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 8 of 182 · 20 per page

• From The Girls (2016)

  to disappear. “Get on outside,” the man said. “Go.” Before she left, she stuck out her tongue at the man. Just a peep, like a droll little cat. — I’d only hesitated for a moment before following the girl outside, but she was already cutting across the parking lot, keeping up a brisk pace. I hurried behind. “Hey,” I called. She kept walking. I said it again, louder, and she stopped. Letting me catch up to her. “What a jerk,” I said. I must have looked shiny as an apple. Cheeks flushed with half-drunk effort. She glared in the direction of the store. “Fat fuck,” she muttered. “I can’t even buy toilet paper.” She finally seemed to acknowledge me, studying my face for a long moment. I could tell she saw me as young. That my bib shirt, a gift from my mother, was considered fancy. I wanted to do something bigger than those facts. I made the offer before I’d really thought about it. “I’ll lift it,” I said, my voice unnaturally bright. “The toilet paper. Easy. I steal stuff from there all the time.” I wondered if she believed me. It must have been obvious how lightly I was wearing the lie. But maybe she respected that. The desperation of my desire. Or maybe she wanted to see how it would play out. The rich girl, trying out kid-glove criminality. “You sure?” she said. I shrugged, my heart hammering. If she felt sorry for me, I didn’t see that part. — My unexplained return agitated the man behind the counter. “Back again?” Even if I’d really planned to try to steal something, it would have been impossible. I dawdled down the aisles, making an effort to wipe my face

• 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 An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  However bizarre this new world seemed to me, and I to it, I actually grew to cotton to its ways. Once I got over the initial shocks, I found most of my remaining experiences in high school a remarkable sort of education. Some of it was even in the classroom. I found the highly explicit conversations of my new classmates spellbinding. Everyone seemed to have at least one, sometimes two or even three, stepparents, depending on the number of household divorces. My friends’ financial resources were of astonishing proportions, and many had a familiarity with sex that was extensive enough to provide me with a very interesting groundwork. My new boyfriend, who was in college, provided the rest. He was a student at UCLA, where I worked as a volunteer on weekends in the pharmacology department. He was also everything I thought I wanted at the time: He was older, handsome, pre-med, crazy about me, had his own car, and, like my first boyfriend, loved to dance. Our relationship lasted throughout the time I was in high school, and, in looking back on it, I think it was as much a way of getting out of my house and away from the turmoil as it was any serious romantic involvement. I also learned for the first time what a WASP was, that I was one, and that this was, on a good day, a mixed blessing. As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise—and inexplicably—to be envied. It was then, and remains, a very strange concept to me. In an immediate way all of this contributed to a certain social fragmentation within the school. One cluster, who went to the beach by day and partied by night, tended toward WASPdom; the other, slightly more casual and jaded, tended toward intellectual pursuits. I ended up drifting in and out of both worlds, for the most part comfortable in each, but for very different reasons. The WASP world provided a tenuous but important link with my past; the intellectual world, however, became the sustaining part of my existence and a strong foundation for my academic future.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  I was twenty-one years old when I left Scotland and returned to UCLA. It was an abrupt shift in mood and surroundings, and an even more abrupt disruption to the pace of my life. I tried to settle back into my old world and routines but found it difficult to do so. For a year I had been free of having to work twenty or thirty hours a week in order to support myself, but now I once again had to juggle my work, classes, social life, and disruptive moods. My career plans also had changed. It had become clear to me over time that my mercurial temperament and physical restlessness were going to make medical school—especially the first two years, which required sitting still in lecture halls for hours at a time—an unlikely proposition. I found it difficult to stay put for long and found that I learned best on my own. I loved research and writing, and the thought of being chained to the kind of schedule that medical school required was increasingly repugnant. As important, I had read William James’s great psychological study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, during my year in St. Andrews and had become completely captivated by the idea of studying psychology, especially individual differences in temperament and variations in emotional capacities, such as mood and intense perceptions. I also had begun working with a second professor on his research grant, a fascinating study of the psychological and physiological effects of mood-altering drugs such as LSD, marijuana, cocaine, opiates, barbiturates, and amphetamines. He was particularly interested in why some individuals were drawn to one class of drugs, for example, the hallucinogens, while others gravitated toward drugs that dampened or elevated mood. He, like me, was intrigued by moods. This professor—a tall, shy, brilliant man—was himself inclined to quick and profound mood swings. I found working for him, first as a research assistant and then as a doctoral student, an extraordinary experience: he was immensely creative, curious, and open-minded; difficult but fair in his intellectual demands; and exceptionally kind in understanding my own fluctuating moods and attentiveness. We had a kind of intuition about one another that was, for the most part, left unsaid, although occasionally one or the other of us would bring up the subject of black moods. My office was adjacent to his, and he would, during my depressed times, ask about how I was feeling, comment that I looked tired or pensive or discouraged, and ask what he could do to help.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  The professor asked me about my background, and I explained that I was a freshman, wanted to become a doctor, and that I was working my way through school. He pointed out the university regulations stating that I was not allowed to be taking his course, as it was for juniors and seniors only, and I said that I knew that, but it looked interesting and the rule seemed completely arbitrary. He laughed out loud, and I suddenly realized that I was finally in a situation where someone actually respected my independence. This was not Miss Courtnay, and I was not expected to curtsy. He said he had a position on his grant for a lab assistant and asked me if I would be interested. I was more than interested. It meant that I could give up my unremittingly boring job as a cashier in a women’s clothing store and that I could learn to do research. It was a wonderful experience: I learned to code and analyze data, program computers, review the research literature, design studies, and write up scientific papers for publication. The professor I was working with was studying the structure of human personality, and I found the idea of investigating individual differences among people absolutely fascinating. I immersed myself in the work and found it not only a source of education and income, but escape as well. Unlike attendance at classes—which seemed stifling and, like the rest of the worlds schedules, based on an assumption of steadiness and consistency in moods and performance—the research life allowed an independence and flexibility of schedule that I found exhilarating. University administrators do not consider the pronounced seasonal changes in behaviors and abilities that are part and parcel of the lives of most manic-depressives. My undergraduate transcript, consequently, was riddled with failing grades and incompleted classes, but my research papers, fortunately, offset my often dreary grades. My mercurial moods and recurrent, very black depressions took a huge personal and academic toll during those college years.

• From The Girls (2016)

  7 I could ride my bike most of the way there. Adobe Road empty of cars, except for the occasional motorcycle or horse trailer. If a car passed, it was usually heading to the ranch, and they’d give me a lift, my bicycle half hanging out a window. Girls in shorts and wood sandals and plastic rings from the dispensers outside the Rexall. Boys who kept losing their train of thought, then coming to with a stunned smile, as if returned from cosmic tourism. The barest of nods we’d give one another, tuned to the same unseen frequencies. — It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember my life before Suzanne and the others, but it had been limited and expected, objects and people occupying their temperate orbits. The yellow cake my mother made for birthdays, dense and chilly from the freezer. The girls at school eating lunch on the asphalt, sitting on their overturned backpacks. Since I’d met Suzanne, my life had come into sharp, mysterious relief, revealing a world beyond the known world, the hidden passage behind the bookcase. I’d catch myself eating an apple, and even the wet swallow of apple could incite gratitude in me. The arrangement of oak leaves overhead condensing with a hothouse clarity, clues to a riddle I hadn’t known you could try to solve. — I followed Suzanne past the motorcycles parked at the front of the main house, as big and heavy looking as cows. Men in denim vests sat on the nearby boulders, smoking cigarettes. The air was prickly from the llamas in their pen, the funny smell of hay and sweat and sunbaked shit. “Hey, bunnies,” one of the men called. Stretching so his belly strained pregnant against his shirt.

• 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 The Girls (2016)

  of any delinquent glimmer, but the man didn’t look away. He glared until I grabbed the toilet paper and brought it to the register, shamed at how easily I snapped into the habit. Of course I wasn’t going to steal anything. That was never going to happen. He got on a tear as he rang up the toilet paper. “A nice girl like you shouldn’t hang out with girls like that,” he said. “So filthy, that group. Some guy with a black dog.” He looked pained. “Not in my store.” Through the pocked glass, I could see the girl ambling in the parking lot outside. Hand shading her eyes. This sudden and unexpected fortune: she was waiting for me. After I paid, the man looked at me for a long moment. “You’re just a kid,” he said. “Why don’t you go on home?” I had felt bad for him until then. “I don’t need a bag,” I said, and stuffed the toilet paper in my purse. I was silent while the man gave me change, licking his lips as if to chase away a bad taste. — The girl perked up as I came over. “You get it?” I nodded, and she huddled me around the corner, her arm hurrying me along. I could almost believe I had actually stolen something, adrenaline brightening my veins as I held out my bag. “Ha,” she said, peeking inside. “Serves him right, the asshole. Was it easy?” “Pretty easy,” I said. “He’s so out of it, anyway.” I was thrilling at our collusion, the way we’d become a team. A triangle of stomach showed where the girl’s dress wasn’t fully buttoned. How easily she invoked a kind of sloppy sexual feeling, like her clothes had been hurried on a body still cooling from sweat. “I’m Suzanne,” she said. “By the way.” “Evie.” I stuck out my hand. Suzanne laughed in a way that made me understand shaking hands was the wrong thing to do, a hollow symbol from the straight world. I flushed. It was hard to know how to act without all the usual polite gestures and forms. I wasn’t sure what took their place. There was a silence: I scrambled to fill it.

• 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)

  Because of his late-arriving but intense paternal sense, I was introduced to the most colorful characters in the Black underground. One afternoon, I was invited into our smoke-filled dining room to make the acquaintance of Stonewall Jimmy, Just Black, Cool Clyde, Tight Coat and Red Leg. Daddy Clidell explained to me that they were the most successful con men in the world, and they were going to tell me about some games so that I would never be “anybody's mark.” To begin, one man warned me, “There ain't never been a mark yet that didn't want something for nothing.” Then they took turns showing me their tricks, how they chose their victims (marks) from the wealthy bigoted whites and in every case how they used the victims' prejudice against them. Some of the tales were funny, a few were pathetic, but all were amusing or gratifying to me, for the Black man, the con man who could act the most stupid, won out every time over the powerful, arrogant white. I remember Mr. Red Leg's story like a favorite melody. “Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse. “There was a cracker in Tulsa who bilked so many Negroes he could set up a Negro Bilking Company. Naturally he got to thinking, Black Skin means Damn Fool. Just Black and I went to Tulsa to check him out. Come to find out, he's a perfect mark. His momma must have been scared in an Indian massacre in Africa. He hated Negroes only a little more than he despised Indians. And he was greedy. “Black and I studied him and decided he was worth setting up against the store. That means we were ready to put out a few thousand dollars in preparation. We pulled in a white boy from New York, a good con artist, and had him open an office in Tulsa. He was supposed to be a Northern real estate agent trying to buy up valuable land in Oklahoma. We investigated a piece of land near Tulsa that had a toll bridge crossing it. It used to be part of an Indian reservation but had been taken over by the state. “Just Black was laid out as the decoy, and I was going to be the fool. After our friend from New York hired a secretary and had his cards printed, Black approached the mark with a proposition. He told him that he had heard that our mark was the only white man colored people could trust. He named some of the poor fools that had been taken by that crook. It just goes to show you how whitefolks can be deceived by their own deception. The mark believed Black.

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

  His valedictory speech was entitled “To Be or Not to Be.” The rigid tenth-grade teacher had helped him write it. He'd been working on the dramatic stresses for months. The weeks until graduation were filled with heady activities. A group of small children were to be presented in a play about buttercups and daisies and bunny rabbits. They could be heard throughout the building practicing their hops and their little songs that sounded like silver bells. The older girls (nongraduates, of course) were assigned the task of making refreshments for the night's festivities. A tangy scent of ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and chocolate wafted around the home economics building as the budding cooks made samples for themselves and their teachers. In every corner of the workshop, axes and saws split fresh timber as the woodshop boys made sets and stage scenery. Only the graduates were left out of the general bustle. We were free to sit in the library at the back of the building or look in quite detachedly naturally, on the measures being taken for our event. Even the minister preached on graduation the Sunday before. His subject was, “Let your light so shine that men will see your good works and praise your Father, Who is in Heaven.” Although the sermon was purported to be addressed to us, he used the occasion to speak to backsliders, gamblers and general ne'er-do-wells. But since he had called our names at the beginning of the service we were mollified. Among Negroes the tradition was to give presents to children going only from one grade to another. How much more important this was when the person was graduating at the top of the class. Uncle Willie and Momma had sent away for a Mickey Mouse watch like Bailey's. Louise gave me four embroidered handkerchiefs. (I gave her three crocheted doilies.) Mrs. Sneed, the minister's wife, made me an underskirt to wear for graduation, and nearly every customer gave me a nickel or maybe even a dime with the instruction “Keep on moving to higher ground,” or some such encouragement. Amazingly the great day finally dawned and I was out of bed before I knew it. I threw open the back door to see it more clearly, but Momma said, “Sister, come away from that door and put your robe on.”

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

  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. In the same second Sister Willson caught his tie, looped it over her fist a few times, and pressed down on him. There wasn't time to laugh or cry before all three of them were down on the floor behind the altar. Their legs spiked out like kindling wood. Sister Monroe, who had been the cause of all the excitement, walked off the dais, cool and spent, and raised her flinty voice in the hymn, “I came to Jesus, as I was, worried, worn and sad, I found in Him a resting place and He has made me glad.” The minister took advantage of already being on the floor and asked in a choky little voice if the church would kneel with him to offer a prayer of thanksgiving. He said we had been visited with a mighty spirit, and let the whole church say Amen.

• 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)

  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. There would be no need for me to speak to the guard since the motor was running, but I had to wait until he looked into the car and gave me the signal to continue. He was busy talking to people in a car facing the mountain I had just conquered. The light from his hut showed him bent from the waist with his upper torso completely swallowed by the mouth of the open window. I held the car in instant readiness for the next lap of our journey. When the guard unfolded himself and stood erect I was able to see he was not the same man of the morning's embarrassment. I was understandably taken aback at the discovery and when he saluted sharply and barked “Pasa” I released the brake, put both feet down and lifted them a bit too sharply. The car outran my intention. It leaped not only forward but left as well, and with a few angry spurts propelled itself onto the side of the car just pulling off. The crash of scraping metal was followed immediately by a volley of Spanish hurled at me from all directions. Again, strangely enough, fear was absent from my sensations. I wondered in this order: was I hurt, was anyone else hurt, would I go to jail, what were the Mexicans saying, and finally, had Dad awakened?

• 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)

  My Miss Kirwin, who was a tall, florid, buxom lady with battleship-gray hair, taught civics and current events. At the end of a term in her class our books were as clean and the pages as stiff as they had been when they were issued to us. Miss Kirwin's students were never or very rarely called upon to open textbooks. She greeted each class with “Good day, ladies and gentlemen.” I had never heard an adult speak with such respect to teenagers. (Adults usually believe that a show of honor diminishes their authority.) “In today's Chronicle there was an article on the mining industry in the Carolinas [or some such distant subject]. I am certain that all of you have read the article. I would like someone to elaborate on the subject for me.” After the first two weeks in her class, I, along with all the other excited students, read the San Francisco papers, Time magazine, Life and everything else available to me. Miss Kirwin proved Bailey right. He had told me once that “all knowledge is spendable currency, depending on the market.” There were no favorite students. No teacher's pets. If a student pleased her during a particular period, he could not count on special treatment in the next day's class, and that was as true the other way around. Each day she faced us with a clean slate and acted as if ours were clean as well. Reserved and firm in her opinions, she spent no time in indulging the frivolous. She was stimulating instead of intimidating. Where some of the other teachers went out of their way to be nice to me—to be a “liberal” with me—and others ignored me completely, Miss Kirwin never seemed to notice that I was Black and therefore different. I was Miss Johnson and if I had the answer to a question she posed I was never given any more than the word “Correct,” which was what she said to every other student with the correct answer. Years later when I returned to San Francisco I made visits to her classroom. She always remembered that I was Miss Johnson, who had a good mind and should be doing something with it. I was never encouraged on those visits to loiter or linger about her desk. She acted as if I must have had other visits to make. I often wondered if she knew she was the only teacher I remembered. 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.

• From How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (2015)

  You can already imagine how Antipas’s relocated and renamed capital, along with its attendant commercialization of the Lake of Galilee, changed the economic situation for all those who had used the lake freely as communal property before the 20s CE . Hence this question: if “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” (Ps. 24:1), whose was the lake and all of its fishes? “They Will Call Him Son of the Most High”I CONCLUDE WITH A final element of the matrix in which both John and Jesus lived and died. It specifies the contemporary eschatological vision as messianic. But what does that mean? In establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth, would God use some agent, intermediary, ambassador, vice-regent, or plenipotentiary? If yes, would that agent be an earthly or a heavenly figure, or maybe even an earthly figure suffused with heavenly power? Would the agent be a priest, a prophet, or a king and be anointed not only with sacred oil, but also with transcendental power? (Hebrew’s Messiah and Greek’s Christos means “the Anointed One.”) Here are two examples of the pre-Christian Jewish expectation of such a transcendental Messiah, both dating to the final half of the first century BCE . The first example is from the Psalms of Solomon. Its matrix is the first direct experience of violent Roman power within the Jewish homeland. Pompey conquered Jerusalem and desecrated its Temple in 63 BCE : “a man alien to our race . . . a lawless one laid waste our land . . . he did in Jerusalem all the things that gentiles do for their gods in their cities” (17:7, 11, 14). But in 48 BCE Pompey was assassinated on an Egyptian beach: “his body was carried about on the waves in much shame, and there was no one to bury him” (2:27). So surely soon, surely now, God would raise up for them [the Jews] their king, the Son of David . . . to smash the arrogance of sinners like a potter’s jar; to shatter all their substance with an iron rod; to destroy the unlawful nations with the word of his mouth . . . he will judge peoples and nations in the wisdom of his righteousness . . . all shall be holy, and their king shall be the Lord Messiah. [For] he will not rely on horse and rider and bow, nor will he collect gold and silver for war. Nor will he build up hope in a multitude for a day of war. (17:21, 23–24, 29, 32–33) On the one hand, this coming Messiah is not exactly a pacifist, and the Romans seem destined for extermination rather than conversion. On the other hand, he is certainly not a military Messiah organizing a rebellion against Rome. Notice those repeated phrases about “the word of his mouth” (17:24, 35) or “the might of his word” (17:36).