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.

Page 179 of 529 · 20 per page

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Within the day he would greet his Lady, and their union would be blessed with children. When he heard this the Chaplain was filled with fear: his heart was so eaten up with his love for the Lady, however wicked it might be, that he had never given thought to the day when the Knight should come back. But the Lady was joyful and filled with God's blessing, and rose up proudly, for she knew that when her husband returned not only would her womb flower but her heart too be lightened of all her sufferings at the hands of the false Chaplain, and the Chaplain would be banished for ever. Now the Chaplain came to her humbly and begged her for God's love to say nothing of the treatment she had had of him. But she said that in God's eyes no sin was hidden, and that all should be known. He fell upon his knees as though he were praying to the Mother of Christ Herself and implored her with tears in his eyes to keep tight the secret of his great love. But all she said, as she had said to him a thousand times, was "No", and "I cannot". Seeing this, he withdrew silently, and came to her again meekly at the day's end, at supper-time, and offered her a beaker of good Burgundy wine to drink. And she drank it joyfully, as a health to her husband, and to the child that should be hers. And not a moment had passed before she fell to the floor, crying out with her hand upon her heart; for the false Chaplain had poisoned the wine with an ichor drawn from a toad's brain, that she might not tell the Knight of his wickedness, and never more be her husband's if she might never be his. And as she lay there a footstep was heard on the stair, and the Knight entered laughing and calling out for his wife; and when he saw her there he took her in his arms and she looked on him and then she died. And the false Chaplain said a blessing over her and prayed for her soul. I looked out of the window at the drifting gleam of the rain against the purple brick of the gables opposite. The limes had lost their leaves now. My thoughts about the ragged injustice of the story dissolved into the inhospitable weather, with its calm and comforting insistence we should stay inside—a frisson of childish safety. I turned back to the crackling quarto with its precious powder-blue wrappers and enormous margins, and then read Paul's comments on the three illustrations to the False Chaplain.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Lindsay had just had her second kid, an adorable little girl, and was expecting a third, and my nephew was still a toddler. Lori’s kids were still babies, too. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to do it. And I knew that if I waited too long, I’d talk myself out of enlisting. So two weeks later, as the Iraq crisis turned into the Iraq war, I signed my name on a dotted line and promised the Marine Corps the first four years of my adult life. At first my family scoffed. The Marines weren’t for me, and people let me know it. Eventually, knowing I wouldn’t change my mind, everyone came around, and a few even seemed excited. Everyone, that is, save Mamaw. She tried every manner of persuasion: “You’re a fucking idiot; they’ll chew you up and spit you out.” “Who’s going to take care of me?” “You’re too stupid for the Marines.” “You’re too smart for the Marines.” “With everything that’s going on in the world, you’ll get your head blown off.” “Don’t you want to be around for Lindsay’s kids?” “I’m worried, and I don’t want you to go.” Though she came to accept the decision, she never liked it. Shortly before I left for boot camp, the recruiter visited to speak with my fragile grandmother. She met him outside, stood up as straight as she could, and glowered at him. “Set one foot on my fucking porch, and I’ll blow it off,” she advised. “I thought she might be serious,” he later told me. So they had their talk while he stood in the front yard. My greatest fear when I left for boot camp wasn’t that I’d be killed in Iraq or that I’d fail to make the cut. I hardly worried about those things. But when Mom, Lindsay, and Aunt Wee drove me to the bus that would take me to the airport and on to boot camp from there, I imagined my life four years later. And I saw a world without my grandmother in it. Something inside me knew that she wouldn’t survive my time in the Marines. I’d never come home again, at least not permanently. Home was Middletown with Mamaw in it. And by the time I finished with the Marines, Mamaw would be gone. Marine Corps boot camp lasts thirteen weeks, each with a new training focus. The night I arrived in Parris Island, South Carolina, an angry drill instructor greeted my group as we disembarked from the plane. He ordered us onto a bus; after a short trip, another drill instructor ordered us off the bus and onto the famed “yellow footprints.” Over the next six hours, I was poked and prodded by medical personnel, assigned equipment and uniforms, and lost all of my hair. We were allowed one phone call, so I naturally called Mamaw and read off of the card they gave me: “I have arrived safely at Parris Island.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  If Jimmy’s youth shielded him from the signs of their deteriorating marriage for a bit, the problem soon reached an obvious nadir. Uncle Jimmy recalled one fight: “I could hear the furniture bumping and bumping, and they were really getting into it. They were both screaming. I went downstairs to beg them to stop.” But they didn’t stop. Mamaw grabbed a flower vase, hurled it, and—she always had a hell of an arm—hit Papaw right between the eyes. “It split his forehead wide open, and he was bleeding really badly when he got in his car and drove off. That’s what I went to school the next day thinking about.” Mamaw told Papaw after a particularly violent night of drinking that if he ever came home drunk again, she’d kill him. A week later, he came home drunk again and fell asleep on the couch. Mamaw, never one to tell a lie, calmly retrieved a gasoline canister from the garage, poured it all over her husband, lit a match, and dropped it on his chest. When Papaw burst into flames, their eleven-year-old daughter jumped into action to put out the fire and save his life. Miraculously, Papaw survived the episode with only mild burns. Because they were hill people, they had to keep their two lives separate. No outsiders could know about the familial strife—with outsiders defined very broadly. When Jimmy turned eighteen, he took a job at Armco and moved out immediately. Not long after he left, Aunt Wee found herself in the middle of one particularly bad fight, and Papaw punched her in the face. The blow, though accidental, left a nasty black eye. When Jimmy—her own brother—returned home for a visit, Aunt Wee was made to hide in the basement. Because Jimmy didn’t live with the family anymore, he was not to know about the inner workings of the house. “That’s just how everyone, especially Mamaw, dealt with things,” Aunt Wee said. “It was just too embarrassing.” It’s not obvious to anyone why Mamaw and Papaw’s marriage fell apart. Perhaps Papaw’s alcoholism got the best of him. Uncle Jimmy suspects that he eventually “ran around” on Mamaw. Or maybe Mamaw just cracked—with three living kids, one dead one, and a host of miscarriages in between, who could have blamed her? Despite their violent marriage, Mamaw and Papaw always maintained a measured optimism about their children’s futures. They reasoned that if they could go from a one-room schoolhouse in Jackson to a two-story suburban home with the comforts of the middle class, then their children (and grandchildren) should have no problem attending college and acquiring a share of the American Dream. They were unquestionably wealthier than the family members who had stayed in Kentucky. They visited the Atlantic Ocean and Niagara Falls as adults despite never traveling farther than Cincinnati as children. They believed that they had made it and that their children would go even further. There was something deeply naive about that attitude, though.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I couldn't see through the crowd what was going on, but the way people turned and after a second or two resumed their conversation with a dismissive flap of the hand made me suppose it was a well-known drunk or the flare-up of some habitual old rivalry. Then, shouting sporadic obscenities, a small bearded man in torn and filthy tweeds came past, waving a stick and making occasional growling sallies at parents and at their slightly scared children, who I guessed were wondering if their mums and dads also knew these wild words that were never heard at home. In front of him hurried a black-and-white terrier, which seemed partly to share in and partly to apologise for its master's performance, and glanced at the animals that were for sale as if to show a puzzled awareness of kinship. When the man wasn't ranting the dog barked, so as to keep the noise more or less continuous. "It's only old Gus," said a man next to me; but his bearing wasn't old—it had a certain mocking rectitude—and when he glanced at me I flinched from a sharp-eyed handsomeness lined and broken under matted hair and a week of beard. He was old in the sense that a "character" is old, and with the premature old age of the destitute. Once he had gone past, one or two of the boys had the courage to whoop a childish insult at him. I had finished with the market but waited a moment until Gus had gone before following him—wary of the man, although when he did turn and brace his shoulders, or dart at someone who embodied for a second whatever it was he hated and raged against, the swipes of his stick fell short; and his words could be laughed uneasily off. At the street's end light struck in from the wider thoroughfare that crossed it and people stood talking in a weekend muddle of idleness and busyness. A nice-looking short dark boy, hands in the pockets of baggy blue corduroys, a guernsey round his shoulders, stepped backwards laughing just as Gus came up behind him. They both recoiled, the boy with momentarily delayed horror, Gus with the snarl of one who loathes above all to be touched; then silence and then a brown-toothed smile. He stepped forward, clutching with his left hand at the low, blackened crotch of his trousers.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I do have the keys to the front door," I said, and he gazed at me as if I might unlock his first grown-up experience; he was shrinking from it already. I thought how later I would tell Luc about this—then remembered that he might actually be here, might have heard the car ticking over and taken it for steady rain on the laurels, might have heard our voices beyond shuttered windows, might be roused from shivering runaway sleep by the key in the lock and the scrape of the heavy door. The air inside seemed to wake reluctantly, to turn and eddy in the light and draught after years of accumulated stillness. Dust climbed and spun on the edge of the bright threshold; the hall smelt musty but obscurely alive, as if animals tunnelled and marked their territories in it. I groped and found a stiff old metal light-switch and forced it till it gave out a dead click. Marcel said there was a torch in the car and ran out to get it whilst I stepped timidly into the near-darkness, following the wall around with a squeamish hand. I came to an opening, the moulded edge of an archway, and registered as a blind person might an impending change of scale; I slid my feet forward over the gritty flags, thinking there might be a step; when I coughed the echo climbed and dropped through a hidden vastness, like a chapel. Too scared to go on, I slunk back into what seemed the dazzle of the hall, the spotlight of the winter morning through the open door, along which Marcel stepped like a comedian. "Come on, there's nothing to be scared of," I said—then he switched on his own strong beam. Away to the right a succession of rooms opened out. We went through them as if Marcel were my guide to an ancient tomb, I was itching to seize the lamp off him. He played it about solemnly but without interest over bare walls, high coved ceilings, the battened-up embrasures of the windows. The place had been abandoned but wasn't quite empty—in one room there was a trio of get ballroom chairs, in another the bench-seat of an old car where vagrants might have drunk and slept. High up on the walls ran the brass rods for hanging tapestries, bare plaster below them never meant to be seen. The torch came back and steadied on scrawled lettering: KRIS and a spouting cock and balls. The final room was the grandest and most ruinous. Here the floor had dropped, and with it a pair of pillars which leaned apart, showing iron spindles which ran up through their wooden cores. It was all trumpery, up to the café-rococo of the ceiling, where a naked woman hovered in the blue. Perhaps she really was Aurora, faded and leprous, with a chalky beard where the plaster was rifted with damp. One eye was lost, the other large and inviting.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was an accomplished pretender by then, but I know I jumped guiltily, or looked astonished enough for the other soldier to call me over. He made me show my papers, asked me whose house I had just come from, and what I was doing. I said I'd been visiting the old cook and housekeeper, whom I helped with various things. We looked back at that very big house, and I was glad of the curtains and shuttered upper windows. I didn't dare catch Willem's eye, whilst he said that the house had already been searched, and that the degenerates had fled, and that it was in the care of a couple who came of good Flemish stock—which seemed a lot for him to know about it. The mass deportations of the Jews were going on all that summer—by then they thought they'd pretty well got them all, so I suppose they attached more glory to finding any who were left; in fact there were thousands hidden, but they were getting nervous about. . . the end. I got on my bicycle, and as I moved away Willem called out 'A nice evening for a ride', and then I looked back and saw him smiling, and the other fellow frowning suspiciously still. "So I took that as a sign and went out later to our meeting-place. He was there waiting, but in uniform. 'You know now,' he said, and looked rather ashamed as I undid the jacket and took it off him, horrible brown stuff. I thought I couldn't do anything with him, but then I found I could, just as usual. After we had . . . made love, he tried to make me put his jacket on, he wanted me to be a little soldier, he said. I did put on the jacket and sat there in the undergrowth with the prickly cloth against my skin and talked and talked to him. I remember the surprise and novelty of that for us both. But not what I said. The truth is I went through it so many thousands of times afterwards, slowly pressing it into a new and less accusing shape, rather as a carpenter or boatmaker steams and twists the wood into the curve he needs. I won't pretend now to know what reasoning I used or what evidence I produced. I know most of what I remember is what I made up later, to my own advantage." "Well, you were only trying to help." I felt my nerves about Luc's father focusing on Paul's predicament—I was trying to justify myself as well with this bland remark.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My friend Nate—who would later serve as one of my groomsmen—did a double take when I extended my hand at a local mall. Perhaps I carried myself a little differently. My old hometown seemed to think so. The new perspective went both ways. Many of the foods that I ate once now violated the fitness standards of a marine. In Mamaw’s house, everything was fried—chicken, pickles, tomatoes. That bologna sandwich on toast with crumbled potato chips as topping no longer appeared healthy. Blackberry cobbler, once considered as healthy as any dish built around fruit (black berries) and grains (flour), lost its luster. I began asking questions I’d never asked before: Is there added sugar? Does this meat have a lot of saturated fat? How much salt? It was just food, but I was already realizing that I’d never look at Middletown the same way again. In a few short months, the Marine Corps had already changed my perspective. I soon left home for a permanent assignment in the Marine Corps, and life at home continued on apace. I tried to return as often as I could, and with long weekends and generous Marine Corps leave, I usually saw my family every few months. The kids looked a bit bigger every time I saw them, and Mom moved in with Mamaw not long after I left for boot camp, though she didn’t plan to stay. Mamaw’s health seemed to improve: She was walking better and even putting on a bit of weight. Lindsay and Aunt Wee, as well as their families, were healthy and happy. My greatest fear before I left was that some tragedy would befall my family while I was away, and I’d be unable to help. Luckily, that wasn’t happening. In January 2005, I learned that my unit would head to Iraq a few months later. I was both excited and nervous. Mamaw fell silent when I called to tell her. After a few uncomfortable seconds of dead air, she said only that she hoped the war would end before I had to leave. Though we spoke on the phone every few days, we never spoke of Iraq, even as winter turned to spring and everyone knew I’d be leaving for war that summer. I could tell that Mamaw didn’t want to talk or think about it, and I obliged. Mamaw was old, frail, and sick. I no longer lived with her, and I was preparing to go fight a war. Though her health had improved somewhat since I’d left for the Marines, she still took a dozen medications and made quarterly trips to the hospital for various ailments. When AK Steel—which provided health care for Mamaw as Papaw’s widow—announced that they were increasing her premiums, Mamaw simply couldn’t afford them. She barely survived as it was, and she needed three hundred dollars extra per month. She told me as much one day, and I immediately volunteered to cover the costs.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Then voices were heard ahead of us, whirling footsteps, numbers shouted out, eighty-three, eighty-four, high-pitched taunts and boasts. What sounded like thirty, forty children were going to come past us. Before I saw them I pictured them as red and black apprentice devils, capering gleefully with their forks over rooftops, clouds. When they came there was just squeezing darkness, airless bombardment. I lost my grip on Edie, my outstretched hand grasped at cold black stone, children's knees, knapsacks; someone trod on my fingers; I clung to the notional central pillar, the inner tapering edge of the steps wasn't wide enough, I saw myself being dislodged by the heedless barging onrush of youngsters and dropping into a black funnel. "There, that wasn't too bad, was it?" said Edie as she hurried up the last few stairs into the sunlight. "Edie . . . Edie . . ." She turned and ducked my head like a baptism under the low lintel. A doorway for dwarfs, for god's sake . . . In front of me lay the rinsed expanse of the leads. I was unhappily aware of Edie springing across it and snorting in one view after another through the generous loopholes in the parapet. "It's glorious!" she shouted, jamming down her hat against a surprisingly tough little wind, undiscernible at ground level, sent to bother those who dared the heights. I thought if I could gain the central flagpole and hang on to it, I might be able to cope. I ran to it as if expecting sniper fire, my legs like rope. Clasping it behind me in both hands I stood and considered my position. It was hard to believe I wasn't play-acting, no one could be so silly about heights; yet my knees were fidgeting with fear and I couldn't breathe deeply for the black knot in my chest. "You must tell me what everything is," called Edie. Slowly, holding me like a difficult drunk, she brought me towards the parapet. I wanted to do it, but had already the sense of scrabbling for existence on the edge of a cliff. I couldn't have done it with anyone but her. Well, Luc, perhaps could have beckoned me on. The long hexagonal apertures opened at diaphragm height and one could grip the stone on either side. I did give her a perfunctory pointer to the Cathedral and St John's; and there was the lantern of St Narcissus, of course, the school with its two hidden courtyards beyond, and that must be the steep old roof of my own room, with the front dormer just visible: Edie looked along my trembling finger to find it.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My heart leapt when I saw there was a figure slumped in the shadow on the ground, sheltering from the rain. It was with an unsteady lurch into jocularity that I said, ‘Arfer, what the fuck are you doing there?’ ‘Man, I thought you was never coming,’ he said in a tense voice, and sniffed heavily. ‘I been sitting here fucking ages waiting for you.’ ‘But I didn’t know you were coming back tonight.’ He didn’t reply but stood up and moved towards me. I felt his heavy breath on my face, and annoyance that he was there. I suppose it was because he had frightened me. He gripped my upper arms with his long, strong hands, and pressed himself against me. The rain fell on us, but as I lifted my hands to embrace him, I realised that he was already soaked through, his body warming the damp clothes just as they were chilling him. ‘Baby, you’re really wet,’ I said in a practical tone. ‘You should have said you were coming.’ I freed myself and felt for my keys. ‘Come in and take everything off,’ I exclaimed, adjusting to the idea that he had returned, and not unmoved that he couldn’t keep away. I stepped past him and unlocked the door, flicking on the light, and passing into the hallway at the foot of the back-stairs. He hesitated, then followed me in, his feet squelching in his sodden trainers, and pushed the door to. I turned back to smile at him, already full of maternal good-will. ‘Baby,’ I breathed … ‘what the fuck have you done.’ He sniffed, and ran the back of his hand across his nose and mouth. He winced under the light. There was a broad cut across his right cheek, clogged and dirty with blood. A purplish patina of blood could be made out on his black throat. Beneath a shabby old cardigan the upper right side of the pink silk shirt I had given him was soaked in blood, its new colour itself bleeding through the rain-wet material. I felt frightened again, unwittingly involved in something bad. There was something repulsive and careless about him, his nose clogged with bloody snot and his eyes tired from crying (though he tried to disguise this weakness with a mutinous look). But at the same time he was utterly defenceless: everything about him spoke of need. We went upstairs.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Forced back to South Central, blocks from where his brother was murdered, Antonio struggled. A court later found that “[l]iving just blocks from where he was shot and his brother was killed, Nuñez suffered trauma symptoms, including flashbacks, an urgent need to avoid the area, a heightened awareness of potential threats, and an intensified need to protect himself from real or perceived threats.” He got his hands on a gun for self-defense but was quickly arrested for it and placed in a juvenile camp where supervisors reported that he eagerly participated in and positively responded to the structured environment and guidance of staff members. After returning from the camp, Antonio was invited to a party where two men twice Antonio’s age told him that they were planning to fake a kidnapping to get money from a relative who would pay the ransom. They insisted that Antonio join them. Fourteen-year-old Antonio got in a car with the men to pick up the ransom money. The pretend victim sat in the backseat, while Juan Perez drove and Antonio sat in the passenger seat. Before they arrived at their Orange County destination to retrieve the money, they found themselves being followed—and then chased—by two Latino men in a gray van. At some point, Perez and the other man gave Antonio a gun and told him to shoot at the van, and a dangerous high-speed shoot-out unfolded. The men chasing them were undercover police officers—but Antonio didn’t know that when he fired. When a marked police car joined the pursuit, Antonio dropped the gun just before the car crashed into some trees. No one was injured, but Antonio and Perez were charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted murder of the police officers. Antonio and his twenty-seven-year-old co-defendant were tried together in a joint trial, and both were found guilty. Under California law, a juvenile has to be at least sixteen to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for murder. But there is no minimum age for kidnapping, so the Orange County judge sentenced Antonio to imprisonment until death, asserting that he was a dangerous gang member who could never change or be rehabilitated, despite his difficult background and the absence of any significant criminal history. The judge sent him to California’s dangerous, overcrowded adult prisons. At fourteen, Antonio became the youngest person in the United States condemned to die in prison for a crime in which no one was physically injured. — Most adults convicted of the kinds of crimes with which Trina, Ian, and Antonio were charged are not sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. In the federal system, adults who unintentionally commit arson-murder where more than one person is killed usually receive sentences that permit release in less than twenty-five years. Many adults convicted of attempted murder in Florida serve less than ten years in prison. Gun violence with no reported injuries frequently result in sentences of less than ten years for adult defendants, even in this era of harsh punishments.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I wanted to get down there, and then a moment later felt I would rather leave it unvisited for ever. The beauty of it lay not so much in itself as in its solitude, like any high-walled place in the middle of a town—deaf old widow's garden or padlocked grave-ground of the Jews or Trinitarians. Half-way down the stairs I stopped, hearing an earlier echo than Cambridge and my first independence. A church tower, somewhere in Kent, its narrow door left open: there's a rehearsal, part of a festival, and my father is singing in it. I'm a little boy, clambering up among the junk the verger and cleaners have stacked at the foot of the spiral ascent, mops and brooms, rolled-up banners, tumbled flower-tripods with their dry Oasis and bent cowls of chicken-wire. Dust and secrecy. I haven't been missed. I go up and up with my hands on the steps above, until there's the slit of a window. When I look out over the churchyard, our Humber drawn in by the lych-gate, the drop of the land beyond trees, I feel afraid, giddy, I have gone too far. And then the beautiful tenor sound starts up, high and untroubled, probably Bach, though maybe something lesser, I know nothing of all that, only the rise and fall of my father's sung line, which I have the illusion of seeing, like a gleaming trace across the shadows. Without knowing why I sit down with a bump and start to cry. The bar Cherif had named was a good walk away, along the broad deserted quays of broad deserted canals, linked by rare stone bridges. The cloud had lifted in the afternoon and in the cool that followed there was a first hint of autumn. I passed a small park with empty benches and an odd dreamy restlessness in its trees. Then there were wide wooden boathouses, broken-down cottages and dogs and children playing who looked unaccustomed to strangers. I wondered for a minute if I had gone wrong, but there was Wanne's bar; there was a curtain inside the door, and beyond it a narrow brown room with men at the counter listening to a football match and abruptly shouting their disgust. The long-haired barman dealt with me neutrally, or it may have been with mild hostility. I needed something to do, and rehearsed and updated my Flemish on a discarded newspaper, which slowly revealed itself as rancorously right-wing. I drank my beer too fast, and ordered another. I wanted to be with Cherif again, the whole day's search had been leading back to him, and flat anger settled in my stomach as he didn't turn up; and then amazement at myself and my baseless belief that my needs could for once have been so easily met.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I was beginning to see why he did not attract drinking companions, & wondering whether we too might not be moving on, when he invited us all to go & hear the negro band at the Savoy: ‘It’s the most wonderful music there is,’ he said. So we knocked off the rest of the champagne at giddy speed, & lurched out into the street: I assumed we wd walk, but our author’s pedestrian performance was as wayward as his sessile one: it combined the futile caution of the drunkard with a true instinct for elegance—if of a somewhat decadent kind. With each step he rippled upwards, from foot to head, whilst appearing somehow to steer & balance himself with low-down oscillations of his hands: again I was reminded of wall-paintings in Egyptian tombs—there was so linear a quality to him. We hailed a cab in Piccadilly Circus & as he slumped into the smoky compartment beside me he exhaled his new resolve: ‘We must have the most heavenly talk about Africa.’ Phil agreed to come with me to visit Ronald Staines, and since we were at my flat I dressed him myself. I forbade him underwear, and forced him into an old pair of fawn cotton trousers which, tight on me, were anatomically revealing on him. The central seam cut up deeply between his balls, and his little cock was espaliered across the top of his left thigh. A loose, boyish, blue Aertex shirt set this off beautifully, and as I followed him downstairs I was thrilled at my affront to his shyness, and could hardly wait for the strapping I would give him when we got back. All along the pavement in the beating sunshine I kept letting my hands knock him, my fingertips trail over him as they swung. We crossed over Holland Park Avenue and were strolling north up Addison Avenue when there was the slap-slap of running sandalled feet behind us, and my little nephew Rupert was prancing along beside us. ‘Roops—this is a pleasure,’ I said. ‘Are you running off somewhere again? You don’t seem very well kitted out if you are.’ He had on smartly pressed shorts with an elasticated waistband and a T-shirt advertising the previous year’s Proms. ‘No, I’m just going for a walk,’ he said. ‘It’s such a lovely day—one would hate to stay indoors!’ ‘One would indeed,’ I agreed. ‘Roops, this is my friend Phil, who’s staying with me for a bit.’

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  The light from her office illuminated a few spiderwebs suspended between the building and the makeshift sun blocker that seemed primed to collapse on top of me. On each web was at least one giant spider, and I thought that if I looked away from them for too long, one of those ghastly creatures would jump on my face and suck my blood. I’m not even afraid of spiders, but these things were big . I wasn’t supposed to be here. I’d structured my entire life to avoid just these types of places. When I thought of leaving my hometown, of “getting out,” it was from this sort of place that I wanted to escape. It was past midnight. The streetlight revealed the silhouette of a man sitting halfway in his truck—the door open, his feet dangling to the side—with the unmistakable form of a hypodermic needle sticking from his arm. I should have been shocked, but this was Middletown, after all. Just a few weeks earlier, the police had discovered a woman passed out at the local car wash, a bag of heroin and a spoon in the passenger seat, the needle still protruding from her arm. The woman running the hotel that night was the most pitiful sight of all. She might have been forty, but everything about her—from the long, gray, greasy hair, the mouth empty of teeth, and the frown that she wore like a millstone—screamed old age. This woman had lived a hard life. Her voice sounded like a small child’s, even a toddler’s. It was meek, barely audible, and very sad. I gave the woman my credit card, and she was clearly unprepared. “Normally, people pay cash,” she explained. I told her, “Yeah, but like I said on the phone, I’m going to pay with a credit card. I can run to an ATM if you’d prefer.” “Oh, I’m sorry, I guess I forgot. But it’s okay, we’ve got one of those machines around here somewhere.” So she retrieved one of those ancient card-swiping machines—the kind that imprints the card’s information on a yellow slip of paper. When I handed her the card, her eyes seemed to plead with me, as if she were a prisoner in her own life. “Enjoy your stay,” she said, which struck me as an odd instruction. I had told her on the phone not an hour earlier that the room wasn’t for me, it was for my homeless mother. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” I was a recent graduate of Yale Law School, a former editor of the prestigious Yale Law Journal , and a member of the bar in good standing. Just two months earlier, Usha and I were married on a beautiful day in Eastern Kentucky. My entire family showed up for the occasion, and we both changed our name to Vance—giving me, finally, the same name as the family to which I belonged.

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

  You see, just because my parents didn’t fight doesn’t mean that I didn’t know the truth about how they felt about each other. I knew every waking hour. My father and stepmother hated my mom and wished that she would disappear. My mom was jealous of my stepmom and felt that their happiness was built on the ruins of her life. All of these feelings went on my whole life. We all pretended they weren’t there, but we all knew different. The divorce was like a skeleton that everyone pretended wasn’t there.” Faced with high expectations for conformist behavior, with no shelter from the storm, four-year-old Lisa quickly learned not to show her feelings and to expect less from her parents. She became the unsmiling, courteous, supervigilant little girl described by her teachers. Her spontaneity ceased like an extinguished flame. And the nightmares erupted. Feelings that Lisa could not express during the day surfaced as terrors at night, as bad dreams that lasted for years. I thought again how the child of divorce is shaped by what goes on in the postdivorce family. Paula and Larry were angry. Karen took care of everyone but herself. Billy turned passive. Lisa, however, is numb. I sat back and thought of Lisa as I had known her for so many years—the charming child with ribbons in her hair who realized in sheer terror that her home was breaking apart. She tried with all her might to keep her anger and fear from erupting. At sixteen, she was cloistered with schoolwork and surrounded by wholesome activities and girlfriends. Her main problem was in maintaining the precarious balance between her two homes. And now I see a very distressed young woman who is facing serious problems in achieving intimacy and fulfilling sexual relationships. I realized then one of the hidden dynamics in Lisa’s family. In their struggle to suppress their own angry feelings at the time of the breakup, Lisa’s parents made the mistake of conveying to the child that she should not express her feelings, either. Again, it’s all too easy to confuse the parents’ agenda with that of the child. Of course parents should try to control their anger, but it’s not advisable or beneficial to keep the child from giving vent to hers. Children naturally restrain themselves at the time of the breakup and don’t express their full anger and terror at what is happening in their lives. They don’t wish to burden their troubled parents and push them further over the brink.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved. ep_prh_5.4_150361393_c0_r7 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Epigraph Prologue for the 10th Anniversary Edition Introduction: Higher Ground Chapter One: Mockingbird Players Chapter Two: Stand Chapter Three: Trials and Tribulation Chapter Four: The Old Rugged Cross Chapter Five: Of the Coming of John Chapter Six: Surely Doomed Chapter Seven: Justice Denied Chapter Eight: All God’s Children Chapter Nine: I’m Here Chapter Ten: Mitigation Chapter Eleven: I’ll Fly Away Chapter Twelve: Mother, Mother Chapter Thirteen: Recovery Chapter Fourteen: Cruel and Unusual Chapter Fifteen: Broken Chapter Sixteen: The Stonecatchers’ Song of Sorrow Epilogue Postscript Dedication Acknowledgments Author’s Note Notes About the Author _150361393_ Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument. — R EINHOLD N IEBUHR Prologue for the 10th Anniversary Edition O n a stormy January evening, a shackled, handcuffed, and condemned man was escorted to the death chamber at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama. Unsettled and overwhelmed, he had been vomiting repeatedly in the days leading up to this moment. He was still hoping for a reprieve when he was strapped to the gurney, where he was scheduled to become the first person in Alabama to ever be executed twice. Kenny Smith did not die at his first scheduled execution in November 2022, when prison staff placed him on this same gurney with his arms extended, bound his ankles and wrists, and jabbed and poked his body with needles for several hours, trying to inject him with lethal toxins. At one point, staff raised the gurney vertically to give executioners a better angle to puncture Mr. Smith’s neck in search of accessible veins. With his body upright and his outstretched arms tied at the wrists, he was kept in what his attorneys later described as “a crucifixion position,” as executioners continued to jab him with needles. After nearly two torturous hours, corrections officials aborted the execution and returned Mr. Smith, trembling and hyperventilating, bleeding, bruised, and unable to walk on his own, to his cell on Alabama’s death row—having experienced a traumatizing execution attempt, but still alive. Kenny Smith was convicted of the 1988 murder of a woman whose husband, a local pastor, had hired twenty-two-year-old Kenny and two other men to kill her. The minister later acknowledged that he was having an affair and wanted insurance proceeds from his wife’s death. When police sorted out the crime, the minister admitted his guilt and immediately committed suicide, leaving Mr. Smith and his accomplices to face the community’s outrage. A jury convicted them of capital murder. Despite the brutality of the crime—stabbing a woman to death in her own home—the jury recognized that Mr.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But are we tough enough to do what needs to be done to help a kid like Brian? Are we tough enough to build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it? Are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. Recall how my cousin Mike sold his mother’s house—a property that had been in our family for over a century—because he couldn’t trust his own neighbors not to ransack it. Mamaw refused to purchase bicycles for her grandchildren because they kept disappearing—even when locked up—from her front porch. She feared answering her door toward the end of her life because an able-bodied woman who lived next door would not stop bothering her for cash—money, we later learned, for drugs. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them. We don’t need to live like the elites of California, New York, or Washington, D.C. We don’t need to work a hundred hours a week at law firms and investment banks. We don’t need to socialize at cocktail parties. We do need to create a space for the J.D.s and Brians of the world to have a chance. I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better. I wanted to ask Brian whether, like me, he had bad dreams. For nearly two decades, I suffered from a terrible recurring nightmare. The first time it came to me, I was seven, fast asleep in my great Mamaw Blanton’s bed. In the dream, I’m trapped in a large conference room in a large tree house—as if the Keebler elves had just finished a massive picnic and their tree house were still adorned with dozens of tables and chairs. I’m there alone with Lindsay and Mamaw, when all of a sudden Mom charges through the room, tossing tables and chairs as she goes. She screams, but her voice is robotic and distorted, as if filtered through radio static. Mamaw and Lindsay run for a hole in the floor—presumably the exit ladder from the tree house. I fall behind, and by the time I reach the exit, Mom is just behind me. I wake up, right as she’s about to grab me, when I realize not just that the monster has caught me but that Mamaw and Lindsay have abandoned me. In different versions, the antagonist changes form. It has been a Marine Corps drill instructor, a barking dog, a movie villain, and a mean teacher. Mamaw and Lindsay always make an appearance, and they always make it to the exit just ahead of me. Without fail, the dream provokes pure terror.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  After a while a tall, burly negro in the group came over & asked if we knew where he could get a girl for the night. We were all awed by his colour and his quiet but resonant voice, & we said we were sorry, we had no idea. ‘Well, what do you do?’ he wanted to know. There was something sarcastic beneath his respectful tone, and we blustered priggishly & inadequately. I suddenly thought how strange it was for a working man from America to be faced with these effete, distinguished youngsters of another colour, almost another language. I doubt if any of us, despite hints some of us put about, had ever had a girl anyway. He nodded at us contemptuously & said ‘I know what you fucking do.’ It was a word we sometimes used, but to hear it used against us by someone from the class where rough language (& ‘fucking’ itself) were known to thrive, was a shocking & belittling experience. Later on, before our group left, I went to the pissoir in the back yard of the pub, a narrow room with a gutter & a powerful smell of Jeyes’ Fluid (it is the same smell in the latrines here—it brought the memory flooding back on my very first day in the Sudan). I had just begun to relieve myself when another figure came in to the shadowy, twilit urinal, and squeezed past me to stand at a position further along. Of course it was the negro soldier. As he urinated copiously he made noises of pleasure and satisfaction, & then began talking quietly & confidentially, as if we were old friends. He said how he had a beautiful girlfriend in Wilmington, Delaware, how lonely it was being a soldier, how he wanted some action (this in a very loaded voice). I felt terrified but also thrilled that he was talking to me. Everything about him was strange, forceful; he was utterly his ordinary self yet to me he was abrasively, rankly new. I could think of nothing to say. I turned to look at him, at least to say goodbye. He stirred some primitive instinct of hospitality in me. I saw his eyes in the gloom, and his teeth. He was looking at me, grinning. My eyes darted about & I just made out that he was stroking his penis. He took his hands away from it & reached towards me, leaving his brutal, aching sex massive and erect. I fled from that pissor & joined my half-drunken friends for the walk back to College, the awkward, well-tried climb back in, my head ringing with the unutterable shock of it. It had been too sudden an offering of what I too deeply desired. I never saw the soldier again.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Charlie’s mother followed his voice to the kitchen, where she let him know that she and Charlie were home playing cards. The two adults had argued earlier in the evening because she had begged him not to go out, fearing that he would come home drunk. Now she looked at him angrily when she saw him standing there, reeking of alcohol. He looked back at her, mirroring her contempt and disgust, and in a flash, he punched her hard in the face. She didn’t expect him to hit her so quickly or violently—he hadn’t done it like that before. She collapsed to the floor with the crush of his blow. Charlie was standing behind his mother and saw her head slam against their metal kitchen counter as she fell. George saw Charlie standing there and glared at him coldly before brushing past him toward the bedroom, where Charlie heard him fall noisily onto the bed. Charlie’s mother was lying on the floor, unconscious and bleeding badly. He knelt by his mother’s side and tried to stop the bleeding. There was some blood on her face, but it poured from an ugly cut on the back of her head. Charlie tried feverishly to revive her. He started crying, futilely asking his mother what to do. He got up and put paper towels behind her head but couldn’t stop the bleeding. He frantically searched for the cloth kitchen towel because he thought that would work better and found it wrapped around a pot on the stove. His mother had cooked black-eyed peas for dinner; he loved black-eyed peas. They’d eaten together before they’d started playing pinochle, his favorite card game. Charlie replaced the paper towels with the cloth towel and panicked all over again when he saw how much blood there was. He was quietly begging his mother to wake up when it appeared to him that she wasn’t breathing. He thought he should call an ambulance, but the phone was in the bedroom with George. George had never hit Charlie, but he terrified him just the same. As a younger child, whenever Charlie got very scared or anxious, he would sometimes start trembling and shaking. The shaking would almost always be followed by a nosebleed. Sitting on the kitchen floor with his mother’s blood all around him, Charlie could feel himself starting to tremble, and within seconds the blood slowly began to trickle out of his nose. His mother would always run to get something to help with his nosebleeds, but now she just lay on the floor. He wiped the blood from his nose and focused on the fact that he had to do something. His trembling stopped. His mother hadn’t moved in nearly fifteen minutes.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Charlie was standing behind his mother and saw her head slam against their metal kitchen counter as she fell. George saw Charlie standing there and glared at him coldly before brushing past him toward the bedroom, where Charlie heard him fall noisily onto the bed. Charlie’s mother was lying on the floor, unconscious and bleeding badly. He knelt by his mother’s side and tried to stop the bleeding. There was some blood on her face, but it poured from an ugly cut on the back of her head. Charlie tried feverishly to revive her. He started crying, futilely asking his mother what to do. He got up and put paper towels behind her head but couldn’t stop the bleeding. He frantically searched for the cloth kitchen towel because he thought that would work better and found it wrapped around a pot on the stove. His mother had cooked black-eyed peas for dinner; he loved black-eyed peas. They’d eaten together before they’d started playing pinochle, his favorite card game. Charlie replaced the paper towels with the cloth towel and panicked all over again when he saw how much blood there was. He was quietly begging his mother to wake up when it appeared to him that she wasn’t breathing. He thought he should call an ambulance, but the phone was in the bedroom with George. George had never hit Charlie, but he terrified him just the same. As a younger child, whenever Charlie got very scared or anxious, he would sometimes start trembling and shaking. The shaking would almost always be followed by a nosebleed. Sitting on the kitchen floor with his mother’s blood all around him, Charlie could feel himself starting to tremble, and within seconds the blood slowly began to trickle out of his nose. His mother would always run to get something to help with his nosebleeds, but now she just lay on the floor. He wiped the blood from his nose and focused on the fact that he had to do something. His trembling stopped. His mother hadn’t moved in nearly fifteen minutes. The house was quiet. The only sound he heard was George breathing heavily in the other room; soon he could hear him snoring.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Later on, before our group left, I went to the pissoir in the back yard of the pub, a narrow room with a gutter & a powerful smell of Jeyes’ Fluid (it is the same smell in the latrines here—it brought the memory flooding back on my very first day in the Sudan). I had just begun to relieve myself when another figure came in to the shadowy, twilit urinal, and squeezed past me to stand at a position further along. Of course it was the negro soldier. As he urinated copiously he made noises of pleasure and satisfaction, & then began talking quietly & confidentially, as if we were old friends. He said how he had a beautiful girlfriend in Wilmington, Delaware, how lonely it was being a soldier, how he wanted some action (this in a very loaded voice). I felt terrified but also thrilled that he was talking to me. Everything about him was strange, forceful; he was utterly his ordinary self yet to me he was abrasively, rankly new. I could think of nothing to say. I turned to look at him, at least to say goodbye. He stirred some primitive instinct of hospitality in me. I saw his eyes in the gloom, and his teeth. He was looking at me, grinning. My eyes darted about & I just made out that he was stroking his penis. He took his hands away from it & reached towards me, leaving his brutal, aching sex massive and erect. I fled from that pissor & joined my half-drunken friends for the walk back to College, the awkward, well-tried climb back in, my head ringing with the unutterable shock of it. It had been too sudden an offering of what I too deeply desired. I never saw the soldier again. A thousand, thousand times I’ve wished I had … I was asleep when Phil came in, and I woke to feel him sitting on the bed, taking his shoes off. I reached out to touch whatever part of him was nearest (it was his right knee) and mumblingly asked him the time (it was six o’clock). I was ready to snuggle down with him for his off-beat, shiftwork sleep, but in a few moments he was lying on top of me, kissing me. The taste of his breath was remarkable, especially since I had just woken and was babyishly vulnerable to him: there was whisky, and laid over it, to conceal it from me as much as from the guests and management, there was peppermint. He was quite slavish with his hands and tongue, and he licked me, lapped at me, in a deaf, drunken homage for several minutes. Then he sat back on his heels, astride me, and unbuttoned and took off his tight little jacket. I stretched out my arms and dreamily stroked his shoulders and tits, smiling in a stupid, sleepy way that he seemed to find just as sexy as I intended.