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 Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  First Table: Piety toward GodSecond Table: Justice toward Others1. Worship no other gods6. No murder2. No graven images (idols)7. No adultery3. No abuse of God’s name8. No theft4. Keep the Sabbath9. No lying5. Honor parents10. No covetingAccording to Josephus, then, the Baptizer’s call to repentance—tshuvah, in the Hebrew of later rabbinic idiom: “turn”—thus meant, precisely, returning to God’s commandments as revealed in the Torah. How radically new was this message? In the Jewish context presupposed by both Josephus and by the evangelists, it wasn’t. And the Baptizer’s emphasis on attending to the inner dimension of repentance (“cleansing the soul through right conduct” in Josephus’ phrasing) before the external protocols of atonement (“purification of the flesh” through immersion) is a stock theme in Jewish penitential tradition of all periods. However, John coupled his call to recommit to the Torah both to bodily purification and to apocalyptic warnings. Those who failed to heed his warning to repent, says the John of Matthew and Luke, will “burn with unquenchable fire”: “Even now the ax is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit”—that is, the fruit of repentance in Matthew 3.8—“is cut down and thrown into the [apocalyptic] fire” (Mt 3.10).9 John’s message apparently had a major impact on Jesus. In all gospel traditions, Jesus begins his own public mission only after his immersion by John. And Jesus too, say the synoptic gospels, oriented his moral teaching by appeal to the Two Tables of the Law. Asked what were the greatest of the commandments, Jesus responds by quoting from the Torah, citing Deuteronomy 6.4 (the first line of the Jewish prayer the Sh’ma) and Leviticus 19.18. “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might”—eusebeia, piety toward God (Dt 6.4); and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”—dikaiosune, justice toward others (Lv 19.18; Mk 12.29–31 and parallels). In Mark’s gospel, Jesus answers a question about inheriting eternal life by responding, “You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and your mother’ ” (Mk 10.19). Finally, like pious Jewish males then and since, Jesus wore ritual fringes—tzitziot in Hebrew; kraspeda in Greek—whose function was to remind the wearer of God’s commandments (Mk 6.56; cf. Nm 15.37–40, lines also incorporated into the Sh’ma). We can infer from all this that Jesus defined living rightly as living according to the Torah, as summed up in and by the Ten Commandments; that he defined sin as breaking God’s commandments; and that he defined “repentance” as (re)turning to this covenant.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Cherie’s at work, her boss wouldn’t let her talk.” The man at the cinema ticket counter has fat fingers and a slow pace. My eyes dart around the theater’s lobby as he paws our change out of his register. “Mister, can you hurry it up a little?” I tell him. He stares at me. “We’re going to be late for the show.” Finally, we sail past the popcorn concession and straight into the theater, in the far left corner. We sit through two viewings of Pretty in Pink , and I’m ready to sit through a third when Rosie stands. “Sit down!” I hiss. “What are you doing?” “Let’s get out of here.” “We can’t— Why?” “Let’s at least see another movie or something.” I glance around. “Well, hurry, so we can walk out with everybody else. Put up your hood and put down your head.” We link arms to hustle through the theater’s lobby, but the instant we turn the corner into the mall corridor, I see the worst possible thing: Nick comes running at us, accompanied by two mall security guards. As I yank Rosie into a semicircle spin, I spot Cherie a few steps behind them. Rosie and I race back into the cinema, down the aisle of an empty theater, and out the emergency exit. I push Rosie to scramble under a big metal garbage bin and then shimmy under next to her. “They’ll think we’re hiding behind something—not under something,” I whisper. “How do you know?” “Because I’ve done this before!” We lie there. It will be a miracle if the pounding of my heart doesn’t lead Nick right to us. Rosie rests her cheek on the cold pavement. “We have no control, Gi,” she says. Her return to using my nickname strikes me; softens me. “That’s why we have to get control, sweetie. We can’t let you go back with her. You’ll be fourteen in October, that’s only seven months from now. We have to get you emancipated, too.” “Where will I hide?” “With me up in New Paltz. I can rent a room in an apartment and we can live off campus.” Suddenly Cherie’s voice rings from the darkness. “Regina! Rosie!” “Close your eyes,” I whisper, near silence. “She’s with Nick.” It’s just like when I was four years old living in the Glue Factory apartment. I ran away, and Susan called out for me. “Regina! Regina!” I rose from my hiding place and ran into her arms, then she carried me out of the woods and toward the street, right back to Cookie. We ignore Cherie’s calls. We stay silent and still. Minutes pass. Cars pass. Rosie passes her hand to me, and I lace my fingers through hers. After quiet falls around us, we shimmy out into the night. We walk through unlit parking lots on Sunrise Highway until I find a phone booth on a dark corner. Camille picks up on the first ring. “Regina.” She’s crying.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I accepted war as a means toward peace where negotiations proved useless, in the manner of a physician who decides to cauterize only after having tried simples. Everything is so complicated in human affairs that my rule, even if pacific, would have also its periods of war, just as the life of a great captain has, whether he likes it or not, its interludes of peace. Before heading north for the final settlement of the Sarmatian conflict, I saw Quietus once more. The butcher of Gyrene remained formidable. My first move had been to disband his columns of Numidian scouts, but he still had his place in the Senate, his post in the regular army, and that immense domain of western sands which he could convert at will either into a springboard or a hiding-place. He invited me to a hunt in Mysia, deep in the forests, and skilfully engineered an accident in which with a little less luck or less bodily agility I should certainly have lost my life. It seemed best to appear unsuspecting, to be patient and to wait. Shortly thereafter, in Lower Moesia, at a time when the capitulation of the Sarmatian princes allowed me to think of an early return to Italy, an exchange of dispatches in code with my former guardian warned me that Quietus had come back abruptly to Rome and had just conferred there with Palma. Our enemies were strengthening their positions and realigning their troops. No security was possible so long as we should have these two men against us. I wrote to Attianus to act quickly. The old man struck like lightning. He overstepped his orders and with a single stroke freed me of the last of my avowed foes: on the same day, a few hours apart, Celsus was killed at Baiae, Palma in his villa at Terracina, and Nigrinus at Faventia on the threshold of his summer house. Quietus met his end on the road, on departing from a conference with his fellow conspirators, struck down on the step of the carriage which was bringing him back to the City. A wave of terror broke over Rome. Servianus, my aged brother-in-law, who had seemed resigned to my success but who was avidly anticipating my errors to come, must have felt an impulse of joy more nearly akin to ecstasy than any experience of his whole life. All the sinister rumors which circulated about me found credence anew. I received this news aboard the ship which was bringing me back to Italy. I was appalled. One is always content to be relieved of one's adversaries, but my guardian had proceeded with the indifference of age for the far-reaching consequences of his act: he had forgotten that I should have to live with the after effects of these murders for more than twenty years.

• 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 Etched in Sand (2013)

  Norm and I laughed. “It sounds like a big old man,” I said, and we laughed even harder. Gi made the macaroni and cheese, and the three of us sat on the living room floor eating the pasta and drinking glass after glass of milk until the entire carton was gone. Gi and Norm finished their meals first and were in the kitchen cleaning up while I still ate. When I was done, I placed my glass on my plate and stood to clear my dishes. With my first step, my glass fell and broke on the wood floor next to Cookie’s boneless face. My mother instantly jumped up and lunged toward me. She grabbed my hair and shouted, “You stupid little twat!” When she jerked my head back, I dropped my plate and that broke too. Gi and Norm ran into the room, and Gi pushed Cookie away from me. The fight that followed was so terrifying I could only see it as a series of frozen snapshots. There was broken glass; there was Cookie with her wooden-heeled shoe thrust into my sister’s back, and her face, and her arms, and her legs; there was blood covering Gi’s face; there was Cookie’s enormous body on top of Gi’s stringy one; there were words—Gi screaming and Cookie saying over and over again that she wished Gi had never been born; and there was Norm and me, both of us hollering, begging for Gi to stop fighting back so maybe our mother would finally stop beating her. “Please, can we have the games?” I whispered to my sisters, ignoring the social worker. “There are a lot of kids where they’re going, and there is no extra room for games,” Mrs. Brady said. My sisters gave each other a look—their expressions were so similar it was like watching only one of them in a mirror. Gi opened my bag and removed the games. Camille held Norm’s hand and Gi carried me to the car. She sobbed in my neck as her footsteps crunched across the gravel. There was a pudgy man with hair all over his face waiting at one car. At the other car, where Mrs. Brady put my and Norm’s Hefty bags, was a big pink-faced man. He opened the back door and let my sisters crawl all over Norm and me as they hugged and kissed us good-bye. Mrs. Brady got in the front seat and immediately put on her seatbelt. Her back was stiff as she stared out the front windshield. “Je t’aime,” Gi whispered in my ear, then she and Camille got out of the car. I reached up and felt my face, wet and slippery from sisters’ tears. Just as the man was closing my door, Cookie trampled out of the house like a

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

  If there was authentic dissent, it surely resided among those whose life condition exposed them to systemic exploitation. The high Roman Empire was a genuine slave society, consuming slaves as ferociously as any previous period, and perhaps on a wider, Mediterranean scale. Women accounted for at least half of the slave population, and they bore the brunt of sexual abuse. Without legal or social protection, they were devastatingly vulnerable. Sexual abuse was simply presumptive, and many slave girls probably experienced sexual initiation traumatically early. The slave woman’s life course was undifferentiated by the great threshold between childhood and marriage that marked the stages of a free woman’s development. Slaves in the house may have been more integrated into the rhythms of the free family’s life, but at the same time proximity meant vulnerability and close control. The slave’s public behavior could be seen as a reflection of the free family’s honor; “the morals of the mistress are judged by those of the slave girls.” Many slaves were owned in small numbers and surreptitiously sought companionship outside the home. In larger households, the slave staff may have offered its own opportunities. Rural slaves might have had the greatest chance of stability and privacy, but our ignorance of their lives is profound. When Leucippe was made a field slave, she was viciously threatened by the sexual advances of her overseer. Although slave marriages were afforded virtually no legal protections, slaves married nonetheless. We hear casually of “slave weddings.” Plutarch knew that a slave girl who was married would suddenly become more resistant to her master’s advances, but slave marriages were not protected under the adultery laws. Slaves were entirely cut off from their male relatives, and the surviving documents of sale are a chilling reminder that the slave family existed only at the master’s will.46 As blurry as our perception of the slave’s life is, the realities of prostitution are possibly even more obscure. Slaves haphazardly appear in our upper-class sources because they inhabited the same walls, because they inevitably intruded upon the daily affairs of their masters. Prostitutes, by contrast, represented “the most impure part of humankind,” and hence real consideration of their existence has been exiled from all literature with pretension to gentility. When prostitutes do appear in the sources, it is thus usually as a cipher for pure sexual indecency. Like the miserable creature whose unfortunate destiny is lost in the brilliant glare of Leucippe’s invincible sexual modesty, the prostitutes we know are mostly nameless, faceless distortions of an inconceivably brutal existence. But like slaves, prostitutes were in reality ubiquitous, and the sexual economy of the Roman Empire directly depended on the exploitation of their available bodies.47

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

  But this revolution was only possible because, from very early on, the con- ventions of romance— above all the charged symbolism of female purity— had fully entered the bloodstream of Christian fi ction.  THE CHRISTIAN ACTS AND THE INVERSION OF ROMANCE Our most complete version of the diff use 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 leg- end, 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 unneces- sary husk of the narrative. Th e 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 profi le. 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 origi- nal audience of the Acts. Th e apostle, shortly after arriving in the Roman province of Achaea, converts the proconsul Lesbius to the Christian faith. Th en a slave, Trophima, the former concubine of the proconsul, turned to the apostle’s teaching and the sexual rigors that accompanied it. Her cur- rent lover, discomfi ted by the loss of his sexual companion, designed a plot ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  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 re- fused 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 con- verted to the Christian faith, condemned to the brothel.  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 suf- fering this pollution, Lord, in whose name I esteem chastity!” An angel ap- peared and struck the youth dead.

• From Untrue (2018)

  And portraying them as hypersexual feeds into the deeply ingrained, deeply dangerous idea that they are less in need of and less deserving of protection from sexual assault. According to experts, including UCLA sexual behavior researcher Gail Wyatt and lawyer, political scientist, and Rutgers associate professor of gender studies Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, African American women are more vulnerable to these types of attacks and yet are less likely to report the attack for a number of reasons, many of them linked to the specific historical experiences of and pressures on black women. “The sisters don’t want to report the brothers because we know what’s going on in penal institutions,” one counselor at a National Sexual Violence Prevention Conference told Los Angeles Times reporter Gayle Pollard-Terry. Pollard-Terry also notes that black women may be reluctant to report sexual assault because they are unable to trust police or find “people who look like [me]” among detectives and sexual assault counselors; because black ministers have historically rallied around black men accused of sexual assault; and because of a more general fear of not being believed. Chillingly, one study found that white female college students felt less intent to intervene and less personal responsibility to intervene, and imputed greater victim pleasure, when the hypothetical victim of sexual assault was a black woman. Modeling “respectability” is one response to dangerously dehumanizing, controlling images, caricatures that justify the oppression of black women in the US or portray them as “too sexual.” In her article “No Disrespect” for Bitch magazine, Winfrey Harris explores the history of what she calls “respectability politics” in the black community. She notes that such politics “work to counter negative views of blackness by aggressively adopting the manners and morality that the dominant culture deems ‘respectable.’” Black civil rights protestors wore suits and ties, jackets and heels, to marches, using their Sunday best to project a message: “Your stereotypes are untrue; we deserve equality; we, too, are respectable.” But such a powerful reframing is not without its problems, Winfrey Harris notes. She traces the ways respectability politics as a liberation strategy “has the potential to harm more than uplift,” for example when it held newly freed black women to the standards of white womanhood, which positioned real women deserving of protection as inherently childlike and submissive. Respectability politics is the force that can hold Beyoncé to a standard of acting like a nice girl or else (be seen as out-of-control licentious), while a performer like Madonna was not only free to be graphically sexual but viewed as in control of her image and sexuality as she did so (thankfully, Beyoncé gave her middle fingers up, hands high to all of that).

• 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 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 Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I remember coming home from school and seeing what looked like a tremendous blackhead on my forehead. It was right smack-dab in the middle of my forehead and it was just like the things that were all over my sister Sue’s face. The more I looked in the mirror, the more scared I got. Stevie Jacket’s face was covered with the things, he had the worst case of them of anyone I ever knew in my life. In gym I saw him once taking a shower, and his face and neck, all over his arms and back, his whole body was covered with blackheads and whiteheads and thousands of little tiny infected bumps, and the kids had started calling him “Bumpy.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  As we left the crowded, shop-brightened streets behind us and crossed into the exclusive quiet of Holland Park I yawned and looked out with pleasure at the deserted pavements, glistening where a street-lamp stood, the overhanging budding branches of trees in front gardens, the unthinking stability which wealth lent the small mansions behind them, where occasional windows, with curtains it was felt unnecessary to draw, revealed books reaching to coved ceilings, figures holding glasses moving about, discreet lighting picking out pictures in dull gold frames. I paid off the cabby at the gate, and jogged across the short gravel sweep to the door at the side of the dark house which gave access to the stairs to my apartment. A small lamp glowed above it, and the wet dripped down from the bare twigs of the creeper which surrounded the recessed porchway. My heart leapt when I saw there was a figure slumped in the shadow on the ground, sheltering from the rain. It was with an unsteady lurch into jocularity that I said, ‘Arfer, what the fuck are you doing there?’ ‘Man, I thought you was never coming,’ he said in a tense voice, and sniffed heavily. ‘I been sitting here fucking ages waiting for you.’ ‘But I didn’t know you were coming back tonight.’ He didn’t reply but stood up and moved towards me. I felt his heavy breath on my face, and annoyance that he was there. I suppose it was because he had frightened me. He gripped my upper arms with his long, strong hands, and pressed himself against me. The rain fell on us, but as I lifted my hands to embrace him, I realised that he was already soaked through, his body warming the damp clothes just as they were chilling him. ‘Baby, you’re really wet,’ I said in a practical tone. ‘You should have said you were coming.’ I freed myself and felt for my keys. ‘Come in and take everything off,’ I exclaimed, adjusting to the idea that he had returned, and not unmoved that he couldn’t keep away. I stepped past him and unlocked the door, flicking on the light, and passing into the hallway at the foot of the back-stairs. He hesitated, then followed me in, his feet squelching in his sodden trainers, and pushed the door to.