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)

  And then Gavin sailed through the door and kissed me! He had completely forgotten our quarrel. It never registered on his radar screen. He must have realized that I was upset because he took me in his arms, hugged me and kissed me, and told me that he loves me more than he thought he would love anybody. And then it was over.” “How often do you have these panics?” “You mean how often do we quarrel? We fight very little. It’s just that when we do, it takes me back to a place in my life where I don’t want to go and I freak out. And I hate that in myself because it’s when I become like my mom or my dad. And that terrifies me.” The Terror of Conflict A CONFLICT-FREE MARRIAGE is an oxymoron. Every married couple must learn how to deal with differences in ways that suit their style, values, and particular relationship. This is a major challenge of modern marriage. Disputes are no longer settled by the father who knows best, a council of elders, or folk tradition. Women hold equal power and not all differences can be compromised, mediated, or settled by taking turns. If he wants no children and she wants one, you can’t have half a child. And you can’t walk away from the conflict. Someone has to prevail or you have to find a way to agree. You can’t live in his hometown in California and your hometown in Boston and be in the same household. Nor is it a solution to live midway in Chicago. You have to face the issue squarely, contain the anger and the disappointment that follows, and solve it peaceably to maintain the marriage. And you have to face the fact that this or another conflict will reappear. It’s an ongoing, challenging process that can be the key to a good marriage or the road to divorce. We learn our most important lessons about conflict at home, while growing up. Every day, children observe how differences and anger are resolved or not resolved in their own families. The lessons are constant, ingrained, permanent. All adults draw on experiences from childhood and adolescence to guide them in knowing how to manage conflict in their close relationships at home, at work, everywhere they turn. This is a never ending struggle because all close relationships—between friends, work or recreation partners, parents and children, or lovers—hold the seeds of repeated conflict. All need to be resolved or the relationship is on the rocks. Children of divorce have trouble with conflict because they grew up in homes where major arguments were not resolved but were surrendered to. Conflict evokes painful memories and feelings of terror from long ago. The quarrels they remember are not those that got worked out but those that spun out of control, escalated, and exploded. Karen’s panic following her husband’s fairly mild rebuke is typical of how adult children of divorce can react to simple disagreements.

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

  I couldn’t believe it. She turned out to be an awful lot like my mother at her worst.” Here Gary gave a reminiscent shudder. “She was possessive and jealous and she was pushing me to get married. I wasn’t ready and after about a year, I wanted out. I learned a lot from that experience. I learned that I wanted a woman who could think for herself and didn’t look to me to be everything for her. And I wanted someone a lot calmer. I didn’t want a playback of my dad’s life.” Gary had gotten himself deeply involved with a woman who was tempestuous like his mother. She was exactly the kind of person he promised himself he would avoid in relationships. Many of the adults we interviewed from intact families reported similar episodes. They had love affairs with partners who were exciting but bad news. Most got terrified and escaped by the skin of their teeth. Later they credited these near mistakes as rites of passage that were important to their maturation. They then used these experiences to help define what they wanted in their life partner, so by the time they were ready to marry they had in their mind’s eye a fairly realistic portrait of what they wanted and needed. Even more important, they had found out what they did not want no matter how exciting it was and when to turn away. The portrait in their heads was a composite of their perspective on their parents’ marriage, lessons from their own earlier experiences, and their lifelong hopes and yearnings. In the process of searching for love and sexual intimacy, they had learned a lot about themselves as well. It was a journey of self-discovery as well as discovery. But children of divorce, as we saw in Karen and others, did not undertake a similar search for the kind of person they wanted. They lacked the self-confidence to think of the choice as theirs. Although some had many relationships, these did not lead to a better understanding of themselves or of the kind of partner that would be a suitable choice. They were too beset by fears of loneliness and too needy to reject an unsuitable lover and move on. They didn’t dare. Nor did they enter marriage or cohabitation with a portrait in mind. Rather, their ideas of an ideal mate were sketchy or very modest, built largely on fears rather than forethought. Mostly they wanted someone nice and caring who would not betray them. Instead of actively choosing, they settled for whatever was there.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Within those absolute limits of which I was just now speaking I can defend my position step by step, and even regain a few inches of lost ground. I have nevertheless reached the age where life, for every man, is accepted defeat. To say that my days are numbered signifies nothing; they always were, and are so for us all. But uncertainty as to the place, the time, and the manner, which keeps us from distinguishing the goal toward which we continually advance, diminishes for me with the progress of my fatal malady. A man may die at any hour, but a sick man knows that he will no longer be alive in ten years' time. My margin of doubt is a matter of months, not years. The chances of ending by a dagger thrust in the heart or by a fall from a horse are slight indeed; plague seems unlikely, and leprosy or cancer appear definitely left behind. I no longer run the risk of falling on the frontiers, struck down by a Caledonian axe or pierced by an arrow of the Parths; storms and tempests have failed to seize the occasions offered, and the soothsayer who told me that I should not drown seems to have been right. I shall die at Tibur or in Rome, or in Naples at the farthest, and a moment's suffocation will settle the matter. Shall I be carried off by the tenth of these crises, or the hundredth? That is the only question. Like a traveler sailing the Archipelago who sees the luminous mists lift toward evening, and little by little makes out the shore, I begin to discern the profile of my death. Already certain portions of my life are like dismantled rooms of a palace too vast for an impoverished owner to occupy in its entirety. I can hunt no longer: if there were no one but me to disturb them in their ruminations and their play the deer in the Etrurian mountains would be at peace. With the Diana of the forests I have always maintained the swift-changing and passionate relations which are those of a man with the object of his love: the boar hunt gave me my first chance, as a boy, for command and for encounter with danger; I fairly threw myself into the sport, and my excesses in it brought reprimands from Trajan. The kill in a Spanish forest was my earliest acquaintance with death and with courage, with pity for living creatures and the tragic pleasure of seeing them suffer.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Throughout the years, we’ve sharpened our nonverbal communications in this way, exchanging affection and understanding with the same evolved understanding as some of the wild lion cubs we watch on Wild Kingdom . The less we speak, the less likely it is that we’ll throw our mother into a rage without knowing why. Camille and I set out to scrub the first floor of the house, where we’ll be spending most of our time . . . but more important, it’s where our mother’s resting now. The sooner we get cleaning around her the sooner she’s sure to leave. I attack the kitchen around the corner from Cookie’s bedroom while Camille begins in the living room. “Psssst,” my sister hisses from the other side of the house. I stretch my neck out of the kitchen to meet her gaze. “You’ll help me with her room?” I nod and mouth to her: After she leaves . A white Formica table sits between three cabineted walls and a block of windows that overlooks the dusty backyard enclosed by a chain-linked fence. When I move the scummy dishes, bowls, and pots that the previous tenant left in the sink, I’m met by rivals to our survival. “WHAT’S WRONG ?” CAMILLE yells when the dishes clatter. Rosie’s head turns toward the kitchen. “Nothing. Camille, can you come help me load the fridge?” Camille will understand this code for the cockroach solution we learned long ago: If there’s a working fridge with a door that shuts, every bit of our food goes inside it, whether or not it needs refrigeration. I’m used to ants, mice, and maggots, who, as creepy as they are, will scatter in fear when they sense my presence. But cockroaches! It’s not even their spiny legs and long antennae that gross me out; it’s the way they work in packs and maneuver in the dark, attacking our food like looters. I join the others in the living room just as Cookie’s emerging from her bedroom, wearing a pair of Jordache jeans, Dr. Scholl’s sandals, and a man’s Hanes tank top. Rather than bathing, Cookie tries to mask her cigarette and alcohol stink with a cheap, toxic mixture of Jontue and Jean Naté. As her figure casts a shadow over the room, I quickly work out the cost implications of her ensemble: One pair of Jordache jeans equals one week of oil for hot water; Dr. Scholl’s equals eight loaves of bread, four boxes of spaghetti, three bags of wheat puffs, and two weeks’ worth of powdered milk. Jontue perfume and Jean Naté almost equal bail after a night in jail, since Cookie had Camille and me steal them from the five-and-dime. Cookie fluffs her hair and rubs her lips together, reminding us how grateful we should be for having a mother who can score such a nice home. “I’m going to find the hair of the dog that bit me. Feed the kids.” “We always do,” Camille mumbles.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “After a nice bath I’ll give her some oatmeal and put her to bed.” She looks at me adoringly and says, “You could have gotten attacked by a wild dog—or even worse, hit by a car, you silly girl. You scared all of us!” Susan kisses me good-bye, again, and walks downstairs. I sob as she closes the outside door behind her. Mom stands there with the phony smile on her face. Then it turns mean. “Cherie, are they gone?” Cherie stands by the window and nods. I beg her, “No!” Doesn’t my big sister know what will happen now? In an instant Mom turns her energy toward me, grabbing me by my hair and slamming me to the ground. It feels like my hair is being pulled all the way out of my head, and the skin on the top of my head is being ripped open. I try to put my arms in front of my face, but she punches them down and grabs me around my waist. Then she picks me up and throws me into the wall, denting it. As I slide down to the floor and land on my back, she grabs my right arm and leg and flips me over on my stomach. Then she kicks my legs, back, and stomach until I’m all weak and my head turns heavy. There’s a loud buzzing sound ringing from my brain. All I can see is white, and I can’t fight back or move my body anymore. When I awake, I’m naked. I try to sit up, but my arms can’t cooperate. I raise my head to see why I can’t move, and I notice my arms are clasped together on my side and tied to the radiator. My legs are bound together above my ankles and tied to the rails underneath my bed. When I see this, I have to rest my neck. My brain feels like it’s swollen. I close my eyes. I feel something cold. When I open my eyes again, Camille is holding a rag that feels like it has ice inside. “Where’s Susan?” “Gi, Susan is only our foster sister. We don’t live with her anymore.” “Can we go back?” “No.” Then she whispers, “Not unless the police find out that Mom hurts us.” Camille tells me, still in a whisper, that while Mom was tying me up, she made my sisters take all my clothes out of the room so I couldn’t run away again. “This is what happens when you don’t listen to Mom,” she says. Now I want to spit in Camille’s face, but I can’t lift my head. After that, Big Norman tells Mom that having a baby was enough, he didn’t bargain for three little girls and their crazy business, too. He starts spending more time away from the house, and one morning Mom’s crying at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, saying Big Norman left her for good.

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

  “About nothing. They’d get into heated debates about some strange point in art or maybe politics. The topic didn’t matter to either of them. They’d get so involved by the end of their second or third martini that Mom would forget all about dinner. My brother and sister and I would take turns being the one to remind them that we hadn’t eaten, but only if the argument they were having was not dangerous. Because I’m the oldest girl, I’d often help Mom put dinner on the table. It makes me cringe to remember how she’d stumble around the kitchen, banging pans and dropping things. Once we sat down, Dad would sober up and drill us on our understanding of a political situation and he’d taunt us when we didn’t know enough. He really picked on my brother, although he could turn his sarcasm just as easily on my little sister or me. Sometimes Steve would be driven to tears. If he tried to leave the table or argue back, Dad would lose his temper and roar at him—‘You are not excused!’” Carol sighed. “Those were the good days. That happened about half the time.” “Those were the good days?” “You haven’t heard anything yet. My brother and sister and I knew it was going to be bad if they started in on each other during the second drink. My parents would begin to taunt each other with hurtful names like stupid and worm. Dad usually took the lead but Mom could rise to the occasion. She’d whisper insults and end up screaming at Dad. He’d wait and goad her on. Mom was usually the first one to get violent. She’d throw a glass at him or kick him. He’d get this horrible grin on his face and say something like ‘Now you’ve got it coming.’ Mom would back away and he’d grab her and slap her and she’d scream. On the better nights she’d cry and it would end there. He’d back off and tell her to get dinner. I’d help her in the kitchen and then we’d all sit there and pretend nothing had happened. Mom would act very aloof and distant. Daddy’d ignore her but he’d be nicer than usual.” Carol shook her head. “But some nights they’d really go at it. There’d be a lot of screaming and yelling and hitting. That was a sort of once-a-month routine. It would end with them disappearing into their bedroom or with Daddy storming out of the house and staying away for the rest of the night. We hated it when they went to their room because then their yelling would change into sounds of them having sex. We could hear them. Later, Dad would come out and tell us to get our own dinner. He’d take something to eat and disappear into his study for the rest of the night. We’d put ourselves to bed. It was so lonely and awful.”

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  And now he sounded like a little whining three-year-old, he sounded like a little baby, he was just like a little frightened baby. “Are you gonna cry?” screamed the sergeant. “Is that what’s gonna happen? Everybody, I want you to look at this, look over here, people, I want you to see the baby cry!” Everyone looked over to where the fat kid was. “Are those tears?” screamed the sergeant. They were all laughing now, laughing, rocking back and forth on their heels, their hands on their hips. “Cry!” screamed the sergeant. “Cry Cry Cry you little baby! That’s what we want, we want you people to cry like little babies because that’s all you maggots are. You are nothing!” The fat kid was now kneeling on the floor. His whole body was shaking; he had his hands against his face like he was praying. “I don’t want this,” he was saying. “I . . . I want . . . to go home. I want to go home.” He was saying it over and over again now, “I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home.” He hadn’t even gotten there, it was the first day and he wanted to go home. And as he watched, the drill instructors, having had all the fun they could, slowly stepped back from where the fat boy was kneeling, laughing and scorning him, pitying him and cursing him, running back and forth screaming in the ears of the other young boys, cursing them and jabbing them again and again, until the whole maddening thunderous echo of cursing sounds and raging angry voices began to deafen his ears and turn his head around and around till he wondered who he was and what was happening and what was this place. “He’s not gonna make it, he’s not gonna make it!” screamed the short sergeant, almost dancing in front of them. “He’s not gonna hack it. He’s a baby. He’s nothing but a baby, ladies!” “He can’t even fit into his pants!” screamed the tall sergeant, laughing. “Yeah,” said the southern sergeant. “He’s nothin’ but a goddamned little baby and you know what we do with babies,” he said. “We kick ’em in their fucking asses and send ’em home. You people, you better listen up!” said the southern sergeant. “You are in Parris Island. You are now in Platoon One Hundred Eighty-one. You are in my platoon and if you people wanna be marines, y’all gonna hafta work harder than you have ever worked before in your lives and you are gonna listen to me and you are gonna do everything I tell you to do if you want to get your asses off this island alive and become marines you better listen to me.” It was beginning to get dark on the island. It had been a long day for him. It had seemed like a hundred days, a thousand days! The day had been endless.

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

  After years of prohibition and delay, executions were again taking place in the Deep South, and most of the people crowded on death row had no lawyers and no right to counsel. There was a growing fear that people would soon be killed without ever having their cases reviewed by skilled counsel. We were getting frantic calls every day from people who had no legal assistance but whose dates of execution were on the calendar and approaching fast. I’d never heard voices so desperate. When I started my internship, everyone was extremely kind to me, and I felt immediately at home. The SPDC was located in downtown Atlanta in the Healey Building, a sixteen-story Gothic Revival structure built in the early 1900s that was in considerable decline and losing tenants. I worked in a cramped circle of desks with two lawyers and did clerical work, answering phones and researching legal questions for staff. I was just getting settled into my office routine when Steve asked me to go to death row to meet with a condemned man whom no one else had time to visit. He explained that the man had been on the row for over two years and that they didn’t yet have a lawyer to take his case; my job was to convey to this man one simple message: You will not be killed in the next year. — I drove through farmland and wooded areas of rural Georgia, rehearsing what I would say when I met this man. I practiced my introduction over and over. “Hello, my name is Bryan. I’m a student with the…” No. “I’m a law student with…” No. “My name is Bryan Stevenson. I’m a legal intern with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee, and I’ve been instructed to inform you that you will not be executed soon.” “You can’t be executed soon.” “You are not at risk of execution anytime soon.” No. I continued practicing my presentation until I pulled up to the intimidating barbed-wire fence and white guard tower of the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center. Around the office we just called it “Jackson,” so seeing the facility’s actual name on a sign was jarring—it sounded clinical, even therapeutic. I parked and found my way to the prison entrance and walked inside the main building with its dark corridors and gated hallways, where metal bars barricaded every access point. The interior eliminated any doubt that this was a hard place. I walked down a tunneled corridor to the legal visitation area, each step echoing ominously across the spotless tiled floor. When I told the visitation officer that I was a paralegal sent to meet with a death row prisoner, he looked at me suspiciously. I was wearing the only suit I owned, and we could both see that it had seen better days. The officer’s eyes seemed to linger long and hard over my driver’s license before he tilted his head toward me to speak. “You’re not local.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Chapter 4 is focused on one of the central preoccupations of ancient fiction, female chastity. Feminine purity was a transcendent symbol, capable of bearing the most consequential meanings. The authors of the imperial romances invested no small part of their talents in contriving elaborate threats to the chastity of their heroines. These scenes, looked at across the genre, provide direct access to the ideological code of romance. The romances are stories in which essence precedes existence. What is most remarkable about the imperial romances is the extent to which they are explicitly built on an acute awareness that forces beyond the individual’s control shape his or her life. Fate furnishes us with moral ends, and more instrumentally, society constitutes us as selves. The romances make their most daring approaches to the inscrutable mysteries of fate in the image of the heroine’s endangered chastity. The romances flirt with the possibility of her violation, because the transgression of her body would mark a visceral contravention of the social and cosmic order. These typological scenes are very near the deep theology of the romance. In the end, she is always rescued, and the deeper order of the cosmos prevails against the flux and frustration that is experienced in human time. The heroine is reserved, by the will of the gods, for marriage. There is salvation in the cycle of nature, which imparts to us the gift of eros within its mysterious order. Christians and Jews would rework these very scenes of feminine imperilment to express their deepest reservations about the world and the place of eros in the constitution of the self. Already in the primitive phases of the religion, Christian authors were adept at reformulating the fictional tropes of Greco-Roman literature. A whole body of legend grew up around the heroes of Christianity, the apostles. In the apocryphal acts, we find the sexual mechanics of the romance deliberately inverted. The ruling Roman order provides the villains, while the apostles, intermediaries of a higher power, furnish the heroes. In these legends, sexual rejection functions as an expression of dissent from the dominant order. By reading the parallel scenes of female endangerment, we glimpse the theological imagination of a movement set apart from mainstream society and convinced in its belief in a separate, spiritual order.17

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  The other day I was in the oasis of Ammon, on the afternoon of the lion hunt. I was in high spirits; everything went as in the time of my former vigor: the wounded lion collapsed to the ground, then rose again; I pressed forward to strike the final blow. But this time my rearing horse threw me; the horrible, bleeding mass of the beast rolled over me, and claws tore at my chest; I came to myself in my room in Tibur, crying out for aid. More recently still I have seen my father, though I think of him rather seldom. He was lying on his sick bed in a room of our house in Italica, where I ceased to dwell soon after his death. On his table he had a phial full of a sedative potion which I begged him to give me. I awoke before he had time to reply. It surprises me that most men are so fearful of ghosts when they are so ready to speak to the dead in their dreams. Presages are also increasing: from now on everything seems like an intimation and a sign. I have just dropped and broken a precious stone set in a ring; my profile had been carved thereon by a Greek artist. The augurs shake their heads gravely, but my regret is for that pure masterpiece. I have come to speak of myself, at times, in the past tense: in the Senate, while discussing certain events which had taken place after the death of Lucius, I have caught myself more than once mentioning those circumstances, by a slip of the tongue, as if they had occurred after my own death. A few months ago, on my birthday, as I was mounting the steps of the Capitol by litter, I found myself face to face with a man in mourning; furthermore, he was weeping, and I saw my good Chabrias turn pale. At that period I still went about and was able to continue performing in person my duties as high pontiff and as Arval Brother, and to celebrate myself the ancient rites of this Roman religion which, in the end, I prefer to most of the foreign cults. I was standing one day before the altar, ready to light the flame; I was offering the gods a sacrifice for Antoninus. Suddenly the fold of my toga covering my brow slipped and fell to my shoulder, leaving me bare-headed; thus I passed from the rank of sacrificer to that of victim.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  THE CHRISTIAN ACTS AND THE INVERSION OF ROMANCEOur most complete version of the diffuse lore that attached to the Christian apostle Andrew survives as a Latin epitome composed by the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours. In the preface to his summary of Andrew’s legend, Gregory concedes that some critics considered the stories of Andrew apocryphal, “on account of their excessive prolixity.” His avowed purpose in writing was to extract the miraculous pulp and to discard the unnecessary husk of the narrative. The story is none the better for Gregory’s literary surgery. But we can be grateful to have, in however brusque and artless an outline, the shape of this ancient apostolic legend in full profile. From Gregory’s bare summary we can reconstruct a rather elaborate episode built around a narrative trope that must have seemed deeply familiar to the original audience of the Acts. The apostle, shortly after arriving in the Roman province of Achaea, converts the proconsul Lesbius to the Christian faith. Then a slave, Trophima, the former concubine of the proconsul, turned to the apostle’s teaching and the sexual rigors that accompanied it. Her current lover, discomfited by the loss of his sexual companion, designed a plot to undo her. He went to the slave’s mistress, the proconsul’s wife, reporting, “Trophima has returned to harlotry, which she used to practice with my lord the proconsul, to whom she has again joined herself.” It was a well-laid trap, because to the proconsul’s wife this news seemed like a revelation: “No wonder my husband has left me behind and for six months now refused our marital rites, for he loves his slave!” So the wife did what any archvillain in a romance would have done: she had Trophima, newly converted to the Christian faith, condemned to the brothel.27 Trophima—slave, concubine—was no romantic heroine of the ordinary build, but she nevertheless found herself in the archetypal testing grounds of feminine respectability. In the brothel, she prayed continuously, and when eager customers came to her, she clutched a copy of the gospel to her chest. One day an unusually insistent client entered, and, while resisting, Trophima dropped the gospel. She cried out to heaven, “Keep me from suffering this pollution, Lord, in whose name I esteem chastity!” An angel appeared and struck the youth dead. Then Trophima, for what reason Gregory has omitted to relate, resurrected the dead young man, a sight “the whole city” rushed to see. The proconsul’s wife was killed by a demon in the public bath, a penalty for her persecution of Trophima. Nevertheless, a distraught nurse prevailed upon Andrew to resurrect the proconsul’s wife, which, in the very public atmosphere of the governor’s headquarters, he did. All were reconciled, miracles reported far and wide, newfound chastity saved.28

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I’m going to start you with the junior varsity team.” Instantly, I begin to structure my days around a full day of school followed by gymnastics practice until six thirty, then babysitting and housecleaning jobs. In study hall, while the other kids sketch the logos of Van Halen and AC/DC on their notebooks, I doodle Rosie and Norman in hearts and bubbles with mia bambina amore and je t’aime scribed around them. Any homework I don’t get done at school is a good excuse for me to maintain my privacy when I get home in the evenings. One night in early October, Addie knocks on my bedroom door. “You have a visitor,” she says. Cherie appears behind her in the doorway, and Camille pops her head out of her bedroom. “What are you doing here?” Camille says. “You never stop over without calling first.” Cherie looks at the ceiling as if she’s praying to save her last nerve. “Cookie was driving drunk and she got into an accident,” she says. “She left the scene, and the police were looking for her . . . and . . . she skipped town with the kids.” Camille asks, “Wait, I didn’t hear this part. What do you mean ‘skipped town’?” Cherie says, “I got a call from Cookie’s friend Jackie Sones. You remember her? She lived near us in Saint James.” “Jackie Sones—the one who moved to Idaho?” “Yeah,” Cherie says, clearly dreading what she has to reveal next. “She told me Cookie is heading out there so she can live in Jackie’s trailer and work with animals on a farm. So, with the kids, off she drove.” We walk out to the kitchen, where Addie gives us permission to call Ms. Harvey at home. “Girls, there’s nothing anybody here can do if your mother left the state.” “Oh, big shock,” I say, “considering how much you did to protect them while they were here.” It’s close to Halloween when Jackie Sones calls Cherie to tell her Cookie and the kids have arrived. “They stayed with Jackie a few weeks until Cookie found a bowlegged old man named Clyde who lives on a farm in some town called Oakview,” Camille tells me. “Let me guess, so she used her ways to convince him that he would be better off if her brood moves in.” We learn that, to maintain her part of the bargain, Cookie volunteered the kids to work as farmhands. They rise every morning to milk the cows, shovel horse manure, bale hay, and tend the crops. “I know how this works,” I tell Camille. “If they don’t step up, they’ll get beaten.” “Yeah,” she sighs. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” “Well, at least they’re in a small town. When we figure out how to fix this, hopefully it will be easy to find them.” She gives me Clyde’s phone number, which Jackie shared with her. I pop more quarters in the pay phone. A gruff, bothered male voice answers.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Epilogue IN LATE OCTOBER, the National Weather Service forecasts a “Superstorm”—a hurricane they’re referring to as Sandy. For the first time ever, the NWS sends a representative out to Long Island to prepare us county leaders and our first responders for how serious this storm will be. “Death and devastation,” they tell us repeatedly. “Your residents have got to take this storm seriously. The devastation won’t be because of the wind or the rains, but because of the storm surge. The topography of Long Island and most likely all of greater New York City will be changed forever.” “Do not let any of the kids leave your house,” I tell Camille. “There will be power outages and fallen trees and worse—in fact you all need to sleep in a part of the house that’s far away from trees.” The thousands of homes along Long Island’s coastline are extremely vulnerable . . . including mine. I lock it up and say a prayer, spending the next few nights at the county’s emergency management unit in Yaphank. The center is filled with the U.S. Coast Guard, New York Army National Guard, social services, police, fire chiefs, Red Cross, and swarms of other emergency response units. With them I stay up through the night as they work to protect as many Suffolk County residents as possible. We also figure out ways to keep communication lines open to the people who are in flood zones and refused to evacuate before it was too late. It’s a night of heavyheartedness that I’m certain will stay with me forever— we’re witness to the flooding that causes complete neighborhoods to be destroyed. It’s a harsh reality check as I hope that these citizens’ homes will be the worst thing that they lose. In the light of day, I join the team of emergency responders and leaders whose job it is to find emergency shelter, food, and supplies for the hundreds in the county who are suddenly homeless or without power. Now I’m working to put the lights back on for the very same community that, decades ago, did the best it could to keep mine from dimming. The National Weather Service’s dire warnings to our emergency responders

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Dumpster and the building’s back wall to create a bed. It’s probably been an hour when I open my eyes at the sound of her jalopy rolling down the street. I peek out around the corner and see the car turning in the direction of the bars. I wish these feelings were new to me—the hurt, anger, rejection from the emotional abuse, and the searing physical pain—but for all of the near-fourteen years of my life, this is the only consistent, predictable part of my relationship with Cookie. To me, feeling secure means the opposite of what it means to most kids. Children are supposed to find their greatest safety and comfort in the arms of their mothers. Instead, Cookie’s homecoming is our darkest danger, like the worst storm anyone can imagine. I brace myself and lock down my wits as she enters with a stir. We have no control over what comes next as the tension builds, then it’s as though the skies open up when she comes down on me in a rage. When she’s finished, she goes suddenly . . . leaving the devastation in her wake as the only evidence she’s ever been here at all. We’re always comforted to know she’ll be gone for a while—safe and content, as though it’s safe to step out into the sun after a torrid rain. And we recover fast, using our wits and will to stay together and rebuild our home. I walk into a quiet house. One of the kids has cleaned up the glass, and they’re both sleeping toe-to-toe on the couch. My heart swells as I kiss their cheeks good night, and whisper in Norman’s ear: “You’re a good big brother.” I rise and stand there watching them . . . then the tears stream down my face. Not for myself but for how powerless we are over what will happen next. After a minute I secure the front and back doors then head to the bathroom to try and soak away my pain.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  There’s no mention of my going back to school, and part of me would prefer to stay on the farm with the workers who look out for us, but at the shelter we’ll get heat and three meals a day, plus running water in the shared bathroom. I find my preferred spot is the shelter’s laundry room, where it’s warm and easy to strike up conversations with our neighbors. That’s where I finally meet a new friend. Just like me, Karen is twelve, and she loves to read like I do. We hang out, paging through magazines from the shelter’s shelves; or often Karen’s family invites Rosie, Norman, and me to sit with them at dinner in the shelter’s dining hall. I love this, because her mother is married, and her stepdad teaches us new words when we play hangman and Scrabble after we help with dinner cleanup. Karen’s stepdad sits in one of the wooden-frame chairs in the shelter’s TV room, urging the baby as she practices walking or talking with Karen and me about what’s happening in the news. He’s the only man I can think of who has ever treated me like an adult, and he’s one of the only decent dads at the shelter. One day when the laundry room is almost empty, Karen tells me her stepdad’s been asking her where I get all my bruises and cuts. “It’s from my brother, tell him,” I reply. “You know boys, they love to wrestle.” Then the man who runs the shelter starts watching me in the laundry room. When I’m in there alone, in the corner of my eye I watch him take a seat next to me. “Regina,” he says. “Can you tell me where your mother spends her time?” “Around,” I answer. “You see her sometimes, but usually she just sleeps a lot.” I pretend to concentrate on my magazine, an issue of TV Guide I’ve read a dozen times, aware that he knows my mother hangs around the shelter long enough to make herself appear present before she takes off for days to go hopping between bars and beds. “I need you to tell me where the marks on your body come from.” I freeze. “Your family’s room is right next to the administration office, and some of the staff have reported hearing shouting, or often the TV’s on full blast.” When she is around to beat us, the loud TV is Cookie’s number one tactic. “It’s my brother,” I insist. “You’ve seen how he plays.” “Regina.” I put down my magazine with a huff. “If you don’t tell me the truth, I can’t let you eat at mealtime.” “It’s my brother,” I tell him. “If I were getting beat, don’t you think you’d hear it?” I’d survived worse than not eating for a few days, and not telling and going hungry was better than the risk of telling and getting separated.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “Well?” “We didn’t say anything,” I tell her. “Just that I dropped a pan of grease and then Camille fell in it.” “And you expect me to believe they bought that crock of shit?” Camille and I look at each other and shrug. “Yeah,” Camille says. “They bought it.” “We’ll see about that. You two clean up the mess you made last night. Camille, you better stay up here and rest today,” she says. “But Regina’s gonna help me at work. We don’t want any nosy teachers asking what happened to you two.” AS THE SCHOOL year winds down, it’s completely clear that Cherie and Camille have no intention of hanging out here this summer. I ask Hank, Cookie’s boss, if I can start helping at the store. He looks at me with hesitation, and then thoughtfulness. “Your mother has had some trouble keeping up,” he admits. “How old are you again?” I fold my arms across my flat chest to hide the prepubescent evidence. “I’m thirteen—and a half.” He looks at me suspiciously. “Weren’t you eleven last week?” “I’m a good worker, Hank, ask anybody.” “All right,” he sighs. “But I’ll have to keep you hidden in the back. You’ve got to be older than fifteen to work in this state.” “I’ll hide,” I promise. “I’m small, see?” “And you’ll have to listen to your mother.” I nod. Being with her in public is safer than being with her at home. The first week, I come in every day after school and head back to his kitchen —a long galley with steel tables, a sink, and a big, industrial fan mounted on the wall over the oven. I slip on plastic serving gloves and roll up my apron to make it shorter, the way I’ve seen Cookie do with her skirts before she goes to the bars. Until six o’clock I work, shredding cabbage for coleslaw and peeling carrots and potatoes, then I clean up and take out the trash in time for the store to close at eight. After my first Friday on the job, Hank hands me fifteen dollars cash in an envelope. When we get upstairs, Cookie wiggles her fingers at me. “Hand that over,” she says. “Hank’s little pet, huh? You wouldn’t have gotten this gig without me getting you a foot in the door.” I look at her in disbelief . . . and then I hand over the money. She opens the front door for my siblings to head out to the movies, leaving me at home by

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  While his hopes were still high, Th ersander remained “wholly CHAPTER ONE Th e Moralities of Sex in the Roman Empire  FROM SHAME TO SIN enthralled” by Leucippe, but the disappointment of rebuff lets loose his fury. He resorts to physical and psychological violence, striking Leucippe across the face and calling her a “miserable slaveling.” “You should be grate- ful that I speak to you, and count your lucky stars that you seem worthy of my kisses. . . . I know that you’re just a little whore, and the man you love is an adulterer. Since you don’t want to accept me as your lover, you will expe- rience me as your master.” In the slave society of the Roman Empire, where the routine sexual exploitation of slaves was an integral part of the sexual economy, the narration of such pedestrian violence was highly unusual, and surely jarring. But the author builds up the uncomfortable potential of the scene, only to let it dissipate in arch melodrama.  We are never really in suspense about Leucippe’s fate, and— what makes the scene so revealing— neither is she. At the tension grows, Leucippe tells Th ersander to “bring the lash, bring the rack, bring the fi re, bring the sword. . . . For though I be naked, for though I be alone, for though I be a woman, my one shield is my freedom [eleutheria], and not blows, nor blade, nor blaze shall prevail against it!” Leucippe is protected by her freedom, her eleutheria, at the very moment when her control over her body seemed most elusive. Her rhetoric speaks on two levels. Most directly, Leucippe means that she will be saved from her imminent distress because she is, in reality, free. She is the knowing heroine, confi dent her objective status will some- how ensure that she is not the victim in this tale. Eleutheria was a powerful word, conjuring not only free status but sexual respectability; for the Greeks and Romans, the two were inseparably fused. Th e eleuthera was the sexu- ally honest woman, a virgin until marriage, chaste within marriage. Th e opposite of the eleuthera was the prostitute, and Leucippe is consoled in the midst of apparently insuperable danger by the truth of her nature and by the rules of romance, which, she seems to know, will not allow her to be violated. Her faith depends on her knowledge that the narrative logic of the Greek romance will ultimately obey the expectations of the social order.  At the same time, Leucippe’s grand speech positions this novel within a matrix of cultural refl ection on the perennial problem of free will and fate.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Anthia’s escape from the brothel is a paradigm of the heroine’s chastity in the romance. Parallel endangerments from pimps and pirates, slave owners and other ruffians, recur throughout the entire genre. The most direct parallel, and the only rival to the Ephesian Tale in the transparency of its conventionality, survives in the popular History of Apollonius, King of Tyre. The History of Apollonius is a family romance rather than an erotic romance, but the pattern of separation, endurance, and reunion is structurally parallel. In this story, which survives in Latin, it is the protagonist’s daughter, Tarsia, who has been cast on the cruel winds of fate and endures lurid threats to her virginal purity. In the climactic scene of the History, Tarsia, like Anthia, is placed for sale in a slave market. The prince of the city and the town’s most notorious procurer enter a bidding war for the beautiful girl, with equally prurient interests. As the price escalates, the prince reckons that the purchase of this one creature would force him to sell off a number of his other slaves. With the dispassionate logic of a cost-cutting accountant, he reasons that he can let the pimp buy her, then pay to be the first customer for just a fraction of the girl’s sale price. “I’ll go in first and snatch the knot of her virginity at a low price and it will be the same as if I had bought her.” The deep material and ideological connection between the flesh trade and the sex trade was rarely exposed to such direct view. The demand for sex was a major impetus behind the circulation of human chattel in the Roman world.6 The pimp in this story, a monochromatic villain, ignores Tarsia’s pleas for compassion. “Don’t you know that supplications and tears have no force with pimps and executioners?” Like the executioner, the pimp is an agent of death. He sends her to the brothel. The prince, with his face covered, entered first. Tarsia prostrated herself at his feet and in the most desperate terms begged for his pity. “Listen to the misfortune that brought me to this unhappy state, weigh the fact of my respectable ancestry.” The prince was startled into compassion. He, too, had a virgin daughter, for whom he might fear a similar fate. He abandoned his lustful intentions and told Tarsia to implore future customers with the same sad recital, until she had earned enough to buy her own freedom. A train of suitors follows, and all are so moved by Tarsia’s story that they refrained from impairing her chastity. She endured, inviolate, until she was reunited with her father, who promised Tarsia to the noble prince as a bride (and incited the people of Mytilene to burn the merciless pimp alive). Tarsia’s preservation of her chastity was less elaborately contrived than Anthia’s. She relied on the bare compassion of strangers. But the underlying assumptions about the order of the universe were the same.7

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

  Sheriff Tate drove Walter to Holman Correctional Facility, a short ride away in Atmore, Alabama. Before the trip, the sheriff again threatened Walter with racial slurs and terrifying plans. It’s unclear how Tate was able to persuade Holman’s warden to house two pretrial detainees on death row, although Tate knew people at the prison from his days as a probation officer. The transfer of Myers and McMillian from the county jail to death row took place on August 1, 1987, less than a month before the scheduled execution of Wayne Ritter. — When Walter McMillian arrived on Alabama’s death row—just ten years after the modern death penalty was reinstituted—an entire community of condemned men awaited him. Most of the hundred or so death row prisoners who had been sentenced to execution in Alabama since capital punishment was restored in 1975 were black, although to Walter’s surprise nearly 40 percent of them were white. Everyone was poor, and everyone asked him why he was there. Condemned prisoners on Alabama’s death row unit are housed in windowless concrete buildings that are notoriously hot and uncomfortable. Each death row inmate was placed in a five-by-eight-foot cell with a metal door, a commode, and a steel bunk. The temperatures in August consistently reached over 100 degrees for days and sometimes weeks at a time. Incarcerated men would trap rats, poisonous spiders, and snakes they found inside the prison to pass the time and to keep safe. Isolated and remote, most prisoners got few visits and even fewer privileges. Existence at Holman centered on Alabama’s electric chair. The large wooden chair was built in the 1930s, and inmates had painted it yellow before attaching its leather straps and electrodes. They called it “Yellow Mama.” The executions at Holman resumed just a few years before Walter arrived. John Evans and Arthur Jones had recently been electrocuted in Holman’s execution chamber. Russ Canan, an attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta, had volunteered to represent Evans. Evans filmed what became an after-school special for kids where he shared the story of his life with schoolchildren and urged them to avoid the mistakes he had made. After courts refused to block the Evans execution following multiple appeals, Canan went to the prison to witness the execution at Evans’s request. It was worse than Russ could have ever imagined. He later filed a much-reviewed affidavit describing the entire horrific process:

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” And when he was finished the lights went out and they slowly closed their eyes. And the first day had ended. * * * (Lights flash, flash, flash standing by my rack now) sir! the private requests to make an emergency sitting head call WHAT DO YOU WANT KOVIC? sir! o god o jesus yessir aye aye sir one two aye aye sir If I die in a combat zone pack me up and ship me home COUNTDOWN—READY—SEATS! GET IN THE PASSAGEWAY SWEETPEA AND GIVE ME FIVE HUNDRED BENDS AND THRUSTS—DO IT! BY THE LEFT FLANK—one two three four I love the Marine Corps THIS IS YOUR RIFLE LADIES I WANT YOU TO KNOW IT ALL OF IT EVERY PART OF IT! CAN’T YOU READ SWEETPEA? this is my rifle this is my gun this is for fighting this is for fun, Ask not what your country (the formation now) remember i can talk no i can’t talk no i can’t bring back by the river—with the rifle—America. America. God shed His grace on thee, Eenie meenie mynie moe catch a nigger by the toe EYES RIGHT! I WANT YOU TO BELIEVE THIS AFTERNOON THAT THIS THING OUT THERE IS A COMMIE SONOFABITCH and wops and spics and chinks and japs and GET IN FRONT OF YOUR RACKS!! THAT’S NOT QUICK ENOUGH! (never quick enough, eighteen i’m eighteen now) UP! DOWN! GET IT! OUT! GET IT! o mom o please o someone someone help now somebody BY THE RIGHT FLANK! GET DOWN! GET UP! (hot deck parades faces mirror face still pimples now boots and socks) o lights flashes GET THE FUCK UP! We will bear any burden by your leave sir excuse me sir pardon me sir suffer any hardships i’m sorry sir o yessir no sir aye aye sir, sir! (push-ups push-ups clanking sounds steel) READY—SEATS! (plates forks and) EAT AND HURRY UP AND RUN AND HURRY UP AND EAT AND HURRY UP AND RUN AND HURRY UP HURRY UP! There is something I believe—we’ll be home by Christmas Eve sir my service number is two-oh-three-oh-two-six-one sir the president of the united states is the honorable lyndon baines johnson sir the vice president is Our Father, Who art in heaven PREPARE TO MOUNT aye aye sir hallowed be Thy name MOUNT! Thy kingdom come, if I die on the Russian front bury me with a Russian cunt DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! DO IT! Thy will be done DO IT! DO IT! DO IT IN YOUR SLEEP ON THE FLOOR ON YOUR HEAD DO IT NOW WANT TO BECOME MEN WANT TO BECOME MEN WANT TO BECOME MEN oh, become, marines oh god bless the marine corps god bless america TIGHTEN UP! TIGHTEN UP! god bless my senior drill instructor god bless the president PLATOON HALT!