Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  so as wars go this was an easy one But for we here who never woke up before to see plane shitting fire into chimney it was a damn awful lot! The baby’s father buried without his legs burned bones in piles along the road “any Cubans around here, girl? any guns?” singed tree-ferns curl and jerk in the mortar rhythms strumming up from shore​uphill a tree explodes showering the house with scraps of leaves the sweetish smell of unseen rotting flesh. For a while there was almost enough water​enough rice​enough quinine the child tugs at her waistband but she does not move quickly she has heard how nervous these green men are with their grenades and sweaty helmets who offer cigarettes and chocolate but no bread free batteries and herpes but no doctors no free buses to the St. Georges market no reading lessons in the brilliant afternoons bodies strewn along Telescope Beach these soldiers say are foreigners but she has seen the charred bits of familiar cloth and knows what to say to any invader with an M–16 rifle held ready while searching her cooking shed overturning the empty pots with his apologetic grin Imelda steps forward the child pressing against her knees “no guns, man, no guns here. we glad you come. you carry water?” The american deputy assistant secretary of defense for equal opportunity and safety pauses in her speech​licks her dry lips “as you can see the Department has a very good record of equal opportunity for our women” swims toward safety through a lake of her own blood. Diaspora Afraid is a country with no exit visas a wire of ants walking the horizon embroiders our passports at birth Johannesburg Alabama a dark girl flees the cattle prods skin hanging from her shredded nails escapes into my nightmare half an hour before the Shatila dawn wakes in the well of a borrowed Volkswagen or a rickety midnight sleeper out of White River Junction Washington bound​again gulps carbon monoxide in a false-bottomed truck fording the Braceras Grande or an up-country river grenades held dry in a calabash leaving. A Question of Climate I learned to be honest the way I learned to swim dropped into the inevitable my father’s thumbs in my hairless armpits about to give way I am trying to surface​carefully remembering the water’s shadow-legged musk cannons of salt​exploding my nostrils’ rage and for years my powerful breast stroke was a declaration of war. Florida Black people fishing the causeway full-skirted​bare brown to the bellyband atilt on the railing​near a concrete road where a crawler-transporter will move the space shuttle from hangar to gantry. Renting a biplane to stalk the full moon in Aquarius as she rose under Venus between propellers Country Western surf feasting on frozen black beans Cubano from Grand Union in the mangrove swamp​elbows of cypress​scrub oak Moon​moon​moon on the syncopated road rimey with bullfrogs​walking beaches​fragrant and raunchy fire-damp sand between my toes. Huge arrogant cockroaches​with white people’s manners

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  While I watched this movie I was also thinking about the course of my own life, the paths I feel bound for inside myself, the way of life that feels most real to me. And I wonder what I may be risking as I become more and more committed to telling whatever truth comes across my eyes my tongue my pen—no matter how difficult—the world as I see it, people as I feel them. And I wonder what I will have to pay someday for that privilege, and in whose coin? Will those forces which serve non-life in the name of power and profit kill me too, or merely dismember me in the eyes of whoever can use what I do? When I stand in the radiance of a place like the Sapphire Sapphos dinner, with the elegant food and abundance of love and beautiful dark women, when I stand in that moment of sweetness, I sometimes become almost afraid. Afraid of their warmth and loving, as if that same loving warmth might doom me. I know this is not so, but it can feel like it. As if so long as I remained too different from my own time and surroundings I was safe, if terribly lonely. But now that I am becoming less lonely and more loved, I am also becoming more visible, and therefore more vulnerable. Malcolm saying to Martin in the film, “I love you, Martin, and we are both dead men.” February 9, 1984 New York City So. No doubt about where we are in the world’s story. It has just cost $32,000 to complete a government-commissioned study that purports to show there is no rampant hunger in the U.S.A. I wonder if they realize rampant means aggressive. So. The starving old women who used to sit in broken-down rooming houses waiting for a welfare check now lie under park benches and eat out of garbage bins. “I only eat fruit,” she mumbled, rummaging through the refuse bin behind Gristedes supermarket, while her gnarled Black hands carefully cut away the rotted parts of a cantaloupe with a plastic Burger King knife. February 18, 1984 Ohio How does it feel, Ms. L., to be a fifty-year-old Black woman who is still bleeding! Cheers to the years! Doing what I like to do best.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  After I had gone to bed she called me back to her twice. The first time I could not pierce through the veil of sleep, but I saw her light and heard her in my dreams. Then at 4:30 in the morning, her little fingers of light reached under the lined window curtains, and I got up as if bidden and went out onto the terrace to greet her. The night was very very still; she was low and bright and brilliantly clear. I stood on the terrace in my robe bathed in her strong quiet light. I raised my arms then and prayed for us all, prayed for the strength for all of us who must weather this time ahead with me. My mother moon had awakened me, calling me out into her brightness, and she shone down upon me as a sign, a blessing on that terrace with the soft gurgle of flowing water in my ears, a promise of answering strength to be whoever I need to be. I felt her in my heart, in my bones, in my thin blood, and I heard Margareta’s voice again: “It’s going to be a hard lonely road, but remember, help is on the way.” That was her farewell Tarot reading for me, seventeen years ago. December 27, 1985 Arlesheim Last night I dreamed I was asleep here in my bed at the Klinik and there was a strange physical presence lying beside me on the left side. I couldn’t see it because it was dark, but I felt this body start to touch me on my left thigh, and I knew that this meant great danger. “It must think I’m dead so it can have (claim) me,” I thought, “but if I moan it will know I’m awake and alive and it’ll leave me alone.” So I began to moan softly, but the creature didn’t stop. I could feel its cold fingers beginning to creep over my left hip, and I thought to myself, “Oh, oh, nightmare time! I’ve got to scream louder. Maybe that noise will make it go away, because there is nobody else here to wake me up!” So I screamed and roared in my sleep, and finally after what seemed like a very long time, I woke myself up calling out, and of course there was nothing in my bed at all, but it still felt as if death had really been trying. December 30, 1985 Arlesheim Frances and I went to the Konditorei [pastry shop] in town this afternoon to have a cup of tea and be together away from the hospital, when the elderly schoolteacher with the rhodonite necklace came in and wanted to sit down with us. It was so apparent how badly she wanted to talk that we couldn’t say no, even though we never have enough time alone together.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  In the light of those facts, and from all the reading I’ve been doing these past weeks (thank the goddess for Barnes & Noble’s medical section), I’ve made up my mind not to have a liver biopsy. It feels like the only reasonable decision for me. I’m asymptomatic now except for a vicious gallbladder. And I can placate her. There are too many things I’m determined to do that I haven’t done yet. Finish the poem “Outlines.” See what europe’s all about. Make Deotha Chambers’ story live. If I have this biopsy and it is malignant, then a whole course of action will be established simply by their intrusion into the suspect site. Yet if this tumor is malignant, I want as much good time as possible, and their treatments aren’t going to make a hell of a lot of difference in terms of extended time. But they’ll make a hell of a lot of difference in terms of my general condition and how I live my life. On the other hand, if this is benign, I believe surgical intervention into fatty tissue of any kind can start the malignant process in what otherwise might remain benign for a long time. I’ve been down that road before. I’ve decided this is a chance I have to take. If this were another breast tumor, I’d go for surgery again, because the organ comes off. But with the tie-in between estrogens, fat cells, and malignancies I’ve been reading about, cutting into my liver seems to me to be too much of a risk for too little return in terms of time. And it might be benign, some little aberrant joke between my liver and the universe. Twenty-two hours of most days I don’t believe I have liver cancer. Most days. Those other two hours of the day are pure hell, and there’s so much work I have to do in my head in those two hours, too, through all the terror and uncertainties. I wish I knew a doctor I could really trust to talk it all over with. Am I making the right decision? I know I have to listen to my body. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from all the work I’ve done since my mastectomy, it’s that I must listen keenly to the messages my body sends. But sometimes they are contradictory. Dear goddess! Face-up again against the renewal of vows.Do not let me die a coward, mother. Nor forget how to sing. Nor forget song is a part of mourning as light is a part of sun. March 22, 1984 En route to New York City This was a good trip. Good connections with the Sojourner Sisters and other women in St. Croix. And I finally taught myself to relax in water, swimming about under the sun in Gloria’s pool to the sound of Donna Summers blowing across the bright water, “State of Independence,” and the coconut tree singing along in the gentle trade winds.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Even the mighty will cry bitterly (Zephaniah 1:14); the inhabitants of the land shall tremble (Joel 2: 1); people will be terrified and will seek some place to hide and will find none (i Enoch 102:1, 102:3). (5) The last days will be a time when the world will be shattered, a time of cosmic upheaval when the universe, as we know it, will disintegrate. The stars will be extinguished; the sun will be turned into darkness and the moon into blood (Isaiah 13:10; Joel 2:30-1, 3:15). The firmament will crash in ruins; there will be a torrent of raging fire, and creation will become a molten mass (Sibylline Oracles 3:83-9). The seasons will lose their order, and there will be neither night nor dawn (Sibylline Oracles 3:796-806). (6) The last days will be a time when human relationships will be destroyed. Hatred and enmity will reign upon the earth. People will turn against their neighbours (Zechariah 14:13). Brothers will kill each other; parents will murder their own children; from dawn to sunset they shall slay one another (1 Enoch 100:1-2). Honour will be turned into shame, strength into humiliation, and beauty into ugliness. Jealousy will arise in those who did not think much of themselves, and passion will take hold of those who were peaceful (2 Baruch 48:31-7). ('7) The last days will be a time of judgment. God will come like a refiner's fire - and who can endure the day of his coming (Malachi 3:1-3)? It is by the fire and the sword that God will plead with people (Isaiah 66:15-16). The Son of Man will destroy sinners from the earth (1 Enoch 69:27), and the smell of brimstone will pervade all things (Sibylline Oracles 3:58-61). The sinners will be burned up as Sodom was long ago (Jubilees 36:10-11). (8) In all these visions, the Gentiles have their place - but it is not always the same place. (a) Sometimes the vision is that the Gentiles will be totally destroyed. Babylon will become such a desolation that there will be no place for the wandering Arabs to plant their tents among the ruins, no place for the shepherds to graze their sheep; it will be nothing more than a desert inhabited by the beasts (Isaiah 13:19-22). God will trample down the Gentiles in his anger (Isaiah 63:6). The Gentiles will come over in chains to Israel (Isaiah 45:14). (b) Sometimes one last gathering of the Gentiles against Jerusalem is depicted, and one last battle in which they are destroyed (Ezekiel 38:14-39:16; Zechariah 14:I- ir). The kings of the nations will throw themselves against Jerusalem; they will seek to ravage the shrine of the Holy One; they will place their thrones in a ring round the city, with their faithless people with them; but it will be only for their final destruction (Sibylline Oracles 3:663-72). (c) Sometimes there is the picture of the conversion of the Gentiles through Israel.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  But a widow of long experience, named Oisille, determined to banish from her mind the fear of bad roads, and repair to Notre Dame de Serrance ; not that she was so superstitious as to suppose that the glorious Virgin would quit her place at her son's right hand to come and dwell in a desert land, but only because she wished to see the holy place, of which she had heard so much ; and also because she was assured that if there were any means of escaping from a danger, the monks were sure to find it out. She met with no end of difficulties ; but at last she arrived, after having passed through places almost impracticable, and so difficult to climb and descend that, notwithstanding her age and her weight, she was com- pelled to perform the greater part of the journey on foot. But the most piteous thing was that most of her servants and horses died on the way, so that she arrived at Serrance at- tended by one man and one woman only. She was, however, charitably received by the monks. There were also among the French party two gentlemen, who had gone to the baths rather to accompany the ladies they loved than for any need they themselves had to use the waters. These gentlemen, seeing that the company was breaking up, and that the husbands of their mistresses were taking them away, thought proper to follow them at a distance, without acquainting anyone with their purpose. The two married gentlemen and their wives arrived one evening at the house of a man who was more a bandit than a peasant. The two young gentlemen lodged at a cottage hard by, and hear- ing a great noise about midnight, they rose with their varlets, TO THE HEFTAMEROM. 3

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

  He said to me, Surely thou seest, O son of man, what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every one in private in his chamber; for they say, The Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth. Ezech. 8:12. 3. It keeps the judgment before us; Let them be ready against the third day; for on the third day the Lord will come down, in the sight of all the people, upon Mount Sinai. Ex. 19:11. Be you then also ready, for at what hour you think not the Son of man will come. St. Luke 12:40. N. Preparation for the judgment in three things; a. The manner; Before judgment prepare thee justice, and learn before thou speakest.… Before judgment examine thyself, and thou shalt find mercy in the sight of God. Ecclus. 18:19, 20. Do penance, for the kingdom of God is at hand. St. Matt. 3:2. Now therefore said the Lord, Be converted to Me with all your heart, in fasting and in mourning and in weeping. Joel 2:12. b. Not to be partakers in the doom of the unprepared; I heard another voice from Heaven saying, Go out from her, My people, that you be not partakers of her sins, and that you receive not of her plagues; for her sins have reached unto Heaven, and the Lord hath remembered her iniquities. Apoc. 18:4, 5. This know ye, that if the householder knew at what hour the thief would come, he would surely watch, and not suffer his house to be broken open. St. Luke 12:39. c. The great gain from being ready; Now, while they went to buy, the Bridegroom came; and they that were ready went in with Him to the marriage, and the door was shut. St. Matt. 25:10. R. The threefold gain of being ready for the judgment; a. The possession of the kingdom of Heaven; Then shall the King say to them that shall be on His right hand, Come, ye blessed of My Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world. St. Matt. 25:34. b. The company of the beloved Spouse; Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ in the air, and so shall we be always with the Lord. 1 Thess. 4:16. Father, I will that where I am, they also whom Thou hast given Me may be with Me, that they may see My glory which Thou hast given Me, because Thou hast loved Me before the foundation of the world. St. John 17:24. c. The fulness of joy; Rejoice with Jerusalem and be glad with her, all ye that love her; rejoice for joy with her, all you that mourn for her. Is. 66:10. Prayer

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  She was sobbing terribly, so to give her something to do, I asked her to fetch me a kettle full of hot water; she vanished downstairs to get it and I stood before the glass to make up my accounts with my own soul. I knew now it was the belladonna I had taken, all of it on an empty stomach: no chance; in ten minutes I should be insensible, in a few hours dead: dead! was I afraid? I recognized with pride that I was not one whit afraid or in any doubt. Death is nothing but an eternal sleep, nothing! Yet I wished that I could have had time to prove myself and show what was in me! Was Smith right? Could I indeed have become one of the best heads in the world? Could I have been with the really great ones had I lived? No one could tell now but I made up my mind as at the time of the rattlesnake bite, to do my best to live. All this time I was drinking cold water: now my sister brought the jug of warm water, saying, “It may make you throw up, dear” and I began drinking it in long draughts. Bit by bit I felt it more difficult to think, so I kissed my sister, saying, “I had better get into bed while I can walk, as I’m rather heavy!” And then as I got into bed I said, “I wonder whether I shall be carried out next feet-foremost while they chant the Miserere! Never mind, I’ve had a great draught of life and I’m ready to go if go I must!” At this moment Dr. Richards came in: “Now how, how in Goodness’ name, man, after our talk and all, how did ye come to take it?” His fussiness and strong Welsh accent made me laugh: “give me the stomach pump, doctor, for I’m full of liquid to the gullet”, I cried. I took the tube and pushed it down, sitting up in bed, and he depressed it; but only a brownish stream came: I had absorbed most of the belladonna. That was nearly my last conscious thought, only in myself I determined to keep thinking as long as I could. I heard the Doctor say: “I’ll give him opium—a large dose”, and I smiled to myself at the thought that the narcotic opium and the stimulant belladonna would alike induce unconsciousness, the one by exciting the heart’s action, the other by slackening it....

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  14 Confederate ideologues turned to the language of class and breeding for obvious reasons. They were invested in upholding a hierarchy rooted in the ownership of slaves. When in 1861, Jefferson Davis spoke of “domestic institutions,” he meant slavery, and its protection formed the central creed of the new constitution that bound “men of one flesh” to the new nation. Vice President Alexander Stephens, in a speech given in Savannah on his return from the constitutional convention, took pains to make Hammond’s mudsill theory the cornerstone of the Confederacy. The delegates had instituted a more perfect government: first, by ensuring that whites would never oppress classes of their own race; and second, by affirming that the African slaves “substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it.” Refuting the premise of Lincoln’s 1858 “House Divided” speech (that a nation cannot stand half slave, half free), Stephens equated the Confederacy with a well-constructed mansion, with slaves as its mudsill base and whites its “brick and marble” adornment. Presumably the brick represented the sturdy yeoman and the planter elite its finely polished alabaster. 15 Class concerns never lost their potency during the war. In 1864, as defeat loomed and the South’s leaders contemplated augmenting the army with slaves, some feared that the rebel nation would fall if deprived of its lowest layer. Black men would achieve a rise in status through military service, undermining general assumptions about the color-coded social hierarchy. Slaves had been impressed by state governments to build fortifications as early as 1861—a policy later adopted by the Confederate high command and the Davis administration. But putting slaves in uniform was a far more radical move, because it elevated them (as Hammond and Stephens had argued) above their station as menial mudsills. Texas secessionist Louis T. Wigfall raged in the Confederate Senate that arming slaves was utterly unthinkable, no different than the British eradicating their landed aristocracy and putting “a market-house mob” in its place. (“Market- house mob” was another term for class revolution, and deposing the aristocracy would turn the Confederacy into another mudsill democracy—like the enfranchised rubbish of the North.) Sounding like a snobbish English lord, Wigfall added that he did not want to live in a country where “a man who blacked his boots and curried his horse was his equal.” In his mind, slaves were born servants, and raising them up by making them soldiers disrupted the entire class structure. Protecting that racial and class system was why southerners had seceded. In this way, class angst suffused Confederate thinking and served to unite southern elites. 16 Class mattered for another reason. Confederate leaders knew they had to redirect the hostility of the South’s own underclass, the nonslaveholding poor whites, many of whom were in uniform.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  18 Educated observers feared social disorder, particularly after the financial panic of 1819, when political writers predicted in the West a “numerous population, in a state of wretchedness.” Increasing numbers of poor settlers and uneducated squatters were “ripe for treason and spoil”—a familiar refrain recalling the language circulated during Shays’ Rebellion in 1786. In the wake of the panic, the federal government devised a program of regulated land sales that kept prices high enough to weed out the lowest classes. 19 By 1850, in what became a common pattern in new southwestern states, at least 35 percent of the population owned no real estate. There was no clear path to land and riches among the lower ranks. Tenants could easily be reduced to landless squatters. In the Northwest, land agents courted buyers and actively discouraged tenancy. Federal laws for purchasing land were weighted in favor of wealthier speculators. The landless west of the Appalachians were more likely to pull up stakes and move elsewhere than they were to stay in one place and work their way upward. 20 The ubiquity of squatters across the United States turned them into a powerful political trope. They came to be associated with five traits: (1) crude habitations; (2) boastful vocabulary; (3) distrust of civilization and city folk; (4) an instinctive love of liberty (read: licentiousness); and (5) degenerate patterns of breeding. Yet even with such unappealing traits, the squatter also acquired some favorable qualities: the simple backwoodsman welcomed strangers into his cabin, the outrageous storyteller entertained them through the night. Squatters, then, were more than troublesome, uncouth rascals taking up land they didn’t own. This double identity made the squatter a contested figure. By the 1830s and 1840s, he was fully a symbol of partisan politics, celebrated as the iconic common man who came to epitomize Jacksonian democracy. Americans tend to forget that Andrew Jackson was the first westerner elected president. Tall, lanky, with the rawboned look of a true backwoodsman, he wore the harsh life of the frontier on his face and literally carried a bullet next to his heart. Ferocious in his resentments, driven to wreak revenge against his enemies, he often acted without deliberation and justified his behavior as a law unto himself. His controversial reputation made him the target of attacks that painted him as a Tennessee cracker. His wife Rachel’s backcountry divorce and her recourse to both cigar and corncob pipe confirmed the couple as Nashville bumpkins, at least in the eyes of their eastern detractors.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Last night I gave a talk to the Black students at the university about coming to see ourselves as part of an international community of people of Color, how we must train ourselves to question what our Blackness—our Africanness—can mean on the world stage. And how as members of that international community, we must assume responsibility for our actions, or lack of action, as americans. Otherwise, no matter how relative that power might be, we are yielding it up to the opposition to be used against us, and against the forces for liberation around the world. For instance, what are our responsibilities as educated Black women toward the land-rights struggles of other people of Color here and abroad? I want to write down everything I know about being afraid, but I’d probably never have enough time to write anything else. Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country. The face of afraid keeps changing constantly, and I can count on that change. I need to travel light and fast, and there’s a lot of baggage I’m going to have to leave behind me. Jettison cargo. February 19, 1984 New York City Last night at Blanche and Clare’s house was a celebration of my first fifty years. Liz Maybank called—such a wonderful gift to hear her voice across all these years since she helped care for my children. Black Women’s Survival 101. I’ve had many teachers. Forever is too long to think about. But the future has always been so real to me. Still is. Chances are I don’t have liver cancer. No matter what they say. Chances are. That’s good. That’s bad. Either way I’m a hostage. So what’s new? Coming to terms with the sadness and the fury. And the curiosity. March 18, 1984 En route to St. Croix, Virgin Islands I’ve written nothing of the intensity with which I’ve lived the last few weeks. The hepatologist who tried to frighten me into an immediate liver biopsy without even listening to my objections and questions. Seeing the growth in my liver on the CAT scan, doing a face-off with death, again. Not again, just escalated. This mass in my liver is not a primary liver tumor, so if it is malignant, it’s most likely metastasized breast cancer. Not curable. Arrestable, not curable. This is a very bad dream, and I’m the only person who can wake myself up. I had a talk before I left with Peter, my breast surgeon. He says that if it is liver cancer, with the standard treatments—surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy—we’re talking four or five years at best. Without treatment, he says, maybe three or four. In other words, western medicine doesn’t have a very impressive track record with cancer metastasized to the liver.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One morning I reproached Lizzie for not bringing me up a black draught Doctor Richards had promised to send me. “It’s on the mantle-piece in the dining-room”, I said, “but don’t trouble, I’ll get it myself”, and I ran down as I was. An evening or two later I left the belladonna mixture the doctor had made up for me on the chimney piece! Like the black draught it was dark brown in color and in a similar bottle. Next morning Lizzie woke me and offered me a glassful of dark liquid: “Your medicine” she said and half asleep still, I told her to leave the breakfast tray on the table by my bed and then drained the glass she offered to me. The taste awoke me: the drink had made my whole mouth and throat dry: I sprang out of bed and went to the looking-glass, yes! yes! the pupils of my eyes were unnaturally distended: had she given me the whole draught of belladonna instead of a black draught? I still heard her on the stairs but why waste time in asking her. I went over to the table, poured out cup after cup of tea and drained them: then I ran down to the dining-room where my sister and father were at breakfast. I poured out their tea and drank cups full of it in silence: then I asked my sister to get me mustard and warm water and met my father’s question with a brief explanation and request. “Go to Dr. Richards and tell him to come at once: I’ve drunk the belladonna mixture by mistake; there’s no time to lose.” My father was already out of the house! My sister brought me the mustard and I mixed a strong dose with hot water and took it as an emetic; but it didn’t work. I went upstairs to my bedroom again and put my fingers down my throat over the bath: I retched and retched but nothing came: plainly the stomach was paralysed. My sister came in crying. “I’m afraid there’s no hope, Nita”, I said, “the Doctor told me there was enough to kill a dozen men and I’ve drunk it all fasting; but you’ve always been good and kind to me, dear, and death is nothing.”

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  Let us, then, look at the situation as depicted in i Peter. Peter's people are undergoing various trials (1:6). Their faith is liable to be tried as metal is tested with fire (r:7). Clearly, they are undergoing a campaign of slander in which ignorant charges with no foundation are being maliciously directed against them (2:12, 2:15, 3:16, 4:4). At this very moment, they are in the middle of an outbreak of persecution because they are Christians (4:12, 4:14, 4:16, 5:9). Such suffering is only to be expected, and they must not be surprised at it (4:12). In any event, it gives them the happiness of suffering for what is right (3:14, 3:17), and of being sharers in the sufferings of Christ (4:13). There is no need to come down to the time of Trajan for this situation. It is one in which Christians in every part of the empire found themselves every day at any time after their true status had been disclosed by the action of Nero. The persecution situation in i Peter does not in any way compel us to date it after the lifetime of Peter. Honour the King But we must proceed with the arguments of those who cannot support the Petrine authorship. It is argued that, in the situation which existed in the time of Nero, Peter could never have written: `For the Lord's sake accept the authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right ... Fear God. Honour the emperor' (2:13-17). The fact is, however, that this is precisely the point of view expressed in Romans 13:1-7. The whole teaching of the New Testament, except only in the Book of Revelation in which Rome is damned, is that Christians must be loyal citizens and must demonstrate the falsity of the charges made against them by the excellence of their behaviour (i Peter 2:15). Even in times of persecution, Christians fully acknowledged their obligation to be good citizens; and their only defence against persecution was to show by the excellence of their citizenship that they did not deserve such treatment. It is by no means impossible that Peter could have written like that. A Sermon and a Pastoral Letter What is the view of those who cannot believe that i Peter is the work of Peter himself? First of all, it is suggested that the initial address (1:1-2) and the closing greetings and salutations (5:12-14) are later additions and no part of the original letter.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Antidemocratic secessionists dismissed the poor as the hapless pawns of crass politicians, willing to sell their votes for homesteads or handouts. In 1860, Georgia governor Joseph Brown prophesied that the new Republican administration would bribe a portion of the citizens with offices, while others predicted that Lincoln would dangle bounties and cheap lands, using flattery and lures to ensnare the “lower strata of Southern society.” It was in response to such projections that small slaveholders in South Carolina organized vigilante societies and “Minute Men” companies, mainly to intimidate nonslaveholders who might try to forestall secession. 23 Some secessionists went out of their way to allay concerns over the loyalty of nonslaveholders. In 1860, James De Bow, the influential editor of De Bow’s Review, published a popular tract detailing the reasons why poor whites had every reason to back the Confederacy. He assured that slavery benefited all classes. Giving the mudsill theory an emphatic endorsement, he declared that “no white man at the South serves another as his body servant to clean his boots, wait on his table, and perform menial services in his household!” Besides, he wrote, wages for white workers were better in the South, and land ownership was more dispersed—which was patently untrue. He went on: class mobility was possible for nonslaveholders who scrimped and saved to buy a slave, especially a breeding female slave, whose offspring were “heirlooms” to be passed on to the next generation. If his promises of trickle-down economics were unconvincing, De Bow tacitly confirmed that slaves’ elevation meant nonslaveholders’ utter degradation. For these reasons, he said, the poorest nonslaveholder would readily “dig in the trenches, in defense of the slave property of his more favored neighbor.” Fear of dropping to the level of slaves would lead poor whites to fight. 24 Disunion did not alleviate such fears. In the lower South, for example, there was no popular referendum on secession except in Texas. The upper South was in no hurry to bolt. The four states that left (Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee) did so only after Lincoln called for troops; all of these states contained significant numbers of pro-Union residents. West Virginians seceded from Virginia and rejoined the Union. Jefferson Davis secured the presidency without opposition, reducing his election to a symbolic vote, rubber-stamping the choice of the elite minority in the Confederate Provisional Congress. 25 In addition to insulating the government from the people, a vocal contingent of delegates to the Confederate constitutional convention called for a repeal of the three-fifths compromise, instead counting slaves as whole persons for the purpose of representation in the Confederate legislature. This manner of representation benefited the states with the highest number of slaves.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge—within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not—I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior. What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours? And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.” In the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, Black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight, and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our Blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, Black or not. And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  What made it worse was that the slaves were deliberately repressed. There were in the Roman Empire 6o,ooo,ooo of them, and the danger of revolt was constantly to be guarded against. A rebellious slave was promptly eliminated. And, if a slave ran away, at best he would be branded with a red-hot iron on the forehead, with the letter F - standing for fugitivus, runaway - and at the worst he would be put to death by crucifixion. Paul was well aware of all this and that slavery was so ingrained into the ancient world that even to send Onesimus back to the Christian Philemon was a considerable risk. Paul's Appeal So Paul gave Onesimus this letter. He makes a pun on Onesimus' name. Onesimus in Greek literally means profitable. Once Onesimus was a useless fellow, but now he is useful (verse i i ). Now, as we might say, he is not only Onesimus by name, he is also Onesimus by nature. Maybe Philemon lost him for a time in order to have him forever (verse 15). He must take him back, not as a slave but as a Christian brother (verse 16). He is now Paul's son in the faith, and Philemon must receive him as he would receive Paul himself. Emancipation Such, then, was Paul's appeal. Many people have wondered why Paul says nothing in this letter about the whole matter of slavery. He does not condemn it; he does not even tell Philemon to set Onesimus free; it is still as a slave that he would have him taken back. There are those who have criticized Paul for not seizing the opportunity to condemn the slavery on which the ancient world was built. The New Testament scholar J. B. Lightfoot says: `The word emancipation seems to tremble on his lips, but he never utters it.' But there are reasons for his silence. Slavery was an integral part of the ancient world; the whole of society was built on it. Aristotle held that it was in the nature of things that certain men should be slaves, hewers of wood and drawers of water, to serve the higher classes. It may well be that Paul accepted the institution of slavery because it was almost impossible to imagine society without it. Further, if Christianity had, in fact, given the slaves any encouragement to revolt or to leave their masters, nothing but tragedy could have followed. Any such revolt would have been savagely crushed; slaves who took their freedom would have been mercilessly punished; and Christianity would itself have been branded as revolutionary and subversive. Given the Christian faith, liberation was bound to come - but the time was not ripe; and to have encouraged slaves to hope for it, and to seize it, would have done infinitely more harm than good. There are some things which cannot be achieved suddenly, and for which the world must wait, until the leaven works. The New Relationship

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  The South Carolinian novelist William Gilmore Simms, for one, thought that the border states, with their larger nonslaveholding populations, might “overslough” the cotton states. In that a slough was a swamp or mire, Simms was alluding to the mudsill-like nonslaveholders of the upper South, whose higher numbers would allow them to have more representatives than the slave-dominated states of the lower South. In the final draft of the Confederate constitution, the repeal of the three-fifths clause was voted down, but by the narrow margin of four to three states. 26 In 1861, a nervous Georgian, who worried that slaveholders were a minority, proposed that the new state government should establish an upper house composed only of slaveholders, much like the English House of Lords. Conservative Georgia and Virginia delegates to their respective state conventions wished to curb the “swinish multitude,” but in the end they refused to tamper with the right to vote. In Virginia, some elitists recognized the problem that conscription posed and sought to deal with it. Nonslaveholders might refuse to fight in a war designed to protect the slaves of the rich. Virginian Edmund Ruffin privately proposed a solution for his state: a dual system of conscription. In his two-track class system, one would require nonelite white men to take up arms, and another for planters’ slaves, who would be impressed by the state and put to work for the army. Too bold and too honest in broadcasting the prevalence of social inequality, Ruffin’s radical plan was never adopted. 27 The future did not bode well for southern patricians. If they remained in the Union, or suffered defeat at the hands of the Yankees, they faced extinction. The aristocracy would be washed away in a flood of northern mudsills and liberated slaves. Their own homegrown white trash were a problem as well. Presumably, without total victory, landless laborers and poor farmers might outbreed the elite class, and if corrupted by northern democratic ideas, they might overwhelm the planter elite at the ballot box. 28 • • • Throughout the war, the unfair conscription policy sparked serious grievances. Early on, Florida’s governor, John Milton, felt that the law could not be enforced, that poor whites would not stand for a substitution system that favored those who could buy a man to do his fighting for him. Exemptions protected the educated: teachers, ministers, clerks, politicians, as well as men in needed industries. Once the lowly conscripts were in the ranks, officers looked down on them as “food for powder,” or compared them to “Tartars” and barbarians, which were the same slurs that elite southerners used to demean Lincoln’s ruthless hordes. An Alabama recruit fed up with such treatment said the obvious: “They think all you are fit for is to stop bullets for them, your betters, who call you poor white trash.”

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Meanwhile, the life of my family had completely changed. Except for a few jewels astutely buried in the normal filling of a talcum powder container, we were absolutely ruined. But this was a very minor matter. The local Tatar government had been swept away by a brand-new Soviet, and we were subjected to the preposterous and humiliating sense of utter insecurity. During the winter of 1917–18 and well into the windy and bright Crimean spring, idiotic death toddled by our side. Every other day, on the white Yalta pier (where, as you remember, the lady of Chekhov’s “Lady with the Lapdog” lost her lorgnette among the vacational crowd), various harmless people had, in advance, weights attached to their feet and then were shot by tough Bolshevik sailors imported from Sebastopol for the purpose. My father, who was not harmless, had joined us by this time, after some dangerous adventures, and, in that region of lung specialists, had adopted the mimetic disguise of a doctor without changing his name (“simple and elegant,” as a chess annotator would have said of a corresponding move on the board). We dwelt in an inconspicuous villa that a kind friend, Countess Sofia Panin, had placed at our disposal. On certain nights, when rumors of nearing assassins were especially strong, the men of our family took turns patrolling the house. The slender shadows of oleander leaves would cautiously move in the sea breeze along a pale wall, as if pointing at something, with a great show of stealth. We had a shotgun and a Belgian automatic, and did our best to pooh-pooh the decree which said that anyone unlawfully possessing firearms would be executed on the spot.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  The poor lady, fearing to lose his friendship, began to cry, and vowed to him that she would rather die than marry the gentleman in question; that he was so impor- tunate that she could not hinder his entering her room at the hours when everyone else visited her. " I do not speak of those hours," said the prince, " for I can visit you then as well as he, and everyone sees what you do ; but I have been told that he comes to you after you are in bed, which I think so bad, that if you continue it without declaring that he is your husband, I look upon you as the woman most ruined in reputation that ever was." She assured him with all the oaths she could think of that she regarded the man neither as husband nor Sixlfi Jay.\ QUEEN OF NA VARRE. 439 lover, but as the most importunate person in the world. " Since that is the case," said the prince, " I promise that I will rid you of him." " What ! " replied the widow, " would you put him to death .? " "No, no," said the prince; " but I will let him know that he must not give occasion in this way for people to s^eak ill of ladies in the king's residence, I swear to you, by the love I bear you, that if he does not correct himself after I have spoken to him, I will correct him in such a manner that he shall be an example for others." With these words the prince went away, and on leav- ing the room he met the Seigneur des Cheriots coming thither, and spoke to him to the same purpose, assuring him that the first time he found him there at any other hour than one in which it was proper for gentlemen to visit ladies, he would give him such a fright as he should not forget as long as he lived, and would teach him not to trifle with a lady whose relations were persons of such consequence. The gentleman protested that he had never been there except like other visitors ; and that it the prince found him transgressing in that respect, he would give him leave to do the worst he could.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  [image file=image_rsrc131.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc132.jpg] This photograph, taken in 1955 by an obliging American tourist, shows the Nabokov house, of pink granite with frescoes and other Italianate ornaments, in St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, 47, Morskaya, now Hertzen Street. Aleksandr Ivanovich Hertzen (1812–1870) was a famous liberal (whom this commemoration by a police state would hardly have gratified) as well as the talented author of Bïloe i Dumï (translatable as “Bygones and Meditations”), one of my father’s favorite books. My room was on the third floor, above the oriel. The lindens lining the street did not exist. Those green upstarts now hide the second-floor east-corner window of the room where I was born. After nationalization the house accommodated the Danish mission, and later, a school of architecture. The little sedan at the curb belongs presumably to the photographer. 11THE cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged—the same house, the same people—and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated. Such fancies are not foreign to young lives. Or, to put it otherwise, first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note—unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.