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

  Gina, a forty-year-old successful executive in an international company, told me, “I grew up feeling that men are unreliable, just flaky, that like my dad they only really want to play with toys. I know that I’ve gone out with men who seemed reliable and wonderful, but still, putting all my eggs in one basket with one man is totally frightening. I’m better off relying on me.” Growing Up Takes LongerWHEN KAREN CAME to see me in 1994 on the eve of her marriage, she was bursting to tell me everything that had happened since our last visit. I remembered her crying her eyes out, complaining about Nick, and here she was, glowing with happiness and optimism. What happened to her between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four? First, she described her decision to leave Nick, a journey that took her to a new life in Washington, D.C., where she stayed with a close friend from college and examined her options. “I realized that I wanted to help children but that to make a difference I’d need a degree, I’d need some expertise,” she said. Working her contacts, Karen soon heard about a masters of public health program at Johns Hopkins that would allow her to combine her interest in child welfare and community organization. Drawing on student loans and what remained from her grandmother’s inheritance, she applied and was accepted into the three-year program, moved to Baltimore, and worked part-time in a pediatric outreach program while attending school. Karen, at last following her own desires, was an outstanding student who soon caught the attention of senior professors who mentored her as she negotiated career opportunities. “I have the best job,” Karen informed me. “I work with severely handicapped children in five southern states where I run a rural outreach program. We’re based in Chapel Hill. I love my work, Judy. I make it my business to spend a lot of time out in the community working with the children. People ask how I can stand it but I don’t find it depressing because I get a lot of gifts from the children. They open up and share things with me, their hopes, their dreams, the things they want to do, and the many things they fear. I realize from being with them how precious life is and how you only have this day.” “Karen, you’ve been helping other people ever since I met you, when you were ten years old. But now it looks like you decided to take a chance on what you want. Maybe the dice will fall your way.” “That’s right. I decided to take a chance and I discovered what I want. And I finally figured out what I don’t want. I don’t want another edition of my relationships with my mom or dad. I don’t want a man who is dependent on me.” “And you do want?”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Any eff ort, from here on out, to keep the Negro in his "place" can only have the most extreme and unl ucky repercussions. This being so, it would seem to me that the most intelligent eff ort we can now make is to give up this doomed endeavor and study how we can most quickly end this division in our house. The Negroes who rioted in the U.N. are but a very small echo of the black discontent now abroad in the world. If we are not able, and quickly, to face and begin to eliminate the sources of this discontent in our own country, we will never be able to do it on the great stage of the world. s. A Fly tn Buttermilk You CAN take the child out of the country," my elders were fond of saying, "but you can't take the country out of the child ." They were speaking of their own antecedents, I supposed; it didn't, anyway, seem possible that they could be warning me; I took myself out of the country and went to Paris. It was there I discovered that the old folks knew what they had been talking about: I found myself , willy-nilly, al chemized into an American the moment I touched French soil. Now, back again after nearly nine years, it was ironical to reflect that if I had not lived in France for so long I would never have found it necessary-o r possibl e-to visit the Amer ican South . The South had always frightened me. How deeply it had frightened me-though I had never seen it-and how soon, was one of the things my dreams revealed to me while I was there. And this made me think of the privacy and mys tery of childh ood all over again, in a new way. I wondered where children got their strength-the strength, in this case, to walk through mobs to get to school . "You've got to remember," said an older Negro friend to me, in Washington, "that no matter what you sec or how it makes you feel, it can't be compared to twenty-five, thirty years ago-you remember those photographs of Negroes hanging from trees?" I looked at him differently. I had seen the photographs-but he might have been one of them. "I remember," he said, "when conductors on streetcars wore pistols and had police powers." And he remembered a great deal more. He remembered, for example, hearing Booker T. Washington speak, and the day-to-day progress of the Scotts boro case, and the rise and bloody fall of Bessie Smith. These had been books and headlines and music for me but it now developed that they were also a part of my identity.

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

  GREGORY. (ubi sup.) Behold when it is said that this God was taken by the Devil into the holy city, pious ears tremble to hear, and yet the Devil is head and chief among the wicked; what wonder that He suffered Himself to be led up a mountain by the wicked one himself, who suffered Himself to be crucified by his members. GLOSS. (ord.) The Devil places us on high places by exalting with pride, that he may dash us to the ground again. REMIGIUS. The pinnacle is the seat of the doctors; for the temple had not a pointed roof like our houses, but was flat on the top after the manner of the country of Palestine, and in the temple were three stories. It should be known, that the pinnacle was on the floor, and in each story was one pinnacle. Whether then he placed Him on the pinnacle in the first story, or that in the second, or the third, he placed Him whence a fall was possible. GLOSS. (ord.) Observe here that all these things were done with bodily sense, and by careful comparison of the context it seems probable that the Devil appeared in human form. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Perhaps you may say, How could he in the sight of all place Him bodily upon the temple? Perhaps the Devil so took Him as though He were visible to all, while He, without the Devil being aware of it, made Himself invisible. GLOSS. (ap. Anselm.) He set Him on a pinnacle of the temple when he would tempt Him through ambition, because in this seat of the doctors he had before taken many through the same temptation, and therefore thought that when set in the same seat, He might in like manner be puffed up with vain pride. JEROME. In the several temptations the single aim of the Devil is to find if He be the Son of God, but he is so answered as at last to depart in doubt; He says, Cast thyself, because the voice of the Devil, which is always calling men downwards, has power to persuade them, but may not compel them to fall. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. How does he expect to discover by this proposition whether He be the Son of God or not? For to fly through the air is not proper to the Divine nature, for it is not useful to any. If then any were to attempt to fly when challenged to it, he would be acting from ostentation, and would so belong rather to the Devil than to God. If it is enough to a wise man to be what he is, and he has no wish to seem what he is not, how much more should the Son of God hold it not necessary to shew what He is; He of whom none can know so much as He is in Himself?

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

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Luke next relates, that the seventy disciples obtained for themselves from Christ apostolical learning, lowliness, innocency, justice, and to prefer no worldly things to holy preachings, but to aspire to such fortitude of mind as to be afraid of no terrors, not even death itself. He adds therefore, Go. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. 33. in Matt.) For their comfort amid every danger was the power of Him who sent them. And therefore saith He, Behold, I send you; as if he said, This will suffice for your consolation, this will be enough to make you hope, instead of fearing the coming evils which He signifies, adding, as lambs among wolves. ISIDORE OF PELEUSIUM. (l. i. ep. 438.) Denoting the simplicity and innocence in His disciples. For those who were riotous, and by their enormities did despite to their nature, He calls not lambs, but goats. AMBROSE. Now these animals are at variance among themselves, so that the one is devoured by the other, the lambs by the wolves; but the good Shepherd has no fear of wolves for His flock. And therefore the disciples are appointed not to make prey, but to impart grace. For the watchfulness of the good Shepherd causes the wolves to attempt nothing against the lambs; He sends them as lambs amid wolves that that prophecy might be fulfilled, The wolf and the lamb shall feed together. (Isaiah 65:25.) CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. 33 in Matt.) For this was a clear announcement of glorious triumph, that the disciples of Christ, when surrounded by their enemies as lambs among wolves, should still convert them. BEDE. Or He especially gives the name of wolves to the Scribes and Pharisees, who are the Jewish clergy.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The landscape has always been familiar; the speech is archaic, but it rings a bell; and so do the ways of the people, though their ways are not his ways. Everywhere he turns, the revenant finds himself reflected. He sees himself as he was before he was born, perhaps; or as the man he would have become, had he actually been born in this place. He sees the world, from an angle odd indeed, in which his fathers awaited his arrival, perhaps in the very house in which he nar rowly avoided being born. He sees, in effect, his anc estors, who, in everything they do and are, proclaim his inescapable identity. And the Northern Negro in the South sees, whatever he or anyone else may wish to believe, that his ancestors are both white and black. The white men, flesh of his flesh, hate him for that very reason. On the other hand, there is scarcely any way for him to join the black community in the South: for both he and this community are in the grip of the immense illusion that their state is more miserable than his own. This illusion owes everything to the great American illusion that our state is a state to be envied by other people: we are powerful, and we are rich. But our power makes us uncom fortable and we handle it very ineptly. The principal effect of our material well-being has been to set the children's teeth on edge. If we ourselves were not so fond of this illusion, we 197 NOBODY KNOW S MY NAM E might understand ourselves and other peoples better than we do, and be enabled to help them understand us. I am very often tempted to believe that this illusion is all that is lef t of the great dream that was to have become America; whether this is so or not, this illusion certainly prevents us from making America what we say we want it to be. But let us put aside, t(>r the moment, these subversive spec ulations. In the fall of last year, my plane hovered over the rust-red earth of Georgia. I was past thirty, and I had never seen this land bct(>re. I pressed my face against the window, watching the earth come closer; soon we were just above the tops of trees. I could not suppress the thought that this earth had acquired its color trom the blood that had dripped down trom these trees. My mind was filled with the image of a black man, younger than I, perhaps, or my own age, hanging from a tree, while white men watched him and cut his sex from him with a knitc. My tather must have seen such sights-he was very old when he died-or heard of them, or had this danger touch him.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The irreducible inconvenience of the moral choice is that it is, by definition, arbitrary- though it sounds so grandiose and, on the surface, unreasonable, and has no justification but (or in) itself My reaction, in the present instance, was unrea sonable on its face, not only because of my ignorance of the Arab world, but also because I could not aficct their destiny 378 NO NAM E IN THE STREET in any degree. And yet, their destiny was somehow tied to mine, their battle was not theirs alone but was my battle also, and it began to be a matter of my honor not to attempt to avoid this loaded tact. And, furthermore-though this was truer in principle than it was in fact, as I had had occasion to learn-my lif e in Paris was to some extent protected by the fact that I carried a green passport. This passport proclaimed that I was a free citizen of a free country, and was not, therefore, to be treated as one of Europe's uncivilized, black possessions. This same passport, on the other side of the ocean, underwent a sea change and proclaimed that I was not an African prince, but a domestic nigger and that no foreign government would be off ended if my corpse were to be found clogging up the sewers. I had never had occasion to reflect before on the brilliance of the white strategy: blacks didn't know each other, could barely speak to each other, and, therefore, could scarcely trust each other-and therefore, wherever we turned, we found our selves in the white man's territory, and at the white man's mercy. Four hundred years in the West had certainly turned me into a Westerner-there was no way around that. But t(mr hundred years in the West had also failed to bleach me-there was no way around that, either-and my history in the West had, for its daily effect, placed me in such mortal danger that I had fled, all the way around the corner, to France. And if I had fled, to Israel, a state created for the purpose of protecting Western interests, I would have been in yet a tighter bind: on which side of Jerusalem would I have decided to live? In 19 48, no African nation, as such, existed, and could certainly neither have needed, nor welcomed, a pennil ess black American, with the possible exception of Liberia. But, even with black over seers, I would not have lasted long on the Firestone rubber plantation. I have said that I was almost entirely ignorant of the details of the Algerian-fr ench complexity, but I was endeavoring to correct this ignorance; and one of the ways in which I was going about it compelled me to keep a file of the editorial pronouncements made by M.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  1ct that the West has been "buying" African natives STRANGER IN THE VI LLAGE 123 for centuries. There is, I should hazard, an instantaneous ne cessit y to be divorced from this so visibly unsa,·cd stranger, in whose heart, moreover, one cannot guess what dreams of ven geance arc being nourished; and, at the same time, there arc few things on earth more attractive than the idea of the un speakable liberty which is allowed the unredeemed. Whe n, be neath the black mask, a human being begins to make himself felt one cannot escape a certain awful wonder as to what kind of human being it is. What one's imagination makes of other people is dictated, of course, by the laws of one's own per sonality and it is one of the ironies of black-white relations that, by means of what the white man imagines the black man to be, the black man is enabled to know who the white man IS. I have said, for example, that I am as much a stranger in this village today as I was the first summer I arrh·cd, but this is not quite true. The villagers wonder less about the texture of my hair than they did then, and wonder rather more about me. And the tact that their wonder now exists on another level is reflected in their attitudes and in their eyes. There are the children who make those delightful, hilarious, sometimes astonishingly grave overtures of friendship in the unpredict able fashion of children; other children, having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish as I approach . Some of the older women never pass without a friendly greeting, never pass, indeed, if it seems that they will be able to engage me in conversation; other women look down or look away or rather contemptuously smirk. Some of the men drink with me and suggest that I learn how to ski partly, I gather, because they cannot imagine what I would look like on skis-and want to know if I am married, and ask questions about my mctic1'. But some of the men have accused lc sale ncgrc-behind my back-o f stealing wood and there is already in the eyes of some of them that peculiar, intent, paranoiac malevolence which one sometimes surprises in the eyes of American white men when, out walking with their Sunday girl, they sec a Negro male approach. There is a dreadful abyss between the streets of this village and the streets of the citY in which I was born, between the children who shout Ncgc1·! today and those who shouted NO TES OF A NATIVE SON Xi._rt._IJCr! yesterday-t he abyss is experience, the American ex perience.

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

  I have become increasingly concerned about children traveling unaccompanied on airplanes. It’s bad enough when five-year-olds are put on planes by themselves clutching teddy bears for company. But it’s just as bad when nine-and twelve-year-olds are sent through major airports and expected to change planes. One nine-year-old I know was ordered by the court to travel from Flint, Michigan, to Philadelphia twice a month to spend a weekend with his father. The judge determined that he could not lose any time at school so he had to leave after school was out on Friday and board the plane to Chicago in the late afternoon or early evening. In Chicago, he changed planes by himself and boarded another plane to Philadelphia. He arrived at his destination after ten at night. The child got to bed after eleven or sometimes closer to midnight. He was terrified of changing planes in the giant Chicago airport. On several occasions, he got lost when planes were late or changed gates. He was afraid of flying during rainy or cold winter weather. He would return after a weekend with his dad and sit in his room silently holding his dog, refusing to see his friends. He became increasingly withdrawn at school and reluctant to leave the house. His mother called me to ask what, if anything, she could do. She explained that her attorney had told her that any complaint on her part would be interpreted by the courts as another example of her anger at her ex-husband, which would only have made matters worse; she’d be seen as angry and unstable. So her son was left without any advocate. She could not speak for the boy because the court would assume that she had an ulterior motive. The attorney also warned her that going to court would cost a ton of money. The mother was frantic. She had lost the power to protect her child. Under the present system, where parents are silenced, no one protects the child. During any given week in this country there are thousands of unaccompanied children flying to see their parents.2 Their number is unknown because no one keeps a record. It’s hard to believe that the courts are protecting the interests of children when we have no idea how many are flying, how frequently, at what distances, and at what tender ages. Rather, the courts are acting blindly. Neither the judge nor the mediator have any knowledge of the child’s state of mind before, during, or after the flight. Once the order is made, there’s no follow-up plan to assess the impact on the child at the time and during the months that follow. Some children can travel with poise. Others panic. How can the court or the mediator or the parents be so sure that the child’s suffering is outweighed by the value of the visit?

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

  PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. Compared with the holiness of John, who is there that can think himself righteous? As a white garment if placed near snow would seem foul by the contrast; so compared with John every man would seem impure; therefore they confessed their sins. Confession of sin is the testimony of a conscience fearing God. And perfect fear takes away all shame. But there is seen the shame of confession where there is no fear of the judgment to come. But as shame itself is a heavy punishment, God therefore bids us confess our sins that we may suffer this shame as punishment; for that itself is a part of the judgment. RABANUS. Rightly are they who are to be baptized said to go out to the Prophet; for unless one depart from sin, and renounce the pomp of the Devil, and the temptations of the world, he cannot receive a healing baptism. Rightly also in Jordan, which means their descent, because they descended from the pride of life to the humility of an honest confession. Thus early was an example given to them that are to be baptized of confessing their sins and professing amendment. 3:7–107. But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8. Bring forth therefore fruits meet for repentance: 9. And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. 10. And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. GREGORY. (De Cur. Past. iii. in prol.) The words of the teachers should be fitted to the quality of the hearers, that in each particular it should agree with itself and yet never depart from the fortress of general edification. GLOSS. (non occ.) It was necessary that after the teaching which he used to the common people, the Evangelist should give an example of the doctrine he delivered to the more advanced; therefore he says, Seeing many of the Pharisees, &c. ISIDORE. (Orig. viii. 4.) The Pharisees and Sadducees opposed to one another; Pharisee in the Hebrew signifies ‘divided;’ because choosing the justification of traditions and observances they were ‘divided’ or ‘separated’ from the people by this righteousness. Sadducee in the Hebrew means ‘just;’ for these laid claim to be what they were not, denied the resurrection of the body, and taught that the soul perished with the body; they only received the Pentateuch, and rejected the Prophets. GLOSS. (non occ.) When John saw those who seemed to be of great consideration among the Jews come to his baptism, he said to them, O generation of vipers, &c.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  They stood, it seemed, for hours, with the magazines in their hands and a kind of miasma in their eyes. There were all kinds of men, mostly young and, in those days, almost exclusively white. Also, for what it's worth, they were heterosexual, since the images they studied, at crotch level, were those of women. Actually, I guess I hit 42nd Street twice and have very nearly blotted the first time out. I was not at the mercy of the street the first time, for, though I may have dreaded going home, I hadn't left home yet. Then, I spent a lot of time in the li brary, and I stole odds and ends out of Woolw orth's-with no com punction at all, due to the way they treated us in Harle m. When I went to the movies, I imagine that a combination of innocence and terror prevented me from too clearly appre hending the action taking place in the darkness of the Apollo-though I understood it well enough to remain standing a great deal of the time. This cunning stratagem failed when, one afternoon, the young boy I was standing behind put his hand behind him and grabbed my cock at the very same moment that a young boy came up behind me and put his cock against my hand: Ignobly enough, I fled, though I doubt that I was missed. The men in the men's room fright ened me, so I moved in and out as quickly as possible, and I also dimly felt, I remember, that I didn't want to "f ool around" and so risk hurting the feelings of my uptown friend. But if I was paralyzed by guilt and terror, I cannot be judged or judge myself too harshly, for I remember the faces of the men. These men, so far from being or resembling fag gots, looked and sounded like the vigilantes who banded to gether on weekends to beat faggots up. (And I was around long enough, suffered enough, and learned enough to be f(>rced to realize that this was very often true. I might not have learned this if I had been a white boy; but sometimes a white man will tell a black boy anything, everythiqg, weeping FREAKS AND AMERIC AN IDE AL OF MAN HOOD 82I briny tears. He knows that the black boy can never betray him, for no one will believe his testimony.) These men looked like cops, football players, soldiers, sail ors, Marines or bank presidents, admen, boxers, construction workers; they had wives, mistresses and children. I sometimes saw them in other settings- in, as it were, the daytime. Some times they spoke to me, sometimes not, for anguish has many days and styl es.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I am not, as I hope is clear, speaking of civil liberties, social equalit y, etc., where, indeed, a strenuous battle is yet carried on; I am speaking, instead, of a particular shal lowness of mind, an intellectual and spiritual laxness, a terror of individual responsibility and a corresponding terror of change. This rigid refusal to look at ourselves may well destroy us; particularly now, since if we cannot understand ourselves we will not be able to understand anyth ing. Mr. Lockridge's death is an inconceivable end for the hero of Raintree County. He, who lived his zestful lif e through, was not slated, in the Lockridge scheme, to meet death at his own hand. This is the ultimate negation, antithetical to every thing John Wyck. liff Shawnessy so thoroughly believed in, whose initials, at the book's end, are written in the air. "What is America?" Mr. Shawnessy asks the question and except to call it a noble dream the question is not answered. Since the book at every point evades the riddle of the hu man being the question is never really asked. The death of the hero of Raintree County admits an uncertainty and desperation the entire county would conspire to deny. Rut if America is a dream it is also a reality; a small dream is not enough to live by. We are not unlike the audience which assembled to hear the only political speech made by Mr. Shawnessy when he was running for off ice: they liked him, they knew it was a good speech. But they could not remember nor repeat a single word of it. 1he Nell' Leade1·, April 10, 1948 Preservation of Innocenc e T HE PROBLEM of the homosexual, so vociferously involved with good and evil, the unnatural as opposed to the nat ural, has its roots in the nature of man and woman and their relationship to one another. While at one time we speak of nature and at another of the nature of man, we speak on both occasions of something of which we know very little and we make the tacit admission that they are not one and the same. Between nature and man there is a difference; there is, indeed, perpetual war. It develops when we think about it that not only is a natural state perversely indefinable outside of the womb or before the grave but that it is not on the whole a state which is altogether desirable. It is just as well that we cook our food and are not balled by water-closets and do not copulate in the public thoroughfare.

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

  She was almost the only human being I saw when I was working so hard at school. She would call or she had a key to my hole in the wall and sometimes she would bring over stuff my mom had cooked and put it in the fridge. Her visits meant a lot to me.” “What’s your concern?” “The divorce was hardest on her. Dad didn’t care about her and she knew it. He insulted her or he ignored her. It really affected her self-esteem. When she graduated from high school, she started to get involved with bad guys. She’d come home with a yellow bruise on her face and a rigid posture, so that I knew her ribs were taped and that the guy she lived with had beat her up again.” His tone turned to exasperation. “What can I tell you? For years she lived in a dream world. She’d say, ‘I love Danny, or Joe, or Jim. He has so much potential. If I love him enough, we can get through this.’ She got involved with violent men who were like leeches. She took care of them, supported them, babied them, did everything and they took advantage of her and hit her. She’s a very pretty woman so boyfriends were never a problem. But she didn’t understand that. There were three guys who hit her that I knew about. She was always afraid that she would marry someone like my dad. I was afraid that was exactly what she’d end up doing.” “What do you think this is all about?” “Seeing my dad hit my mom affected her badly. She had nightmares and stomachaches for years after the breakup. Plus she always thought it was her fault that my folks’ marriage was falling apart. She was fourteen before my mom finally sat down with her and explained the divorce and the violence. I’ve really been worried about her getting badly hurt or killed. I’ve gone to get her twice in the emergency room. Each time I told her she needed professional help, not just getting emergency aid. I think that she finally listened. She’s doing better, but it’s taken a lot of years and a lot of beatings.” “It sounds like you were able to help each other.” “That’s true. That’s been one of the good things about our crazy family. Recently Anja told my wife that maybe there was a point to all of that pain and suffering that we had. ‘You know what I think of,’ she said. ‘I have Larry as a brother and that makes it all worth it.’” He smiled. “I certainly feel that way about her.” He seemed to be holding a vision of his sister in his head. “Anja finally went into some heavy-duty therapy and it’s helped. Now she’s married to a decent man and they have a neat child.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  No one resembling him, or anyone resembling any of the Scottsboro Boys, nor anyone resembling my father, has yet made an appearance on the American cinema scene. Perhaps to compensate for this, Bill now takes me to see Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda in the Walter Wanger production of Fritz Lang's You OnZ1• LiPe Once. I, also, either with her or without her, I don't remember, sec the Warner Brothers production (or screen 1'e11dition, which pompous formulation I adored) of a novel I had read, Ward Greene's Death in the Deep South, brought to the screen by (I think) Mervyn LeRoy, as They Won't Forget, starring Claude Rains; and Samuel Goldwyn's production of William Wyler's Dead End, again starring Sylvia Sidney. Who also starred in the film version of a play Bill took me to see, the WPA Living Newspaper production,-one third of a na tion-. It is not entirely true that no one from the world I knew had yet made an appearance on the American screen: there were, for example, Stepin Fetchit and Willie Best and Manton Moreland, all of whom, rightly or wrongly, I loathed. It seemed to me that they lied about the world I knew, and debased it, and certainly I did not know anybody like them as f.1 r as I could tell; f(>r it is also possible that their comic, bug-eyed terror contained the truth concerning a terror by which I hoped never to be engulfed. Y ct, I had no reservations at all concerning the terror of the black janitor in 17Jey Wou't Forget. I think that it was a black actor named Clinton Rosewood who played this part, and he looked a little like my father. He is terrified because a young white girl, in this small Southern town, has been raped and murdered, and her body has been found on the premises of which he is the janitor. (Lana Turner, in her first movie, is the raped and murdered girl, which is, perhaps, a somewhat cu- CHAPTER ONE 4-93 rious beginning for so gold-plated a career.) The role of the janitor is small, yet the man's face hangs in my memory until today: and the film's icy brutality both scared me and strengthened me. The Southern politician (Rains) needs an issue on which to be re-elected. He decides, therefore, that to pin the rape and murder of the white girl on a black man is insufficiently sensational.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Lodging for transient blacks, or entertainment for the locals, is a severely circumscribed matter in the Deep South, so that, for example, if one is not staying with friends or relatives, one stays in a hotel like mine, or, if one's friends or relatives decide to buy you a drink, they will bring you to the bar of this hotel. I li ked it very much. I lik ed watching staid Baptist ministers and their plump, starched wives seated but a table away from the town's loose and fallen ladies and their unstarched men. I thought it health y, because it reduced the possibilities of self -delu sion-especially in those years. The Man had everybody in the same bag, and for the 400 NO NAM E IN THE STREE T same reason, no matter what kind of suit he was wearing, or what kind of car he drove. And the people treated each other, it seemed to me, with rather more respect than was typical of New Yo rk, where, of course, the opportunities for self -delu sion were, comparatively, so much greater. Where whiskey was against the law, you simply bought your whiskey from the law enforcers. I did it, many times, all over the South, at first simply to find out if what I had been told was true-to see it with my own eyes and to pay the man with my own hands-and then, later, because lif e on the road be gan to run me ragged. It was almost impossible to get any thing but bourbon, and the very smell of bourbon is still associated in my mind with the mean little eyes of deputy sheriffs and the holster on the hip and the ominous trees which line the highways. Nor can you get a meal anywhere in the South without being confronted with "grits"; a pale, lumpy, tasteless kind of porridge which the Southerner insists is a delicacy but which I believe they ingest as punishment for their sins. "What? you don't want no grits?" asks the wide eyed waitress; not hostile yet, merely baffled . She moves away and spreads the word all over the region: "You see that man there? Well, he don't eat no grits"-and you are, suddenly, a marked man. It is not difficult to become a marked man in the South all you have to do, in fuct, is go there. The Montgomery airport, for example, was, in those years, a brave little shack, set down, defiantly, in limbo. It was being guarded, on the morning of my first arrival, by three more or less senior citi zens, metallic of color and decidedly sparing of speech. I was the only thing, of any color, to descend from that plane that morning, and they stood at the gate and watched me as I crossed the field. I was carrying my typewriter, which suddenly seemed very heavy. I was frightened. The way they watched me frightened me.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "We must do it," she said, and didn't see at first my misery at hearing what I most dreaded proposed by a friend with brutal high spirits. Then she was telling me not to come, she'd wave from the top, I could wait "like a grown-up" at the cafe across the square. I stood back and wincingly scanned the exterior. I admired it of course in a picturesque way, but to the prospective climber its odd construction, like three tall church towers stacked in narrowing sequence, heightened the sense of the ordeal by dividing it into three phases. In each the stairs would doubtless be narrower, the sense of entrapment tighter, the occasional glimpses from tiny windows the more terrifyingly remote from earth. The topmost part was an airy octagon in which the bells could be seen hanging over nothing. The first phase wasn't actually too bad. The stairs were broad and well lit. It took a while for the tower to disengage itself from the great squat gothic hall which it surmounted. At the top we stepped into a gloomy chamber that housed a museum of local history, and out of sheer relief I looked minutely at the decrepit noseless or fingerless manikins in historic costume and the scale-model of the town at the time of Charles the Bold, with its fallen-over toy soldiers and web of canals covered in dust. The second section was more testing. Edie kept saying how incredibly brave she thought I was being and why didn't I go down; and I don't know what perverse machismo pushed me on, like someone just behind me with their fist pressed into the small of my back. "I wouldn't tell anybody back home," she said. "I want you to tell everyone back home that I did it," I panted, recoiling from an arrow-slit image of old roofs far below and a horizon of ploughed land. In the bottom of the third part was the carilloniste's office, deserted at the moment: we looked in through the roped-off doorway at the keyboard and the framed photographs of various celebrities who, amazingly in some cases, had climbed this far and shaken the caruloniste's hand: King Leopold II, Montserrat Caballe, a man in furs and regalia who looked like Eric Sykes. It was cosily appointed—one half-expected to see a gas-ring and kettle. Then the real horror began. The stair was not much wider than a person, and very steep and dark. I became hilarious, shouting snatches of poetry, which Edie took as a good sign until I was groping and gripping at her heels, the calves of her trousers. I longed to turn back, but wouldn't have dared go down by myself.

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

  “Simple. If you don’t marry, you don’t get betrayed. You don’t divorce. You’re safe from a whole lot of things. That’s reality. I’m in my thirties and I’ve never been in love where I felt like somebody was the right person and that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him. People say you just know it if you’re in love. I’ve never known it and I doubt I ever will. I’ve pretty much been convinced my whole life that I’m not going to have a romantic relationship that works. I’m sure I’m not the first to tell you that.” A Generation Stays SingleLISA WAS RIGHT. She has lots of company. Forty percent of the men and women in this divorce study have never married, a figure that exceeds the national average for adults in this age group raised in intact families.1 This never-married group is a mix, including people like Lisa who are cohabiting, those who have serial lovers, and those who lead solitary lives. The increase in unmarried adults nationwide is a trend that shows no signs of abating and is probably an inevitable consequence of our divorce culture.2 Children of divorce know the script when it comes to marriage. So do adults from intact marriages. Why take that risk? One young woman said scornfully, “You spend a fortune on the wedding and then when you’re broke, you divorce.” But most who choose not to marry frankly say they are scared by what they know from their own history and from the number of broken marriages they have seen. Like Lisa they hope for a loving commitment and have been disappointed or hurt in relationships. While they don’t like living alone or in a cohabitation that is going nowhere, they say that they reluctantly but firmly change their expectations. A few of the still single young women said that they hoped to marry and to have children some day. Several were living with men and had these plans in mind. But most had firmly decided against marriage and motherhood. They gave many reasons that mostly boiled down to a distrust of men. They felt safer without legal marriage to keep them tied. A few talked about the great advantages of lifelong freedom. They said cohabitation was safer than marriage because escape was easier if they needed to get out or if the man left. I thought to myself that everything Lisa had said was logical, but it just wasn’t very convincing. I couldn’t help thinking how distressed I would feel if Lisa were my daughter and had decided to forgo ever finding a man she could love. Having been in a happy marriage for fifty-three years, I knew how much she would be missing. Of course, men and women can live rich and interesting lives without ever getting married, but Lisa’s decision was coming not so much from disinterest in an intimate relationship as from her fear that trust and love were beyond her reach.

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

  The Need for Intervention in Violent FamiliesAT THE TIME of divorce much can be done to help children who have witnessed violence. But before we get to suggestions, let’s first consider what happened to the families in our study in the years following the breakup. Every child from a violent family continued to visit his or her father after the divorce. Men sought to co-opt their children as allies, to help bring the woman back. Often these men found a receptive audience for their pleas. Children tend to sympathize with the parent who wants the marriage restored. They identify with the father’s distress and come to feel that he is the aggrieved one, even when they have witnessed their mother being hurt or were themselves beaten or kicked. When a father begs his children to help bring his wife home, the children can be greatly moved by the transformation of the powerful man to the sad woebegone daddy. In this they are not unlike many abused women who take the man back again and again, out of pity or love, saying, “He didn’t mean to hurt me. He needs me.” Courts typically regard a child’s relationship with the father as being entirely separate from any assaults on the mother. Husbands who beat their wives are not barred from visiting their children. In most states they can still obtain joint custody, although in an increasing number this is no longer possible. The dominant perspective of the courts and mediators is that the child should have access to both parents after the breakup and that parent-child contact should resemble their predivorce relationship as much as possible. Basically it’s assumed that if the father attacked the mother, such violence is irrelevant to the child’s conscience formation or any other aspect of his future development. So following divorce, the woman no longer comes into contact with her ex-husband, except when children are exchanged within visiting arrangements, but the children are in regular contact with the man who beat her.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It was a strange feeling, in this situation, after a year in Paris, to discover that my weapons would never again serve me as they had. It was quite clear to me that the Frenchmen in whose hands I found myself were no better or worse than their American counterparts. Certainly their uniforms frightened me quite as much, and their impersonality, and the threat, always very keenly felt by the poor, of violence, was as present in that commissariat as it had ever been for me in any police station. And I had seen, fi>r example, what Paris policemen could do to Arab peanut vendors. The only difference here was that I did not understand these people, did not know what tech niques their cruelty took, did not know enough about their personalities to sec danger coming, to ward it off, did not know on what ground to meet it. That evening in the com missariat I was not a despised black man. They would simply EQUAL IN PARIS I0 7 have laughed at me if I had behaved like one. For them, I was an American. And here it was they who had the advantage, for that word, Americain, gave them some idea, far from in accurate, of what to expect from me. In order to corroborate none of their ironical expectations I said nothing and did nothing-wh ich was not the way any Frenchman, white or black, would have reacted. The question thrusting up from the bottom of my mind was not what I was, but who. And this question, since a what can get by with skill but a who demands resources, was my first real intimation of what hu mility must mean. In the morning it was still raining. Between nine and ten o'clock a black Citroen took us off to the lie de Ia Cite, to the great, gray Prefecture. I realize now that the questions I put to the various policemen who escorted us were always answered in such a way as to corroborate what I wished to hear. This was not out of politeness, but simply out of indif ference-or, possibly, an ironical pity-s ince each of the po licemen knew very well that nothing would speed or halt the machine in which I had become entangled. They knew I did not know this and there was certainly no point in their telling me. In one way or another I would certainly come out at the other side-f or they also knew that being found with a stolen bedsheet in one's possession was not a crime punishable by the guillotine. (They had the advantage over me there, too, for there were certainly moments later on when I was not so sure.) If I did not come out at the other side-w ell, that was just too bad. So, to my question, put while we were in the Citroen-"Will it be over today?"-1 received a aoui , bien sur."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Rats live there too, feeding off the garbage, and we first en counter Bigger in the act of killing one. One may consider that the entire book, from that harsh Erring! to Bigger's weak "Good-by" as the lawyer, Max, leaves him in the death cell, is an extension, with the roles inverted, of this chilling meta phor. Bigger's situation and Bigger himself exert on the mind the same sort of fascination. The premise of the book is, as I take it, clearly conveyed in these first pages: we are confront ing a monster created by the American republic and we are, through being made to share his experience, to receive illu mination as regards the manner of his lif e and to feel both pity and horror at his awful and inevitable doom. This is an arresting and potentially rich idea and we would be discussing a very different novel if Wright's execution had been more perceptive and if he had not attempted to redeem a symbolical monster in social terms. One may object that it was precisely Wright's intention to MANY THO USAN DS GONE 27 create in Bigger a social symbol, re,·elatory of social disease and prophetic of disaster. I think, however, that it is this as sumption which we ought to examine more carefully. Bigger has no discernible relationship to himself, to his mm lif e, to his own people, nor to any other people-in this respect, per haps, he is most American-and his force comes, not from his significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his sig nificance as the incarnation of a myth. It is remarkable that, though we follow him step by step from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as little about him when this jour ney is ended as we did when it began; and, what is eYen more remarkable, we know almost as little about the social dynamic which we are to beli e,·e created him. Despite the details of slum lif e which we are gh·en, I doubt that anyone who has thought about it, disengaging himself from sentimentality, can accept this most essential premise of the nm·el for a moment. Those �egroes who surround him, on the other hand, his hard-working mother, his ambitious sister, his poolroom cro nies, Bessie, might be considered as far richer and far more subtle and accurate illus trations of the ways in which �egroes are controlled in our society and the complex techniques they have e\•olved for their suryi,·al. We are limited, however, to Bigger's ,·iew of them, part of a deliberate plan which might not haYe been disastrous if we were not also limited to Big ger's perceptions.

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

  And we were drinking more. Our fights escalated to really nasty. One day when Racer was two Brad was babysitting while I was at work. Both of us had partied all night. Brad fell asleep, and Racer wandered outside. He tootled down the street right into a busy intersection. The police found him and somebody told them who Racer was. This cop came to the store where I was working, carrying Racer. I’ll never forget Racer’s face. He looked so lost and so scared. ‘Lady, is this your little boy? You’re lucky he’s still alive.’ That cop looked at me like I was dirt. I freaked out.” As she told me the episode Paula twisted her hands together and her voice thickened. “My God, Paula, what a nightmare.” She nodded, hardly able to speak. “That did it. That night I told Brad that we both had to stop drinking because our son’s life was in danger. He tried to laugh off what had happened, like it was no big deal. I couldn’t stand that. So I grabbed the baby, took my purse and his diaper bag, got in the car, and left. I called my mom from a gas station and told her that Racer and I were coming. Thank God she didn’t ask for details. We arrived at midnight. She took one look and put us both to bed. We’ve been here ever since.” Paula’s face was strained and withdrawn. “So there I was—no money, no training, no job, no home, no nothing, with a child to support and raise. I was just where my mom was when I was four. All that I had sworn to avoid had happened in spades.” Social critics have been quick to say that children of divorce have more divorces because they are less committed to marriage. I see no evidence of that. They fervently want to avoid divorce in their own adult lives, dreading it even more if they have children. Yet despite a conscious resolution to not follow in their parents’ footsteps, many do end their marriages amid great suffering. It’s the arrival of the nightmare they feared. Like their peers from intact families whose marriages don’t work out, they are often devastated. Recovery is slow because the divorce confirms what they’ve always believed—failure is inevitable and cannot be prevented. “How has it been living with your mom? Is it working out for you and Racer?” Paula shook her head sadly. “It’s not permanent. My mom has a lot going on. She’s remarried. Dan is a nice guy but we don’t know each other and I can’t expect that he would have the same feeling for me as my own dad. I can tell it’s a strain on him and Mom having Racer and me living there.