just like Jane Withers and Donald O'Connor I was going on a vacation. Daddy Bailey invited me to spend the summer with him in southern California and I was jumpy with excitement. Given our father's characteristic air of superiority, I secretly expected him to live in a manor house surrounded by grounds and serviced by a liveried staff. Mother was all cooperation in helping me to shop for summer clothes. With the haughtiness San Franciscans have for people who live in the warmer climate, she explained that all I needed were lots of shorts, pedal pushers, sandals and blouses because “southern Californians hardly ever wear anything else.” Daddy Bailey had a girl friend, who had begun corresponding with me some months before, and she was to meet me at the train. We had agreed to wear white carnations to identify each other, and the porter kept my flower in the diner's Frigidaire until we reached the small hot town. On the platform my eyes skimmed over the whites and searched among the Negroes who were walking up and down expectantly. There were no men as tall as Daddy, and no really glamorous ladies (I had decided that given his first choice, all his succeeding women would be startlingly beautiful). I saw a little girl who wore a white flower, but dismissed her as improbable. The platform emptied as we walked by each other time after time. Finally she stopped me with a disbelieving “Marguerite?” Her voice screeched with shock and maturity. So, after all, she wasn't a little girl. I, too, was visited with unbelief. She said, “I'm Dolores Stockland.” Stunned but trying to be well mannered, I said, “Hello. My name is Marguerite.” Daddy's girl friend? I guessed her to be in her early twenties. Her crisp seersucker suit, spectator pumps and gloves informed me that she was proper and serious. She was of average height but with the unformed body of a girl and I thought that if she was planning to marry our father she must have been horrified to find herself with a nearly six-foot prospective stepdaughter who was not even pretty. (I found later that Daddy Bailey had told her that his children were eight and nine years old and cute as buttons. She had such a need to believe in him that even though we corresponded at a time when I loved the multisyllabic words and convoluted sentences she had been able to ignore the obvious.) I was another link in a long chain of disappointments. Daddy had promised to marry her but kept delaying until he finally married a woman named Alberta, who was another small tight woman from the South. When I met Dolores she had all the poses of the Black bourgeoisie without the material basis to support the postures. Instead of owning a manor house and servants, Daddy lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of a town that was itself the outskirts of town.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  On my way out of the house one morning she said, “Life is going to give you just what you put in it. Put your whole heart in everything you do, and pray, then you can wait.” Another time she reminded me that “God helps those who help themselves.” She had a store of aphorisms which she dished out as the occasion demanded. Strangely, as bored as I was with clichés, her inflection gave them something new, and set me thinking for a little while at least. Later when asked how I got my job, I was never able to say exactly. I only knew that one day which was tiresomely like all the others before it, I sat in the Railway office, ostensibly waiting to be interviewed. The receptionist called me to her desk and shuffled a bundle of papers to me. They were job application forms. She said they had to be filled in triplicate. I had little time to wonder if I had won or not, for the standard questions reminded me of the necessity for dexterous lying. How old was I? List my previous jobs, starting from the last held and go backward to the first. How much money did I earn, and why did I leave the position? Give two references (not relatives). Sitting at a side table my mind and I wove a cat's ladder of near truths and total lies. I kept my face blank (an old art) and wrote quickly the fable of Marguerite Johnson, aged nineteen, former companion and driver for Mrs. Annie Henderson (a White Lady) in Stamps, Arkansas. I was given blood tests, aptitude tests, physical coordination tests, and Rorschachs, then on a blissful day I was hired as the first Negro on the San Francisco streetcars. Mother gave me the money to have my blue serge suit tailored, and I learned to fill out work cards, operate the money changer and punch transfers. The time crowded together and at an End of Days I was swinging on the back of the rackety trolley, smiling sweetly and persuading my charges to “step forward in the car, please.” For one whole semester the streetcars and I shimmied up and scooted down the sheer hills of San Francisco. I lost some of my need for the Black ghetto's shielding-sponge quality, as I clanged and cleared my way down Market Street, with its honky-tonk homes for homeless sailors, past the quiet retreat of Golden Gate Park and along closed undwelled-in-looking dwellings of the Sunset District. My work shifts were split so haphazardly that it was easy to believe that my superiors had chosen them maliciously. Upon mentioning my suspicions to Mother, she said, “Don't worry about it. You ask for what you want, and you pay for what you get. And I'm going to show you that it ain't no trouble when you pack double.”

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  The Negro section of St. Louis in the mid-thirties had all the finesse of a gold-rush town. Prohibition, gambling and their related vocations were so obviously practiced that it was hard for me to believe that they were against the law. Bailey and I, as newcomers, were quickly told by our schoolmates who the men on the street corners were as we passed. I was sure that they had taken their names from Wild West Books (Hard-hitting Jimmy, Two Gun, Sweet Man, Poker Pete), and to prove me right, they hung around in front of saloons like unhorsed cowboys. We met the numbers runners, gamblers, lottery takers and whiskey salesmen not only in the loud streets but in our orderly living room as well. They were often there when we returned from school, sitting with hats in their hands, as we had done upon our arrival in the big city. They waited silently for Grandmother Baxter. Her white skin and the pince-nez that she dramatically took from her nose and let hang free on a chain pinned to her dress were factors that brought her a great deal of respect. Moreover, the reputation of her six mean children and the fact that she was a precinct captain compounded her power and gave her the leverage to deal with even the lowest crook without fear. She had pull with the police department, so the men in their flashy suits and fleshy scars sat with churchlike decorum and waited to ask favors from her. If Grandmother raised the heat off their gambling parlors, or said the word that reduced the bail of a friend waiting in jail, they knew what would be expected of them. Come election, they were to bring in the votes from their neighborhood. She most often got them leniency, and they always brought in the vote. St. Louis also introduced me to thin-sliced ham (I thought it a delicacy), jelly beans and peanuts mixed, lettuce on sandwich bread, Victrolas and family loyalty. In Arkansas, where we cured our own meat, we ate half-inch slabs of ham for breakfast, but in St. Louis we bought the paper-thin slices in a strange-smelling German store and ate them in sandwiches. If Grandmother never lost her German accent, she also never lost her taste for the thick black German Brot, which we bought unsliced. In Stamps, lettuce was used only to make a bed for potato salad or slaw, and peanuts were brought in raw from the field and roasted in the bottom of the oven on cold nights. The rich scents used to fill the house and we were always expected to eat too many. But that was a Stamps custom. In St. Louis, peanuts were bought in paper bags and mixed with jelly beans, which meant that we ate the salt and sugar together and I found them a delicious treat. The best thing the big town had to offer.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  I had chosen drama simply because I liked Hamlet's soliloquy beginning, “To be, or not to be.” I had never seen a play and did not connect movies with the theater. In fact, the only times I had heard the soliloquy had been when I had melodramatically recited to myself. In front of a mirror. It was hard to curb my love for the exaggerated gesture and the emotive voice. When Bailey and I read poems together, he sounded like a fierce Basil Rathbone and I like a maddened Bette Davis. At the California Labor School a forceful and perceptive teacher quickly and unceremoniously separated me from melodrama. She made me do six months of pantomime. Bailey and Mother encouraged me to take dance, and he privately told me that the exercise would make my legs big and widen my hips. I needed no greater inducement. My shyness at moving clad in black tights around a large empty room did not last long. Of course, at first, I thought everyone would be staring at my cucumber-shaped body with its knobs for knees, knobs for elbows and, alas, knobs for breasts. But they really did not notice me, and when the teacher floated across the floor and finished in an arabesque my fancy was taken. I would learn to move like that. I would learn to, in her words, “occupy space.” My days angled off Miss Kirwin's class, dinner with Bailey and Mother, and drama and dance. The allegiances I owed at this time in my life would have made very strange bedfellows: Momma with her solemn determination, Mrs. Flowers and her books, Bailey with his love, my mother and her gaiety, Miss Kirwin and her information, my evening classes of drama and dance.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  Abraham would ask them how old they were and they would answer perhaps 50 or 60 years of age. ‘Woe to a man of such an age’, said Abraham, ‘who adores the work of one day!’ A strong and fit man of 70 came in. Abraham asked him his age and then said: ‘You fool to adore a god who is younger than yourself!’ A woman came in with a dish of meat for the gods. Abraham took a stick and smashed all the idols but one, in whose hands he set the stick he had used. Terah returned and was angry. Abraham said: ‘My father, a woman brought this dish of meat for your gods; they all wanted to have it and the strongest knocked the heads off the rest, in case they should eat it all.’ Terah said: ‘That is impossible, for they are made of wood and stone.’ And Abraham answered: ‘Let your own ear hear what your own mouth has spoken!’ All these legends give us a vivid picture of Abraham searching after God and being dissatisfied with the idolatry of his people. So, when God’s call came to him, he was ready to go out into the unknown to find him. Abraham is the supreme example of faith. (1) Abraham’s faith was the faith that was ready for adventure . God’s summons meant that he had to leave home and family and business; yet he went. He had to go out into the unknown; yet he went. In the best of us, there is a certain timidity. We wonder just what will happen to us if we take God at his word and act on his commands and promises. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin tells of the negotiations which led to the formation of the United Church of South India. He took part in these negotiations and in the long discussions which were necessary. Things were frequently held up by cautious people who wanted to know just where each step was taking them, until in the end the chairman reminded them that Christians have no right to ask where they are going. Most of us live a cautious life on the principle of safety first; but, to live the Christian life, it is necessary to have a certain reckless willingness to be adventurous. If faith can see every step of the way, it is not really faith. It is sometimes necessary for Christians to take the way to which the voice of God is calling them without knowing what the consequences will be. Like Abraham, they have to go out not knowing where they are going.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  I ran all the way home. Not too sure I wouldn't be bombed before I reached Bailey and Mother. Grandmother Baxter calmed my anxiety by explaining that America would not be bombed, not as long as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president. He was, after all, a politician's politician and he knew what he was doing. Soon after, Mother married Daddy Clidell, who turned out to the be the first father I would know. He was a successful businessman, and he and Mother moved us to San Francisco. Uncle Tommy, Uncle Billy and Grandmother Baxter remained in the big house in Oakland. 27In the early months of World War II, San Francisco's Fill-more district, or the Western Addition, experienced a visible revolution. On the surface it appeared to be totally peaceful and almost a refutation of the term “revolution.” The Yakamoto Sea Food Market quietly became Sammy's Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop. Yashigira's Hardware metamorphosed into La Salon de Beauté owned by Miss Clorinda Jackson. The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen, and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived Southern Blacks. Where the odors of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed. The Asian population dwindled before my eyes. I was unable to tell the Japanese from the Chinese and as yet found no real difference in the national origin of such sounds as Ching and Chan or Moto and Kano. As the Japanese disappeared, soundlessly and without protest, the Negroes entered with their loud jukeboxes, their just-released animosities and the relief of escape from Southern bonds. The Japanese area became San Francisco's Harlem in a matter of months. A person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese. Especially in view of the fact that they (the Blacks) had themselves undergone concentration-camp living for centuries in slavery's plantations and later in sharecroppers' cabins. But the sensations of common relationship were missing. The Black newcomer had been recruited on the desiccated farm lands of Georgia and Mississippi by war-plant labor scouts. The chance to live in two-or three-story apartment buildings (which became instant slums), and to earn two-and even three-figured weekly checks, was blinding. For the first time he could think of himself as a Boss, a Spender. He was able to pay other people to work for him, i.e. the dry cleaners, taxi drivers, waitresses, etc. The shipyards and ammunition plants brought to booming life by the war let him know that he was needed and even appreciated. A completely alien yet very pleasant position for him to experience. Who could expect this man to share his new and dizzying importance with concern for a race that he had never known to exist?

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  I was being crushed by two unrelenting forces: the uneasy suspicion that I might not be a normal female and my newly awakening sexual appetite. I decided to take matters into my own hands. (An unfortunate but apt phrase.) Up the hill from our house, and on the same side of the street, lived two handsome brothers. They were easily the most eligible young men in the neighborhood. If I was going to venture into sex, I saw no reason why I shouldn't make my experiment with the best of the lot. I didn't really expect to capture either brother on a permanent basis, but I thought if I could hook one temporarily I might be able to work the relationship into something more lasting. I planned a chart for seduction with surprise as my opening ploy. One evening as I walked up the hill suffering from youth's vague malaise (there was simply nothing to do), the brother I had chosen came walking directly into my trap. “Hello, Marguerite.” He nearly passed me. I put the plan into action. “Hey.” I plunged, “Would you like to have a sexual intercourse with me?” Things were going according to the chart. His mouth hung open like a garden gate. I had the advantage and so I pressed it. “Take me somewhere.” His response lacked dignity, but in fairness to him I admit that I had left him little chance to be suave. He asked, “You mean, you're going to give me some trim?” I assured him that that was exactly what I was about to give him. Even as the scene was being enacted I realized the imbalance in his values. He thought I was giving him something, and the fact of the matter was that it was my intention to take something from him. His good looks and popularity had made him so inordinately conceited that they blinded him to that possibility. We went to a furnished room occupied by one of his friends, who understood the situation immediately and got his coat and left us alone. The seductee quickly turned off the lights. I would have preferred them left on, but didn't want to appear more aggressive than I had been already. If that was possible. I was excited rather than nervous, and hopeful instead of frightened. I had not considered how physical an act of seduction would be. I had anticipated long soulful tongued kisses and gentle caresses. But there was no romance in the knee which forced my legs, nor in the rub of hairy skin on my chest. Unredeemed by shared tenderness, the time was spent in laborious gropings, pullings, yankings and jerkings. Not one word was spoken. My partner showed that our experience had reached its climax by getting up abruptly, and my main concern was how to get home quickly. He may have sensed that he had been used, or his disinterest may have been an indication that I was less than gratifying.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  To these and others like them, death has always been a call to come up higher, a crossing from the dark to the dawn. (7) Some have seen death as an adventure . As J. M. Barrie made Peter Pan say: ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’ Charles Frohman, who had known Barrie so well, went down when the Lusitania sank in the disaster of 7 May 1915. His last words were: ‘Why fear death? It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ An old scholar who was dying turned to his friends: ‘Do you realize’, he said, ‘that in an hour or two I will know the answers for which we have been searching all our lives?’ To these, death is the adventure of supreme discovery. (8) Above all, there are those, like Enoch, who have seen death as an entering into the nearer presence of the one with whom they have lived for so long. If we have lived with Christ, we may die in the certainty that we go to be forever with our Lord. In this passage, the writer to the Hebrews lays down, in addition, the two great foundation acts of faith of the Christian life. (1) We must believe in God . There can be no such thing as religion without that belief. Religion began when men and women became aware of God; it ceases when they live a life in which for them God does not exist. (2) We must believe that God is interested . As the writer to the Hebrews put it, we must believe that God is the rewarder of those who diligently seek him. There were those in the ancient world who believed in the gods, but they believed that they lived out in the spaces between the worlds, entirely unaware of human life. ‘God’, said the philosopher Epicurus as a first principle, ‘does nothing.’ There are many who believe in God but do not believe that he cares. It has been said that no astronomer can be an atheist; but it has also been said that an astronomer is bound to believe that God is a mathematician. But a God who is a mathematician need not care. God has been called the First Principle, the First Cause, the Creative Energy, the Life Force. These are the statements of people who believe in God, but not in a God who cares. When the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was asked why he believed in the gods, he said: ‘True, the gods are not discernible by human sight, but neither have I seen my soul and yet I honour it. So, I believe in the gods and I honour them, because again and again I have experienced their power.’ It was not logic but life that convinced him of the gods. The Stoic philosophers believed in the power of the gods over the universe.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  23The children in Stamps trembled visibly with anticipation. Some adults were excited too, but to be certain the whole young population had come down with graduation epidemic. Large classes were graduating from both the grammar school and the high school. Even those who were years removed from their own day of glorious release were anxious to help with preparations as a kind of dry run. The junior students who were moving into the vacating classes' chairs were tradition-bound to show their talents for leadership and management. They strutted through the school and around the campus exerting pressure on the lower grades. Their authority was so new that occasionally if they pressed a little too hard it had to be overlooked. After all, next term was coming, and it never hurt a sixth grader to have a play sister in the eighth grade, or a tenth-year student to be able to call a twelfth grader Bubba. So all was endured in a spirit of shared understanding. But the graduating classes themselves were the nobility. Like travelers with exotic destinations on their minds, the graduates were remarkably forgetful. They came to school without their books, or tablets or even pencils. Volunteers fell over themselves to secure replacements for the missing equipment. When accepted, the willing workers might or might not be thanked, and it was of no importance to the pregraduation rites. Even teachers were respectful of the now quiet and aging seniors, and tended to speak to them, if not as equals, as beings only slightly lower than themselves. After tests were returned and grades given, the student body, which acted like an extended family, knew who did well, who excelled, and what piteous ones had failed. Unlike the white high school, Lafayette County Training School distinguished itself by having neither lawn, nor hedges, nor tennis court, nor climbing ivy. Its two buildings (main classrooms, the grade school and home economics) were set on a dirt hill with no fence to limit either its boundaries or those of bordering farms. There was a large expanse to the left of the school which was used alternately as a baseball diamond or a basketball court. Rusty hoops on the swaying poles represented the permanent recreational equipment, although bats and balls could be borrowed from the P. E. teacher if the borrower was qualified and if the diamond wasn't occupied.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  I never knew why I was given a scholarship to the California Labor School. It was a college for adults, and many years later I found that it was on the House Un-American Activities list of subversive organizations. At fourteen I accepted a scholarship and got one for the next year as well. In the evening classes I took drama and dance, along with white and Black grownups. I had chosen drama simply because I liked Hamlet's soliloquy beginning, “To be, or not to be.” I had never seen a play and did not connect movies with the theater. In fact, the only times I had heard the soliloquy had been when I had melodramatically recited to myself. In front of a mirror. It was hard to curb my love for the exaggerated gesture and the emotive voice. When Bailey and I read poems together, he sounded like a fierce Basil Rathbone and I like a maddened Bette Davis. At the California Labor School a forceful and perceptive teacher quickly and unceremoniously separated me from melodrama. She made me do six months of pantomime. Bailey and Mother encouraged me to take dance, and he privately told me that the exercise would make my legs big and widen my hips. I needed no greater inducement. My shyness at moving clad in black tights around a large empty room did not last long. Of course, at first, I thought everyone would be staring at my cucumber-shaped body with its knobs for knees, knobs for elbows and, alas, knobs for breasts. But they really did not notice me, and when the teacher floated across the floor and finished in an arabesque my fancy was taken. I would learn to move like that. I would learn to, in her words, “occupy space.” My days angled off Miss Kirwin's class, dinner with Bailey and Mother, and drama and dance. The allegiances I owed at this time in my life would have made very strange bedfellows: Momma with her solemn determination, Mrs. Flowers and her books, Bailey with his love, my mother and her gaiety, Miss Kirwin and her information, my evening classes of drama and dance.

• From How God Became King (2012)

  It isn’t just that the church finds itself doing a few of the things that Jesus’s first followers found themselves doing. It is that the story of the gospels, reaching its unique climax in the death and resurrection of Jesus, is told in such a way as to indicate that Jesus’s followers now have a mission, indeed a mission that goes way beyond anything they had had during Jesus’s lifetime. We have already seen that Matthew suggests a transition from a limited mission in Jesus’s lifetime to a worldwide one after the resurrection. Something similar is true in John’s gospel (not that the disciples have as much of a “mission” there during Jesus’s lifetime). In John, until Jesus is “glorified,” the Spirit is not given (John actually says, starkly, that up to that point “there was no spirit,” 7:39); but once Jesus has died and has been raised—once, in other words, Israel’s God has been glorified in him, in the “new Temple” sense that permeates John’s gospel—then the Spirit is given, so that the disciples can at last be for the world what Jesus was for Israel. “As the father has sent me, so I am sending you” (20:21) is one of the most demanding of mission charges, but also a key moment in gospel hermeneutics. That passage explains how, in the gospel writers’ own telling of the story, the unique and unrepeatable mission and achievement of Jesus becomes the mandate and pattern for the mission of the church. Thus: On the last day of the festival, the great final celebration, Jesus stood up and shouted out, “If anybody’s thirsty, they should come to me and have a drink! Anyone who believes in me will have rivers of living water flowing out of their heart, just like the Bible says!” He said this about the spirit, which people who believed in him were to receive. The spirit wasn’t available yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified. (7:37–39) “Peace be with you,” Jesus said to them again. “As the father has sent me, so I’m sending you.” With that, he breathed on them. “Receive the holy spirit,” he said. (20:21–22) Here is the heart of it. The more you tell the story of Jesus and pray for his Spirit, the more you discover what the church should be doing in the present time. Because the gospels are the foundational charter for the church’s life, they must be stories primarily about Jesus; otherwise the church would be rooted in itself. Here we find, in fact, the mirror image of the Bultmannian position: unless the church’s life and mission is rooted in the historical accomplishment of Jesus, all Christian life would be either arrogance or folly, or both. (As I write this paragraph, an e-mail comes in from Christian friends working among refugees and trafficked women in one of the toughest corners of the world. Why do we do this unless it’s the work of Jesus?)

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  23 The children in Stamps trembled visibly with anticipation. Some adults were excited too, but to be certain the whole young population had come down with graduation epidemic. Large classes were graduating from both the grammar school and the high school. Even those who were years removed from their own day of glorious release were anxious to help with preparations as a kind of dry run. The junior students who were moving into the vacating classes' chairs were tradition-bound to show their talents for leadership and management. They strutted through the school and around the campus exerting pressure on the lower grades. Their authority was so new that occasionally if they pressed a little too hard it had to be overlooked. After all, next term was coming, and it never hurt a sixth grader to have a play sister in the eighth grade, or a tenth-year student to be able to call a twelfth grader Bubba. So all was endured in a spirit of shared understanding. But the graduating classes themselves were the nobility. Like travelers with exotic destinations on their minds, the graduates were remarkably forgetful. They came to school without their books, or tablets or even pencils. Volunteers fell over themselves to secure replacements for the missing equipment. When accepted, the willing workers might or might not be thanked, and it was of no importance to the pregraduation rites. Even teachers were respectful of the now quiet and aging seniors, and tended to speak to them, if not as equals, as beings only slightly lower than themselves. After tests were returned and grades given, the student body, which acted like an extended family, knew who did well, who excelled, and what piteous ones had failed. Unlike the white high school, Lafayette County Training School distinguished itself by having neither lawn, nor hedges, nor tennis court, nor climbing ivy. Its two buildings (main classrooms, the grade school and home economics) were set on a dirt hill with no fence to limit either its boundaries or those of bordering farms. There was a large expanse to the left of the school which was used alternately as a baseball diamond or a basketball court. Rusty hoops on the swaying poles represented the permanent recreational equipment, although bats and balls could be borrowed from the P. E. teacher if the borrower was qualified and if the diamond wasn't occupied. Over this rocky area relieved by a few shady tall persimmon trees the graduating class walked. The girls often held hands and no longer bothered to speak to the lower students. There was a sadness about them, as if this old world was not their home and they were bound for higher ground. The boys, on the other hand, had become more friendly, more outgoing. A decided change from the closed attitude they projected while studying for finals. Now they seemed not ready to give up the old school, the familiar paths and classrooms.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  church. As soon as she took her seat, all the ushers would move to her side of the church because it took three women and sometimes a man or two to hold her. Once when she hadn't been to church for a few months (she had taken off to have a child), she got the spirit and started shouting, throwing her arms around and jerking her body, so that the ushers went over to hold her down, but she tore herself away from them and ran up to the pulpit. She stood in front of the altar, shaking like a freshly caught trout. She screamed at Reverend Taylor, “Preach it. I say, preach it.” Naturally he kept on preaching as if she wasn't standing there telling him what to do. Then she screamed an extremely fierce “I said, preach it” and stepped up on the altar. The Reverend kept on throwing out phrases like home-run balls and Sister Monroe made a quick break and grasped for him. For just a second, everything and everyone in the church except Reverend Taylor and Sister Monroe hung loose like stockings on a wash-line. Then she caught the minister by the sleeve of his jacket and his coat-tail, then she rocked him from side to side. I have to say this for our minister, he never stopped giving us the lesson. The usher board made its way to the pulpit, going up both aisles with a little more haste than is customarily seen in church. Truth to tell, they fairly ran to the minister's aid. Then two of the deacons, in their shiny Sunday suits, joined the ladies in white on the pulpit, and each time they pried Sister Monroe loose from the preacher he took another deep breath and kept on preaching, and Sister Monroe grabbed him in another place, and more firmly. Reverend Taylor was helping his rescuers as much as possible by jumping around when he got a chance. His voice at one point got so low it sounded like a roll of thunder, then Sister Monroe's “Preach it” cut through the roar, and we all wondered (I did, in any case) if it would ever end. Would they go on forever, or get tired out at last like a game of blindman's bluff that lasted too long, with nobody caring who was “it”? I'll never know what might have happened, because magically the pandemonium spread. The spirit infused Deacon Jackson and Sister Willson, the chairman of the usher board, at the same time. Deacon Jackson, a tall, thin, quiet man, who was also a part-time Sunday school teacher, gave a scream like a falling tree, leaned back on thin air and punched Reverend Taylor on the arm. It must have hurt as much as it caught the Reverend unawares. There was a moment's break in the rolling sounds and Reverend Taylor jerked around surprised, and hauled off and punched Deacon Jackson.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  When she called me I could hear it in her voice. Who could blame her? Somehow she had gotten another taste of sparkle. Now that she had a taste or saw its potential she was going for it again. When she looked back at the group she saw sick, miserable humans, something she would want to block out having ever been a part of. But the women in the group would see her as the sick, miserable one. They thought she would either come back or face devastation. But they’d forgotten the sensation of what it was like out there, to be in the throes of madness. I didn’t tell Diana about Theo, either. I took Dominic for a quick walk. He began pulling me in the direction of Oakwood Park, but I didn’t have the energy for it. I held the leash tightly as he yanked and skipped in place, whimpering with his head pointing in that direction. I knew that I should give him what he wanted, a little piece of that effortless happiness, but I couldn’t play wolf woman today. My mind was too much elsewhere, already on the rocks, waiting, waiting for Theo to surface and transform my perception. My mind was already in the ocean. I decided I would call Claire. “How are you doing, dearest?” I asked. “I’m better,” she said. “David called. I’m seeing him tomorrow. I told him he isn’t giving me enough of what I need. I haven’t hung myself from any silk scarves. So I guess that’s progress?” “Good,” I said. “And you?” “I’ve done it again,” I said. “I’ve fallen hard. Only this time I think it’s real.” “The surfer?” asked Claire. She sounded skeptical, and I wondered what right she had to be skeptical when she had just been in a bottomless pit. “Swimmer,” I said. “All we do is talk. Or all we did was talk until last night when he went down on me for forty-five minutes.” “Nooooo,” she said. “Yes. At least forty-five. What does it mean when a boy goes down on you for forty-five minutes? I feel like it has to be love. Like, I feel like he loves me.” “Either he loves you or he loves pussy. One of the two.” I laughed. “No, he doesn’t seem like that. He isn’t a pussy hound. Well, I can’t tell. I mean, I think he is gorgeous, but he isn’t typically gorgeous. But if I think he is gorgeous then probably a million others do too.” “Usually that’s the way it works,” she said. “Still, I’m glad you’re getting shagged properly. It’s important. I think it’s very important that you be well fucked.” “We haven’t fucked yet,” I said. “I haven’t even seen his dick.” “Oh really?” she said. “Then it could be love on his part.” “That’s what I think,” I said. “But what about you?” “I’m smitten,” I said.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I got to the rocks and saw the rosy dawn, the sun rising over the mountains. The rocks were cold and wet, and each wave that came in slapped against them—making its own little crash for a moment, then vanishing. I hadn’t slept much and felt giddy. What the hell was going on? I was out here looking for a merman. Was I crazy? Was I becoming just another Venice lost soul, belongings in a wagon, having insane visions by the ocean? I laughed aloud to myself. I imagined moving onto the beach at the end of the summer when Annika returned. I could sleep under the stars, meeting Theo every night. Then I could go eat breakfast and shower in their multimillion-dollar home. The thought of moving to the water’s edge seemed romantic in that moment. Sappho had always lived by the ocean, imagining love as a luminous divinity rising from the waves. This would be my living thesis. Then I saw Theo’s head surface, his thick wet hair draped over his left eye. “Hey!” he said, spitting out water. “Can you see when you’re underwater?” “Yes,” he said. “I live there.” “Well, I’m here to kidnap you,” I said. “No, I’m willfully coming,” he said. “I’m coming up. Land ho.” He looked around to see if anyone was coming. “Wow, you weren’t kidding about a wagon. You are really committed to doing this, I see.” “Uh-huh,” I said. “I think we should at least try, anyway. I will protect you. I just want to be safe with you, no elements, just a soft place to land together, by ourselves.” “I really want to be with you,” he said. I shuddered. He climbed up onto the rocks belly first, then flipped himself over, grunting. “Need help?” I asked. “I’m okay.” I rolled the wagon over to the edge of the rocks and held it steady. As he dragged himself on board, he looked like a paraplegic pulling himself onto a seat. He rolled over just using his arms to rearrange himself and tucked where his knees would be up to his chest. I draped the blanket around his shoulders and let it collect in front of him, covering the bulk of his tail. We were good, it seemed. But hoisting the wagon off the rocks proved more difficult than I thought. I pulled left and right, and the tin axles ground. He tried to push off the rock with his arms, like a man in a wheelchair, face straining. With him pushing, I gave a final tug and the wagon fell onto the beach, toppling over and dumping Theo in the sand. “Oh my God, are you okay?” I asked. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. But I noticed he was shaking. “Would you cover me up with the blanket quickly? Please?”