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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  All my strength in that moment, which I thought my last, had been concentrated into my hand as I clutched at Celer, who was standing beside me; he later showed me the marks of my fingers upon his shoulder. But that brief agony was, like all bodily experiences, indescribable, and remains the secret of him who has lived through it, whether he would tell it or no. Since that time I have passed similar crises, though never identical, and no doubt one does not go twice (and still live) through that terror and that night. Hermogenes finally diagnosed an initial stage of hydropic heart; there was no choice but to accept the orders given me by this illness, which had suddenly become my master, and to consent to a long period of inaction, if not of rest, limiting the perspectives of my life for a time to the frame of a bed. I was almost ashamed of such an ailment, wholly internal and barely visible, without fever, abscess, or intestinal pain, with its only symptom a somewhat hoarser breathing and a livid mark left by the sandal strap across the swollen foot. An extraordinary silence reigned round my tent; the entire camp of Bethar seemed to have become a sick room. The aromatic oil which burned below my Genius rendered the close air of this canvas cage heavier still; the pounding of my arteries made me think vaguely of the island of the Titans on the edge of night. At other moments the insufferable noise changed to that of galloping horses thudding down on wet earth; the mind so carefully reined in for nearly fifty years was wandering; the tall body was floating adrift; I resigned myself to be that tired man who absently counted the star-and-diamond pattern of his blanket.

• 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. —REINHOLD NIEBUHR O Prologue for the 10th Anniversary Edition 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 The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

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

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  They were noisy, but not I suppose dangerous or even unfriendly. 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.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I had several dreams of siege, in which the house became a frail slatted box, shadowy and exquisite within, the walls all cracked and bleached louvres which fell to powder as one brushed against them. In one dream Arthur and I were there, and others, old school friends, a gaggle of black kids from the Shaft, my grandfather tearful and hopeless. We knew we had no chance of surviving the violence that surrounded us, closing in fast, and I was gripped by a nauseating terror. I woke up in the certain knowledge that I was about to die: the bedsprings were ticking from the sprinting vehemence of my heartbeat. I didn’t dare go back to sleep and after a while sat up and read, while Arthur slept deeply beside me. It took days to lose the mood of the dream, and its power to prickle my scalp. The neighbourhood seemed eerily impregnated with it, and its passing made possible a new confidence, as if a sentence had been lifted. That Thursday I had my lunch with Lord Nantwich. I told Arthur I had a long-standing arrangement and he made a point of saying, ‘Okay, man—I mean you’ve got to lead your own life: I’ll be all right here.’ I realised I’d been apologising in a way and I was relieved by his practical reply. ‘You can always have some bread and cheese, and you can finish off that cold ham in the fridge. Anything you want me to get you?’ ‘No, ta.’ He stood and smiled crookedly. I didn’t kiss him but just patted him on the bum as I slipped out. I’d put a suit on, smarter perhaps than I needed to be, but I enjoyed its protective conformity. I so rarely dressed up, and not having to wear a suit for work I seldom took any of mine off their hangers. My father had had me kitted out with morning suits and evening dress as I grew up and I had always relished the handsomeness of dark, formal clothes, wing-collars, waistcoats over braces: I looked quite the star of my sister’s wedding when the pictures appeared in Tatler. But I rarely wore this stuff. I had always been a bit of a peacock—or rather, whatever animal has brightly coloured legs, a flamingo perhaps. I was a bit late so I took a cab—which also solved the problem of finding Wicks’s. My father was a member of the Garrick and my grandfather a member of the Athenæum, but otherwise I was unsure about London Clubs.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But she had in fact done something: In the minutes between my call to Mamaw and Mom’s arrival, the woman had apparently dialed 911. So as Mom dragged me to her car, two police cruisers pulled up, and the cops who got out put Mom in handcuffs. She did not go quietly; they wrestled her into the back of a cruiser. Then she was gone. The second cop put me in the back of his cruiser as we waited for Mamaw to arrive. I have never felt so lonely, watching that cop interview the homeowner—still in her soaking-wet bathing suit, flanked by two pint-sized guard dogs—unable to open the cruiser door from the inside, and unsure when I could expect Mamaw’s arrival. I had begun to daydream when the car door swung open, and Lindsay crawled into the cruiser with me and clutched me to her chest so tightly that I couldn’t breathe. We didn’t cry; we said nothing. I just sat there being squeezed to death and feeling like all was right with the world. When we got out of the car, Mamaw and Papaw hugged me and asked if I was okay. Mamaw spun me around to inspect me. Papaw spoke with the police officer about where to find his incarcerated daughter. Lindsay never let me out of her sight. It had been the scariest day of my life. But the hard part was over. When we got home, none of us could talk. Mamaw wore a silent, terrifying anger. I hoped that she would calm down before Mom got out of jail. I was exhausted and wanted only to lie on the couch and watch TV. Lindsay went upstairs and took a nap. Papaw collected a food order for Wendy’s. On his way to the front door, he stopped and stood over me on the couch. Mamaw had left the room temporarily. Papaw placed his hand on my forehead and began to sob. I was so afraid that I didn’t even look up at his face. I had never heard of him crying, never seen him cry, and assumed he was so tough that he hadn’t even cried as a baby. He held that pose for a little while, until we both heard Mamaw approaching the living room. At that point he collected himself, wiped his eyes, and left. Neither of us ever spoke of that moment. Mom was released from jail on bond and prosecuted for a domestic violence misdemeanor. The case depended entirely on me. Yet during the hearing, when asked if Mom had ever threatened me, I said no. The reason was simple: My grandparents were paying a lot of money for the town’s highest-powered lawyer. They were furious with my mother, but they didn’t want their daughter in jail, either. The lawyer never explicitly encouraged dishonesty, but he did make it clear that what I said would either increase or decrease the odds that Mom spent additional time in prison.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  His other hand lay loosely in his lap, and it took me a while to see that he was hiding and coaxing—yes—a hard-on in his respectable grey slacks. I was not aroused by this; but did I dwindle, if only for a moment, in the face of their glowing, fertile closeness? I felt perhaps I did. Last thing of all before sleep we muttered about the charge against James, though he was shy of my ruse not only to get him off but to bring Colin down. He had pleaded not guilty to the magistrate on the morning after his arrest, and so gained time, the case being deferred. He had a good lawyer, one of his Holland Park patients, who was gay himself and knew how to fight and what such fights could mean if lost. We wondered if it depended on whether the court would accept works of art as evidence; and besides, whether they would accept that Staines’s photographs were works of art. It was a shaky idea, and I fell asleep and dreamed that they confiscated all Staines’s pictures and sent him to gaol instead. When I woke before dawn, parched and aching, I felt lost. I decided that if necessary, and if it might save James, I would testify in court to what I had done with Colin—and so perhaps do something, though distant and symbolic, for Charles, and for Lord B’s other victims. I had that most oppressive of feelings—that some test was looming. James was off to work early, so I walked home through the awakening streets. I moped about in the flat, now furious with Phil, now reproachful, and held a hundred imaginary conversations with him, in which I would often speak out loud—‘What do you mean, you did it out of pity?’, ‘How could you imagine that I wouldn’t find out?’, ‘I’ve never heard anything so absurd in my life …’ and on and on. But when the phone rang I was terrified to answer it and embroil myself in the meanness and misery of arguments. I sat on the bed looking at it and summoning my resolve; but when I did pick up the receiver it was someone I had been at Winchester with—one of those City youngsters—informing me of the memorial service for a not-much-liked don. I was apprehensive about going to the Corry too, but after a day of fretting, squalid inactivity, I decided to take the chance.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Let me see,’ he said, grabbing my wrist and giving me a strange, private smile. There was a swastika tattoo on the back of his hand, very badly done, almost as though it had been drawn on with a biro. Another of the group was across the alleyway, his eyes shifting with amazing speed, as if he was mad. ‘Give us your watch!’ he said, with extreme, petulant vehemence, though never looking at me for a second together. But the sexy one tossed my arm away from him, I gave a nervous gasp of a laugh, and decided I was in control of things. I stepped forward, and around the big boy, who had moved out to block my passage; the other one said, ‘Where do you think you’re going? We want your watch.’ I said rather crossly, ‘Well, you can’t have it.’ At this point a third youth, that I hadn’t spotted in the narrow shaft of the bin-yard on the right, clambered rapidly up one of the six-foot-high bins and sat throned on the top among the black bags of rubbish, banging his heels against the side of the container. ‘Fucking poof!’ he said, with a kind of considered anger. Angry myself, I wanted simply to get away—but as I tried to do so was challenged with ‘Um—excuse me—no one said you could go.’ ‘You can tell he’s a fuckin’ poof,’ said the one on top of the bin. It was an old problem: what to say, what was the snappy putdown? Clever, but not too clever. I acted out a weary sigh, and said, tight-lipped: ‘Actually, poof is not a word I would use.’ ‘Isn’t it, actually?’ said the leader, again with a smile that seemed to say he knew my game, he knew what I liked. ‘Look, excuse me,’ I said tetchily, nervous, hearing my own voice in my ears as though they had played it to me on a tape-recorder. I felt I mustn’t flatten it, or pretend, but to them it must have sounded a parody voice, pickled in culture and money. The jittery one, skinny, pecking forward with his oddly vulnerable neck and gulping Adam’s apple, said: ‘Yeah! What’s ’is game, any’ow? What’s ’e doin’ ’ere?’ His eyes ran up and down over me, as if wondering where to strike. I knew I needn’t answer and blustered inwardly about a ‘lawless tribunal’. At the same time I had a terrible certainty that I was lost. They had decided on my fate and were nerving themselves up to it by humiliating me. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve come to see a friend.’ I was hopeless at this, and my looking about showed how I wanted to escape. ‘Fuckin’ shit-hole wanker,’ the skinhead on the bin said, then spat, hitting the ground just in front of me. The leader took in his boys with an ironic glance, and said: ‘I think his friend must be one of our little coloured brothers, don’t you?’

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Take gay rights, a particularly hot topic among conservative Protestants. I’ll never forget the time I convinced myself that I was gay. I was eight or nine, maybe younger, and I stumbled upon a broadcast by some fire-and-brimstone preacher. The man spoke about the evils of homosexuals, how they had infiltrated our society, and how they were all destined for hell absent some serious repenting. At the time, the only thing I knew about gay men was that they preferred men to women. This described me perfectly: I disliked girls, and my best friend in the world was my buddy Bill. Oh no, I’m going to hell. I broached this issue with Mamaw, confessing that I was gay and I was worried that I would burn in hell. She said, “Don’t be a fucking idiot, how would you know that you’re gay?” I explained my thought process. Mamaw chuckled and seemed to consider how she might explain to a boy my age. Finally she asked, “J.D., do you want to suck dicks?” I was flabbergasted. Why would someone want to do that? She repeated herself, and I said, “Of course not!” “Then,” she said, “you’re not gay. And even if you did want to suck dicks, that would be okay. God would still love you.” That settled the matter. Apparently I didn’t have to worry about being gay anymore. Now that I’m older, I recognize the profundity of her sentiment: Gay people, though unfamiliar, threatened nothing about Mamaw’s being. There were more important things for a Christian to worry about. In my new church, on the other hand, I heard more about the gay lobby and the war on Christmas than about any particular character trait that a Christian should aspire to have. I recalled that moment with Mamaw as an instance of secularist thinking rather than an act of Christian love. Morality was defined by not participating in this or that particular social malady: the gay agenda, evolutionary theory, Clintonian liberalism, or extramarital sex. Dad’s church required so little of me. It was easy to be a Christian. The only affirmative teachings I remember drawing from church were that I shouldn’t cheat on my wife and that I shouldn’t be afraid to preach the gospel to others. So I planned a life of monogamy and tried to convert other people, even my seventh-grade science teacher, who was Muslim. The world lurched toward moral corruption—slouching toward Gomorrah. The Rapture was coming, we thought. Apocalyptic imagery filled the weekly sermons and the Left Behind books (one of the best-selling fiction series of all time, which I devoured). Folks would discuss whether the Antichrist was already alive and, if so, which world leader it might be. Someone told me that he expected I’d marry a very pretty girl if the Lord hadn’t come by the time I reached marrying age. The End Times were the natural finish for a culture sliding so quickly toward the abyss.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But I know what it is to fondle the harsh fibres of a rope or the edge of a knife. Gradually I turned my dread desire into a rampart against itself: the fact that the possibility of suicide was ever present helped me to bear life with less impatience, just as a sedative potion within hand's reach serves to calm a man afflicted with insomnia. By some inner contradiction this obsession with death ceased only after the first symptoms of illness came to distract me from that one thought; I began to interest myself anew in this life which was leaving me; in Sidon's gardens I wanted intensely to enjoy my body for some years more. One desires to die, but not to suffocate; sickness disgusts us with death, and we wish to get well, which is a way of wishing to live. But weakness and suffering, with manifold bodily woes, soon discourage the invalid from trying to regain ground: he tires of those respites which are but snares, of that faltering strength, those ardors cut short, and that perpetual lying in wait for the next attack. I kept sly watch upon myself: that dull chest pain, was it only a passing discomfort, the result of a meal absorbed too fast, or was I to expect from the enemy an assault which this time would not be repulsed? I no longer entered the Senate without saying to myself that the door had perhaps closed behind me as finally as if I had been awaited, like Caesar, by fifty conspirators armed with knives. During the suppers at Tibur I feared to distress my guests by the discourtesy of a sudden and final departure; I was afraid to die in my bath, or in the embrace of young arms. Functions which formerly were easy to perform or even agreeable, become humiliating now that they have become more laborious; one wearies of the silver vase handed each morning to be examined by the physician. The principal ailment brings with it a whole train of secondary afflictions: my hearing is less acute than before; even yesterday I was forced to ask Phlegon to repeat a whole sentence; no crime would have cost me more shame. The months which followed the adoption of Antoninus were bad indeed: the stay in Baiae and the return to Rome, with the negotiations accompanying it, overtaxed what strength I had left. The obsession with death again took hold of me, but this time the reasons were plain to see, and could be told; my worst enemy would have had no cause to smile over my despair.

• 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 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 Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  We’d been dating for only a few months when she stumbled upon an analogy that described me perfectly. I was, she said, a turtle. “Whenever something bad happens—even a hint of disagreement—you withdraw completely. It’s like you have a shell that you hide in.” It was true. I had no idea how to deal with relationship problems, so I chose not to deal with them at all. I could scream at her when she did something I didn’t like, but that seemed mean. Or I could withdraw and get away. Those were the proverbial arrows in my quiver, and I had nothing else. The thought of fighting with her reduced me to a morass of the qualities I thought I hadn’t inherited from my family: stress, sadness, fear, anxiety. It was all there, and it was intense . So I tried to get away, but Usha wouldn’t let me. I tried to break everything off multiple times, but she told me that was stupid unless I didn’t care about her. So I’d scream and I’d yell. I’d do all of the hateful things that my mother had done. And then I’d feel guilty and desperately afraid. For so much of my life, I’d made Mom out to be a kind of villain. And now I was acting like her. Nothing compares to the fear that you’re becoming the monster in your closet. During that second year of law school, Usha and I traveled to D.C. for follow-up interviews with a few law firms. I returned to our hotel room, dejected that I had just performed poorly with one of the firms I really wanted to work for. When Usha tried to comfort me, to tell me that I’d probably done better than I expected, but that even if I hadn’t, there were other fish in the sea, I exploded. “Don’t tell me that I did fine,” I yelled. “You’re just making an excuse for weakness. I didn’t get here by making excuses for failure.” I stormed out of the room and spent the next couple of hours on the streets of D.C.’s business district. I thought about that time Mom took me and our toy poodle to Middletown’s Comfort Inn after a screaming match with Bob. We stayed there for a couple of days, until Mamaw convinced Mom that she had to return home and face her problems like an adult. And I thought about Mom during her childhood, running out the back door with her mother and sister to avoid another night of terror with her alcoholic father. I was a third-generation escaper. I was near Ford’s Theatre, the historic location where John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. About half a block from the theater is a corner store that sells Lincoln memorabilia. In it, a large Lincoln blow-up doll with an extraordinarily large grin gazes at those walking by. I felt like this inflatable Lincoln was mocking me. Why the hell is he smiling? I thought.

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

  I followed the bailiff and saw him whisper something to the deputy outside the courtroom. McMillian’s supporters would be let into the courtroom—now that half the courtroom was already filled. I walked over to where two ministers had assembled all of Walter’s supporters and tried to explain the situation. “I’m sorry, everyone,” I said. “They’ve done something really inappropriate today. They’ll let you in now, but the courtroom is already half filled with people here to support the State. There won’t be enough seats for everyone.” One of the ministers, a heavyset African American man dressed in a dark suit with a large cross around his neck, walked over to me. “Mr. Stevenson, it’s okay. Please don’t worry about us. We’ll have a few people be our representatives today and we will be here even earlier tomorrow. We won’t let nobody turn us around, sir.” The ministers began selecting people to be representatives in the courtroom. They told Minnie, Armelia, Walter’s children, and several others to go on in. When the ministers called out Mrs. Williams, everyone seemed to smile. Mrs. Williams, an older black woman, stood up and prepared herself to enter the courtroom. She took great care in fixing her hair just right. On top of her gray hair she wore a small hat whose placement she precisely adjusted. She then pulled out a long blue scarf that she delicately wrapped around her neck. Only then did she slowly begin to make her way to the courtroom door where the line of McMillian supporters had formed. I found her dignified ritual riveting, but when the spell was broken I realized that I needed to get going myself. I hadn’t spent the morning preparing for witnesses as I had intended but had instead been drawn into this foolish mistreatment of McMillian’s supporters. I walked past the line of patient people and went inside to begin preparing for the hearing. I was standing at counsel’s table when out of the corner of my eye I saw that Mrs. Williams had made it to the courtroom door. She was quite elegant in her hat and scarf. She wasn’t a large woman, but there was something commanding about her presence—I couldn’t help but watch her as she moved carefully through the doorway toward the metal detector. She walked more slowly than everyone else, but she held her head high with an undeniable grace and dignity. She reminded me of older women I’d been around all my life—women whose lives were hard but who remained kind and dedicated themselves to building and sustaining their communities. Mrs. Williams glanced at the available rows to see where she would sit, and then turned to walk through the metal detector—and that’s when she saw the dog. I watched all her composure fall away, replaced by a look of absolute fear.