Fear

Passages

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

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Who going to take care of tts if we don't take care of each other? I feared, feared-like a thief in the night, as one of my brothers would put it-to connect all this with my father and mother and everyone I knew, and with myself , and to connect all this with black Uncle Tom: no more than I had wished to be that fleeing fugitive on that moving train did I desire to endure his destiny or meet his end. Uncle Tom really believed vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, for he believed in the Lord, as I flattered myself I did not: this inconvenient faith (de scribed, furthermore, by a white woman) obscured the fact that Tom allowed himself to be murdered for refusing to dis close the road taken by a runaway slave. Because Uncle Tom would not take vengeance into his own hands, he was not a hero for me. Heroes, as far as I could then sec, were white, and not merely because of the movies but because of the land in which I lived, of which movies were simply a reflection: I despised and feared those heroes because they did take vcn gcancc into their own hands. They thought that vengeance was theirs to take. This difficult coin did not cease to spin, it had neither heads nor tails: for what white people took into their hands could scarcely even be called vengeance, it was something less and something more. The Scottsboro boys, for exampl e-f or the Scottsboro Case has begun-were certainly innocent of anything requiring vengeance. My father's young est son by his first marriage, nine years older than I, who had vanished from our lives, might have been one of those boys, now being murdered by my fellow Americans on the basis of +92 THE DE VIL FI NDS WORK the rape charge delivered by two white whores: and I was reading Angelo Herndon's Let Me LiJJe. Yes. I understood that: my countrymen were my enemy, and I had already be gun to hate them from the bottom of my heart. Angelo Herndon was a young, black labor organizer in the Deep South, railroaded to prison, who lived long enough, at least, to write a book about it-the George Ja ckson of the era.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On the morning of the first trial I was awakened by hearing my name called. I was told, hanging in a kind ofvoid between my mother's fried chicken and the cold prison floor, ({Vous preparez. Vous etes extraitJJ- which simply terrified me, since I did not know what interpretation to put on the word ({ex trait, JJ and since my cell mates had been amusing themselves with me by telling terrible stories about the inefficiency of French prisons, an inefficiency so extreme that it had often happened that someone who was supposed to be taken out and tried found himself on the wrong line and was guillotined instead. The best way of putting my reaction to this is to say that, though I knew they were teasing me, it was simply not possible for me to totally disbelieve them. As far as I was con- EQ UAL IN PARIS ll3 cerned, once in the hands of the law in France, anything could happen. I shuff led along with the others who were extrait to the center of the prison, trying, rather, to linger in the office, which seemed the only warm spot in the whole world, and found myself again in that dreadful wagon, and was carried again to the lie de Ia Cite, this time to the Palais de Justice. The entire day, except for ten minutes, was spent in one of the cells, first waiting to be tried, then waiting to be taken back to prison. For I was not tried that day. By and by I was handcuffed and led through the halls, upstairs to the courtroom where I found my New York friend. We were placed together, both stage-whisperingly certain that this was the end of our ordeal. Nevertheless, while I waited for our case to be called, my eyes searched the courtroom, looking for a face I knew, hoping, anyway, that there was someone there who knew me, who would carry to someone outside the news that I was in trou ble . But there was no one I knew there and I had had time to realize that there was probably only one man in Paris who could help me, an American patent attorney for whom I had worked as an office boy. He could have helped me because he had a quite solid position and some prestige and would have testified that, while working for him, I had handled large sums of money regularly, which made it rather unlikely that I would stoop to trafficking in bedsheets. However, he was somewhere in Paris, probably at this very moment enjoying a snack and a glass of wine and as far as the possibility of reach ing him was concerned, he might as well have been on Mars. I tried to watch the proceedings and to make my mind a blank. But the proceedings were not reassuring.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The NAACP there had been try ing for six years before Black Monday to make the city fathers honor the "separate but equal" statute and do something about the situation in Negro schools. Nothing whatever was done. After Black Monday, Charlotte begged for "time": and what she did with this time was work out legal stratagems designed to get the least possible integration over the longest possible period. In August of 1955, Governor Hodges, a mod- NOBOD Y KNOWS MY NAM E 20 3 erate, went on the air with the suggestion that Negroes seg regate themselv es volun tarily-f or the good, as he put it, of both races. Negroes seeming to be unmoved by this moderate proposal, the Klan reappeared in the counties and was still active there when I lef t. So, no doubt, are the boys on the chain gang. But "Charlotte," I was told, "is not the South ." I was told, "You haven't seen the South yet." Charlotte seemed quite Southern enough tor me, but, in fact, the people in Charlotte were right. One of the reasons for this is that the South is not the monolithic structure which, trom the North, it appears to be, but a most various and divided region. It clings to the myth of its past but it is being inexorably changed, meanwhile, by an entirely unmythical present: its habits and its self-i nterest are at war. Everyone in the South feels this and this is why there is such panic on the bottom and such impotence on the top. It must also be said that the racial setup in the South is not, for a Negro, very different from the racial setup in the North. It is the etiquette which is baffli ng, not the spirit. Segregation is unofficial in the North and official in the South, a crucial difference that does nothing, nevertheless, to alleviate the lot of most Northern Negroes. But we will return to this question when we discuss the relationship between the Southern cities and states. Atlanta, however, is the South . It is the South in this re spect, that it has a very bitter interracial history. This is written in the faces of the people and one feels it in the air. It was on the outskirts of Atlanta that I first felt how the Southern land scape-the trees, the silence, the liquid heat, and the fact that one always seems to be traveling great distances-seems de signed for violence, seems, almost, to demand it. What pas sions cannot be unleashed on a dark road in a Southern night! Everything seems so sensual, so languid, and so private. Desire can be acted out here; over this fence, behind that tree, in the darkness, there; and no one will see, no one will ever know. Only the night is watching and the night was made t(:>r desire.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Not only Algerians. Everyone in Paris, in those years, who was not, resoundingly, from the north of Europe was sus pected of being Algerian; and the police were on every street corner, sometimes armed with machine guns. Turks, Greeks, 376 NO NAME IN THE STREE T Spaniards, Jews, Italians, American blacks, and Frenchmen from Marseilles, or Nice, were all under constant harassment, and we will never know how many people having not the remotest connection with Algeria were thrown into prison, or murdered, as it were, by accident. The son of a world-f amous actor, and an actor himself, swarthy, and speaking no French-rendered speechless indeed by the fact that the policeman had a gun leveled at him-was saved only by the fact that he was close enough to his hotel to shout for the night porter, who came rushing out and identified him. Two young Italians, on holiday, did not fare so well: speeding mer rily along on their Vespa, they failed to respond to a police man's order to halt, whereupon the policeman fired, and the holiday came to a bloody end. Everyone one knew was full of stories like these, which eventually began to appear in the press, and one had to be careful how one moved about in the fabulous city of light. I had never, thank God-and certainly not once I found myself living there-been even remotely romantic about Paris. I may have been romantic about London-because of Charles Dickens-but the romance lasted for exactly as long as it took me to carry my bags out of Victoria Station. My journey, or my flight, had not been to Paris, but simply away from Amer ica. For example, I had seriously considered going to work on a kibbutz in Israel, and I ended up in Paris almost literally by closing my eyes and putting my finger on a map. So I was not as demoralized by all of this as I would certainly have been if I had ever made the error of considering Paris the most civi lized of cities and the French as the least primitive of peoples. I knew too much about the French Revolution for that. I had read too much Balz ac for that. Whenever I crossed Ia place de Ia Concorde, I heard the tumbrils arriving, and the roar of the mob, and where the obelisk now towers, I saw-a nd see /a guillotine. Anyone who has ever been at the mercy of the people, then, knows something awful about us, will forever distrust the popular patriotism, and avoids even the most con vivial of mobs. Still, my flight had been dictated by my hope that I could find myself in a place where I would be treated more hu manely than my society had treated me at home, where my TAKE ME TO THE WATER 377 risks would be more personal, and my fate less austerely scaled.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  We were awakened at seven-thirty by a rapping on what I believe is called the ] udas, that small opening in the door of the cell which allows the guards to survey the prisoners. At this rap ping we rose from the floor-we slept on straw pallets and each of us was covered with one thin blanket-and moved to the door of the cell. We peered through the opening into the center of the prison, which was, as I remember, three tiers high, all gray stone and gunmetal steel, precisely that prison I had seen in movies, except that, in the movies, I had not known that it was cold in prison. I had not known that when one's shoelaces and belt have been removed one is, in the strangest way, demoralized. The necessity of shuffling and the necessity of holding up one's trousers with one hand turn one I12 NOTES OF A NATIVE SON into a rag doll. And the movies fail, of course, to give one any idea of what prison food is like. Along the corridor, at seven thirty, came three men, each pushing before him a great gar bage can, mounted on wheels. In the garbage can of the first was the bread-this was passed to one through the small opening in the door. In the can of the second was the coffee. In the can of the third was what was always called Ia soupe, a pallid paste of potatoes which had certainly been bubbling on the back of the prison stove long before that first, so momen tous revolution. Naturally, it was cold by this time and, starv ing as I was, I could not cat it. I drank the coffee-which was not coffee-because it was hot, and spent the rest of the day, huddled in my blanket, munching on the bread. It was not the French bread one bought in bakeries. In the evening the same procession returned. At ten-thirty the lights went out. I had a recurring dream, each night, a nightmare which always involved my mother's fried chicken. At the moment I was about to eat it came the rapping at the door. Silence is really all I remember of those first three days, silence and the color gray. I am not sure now whether it was on the third or the fourth day that I was taken to trial for the first time. The days had nothing, obviously, to distinguish them fr om one another. I remember that I was very much aware that Christmas Day was approaching and I wondered if I was really going to spend Christmas Day in prison. And I remember that the first trial came the day bctorc Ch ristmas Eve. On the morning of the first trial I was awakened by hearing my name called. I was told , hanging in a kind of void between my mother's fried chicken and the cold prison floor, ({Vous preparez.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  THE TWENTY-NINTH CHAPTER How Apuleius was accused of Lechery by the boy. A few dayes after, the boy invented another mischiefe: For when he had sold all the wood which I bare, to certaine men dwelling in a village by, he lead me homeward unladen: And then he cryed that he was not able to rule me, and that hee would not drive mee any longer to the hill for wood, saying: Doe you not see this slow and dulle Asse, who besides all the mischiefes that he hath wrought already, inventeth daily more and more. For he espyeth any woman passing by the way, whether she be old or marryed, or if it be a young child, hee will throw his burthen from his backe, and runneth fiercely upon them. And after that he hath thrown them downe, he will stride over them to commit his buggery and beastly pleasure, moreover hee will faine as though hee would kisse them, but he will bite their faces cruelly, which thing may worke us great displeasure, or rather to be imputed unto us as a crime: and even now when he espyed an honest maiden passing by the high way, he by and by threw downe his wood and runne after her: And when he had throwne her down upon the ground, he would have ravished her before the face of all the world, had it not beene that by reason of her crying out, she was succored and pulled from his heeles, and so delivered. And if it had so come to passe that this fearefull maid had beene slaine by him, what danger had we beene in? By these and like lies, he provoked the shepheards earnestly against me, which grieved mee (God wot) full sore that said nothing. Then one of the shepheards said: Why doe we not make sacrifice of this common adulterous Asse? My sonne (quoth he) let us kill him and throw his guts to the dogges, and reserve his flesh for the labourers supper. Then let us cast dust upon his skinne, and carry it home to our master, and say that the Woolves have devoured him. The boy that was my evill accuser made no delay, but prepared himselfe to execute the sentence of the shepheard, rejoycing at my present danger, but O how greatly did I then repent that the stripe which I gave him with my heele had not killed him. Then he drew out his sword and made it sharp upon the whetstone to slay me, but another of the shepheards gan say, Verely it is a great offence to kill so faire an Asse, and so (by accusation of luxurie and lascivious wantonnesse) to lack so necessarie his labour and service, where otherwise if ye would cut off his stones, he might not onely be deprived of his courage but also become gentle, that we should be delivered from all feare and danger. Moreover he would be thereby more fat and better in flesh. For I know my selfe as well many Asses, as also most fierce horses, that by reason of their wantonnesse have beene most mad and terrible, but (when they were gelded and cut) they have become gentle and tame, and tractable to all use. Wherefore I would counsell you to geld him. And if you consent thereto, I will by and by, when I go to the next market fetch mine irons and tooles for the purpose: And I ensure you after that I have gelded and cut off his stones, I will deliver him unto you as tame as a lambe. When I did perceive that I was delivered from death, and reserved to be gelded, I was greatly sorrie, insomuch that I thought all the hinder part of my body and my stones did ake for woe, but I sought about to kill my selfe by some manner of meanes, to the end if I should die, I would die with unperished members.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  He took me into the Coney Island breakers on his back one day, teaching me to swim, and somehow ducked beneath me, playing, or was carried away from me t(>r a moment, terrified, caught me and brought me above the waves. In the time that his body vanished beneath me and the waters rolled over my head, I still remember the slimy sea water and the blinding green-it was not green; it was all the world's snot and vomit; it entered into me; when my head was abruptly lifted out of the water, when I tCit my brother's anns and saw his worried face-his eyes looking steadily into mine with the intense and yet im personal anxiety of a surgeon, the sky above me not yet in t(>cus, my lungs tailing to deliver the mighty scream I had nearly burst with in the depths, my four or five or six-y ear old legs kicking-and my brother slung me over his shoulder like a piece of meat, or a much beloved child, and strode up out of the sea with me, with me! he had saved me, after all, TAKE ME TO THE WATER 357 I learned something about the terror and the loneline ss and the depth and the height of love. Not so very much later, this brother, who was in his teens, fooling around with girls or shooting dice with his friends, who knows, came home late, which was forbidden in our Bap tist house, and had a terrible fight with his Daddy and left the house and never came back. He swore that he never would come back, that his Daddy would never see him again. And he never did come back, not while Daddy was still alive. Daddy wrote, but his son never answered. When I became a young minister, I was asked to write him, and I did-some times my father dictated the letters to me. And the boy an swered me, sometimes, but he never answered his father and never mentioned him. Daddy slowly began to realize that he was never going to see that son, who was his darling, the apple of his eye, anymore, and this broke his heart and destroyed his will and helped him into the madhouse and the grave my only intimation, perhaps, during all those years, that he was human. The son came home, when his father died, to help me bury him. Then he went away again, and I didn't see him until I had to go to Calif ornia on a Civil Rights gig, and he met me at the airport. By then, I was thirty-nine and he was nearly fifty, I had made his disowned father's name fa mous, and I had lef t home in exactly the same way he did, for more or less the same reasons, and when I was seventeen.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Well, if I was "strange"-and I knew that I must be, otherwise people would not have treated me so strangely, and I would not ha ve been so miserable-perhaps I could find a way to use my strangeness. A "strange" child, anyway, dimly and fearfully apprehends that the years are not likely to make him less strange. Therefore, if he wishes to live, he must calculate, and I knew that I had to live. I very much wanted my mother to be happy and to be proud of me, and I very much loved my brothers and my sisters, who, in a sense, were all I had. My father showed no favoritism, he did not beat me worse than the others because I was not his son. (I didn't know this then, anyway, none of the children did, and by the time we all found out, it became just one more detail of the peculiar journey we had made in company with each other.) I knew, too, that my mother depended on me. I was not alw ays dependable, for no child can be, but I tried: and I knew that I might have to prepare myself to be, one day, the actual head of my family. I did not actually do this, either, for we were all forced to take on our responsibilities each for the other, and to dis charge them in our different ways. The eldest can be, God knows, as much a burden as a help, and is doomed to be something of a mystery for those growing up behind him-a mystery when not, indeed, an intolerable exasperation. I, nevertheless, was the eldest, a responsibility I did not intend to fail, and my first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world's intentions for me and mine began on that Saturday afternoon in what we called the movies, but which was actually my first entrance into the cinema of my mind. I read Uncle Tom's Cabin over and over and over again this is the first book I can remember having read-and then I read A Tale of TJVo Cities-over and over and over again. THE DE VIL FINDS WORK Bill Miller takes me to see A Tale ofTJVo Cities, at the Lincol n, on 1 35th Street. I am twelve. I did not yet know that virtually every black community in America contains a movie house, or, sometimes, in those days, an actual theater, called the Lincoln, or the Booker T. Wash ington, nor did I know why; any more than I knew why The Cotton Club was called The Cotton Club. I knew about Lin coln only that he had freed the slaves (in the South, which made the venture remote from me) and then had been shot, dead, in a theater, by an actor; and a movie I was never to see, called The Prisoner of Shark Island, had something to do with the murder of Lincoln.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I hoped that they wouldn't forget me. I missed Harlem Sunday mornings and fried chicken and biscuits, I missed the music, I missed the style-that style possessed by no other people in this world. I missed the way the dark face closes, the way dark eyes watch, and the way, when a dark tacc opens, a light seems to go on everywhere. I missed my brothers especiall y-missed David's grin and George's solemnity and Wilmer's rages, missed, in short, my connections, missed the lif e which had TAKE ME TO THE WA TER 397 produced me and nourished me and paid for me. �ow, though I was a stranger, I was home. The racial dividi ng lines of Southern towns are baffling and treacherous for a stranger, for they are not as clearly marked as in the North-or not as clearly marked for him. I passed a porch \\ith dark people; on the corner about a block away there was a restaurant. \Vhen I reached the corner, I entered the restaurant. I will never forget it. I don't know if I can describe it. Everything abruptly froze into what, even at that moment, struck me as a kind of Marx Brothers parody of horror. E,·ery white face turned to stone: the arri,·al of the messenger of death could not have had a more de,·astating effect than the appearance in the restaurant doorw ay of a small, unarmed, utterly astounded black man. I had realized my error as soon as I opened the door: but the absolute terror on all these white faces-! S\vear that not a soul mm·ed-paralyzed me. They stared at me, I stared at them. The spell , .. ·as broken by one of those women, produced, I hope, only in the South, \\i th a face like a rusty hatchet, and eyes like two rusty nails-nails left over from the Crucifixion. She rushed at me as though to club me down , and she barked-f or it was not a human sound: "What you want, boy? What you want in here?" And then, a decontaminating ges ture, "Right around there, boy. Right around there." I had no idea what she was talking about. I backed out the door. "Right around there, boy," said a ,·oice behind me. A white man had appeared out of nowhere, on the sidewalk which had been empty not more than a second before. I stared at him blankly. He watched me steadi ly, with a kind of suspended menace . .My first shock had subsided. I really had not had time to feel either fear or anger. Now, both began to rise in me. I knew I had to get off this street. He had pointed to a door, and I knew immediately that he was pointing to the colored entrance.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  If I could scarcely remember his name, he would certainly have the same difficulty with mine, and, if he was a fugitive trom justice, he would scarcely take a chance on coming to hide in my cabin. I knew the name now, and I was determined not to reveal it. It was no part of my duty to help them trap the cat, and, no doubt, he had his reasons tor deserting the Marines. But the interrogation was rugged, ruthless, and prolonged, and, eventually, the name slipped out: "Well, there was Carmen, and me, and Joe, and Teddy-" "Teddy? Is this Teddy?" I cursed myself, for, of course, they had known the name all along. My utterance of the name had confirmed something, and I had been helpful to them, after all. This fr ightened me in a new way, in a way that I had never been fr ightened before. I could see, suddenly, that they could keep me against this wall, under this sun, tor the foreseeable future, and, finally, whatever I knew would be dragged out of me. But, in tact, thank God, or somebody, all I knew about the boy was his name. I did not even know his last name. And the afternoon wore on, with threats and curses. They came to my cabin, and searched it-I felt that they had searched it before. When the interrogation was finally over, one of them took out a nickel and dropped it into my palm. With this nickel, the moment I had any news of Teddy I was to call him. I'd be a mighty sorry nigger if I didn't. I took the nickel, and I assured him that I would certainly call him the moment I had any news of Teddy. I thought, You can bet your ass I'll call you. Don't piss, don't shit, don't fuck, until I call you: do nothing till you hear trom me. Thev lcti: me, finallv, haunted the cabin, and roamed the town i ·o r two days. T�ddy never appeared. I never spent the nickel, I threw it away. * CHAPTER TWO 549 Teddy was turned in. This, I learned much later, in New York, during my visit in 1952. One of the friends at that long gone party really knew Teddy, and the FBI had come to see him, too, and had also given him a nickel.

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

  The Terror of ConflictA CONFLICT-FREE MARRIAGE is an oxymoron. Every married couple must learn how to deal with differences in ways that suit their style, values, and particular relationship. This is a major challenge of modern marriage. Disputes are no longer settled by the father who knows best, a council of elders, or folk tradition. Women hold equal power and not all differences can be compromised, mediated, or settled by taking turns. If he wants no children and she wants one, you can’t have half a child. And you can’t walk away from the conflict. Someone has to prevail or you have to find a way to agree. You can’t live in his hometown in California and your hometown in Boston and be in the same household. Nor is it a solution to live midway in Chicago. You have to face the issue squarely, contain the anger and the disappointment that follows, and solve it peaceably to maintain the marriage. And you have to face the fact that this or another conflict will reappear. It’s an ongoing, challenging process that can be the key to a good marriage or the road to divorce. We learn our most important lessons about conflict at home, while growing up. Every day, children observe how differences and anger are resolved or not resolved in their own families. The lessons are constant, ingrained, permanent. All adults draw on experiences from childhood and adolescence to guide them in knowing how to manage conflict in their close relationships at home, at work, everywhere they turn. This is a never ending struggle because all close relationships—between friends, work or recreation partners, parents and children, or lovers—hold the seeds of repeated conflict. All need to be resolved or the relationship is on the rocks. Children of divorce have trouble with conflict because they grew up in homes where major arguments were not resolved but were surrendered to. Conflict evokes painful memories and feelings of terror from long ago. The quarrels they remember are not those that got worked out but those that spun out of control, escalated, and exploded. Karen’s panic following her husband’s fairly mild rebuke is typical of how adult children of divorce can react to simple disagreements. For them any conflict spells danger, a devil that threatens to tear the fabric of family life, destroy their marriage, and break their hearts.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But this choice was a choice in terms of a personal, a private better (I was, after all, a wr iter); what was its relevance in terms of a social worse? Here was the South Side-a million in captivity-stretching from this doorstep as fa r as the eye could see. And they didn't even read; depressed populations don't have the time or energy to spare. The affluent populations, which should have THE FIRE NEXT TIME been their help, didn't, as fa r as could be discovered, read, either-they merely bought books and devoured them, but not in order to learn: in order to learn new attitudes. Also, I knew that once I had entered the house, I couldn't smoke or drink, and I fe lt guilty about the cigarettes in my pocket, as I had fe lt years ago when my fr iend first took me into his church. I was half an hour late, having got lost on the way here, and I fe lt as deserving of a scolding as a schoolboy. The young man who came to the door-he was about thirty, perhaps, with a handsome, smiling face-didn't seem to find my lateness offensive, and led me into a large room. On one side of the room sat half a dozen women, all in white; they were much occupied with a beautiful baby, who seemed to belong to the youngest of the women. On the other side of the room sat seven or eight men, young, dressed in dark suits, very much at case, and very imposing. The sunlight came into the room with the peacefulness one remembers fr om rooms in one's early childhood-a sunlight encountered later only in one's dreams. I remember being astounded by the quietness, the case, the peace, the taste. I was introduced, they greeted me with a genuine cordiality and respect-and the respect increased my fright, fo r it meant that they expected something of me that I knew in my heart, fo r their sakes, I could not give-and we sat down. Elijah Muhammad was not in the room. Conversation was slow, but not as stiff as I had fe ared it would be. They kept it going, fo r I simply did not know which subjects I could acceptably bring up. They knew more about me, and had read more of what I had written, than I had expected, and I wondered what they made of it all, what they took my usefulness to be. The women were carrying on their own conversation, in low tones; I gathered that they were not expected to take part in male conversations. A fe w women kept coming in and out of the room, apparently making preparations tix dinner. We, the men, did not plunge deeply into any subject, fo r, clearly, we were all waiting fo r the appearance of Elijah. Presently, the men, one by one, left the room and returned.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Howbeit (quoth they) keepe him not wholly for your owne riding, but let us likewise have him at commandement. Therewithall they led me into the stable, and tied me to the manger: there was a certaine yong man with a mighty body, wel skilled in playing on instruments before the gods to get money, who (as soone as he had espied me) entertained me verie well, for he filled my racke and maunger full of meat, and spake merrily saying, O master Asse, you are very welcome, now you shall take my office in hand, you are come to supply my roome, and to ease me of my miserable labour: but I pray God thou maist long live and please my Master well, to the end thou maist continually deliver me from so great paine. When I heard these words I did prognosticate my miserie to come.

• From Best Erotic Romance

  That first elevator ride with Robin had been like a flipped switch, jolting him out of his coma. She’d forced the air back into his lungs and the blood back through his veins. He had begun to live for the weekends he spent with her, craving her laughter and smiles, her touch and her scent. But when she’d suggested they take their relationship to the next level, he had panicked, prompting her to walk out on him with her head held high and his heart in her hands. Reminded of how damned lucky he was to have her ready and willing again, Paul pinned her slender body against the door and took her mouth in a lush, hot kiss. His lips sealed over hers, his tongue gliding along the lower curve before slipping inside. She was stiff at first, resistant, which got his guard up. When it came to physical intimacy, they’d never had any barriers between them. As he stroked his tongue along hers, Robin reached for his cock and slung one leg around his waist. She jacked him with both hands, making him so hard and thick he groaned into her mouth and slickened her fingers with pre-cum. She used him to prime herself, massaging the tiny knot of her clitoris with the head of his dick. Impatient, he brushed her hands aside and tucked his cockhead into her slit. She was so ready, he slipped through her wetness and sank an inch inside her. As her cunt fluttered around him, his chest heaved with the loss of his control. What he wanted was to nail her to the door with pounding thrusts; what she needed was to know that he was committed to making their relationship work. “Hurry,” she hissed. Before he could rein himself in, her hands gripped his ass and yanked him into her. The unexpected thrust sent him tunneling deep. His palms hit the door on either side of her head and a curse burst from his lips. “Robin, baby,” he growled. “Give me a damn minute.” But she was already coming. With her head thrown back against the door and a purely erotic moan of pleasure, her cunt tightened around his aching dick like a tender fist. When the delicate muscles began milking his length in incredible ripples, he lost it. “Ah, shit,” he gasped, feeling his balls tighten and semen rush to the tip of his cock. Gripping her ass in the palms of his hands, Paul fucked her convulsing pussy like a mad man, banging her with hammering strokes. The violent orgasm was the rawest of his life, the pleasure so pure and hot he couldn’t stop the growls that tore from his throat. Or the words. “Robin...fuck...I love you, baby.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was Southern, therefore, to put it brutally , because of the his tory of America-the United States of America: and small black boys and girls were now paying for this holocaust. They were attempting to go to school. They were attempting to get an education, in a country in which education is a synonym for indoctrination, if you are \vhite, and subjugation, if you are black. It was rather as though small Jewish boys and girls, in Hitler's Germany, insisted on getting a German education in order to overthrow the Third Reich. Here they were, nev ertheless, scrubbed and shining, in their never-to-be-f orgotten stiff little dresses, in their never-to-b e-f orgotten little blue suits, facing an army, facing a citizenry, facing white fathers, facing white mothers, facing the progeny of these co-citizens, 390 NO NAM E IN THE STREET facing the white past, to say nothing of the white present: small soldiers, armed with stif f, white dresses, and long or short dark blue pants, entering a leper colony , and young enough to believe that the colony could be healed, and saved. They paid a dreadful price, those children, for their missionary work among the heathen. My terror involved my realization of the nature of the hea then. I did not meet any of my official murderers, not during that first journey. I met the Negro's friends. Thus, I was forced to recognize that, so long as your friend thinks ofyou as a Negro, you do not have a friend, and neither does he your friend. You have become accomplices. Everything be tween you depends on what he cannot say to you, and what you will not say to him. And one of you is listening. If one of you is listening, to all those things, precisely, which are not being said, the intensity of this attention can scarcely be de scribed as the attention one friend brings to another. If one of you is list ening, both of you are plotting, though, perhaps, only one of you knows it. Both of you may be plotting to escape, but, since very different avenues appear to be open to each of you, you are plotting your escape from each other. I have written elsewhere about those early days in the South, but from a distance more or less impersonal. I have never, for example, written about my unbelieving shock when I realized that 1 was being groped by one of the most pow erful men in one of the states 1 visited. He had got himself sweating drunk in order to arrive at this despairing titillat ion. With his wet eyes staring up at my tace, and his wet hands groping fc:>r my cock, we were both, abruptly, in history's ass pocket.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I for got to mention the priest, who is, perhaps, the master stroke of the film. Though, as the film carefully informs us, the Tracy-Hepburn couple are not Catholic, this priest is their best friend, and he is, unequivocally, on the side of the young couple. The two crass, practical fathers find, therefore, that they have taken on those two formidable adversaries, the Church, and mother love-the last being also related to wom en's intuition. The Church, here, is truculent (rather than mil itant) and mocks the fears of the white father: and mother love, as projected by Bea Richards in her brief scene with Spencer Tracy, moderately poignant and perceptive. The out come cannot really very much longer be left in doubt (the film has got to end) but before we can arrive at the film's resolution, there is another matter to be dealt with, and that involves the relationship of the black father to the black son. It is here that the film's polish cracks- becomes, as it were, unglued. There is no way, simply, for so light and self -serving a fable to deal with a matter so weighty-and so painful. It is not enough for the father to feel that his son has gone mad, and is throwing away his lif e, or his future, because of a doomed infatuation. The crucial element in such a conf ron tation is the question-vivid, though nearly unspoken-be tween the father and the son: what did the father raise the son to respect? For the son can make his lonely decision now only by conf ronting the nature and the value of that gift. A black man who has raised a son who has achieved his own lif e, and a son who has also achieved worldly eminence, has great respect for that son. He will off er his judgment, but he will not attempt to impose his will. As for being frightened f(.>r that son, the father has been frightened so long that this tear has become no more remarkable to him than the fact that CHAPTER TWO 535 he has to shave; moreover, hiding his fear from his son has been one of the principal conditions of his lif e, as a father, and a man. And rarely does the father complain about the sacrifices he has made: the subject arrives during adolescence, when the father is attempting to prepare the son for the price he will have to pay for his lif e. All this takes place, anyway, in a kind of short-hand virtually impossible to translate for the bulk of white Americans. But, leaving all that aside, the father has absolutely no motive for this scene.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was somewhere around seven or eight. God knows how I did it, but I somehow climbed up and dragged the book down. Then, my mother, as she herself puts it, "didn't hide it any more," and, indeed, from that moment, though in fear and trembling, began to let me go. I understood, as Bill had intended me to, something of revolution-under stood, that is, something of the universal and inevitable hu man ferment which explodes into what is called a revolution. Revolution: the word had a sole mn, dread ful ring: what was going on in Spain was a revolution. It was said that Roosevelt had saved America: from a revolution. Rev olution was the only hope of the American working cl ass the proletariat, and world-wide revolution was the only hope of the world. I could understand (or, rather, accept) all this, as it were, negatively. I could not see where I fit in this for mulation, and I did not see where blacks fit. I don't think that I ever dared pose this question to Bill, partly because I hadn't yet really accepted, or understood, that I was black and also because I knew (and didn't want her to know, although, of course, she did) how much my father distrusted and disliked her. My father was certainly a proletarian, but I had been sent downtown often to pay his union dues, and I knew how much he hated these greasy, slimy men-also proletarian-whom he called, quite rightly, robbers. In the film, I was not overwhelmed by the guillotine. The guillotine had been very present for me in the novel because CHAPTER ONE I already wanted, and for very good reasons, to lop ofr heads. But: once begun, how to distinguish one head from another, and how, where, and for what reason, would the process stop? Beneath the resonance of the word, revolution, thundered the word, revenge. But: vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: a hard saying, the identity of the Lord becoming, with the passage of time, either a private agony or an abstract question. And, to put it as simply as it can be put, unless one can conceive of (and endure) an abstract lif e, there can be no abstract ques tions. A question is a threat, the door which slams shut, or swings open: on another threat. I was haunted, fix example, by Alexandre Manette's doc ument, in A Tale of Two Cities, describing the murder of a peasant boy-who, dying, speaks: I say, 1ve were so robbed, and hunt ed, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into this world, and that what 1ve should most pray for was that our women might be barren and our miserable race die out! (I had never before, observes Dr.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Malcolm's statement is not answered by refer ences to the triumphs ofthe N.A.A.C.P., the more particularly since very tew liberals have any notion of how long, how costly, and how heartbreaking a task it is to gather the evi dence that one can carry into court, or how long such court battles take. Neither is it answered by references to the student sit-in movement, if only because not all Negroes are students and not all of them live in the South. I, in any case, certainly refuse to be put in the position of denying the truth of Malcolm's statements simply because I disagree with his con clusions, or in order to pacifY the liberal conscience. Things DOWN AT THE CROSS 3 21 are as bad as the Muslims say they are-in fa ct, they arc worse, and the Muslims do not help matters-but there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more fa rseeing than whites; indeed, quite the con trary. The real reason that non-violence is considered to be a virtue in Negroes-I am not speaking now of its racial value, another matter altogether-is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened. One wishes they would say so more often. At the end of a television program on which Malcolm X and I both appeared, Malcolm was stopped by a white member of the audience who said, "I have a thousand dollars and an acre of land. What's going to happen to me?" I admired the directness of the man's ques tion, but I didn't hear Malcolm's reply, because I was trying to explain to someone else that the situation of the Irish a hundred years ago and the situation of the Negro today can not very usefully be compared. Negroes were brought here in chains long before the Irish ever thought of leaving Ireland; what manner of consolation is it to be told that emigrants arriving here-voluntarily-long after you did have risen fa r above you? In the hall, as I was waiting fo r the elevator, some one shook my hand and said, "Goodbye, Mr. James Baldwin. We'll soon be addressing you as Mr. James X." And I thought, fo r an awful moment, My God, if this goes on much longer, you probably will. Elijah Muhammad had seen this show, I think, or another one, and he had been told about me. Therefo re, late on a hot Sunday afternoon, I presented myself at his door. I was frightened, because I had, in effect, been summoned into a royal presence. I was frightened fo r another reason, too. I knew the tension in me between love and power, between pain and rage, and the curious, the grinding way I remained extended between these poles-perpetually attempting to choose the better rather than the worse.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part 3 12 THE FIRE NEXT TIME of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fo untain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum-that is, any reality-so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone fo r reality-for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, fu rthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public atti tudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves. White Christians have also fo rgotten several elementary his torical details. They have fo rgotten that the religion that is now identified with their virtue and their power-"God is on our side," says Dr. Verwoerd-came out of a rocky piece of ground in what is now known as the Middle East before color was invented, and that in order fo r the Christian church to be established, Christ had to be put to death, by Rome, and that the real architect of the Christian church was not the disrep utable, sun-baked Hebrew who gave it his name but the mer cilessly fa natical and self-righteous St. Paul. The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, fo r though this transformation contains the hope of liberation, it also imposes a necessity fo r great change. But in order to deal with the untapped and dormant fo rce of the previously sub jugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be t(xced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that arc now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long. "The white man's Heaven," sings a Black Muslim minister, "is the black man's Hell." One may object-possibly-that this puts the matter somewhat too simply, but the song is true, and it has been true fo r as long as white men have ruled the world.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was another tear, a fear that the child, in chal lenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destructi on. A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what un believable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents' voices because his parents hold up the world f(.>r him and he has no protection without them. I de tended myself, as I imagined, against the tear my father made me tee! by remembering that he was very old-tashioned. Also, I prided myself on the tact that I already knew how to out wit DO WN AT THE CROSS 303 him. To detend oneself against a tear is simply to insur e that one will, one day, be conquered by it; tears must be faced. As for one's wits, it is ju st not true that one can liYe by them not, that is, if one wishes really to liYe. That summer, in any case, all the tears with "·hich I had grown up, and which "·ere now a part of me and controlled my Yision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and droYe me into the church. As I look back, e\·erything I did seems curiou sly deliberate, though it certainly did not seem deliberate th en. For example, I did not join the church of which my father "·as a member and in which he preached. My best friend in school, who at tended a different church, had already "surrendered his lit e to the Lord," and he was Yery anxious about my soul's sah·ati on. (I wasn't, but any human attention was better than none.) One Saturday afternoon, he took me to his church. There were no sen·ices that day, and the church was empty, except for some women cleaning and some other women praying. My friend took me into the back room to meet his pastor a woman. There she sat, in her robes, smiling, an extremely proud and handsome woman, with Africa, Europe, and the America of the American Indian blended in her face. She was perhaps forty-fi,·e or fifty at this time, and in our world she was a \"ery celebrated woman.