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

  The pleasure of the marriage couch was a distraction, an insidiously dangerous one. Like a torrential river, the delights of sex threatened to drag the soul into its raging currents and send it careening down the “rapids of incontinence.” For the virgins of Methodius, pleasure lacked any positive value. Sex could not act as the warm bonding agent it is in Plutarch’s marital counsels, nor could it be celebrated as the mysterious wash of ecstasy vouchsafed for man by nature and nature’s gods. Sex, with its corporal gyrations, was a little putrid. But it was not, in itself, immoral. The virgins of Methodius knew it would be overbold to declare the generation of children sinful, when God himself had installed marriage and reproduction in the order of creation. Besides, marriage produced new generations of martyrs, soldiers of God ready to face the trials of persecution. Marital intercourse, even for these virginal symposiasts, also served another, less exalted purpose: it prevented worse uses of the body. For those too weak to pursue virginity, who smoldered with desire for sex, marriage was a safe harbor to prevent them from crashing on the rocks of fornication, porneia. The logic is distinctly that of Paul. Marital congress was a prophylactic against other, easily obtained satisfactions. In their alertness to the perils of fornication, the virgins at this symposium reveal the influence of a mental world, even a language, that would have been unrecognizable to Plato and his many followers in the Roman Empire. Fornication was one of the “horns of the devil,” by which the evil one would cast down those who lacked self-control. It became for Christians a supremely depraved form of sin, embedded in the institutions and practices of the world around them. Even the virgins of Methodius, in their lofty acclamations of bodily purity, must pause to worry about the pollutions of fornication.3

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  The boy was older than any of us and he was a sissy, a fairy in the making. His very walk used to enrage us. As soon as he was spotted the news went out in every direction and before he had reached the corner he was surrounded by a gang of boys all much smaller than himself who taunted him and mimicked him until he burst into tears. Then we would pounce on him, like a pack of wolves, pull him to the ground and tear the clothes off his back. It was a disgraceful performance but it made us feel good. Nobody knew yet what a fairy was, but whatever it was we were against it. In the same way we were against the Chinamen. There was one Chinaman, from the laundry up the street, who used to pass frequently and, like the sissy from Father Carroll’s church, he too had to run the gantlet. He looked exactly like the picture of a coolie which one sees in the schoolbooks. He wore a sort of black alpaca coat with braided button holes, slippers without heels, and a pigtail. Usually he walked with his hands in his sleeves. It was his walk which I remember best, a sort of sly, mincing, feminine walk which was utterly foreign and menacing to us. We were in mortal dread of him and we hated him because he was absolutely indifferent to our gibes. We thought he was too ignorant to notice our insults. Then one day when we entered the laundry he gave us a little surprise. First he handed us the package of laundry; then he reached down below the counter and gathered a handful of lichee nuts from the big bag. He was smiling as he came from behind the counter to open the door. He was still smiling as he caught hold of Alfie Betcha and pulled his ears; he caught hold of each of us in turn and pulled our ears, still smiling. Then he made a ferocious grimace and, swift as a cat, he ran behind the counter and picked up a long, ugly-looking knife which he brandished at us. We fell over ourselves getting out of the place. When we got to the corner and looked around we saw him standing in the doorway with an iron in his hand looking very calm and peaceful. After this incident nobody would go to the laundry any more; we had to pay little Louis Pirossa a nickel each week to collect the laundry for us. Louis’s father owned the fruit stand on the corner. He used to hand us the rotten bananas as a token of his affection. Stanley was especially fond of the rotten bananas as his aunt used to fry them for him. The fried bananas were considered a delicacy in Stanley’s home. Once, on his birthday, there was a party given for Stanley and the whole neighborhood was invited.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  I had another mug of beer and then a drop of brandy and I thought to myself in my callous way—if the poor bastard hasn’t got brains enough to enjoy his own wife’s funeral then I’ll enjoy it for him. And the more I thought about it, the happier I grew, and if there was the least bit of grief or envy it was only for the fact that I couldn’t change places with her, the poor dead Jewish soul, because death was something absolutely beyond the grip and comprehension of a dumb goy like myself and it was a pity to waste it on the likes of them as knew all about it and didn’t need it anyway. I got so damned intoxicated with the idea of dying that in my drunken stupor I was mumbling to the God above to kill me this night, kill me, God, and let me know what it’s all about. I tried my stinking best to imagine what it was like, giving up the ghost, but it was no go. The best I could do was to imitate a death rattle, but on that I nearly choked, and then I got so damned frightened that I almost shit in my pants. That wasn’t death, anyway. That was just choking. Death was more like what we went through in the park: two people walking side by side in the mist, rubbing against trees and bushes, and not a word between them. It was something emptier than the name itself and yet right and peaceful, dignified, if you like. It was not a continuation of life, but a leap in the dark and no possibility of ever coming back, not even as a grain of dust. And that was right and beautiful, I said to myself, because why would one want to come back. To taste it once is to taste it forever—life or death. Whichever way the coin flips is right, so long as you hold no stakes. Sure, it’s tough to choke on your own spittle—it’s disagreeable more than anything else. And besides, one doesn’t always die choking to death. Sometimes one goes off in his sleep, peaceful and quiet as a lamb. The Lord comes and gathers you up into the fold, as they say. Anyway, you stop breathing. And why the hell should one want to go on breathing forever? Anything that would have to be done interminably would be torture. The poor human bastards that we are, we ought to be glad that somebody devised a way out. We don’t quibble about going to sleep. A third of our lives we snore away like drunken rats. What about that? Is that tragic? Well then, say three-thirds of drunken ratlike sleep. Jesus, if we had any sense we’d be dancing with glee at the thought of it! We could all die in bed tomorrow, without pain, without suffering—if we had the sense to take advantage of our remedies.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He stripped off his clothes and dropped them in the middle of the floor. He lay on his back and put one hand on his cock. He imagined dozens of intriguing images, perusing the possible nuance of each circumstance. There was Cecilia. There was the girl at the bar. There was Sara. “Get my belt,” he had said to her. She hesitated. “Don’t you think you deserve it?” He masturbated watching spread-legged Sara arch her neck and rub her injured-looking vagina. He finished. He mopped his abdomen with a “snot rag.” A memory separated from the fantasy and lingered. “I love you,” said Sara. “It’s not real,” he said. “It’s puppy love.” “No. I love you.” She nuzzled his cheek with her nose and lips, and her tenderness pierced him. The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned-off TV. Connection Susan had not been in Manhattan for five years, and she had been looking forward to this visit as a gorgeous wallow in sentimentality and the mild pain of déjà vu. The first three days had been just that. She had gone on long walks, visited with old friends and sat in cafés she’d once frequented as a thin, long- haired girl, lonely and worrying over tea. She had wandered through these days desultorily, enjoying the odd mix of memories and emotions that playfully showed their shadows and vanished again. She had been walking on Bleecker toward Lafayette when a tiny, youthful bag lady entered her vision. She was standing still in the middle of the sidewalk, one hand out, the other daintily holding a small plastic garbage bag as though it were a pocketbook, begging from everyone and looking at no one. Her torn sweater, ragged skirt and wool socks were drably color-coordinated; her small head was tilted at an odd birdlike angle that was an unintentional caricature of childlike curiosity. Her clearly once-beautiful face was as still as her body; her full lips, potentially so expressive, were held fixed and tight. Her stillness amidst the march of New Yorkers made her look lost and groundless, but there was an intensity about her, and a feeling of heat, as though she were exuding some sticky substance from her pores. The quick feeling of panic in Susan’s stomach made her turn and walk the other way before she had a mental reaction; when she figured out why she was upset, she felt even worse. The bag lady looked exactly like Leisha, her best friend many years ago. Her face, posture, even the style of her rags recalled Leisha. Susan turned a corner and stopped against a wall, her heart beating miserably. She remembered an article or a talk show or something where a smug somebody discussed the problem of chance meetings with old friends who were not as successful as you, and how you could avoid rubbing it in.

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

  Around the year AD 51 the apostle Paul arrived for the first time in Corinth, the bustling seat of Roman power in Achaea. The city, once razed by the Romans but long since resurrected by its destroyers, was an imposing sight. In Paul’s own words, he came to Corinth “in weakness and in much fear and trembling.” The Acrocorinth, the sheer escarpment housing Corinth’s most archaic temples, dominated the views of the approaching visitor. Perched on its eastern summit was a temple of Aphrodite, looming over the town that sprawled toward the sea beneath her solicitous watch. As Paul entered the forum, he would have been confronted by the bewildering noise of power, commerce, and diffuse piety that characterized urban life in a vibrant provincial town of the Roman Empire. The sanctuaries of the gods—Tychē and Aphrodite, Artemis and Dionysus—ringed the crowded center of the town, hard by the merchants’ stalls and public offices. The haphazard accretion of religious monuments, and the tessellation of the sacred and the profane, belied the reverent balance and careful rhythms that guaranteed the gods their due honor. Into this enveloping cityscape of tremulous paganism crept a missionary with a startling message. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?”9 We meet the community of Christians Paul founded in Corinth through the tantalizing but imperfect prism of the letters he wrote, some six years after first visiting the city, when challenged by the unexpectedly fractious relations in a small apocalyptic movement. Word reached Paul in Ephesus that the Corinthian Christians were feuding, split on a range of mundane problems, from marriage and manumission to sacrificial meat. In the patient response of the apostle that has come to be known as First Corinthians, fierce disagreement over proper sexual behavior lurches to the surface. Such dissent was surely inevitable. Nowhere did the moral expectations of the Jesus movement stand in such stark contrast to the world in which its adherents moved. Corinth in particular was not famous for its sexual virtue. In recent decades the reputation of Roman Corinth has enjoyed the sort of undeserved rehabilitation that comes only when generations of gross exaggeration allow overcorrection to pass as healthy revision. It is true that Corinth had first earned its notoriety in centuries long past. But the laxity of the Corinthians in venereal affairs was not just hoary legend. In the words of a second-century admirer, Corinth was a city “more dear to Aphrodite than all cities that exist or have existed.” The eroticized atmosphere of Corinth was the predictable attribute of a wealthy, imperial crossroads; even against the indulgent backdrop of late pagan sensuality, Corinth stood out as louche.10

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  It happened twice more in the next week and a half. The following week, when I made a typing mistake, he didn’t spank me. Instead, he told me to bend over his desk, look at the typing mistake and repeat “I am stupid” for several minutes. Our relationship didn’t change otherwise. He was still brisk and friendly in the morning. And, because he seemed so sure of himself, I could not help but react to him as if he were still the same domineering but affable boss. He did not, however, ever invite me to discuss my problems with him again. I began to have recurring dreams about him. In one, the most frequent, I walked with him in a field of big bright red poppies. The day was brilliant and warm. We were smiling at each other, and there was a tremendous sense of release and goodwill between us. He looked at me and said, “I understand you now, Debby.” Then we held hands. There was one time I felt disturbed about what was happening at the office. It was just before dinner, and my father was upset about something that had happened to him at work. I could hear him yelling in the living room while my mother tried to comfort him. He yelled, “I’d rather work in a circus! In one of those things where you put your head through a hole and people pay to throw garbage at you!” “No circus has that anymore,” said my mother. “Stop it, Shep.” By the time I went down to eat dinner, everything was as usual. I looked at my father and felt a sickening sensation of love nailed to contempt and panic. The last time I made a typing error and the lawyer summoned me to his office, two unusual things occurred. The first was that after he finished spanking me he told me to pull up my skirt. Fear hooked my stomach and pulled it toward my chest. I turned my head and tried to look at him. “You’re not worried that I’m going to rape you, are you?” he said. “Don’t. I’m not interested in that, not in the least. Pull up your skirt.” I turned my head away from him. I thought, I don’t have to do this. I can stop right now. I can straighten up and walk out. But I didn’t. I pulled up my skirt. “Pull down your panty hose and underwear.” A finger of nausea poked my stomach. “I told you I’m not going to fuck you. Do what I say.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Bring her back!” I started after her, the rain still coming down like pitchforks, and yelling to her to come back, but she ran on blindly as though possessed of the devil, and when she got to the water’s edge she dove straight in and made for the boat. I swam after her and as we got to the side of the boat, which I was afraid she would capsize, I got hold of her round the waist with my one hand and I started to talk to her calmly and soothingly, as though I was talking to a child. “Go away from me,” she said, “you’re an atheist!” Jesus, you could have knocked me over with a feather, so astonished I was to bear that. So that was it? All that hysteria because I was insulting the Lord Almighty. I felt like batting her one in the eye to bring her to her senses. But we were out over our heads and I had a fear that she would do some mad thing like pulling the boat over our heads if I didn’t handle her right. So I pretended that I was terribly sorry and I said I didn’t mean a word of it, that I had been scared to death, and so on and so forth, and as I talked to her gently, soothingly, I slipped my hand down from her waist and I gently stroked her ass. That was what she wanted all right. She was talking to me blubberingly about what a good Catholic she was and how she had tried not to sin, and maybe she was so wrapped up in what she was saying she didn’t know what I was doing, but just the same when I got my hand in her crotch and said all the beautiful things I could think of, about God, about love, about going to church and confessing and all that crap, she must have felt something because I had a good three fingers inside her and working them around like drunken bobbins. “Put your arms around me, Agnes,” I said softly, slipping my hand out and pulling her to me so that I could get my legs between hers. . . . “There, that’s a girl . . . take it easy now . . . it’ll stop soon.” And still talking about the church, the confessional, God, love, and the whole bloody mess I managed to get it inside of her. “You’re very good to me,” she said, just as though she didn’t know my prick was in her, “and I’m sorry I acted like a fool.” “I know, Agnes,” I said, “it’s all right . . . listen, grab me tighter . . . yeah, that’s it.” “I’m afraid the boat’s going to tip over,” she says, trying her best to keep her ass in position by paddling with her right hand.

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

  women, they waste in body and soul, so that not one ember of their manly nature is left fl ickering with heat.” Similar conceptions may well have un-derlain Greco- Roman opposition to pederasty with free boys, though Philo has given fullest voice to the fear. Pederasty, he argued, might so disrupt the buildup of proper heat that turned a boy into a man that an irreversible cycle of tabescence would set in, rendering the boy cold, frail, moist: an ef-feminate. Manliness was such a fragile, indeterminate thing that it might be lost altogether. Th e eromenos might become an androgyne, a she- male, a physiological monster. Th e androgyne, thought Philo, for “debasing the coinage of his nature,” should be killed with impunity, not allowed to live for one day, or one hour. Th e shrill tone never falters. Th ere is a sense, in Philo’s fevered attacks, that he is throwing the kitchen sink at a practice that he held in special disfavor. But beneath the vernacular assumptions about masculinity, Philo’s attack on same- sex eros is governed by an irreducibly Jewish logic, a sense of blinding dread toward all forms of sexual contact between males. For Philo, no mitigating factors— not age, not status— could render male fl esh an appropriately neutral object of sexual desire for men. His coruscat-ing attack dispersed all the mists of ambiguity— the sympotic drunken- T H E W I L L A N D T H E WO R L D  ness, the close philosophical mentorship, the obfuscated exchanges of gifts and favors— that had, for centuries, sustained the institution of pederasty amid a culture of machismo. What is so striking about Philo’s invective is the remorseless effi ciency with which he unravels the contradictions of pederasty from the inside out, in native terms of masculinity, all in the ser vice of his own exceptional opposition to venereal contact between members of the same sex. It is but a short step from Philo’s logic to that which animates Paul’s thought in the epistle to the Romans. Th e unexpected outburst at the head of the Letter to the Romans was to prove absolutely decisive for Christian attitudes toward same- sex erotics. It would completely overshadow the even more fl eeting and oblique condemnations in the vice lists of the New Testament. Th ese rapid-fi re rosters of iniquity regularly included adulterers and fornicators, as well as two types of sexual actors whose crimes are less obvious. Paul provides the fi rst attested use of the term arsenokoitēs. Although it recurs sporadically across the centuries, arsenokoitēs was not destined to become a primary term of the Christian sexual vocabulary. It has perennially befuddled earnest translators. Th

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  He had met her at a party during the previous week. She immediately reminded him of a girl he had known years before, Sharon, a painfully serious girl with a pale, gentle face whom he had tormented off and on for two years before leaving for his wife. Although it had gratified him enormously to leave her, he had missed hurting her for years, and had been half-consciously looking for another woman with a similarly fatal combination of pride, weakness and a foolish lust for something resembling passion. On meeting Beth, he was astonished at how much she looked, talked and moved like his former victim. She was delicately morbid in all her gestures, sensitive, arrogant, vulnerable to flattery. She veered between extravagant outbursts of opinion and sudden, uncertain halts, during which she seemed to look to him for approval. She was in love with the idea of intelligence, and she overestimated her own. Her sense of the world, though she presented it aggressively, could be, he sensed, snatched out from under her with little or no trouble. She said, “I hope you are a savage.” He went home with her that night. He lay with her on her sagging, lumpy single mattress, tipping his head to blow smoke into the room. She butted her forehead against his chest. The mattress squeaked with every movement. He told her about Sharon. “I had a relationship like that when I was in college,” she said. “Somebody opened me up in a way that I had no control over. He hurt me. He changed me completely. Now I can’t have sex normally.” The room was pathetically decorated with postcards, pictures of huge-eyed Japanese cartoon characters, and tiny, maddening toys that she had obviously gone out of her way to find, displayed in a tightly arranged tumble on her dresser. A frail model airplane dangled from the light above the dresser. Next to it was a pasted-up cartoon of a pink-haired girl cringing open-mouthed before a spire-haired boy-villain in shorts and glasses. Her short skirt was blown up by the force of his threatening expression, and her panties showed. What kind of person would put crap like this up on her wall? “I’m afraid of you,” she murmured. “Why?” “Because I just am.” “Don’t worry. I won’t give you any more pain than you can handle.” She curled against him and squeezed her feet together like a stretching cat. Her socks were thick and ugly, and her feet were large for her size. Details like this could repel him, but he felt tenderly toward the long, grubby, squeezed-together feet. He said, “I want a slave.” She said, “I don’t know. We’ll see.” He asked her to spend the weekend with him three days later.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  A Zulu driver got out with an iwisa, a large, traditional Zulu weapon—a war club, basically. They’re used to smash people’s skulls in. Another guy, his crony, got out of the passenger side. They walked up to the driver’s side of the car we were in, grabbed the man who’d offered us a ride, pulled him out, and started shoving their clubs in his face. “Why are you stealing our customers? Why are you picking people up?” It looked like they were going to kill this guy. I knew that happened sometimes. My mom spoke up. “Hey, listen, he was just helping me. Leave him. We’ll ride with you. That’s what we wanted in the first place.” So we got out of the first car and climbed into the minibus. We were the only passengers in the minibus. In addition to being violent gangsters, South African minibus drivers are notorious for complaining and haranguing passengers as they drive. This driver was a particularly angry one. As we rode along, he started lecturing my mother about being in a car with a man who was not her husband. My mother didn’t suffer lectures from strange men. She told him to mind his own business, and when he heard her speaking in Xhosa, that really set him off. The stereotypes of Zulu and Xhosa women were as ingrained as those of the men. Zulu women were well-behaved and dutiful. Xhosa women were promiscuous and unfaithful. And here was my mother, his tribal enemy, a Xhosa woman alone with two small children—one of them a mixed child, no less. Not just a whore but a whore who sleeps with white men. “Oh, you’re a Xhosa,” he said. “That explains it. Climbing into strange men’s cars. Disgusting woman.” My mom kept telling him off and he kept calling her names, yelling at her from the front seat, wagging his finger in the rearview mirror and growing more and more menacing until finally he said, “That’s the problem with you Xhosa women. You’re all sluts—and tonight you’re going to learn your lesson.” He sped off. He was driving fast, and he wasn’t stopping, only slowing down to check for traffic at the intersections before speeding through. Death was never far away from anybody back then. At that point my mother could be raped. We could be killed. These were all viable options. I didn’t fully comprehend the danger we were in at the moment; I was so tired that I just wanted to sleep. Plus my mom stayed very calm. She didn’t panic, so I didn’t know to panic. She just kept trying to reason with him. “I’m sorry if we’ve upset you, bhuti. You can just let us out here—” “No.” “Really, it’s fine. We can just walk—” “No.”

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  As the apartheid regime fell, we knew that the black man was now going to rule. The question was, which black man? Spates of violence broke out between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC, the African National Congress, as they jockeyed for power. The political dynamic between these two groups was very complicated, but the simplest way to understand it is as a proxy war between Zulu and Xhosa. The Inkatha was predominantly Zulu, very militant and very nationalistic. The ANC was a broad coalition encompassing many different tribes, but its leaders at the time were primarily Xhosa. Instead of uniting for peace they turned on one another, committing acts of unbelievable savagery. Massive riots broke out. Thousands of people were killed. Necklacing was common. That’s where people would hold someone down and put a rubber tire over his torso, pinning his arms. Then they’d douse him with petrol and set him on fire and burn him alive. The ANC did it to Inkatha. Inkatha did it to the ANC. I saw one of those charred bodies on the side of the road one day on my way to school. In the evenings my mom and I would turn on our little black-and-white TV and watch the news. A dozen people killed. Fifty people killed. A hundred people killed. Eden Park sat not far from the sprawling townships of the East Rand, Thokoza and Katlehong, which were the sites of some of the most horrific Inkatha–ANC clashes. Once a month at least we’d drive home and the neighborhood would be on fire. Hundreds of rioters in the street. My mom would edge the car slowly through the crowds and around blockades made of flaming tires. Nothing burns like a tire—it rages with a fury you can’t imagine. As we drove past the burning blockades, it felt like we were inside an oven. I used to say to my mom, “I think Satan burns tires in Hell.” Whenever the riots broke out, all our neighbors would wisely hole up behind closed doors. But not my mom. She’d head straight out, and as we’d inch our way past the blockades, she’d give the rioters this look. Let me pass. I’m not involved in this shit. She was unwavering in the face of danger. That always amazed me. It didn’t matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be. It was the same stubbornness that kept her going to church despite a broken-down car. There could be five hundred rioters with a blockade of burning tires on the main road out of Eden Park, and my mother would say, “Get dressed. I’ve got to go to work. You’ve got to go to school.” “But aren’t you afraid?” I’d say. “There’s only one of you and there’s so many of them.” “Honey, I’m not alone,” she’d say. “I’ve got all of Heaven’s angels behind me.”

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  . . It’s just as hard to go back as to go forward. I don’t have the feeling of being an American citizen any more. The part of America I came from, where I had some rights, where I felt free, is so far behind me that it’s beginning to get fuzzy in my memory. I feel as though someone’s got a gun against my back all the time. Keep moving, is all I seem to hear. If a man talks to me I try not to seem too intelligent. I try to pretend that I am vitally interested in the crops, in the weather, in the elections. If I stand and stop they look at me, whites and blacks—they look me through and through as though I were juicy and edible. I’ve got to walk another thousand miles or so as though I had a deep purpose, as though I were really going somewhere. I’ve got to look sort of grateful, too, that nobody has yet taken a fancy to plug me. It’s depressing and exhilarating at the same time. You’re a marked man—and yet nobody pulls the trigger. They let you walk unmolested right into the Gulf of Mexico where you can drown yourself. Yes sir, I reached the Gulf of Mexico and I walked right into it and drowned myself. I did it gratis. When they fished the corpse out they found it was marked F.O.B. Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn; it was returned C.O.D. When I was asked later why I had killed myself I could only think to say—because I wanted to electrify the cosmos! I meant by that a very simple thing—The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western had been electrified, the Seaboard Air Line had been electrified, but the soul of man was still in the covered wagon stage. I was born in the midst of civilization and I accepted it very naturally—what else was there to do? But the joke was that nobody else was taking it seriously. I was the only man in the community who was truly civilized. There was no place for me—as yet. And yet the books I read, the music I heard assured me that there were other men in the world like myself. I had to go and drown myself in the Gulf of Mexico in order to have an excuse for continuing this pseudo-civilized existence. I had to delouse myself of my spiritual body, as it were. When I woke up to the fact that as far as the scheme of things goes I was less than dirt I really became quite happy. I quickly lost all sense of responsibility. And if it weren’t for the fact that my friends got tired of lending me money I might have gone on indefinitely pissing the time away. The world was like a museum to me; I saw nothing to do but eat into this marvelous chocolate layer cake which the men of the past had dumped on our hands.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There is only one street, I must say—the continuation of the street on which I lived. I come finally to an iron bridge over the railroad yards. It is always nightfall when I reach the bridge, though it is only a short distance from the boundary line. Here I look down upon the webbed tracks, the freight stations, the tenders, the storage sheds, and as I gaze down upon this cluster of strange moving substances a process of metamorphosis takes place, just as in a dream . With the transformation and deformation I become aware that this is the old dream which I have dreamed so often. I have a wild fear that I shall wake up, and indeed I know that I will wake up shortly, just at the moment when in the midst of a great open space I am about to walk into the house which contains something of the greatest importance for me. Just as I go toward this house the lot on which I am standing begins to grow vague at the edges, to dissolve, to vanish. Space rolls in on me like a carpet and swallows me up, and with it of course the house which I never succeed in entering. There is absolutely no transition from this, the most pleasurable dream I know, to the heart of a book called Creative Evolution . In this book by Henri Bergson, which I came to as naturally as to the dream of the land beyond the boundary, I am again quite alone, again a foreigner, again a man of indeterminate age standing on an iron bridge observing a peculiar metamorphosis without and within. If this book had not fallen into my hands at the precise moment it did, perhaps I would have gone mad. It came at a moment when another huge world was crumbling on my hands. If I had never understood a thing which was written in this book, if I have preserved only the memory of one word, creative , it is quite sufficient. This word was my talisman. With it I was able to defy the whole world, and especially my friends. There are times when one must break with one’s friends in order to understand the meaning of friendship. It may seem strange to say so, but the discovery of this book was equivalent to the discovery of a weapon, an implement, wherewith I might lop off all the friends who surrounded me and who no longer meant anything to me. This book became my friend because it taught me that I had no need of friends. It gave me the courage to stand alone, and it enabled me to appreciate loneliness. I have never understood the book; at times I thought I was on the point of understanding, but I never really did understand. It was more important for me not to understand.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  It’s in the air, in the climate, in the ultra-grandiose landscape, in the stone forests that are lying horizontal, in the torrential rivers that bite through the rocky canyons, in the supra-normal distances, the supernal arid wastes, the over-lush crops, the monstrous fruits, the mixture of quixotic bloods, the fatras of cults, sects, beliefs, the opposition of laws and languages, the contradictoriness of temperaments, principles, needs, requirements. The continent is full of buried violence, of the bones of antediluvian monsters and of lost races of man, of mysteries which are wrapped in doom. The atmosphere is at times so electrical that the soul is summoned out of its body and runs amok. Like the rain everything comes in bucketsful—or not at all. The whole continent is a huge volcano whose crater is temporarily concealed by a moving panorama which is partly dream, partly fear, partly despair. From Alaska to Yucatan it’s the same story. Nature dominates. Nature wins out. Everywhere the same fundamental urge to slay, to ravage, to plunder. Outwardly they seem like a fine, upstanding people—healthy, optimistic, courageous. Inwardly they are filled with worms. A tiny spark and they blow up. Often it happens, as in Russia, that a man came in with a chip on his shoulder. He woke up that way, as if struck by a monsoon. Nine times out of ten he was a good fellow, a fellow whom everyone liked. But when the rage came on nothing could stop him. He was like a horse with the blind staggers and the best thing you could do for him was to shoot him on the spot. It always happens that way with peaceable people. One day they run amok. In America they’re constantly running amok. What they need is an outlet for their energy, for their blood lust. Europe is bled regularly by war. America is pacifistic and cannibalistic. Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it’s a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbor and sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world; actually it’s a whorehouse run by women, with the native sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh. Nobody knows what it is to sit on his ass and be content. That happens only in the films where everything is faked, even the fires of hell. The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place. Nobody could have slept more soundly than I in the midst of this nightmare. The war, when it came along, made only a sort of faint rumble in my ears. Like my compatriots, I was pacifistic and cannibalistic. The millions who were put away in the carnage passed away in a cloud, much like the Aztecs passed away, and the Incas and the red Indians and the buffaloes.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  It was different for Andrew. Andrew was Abel’s son, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. Despite being nine years younger than me, Andrew was really the eldest son in that house, Abel’s firstborn, and that accorded him a respect that I and even my mother never enjoyed. And Andrew had nothing but love for that man, despite his shortcomings. Because of that love, I think, out of all of us, Andrew was the only one who wasn’t afraid. He was the lion tamer, only he’d been raised by the lion—he couldn’t love the beast any less despite knowing what it was capable of. For me, the first glint of anger or madness from Abel and I was gone. Andrew would stay and try to talk Abel down. He’d even get between Abel and Mom. I remember one night when Abel threw a bottle of Jack Daniel’s at Andrew’s head. It just missed him and exploded on the wall. Which is to say that Andrew stayed long enough to get the bottle thrown at him. I wouldn’t have stuck around long enough for Abel to get a bead on me. — When Mighty Mechanics went under, Abel had to get his cars out. Someone was taking over the property; there were liens against his assets. It was a mess. That’s when he started running his workshop out of our yard. It’s also when my mother divorced him. In African culture there’s legal marriage and traditional marriage. Just because you divorce someone legally doesn’t mean they are no longer your spouse. Once Abel’s debts and his terrible business decisions started impacting my mother’s credit and her ability to support her sons, she wanted out. “I don’t have debts,” she said. “I don’t have bad credit. I’m not doing these things with you.” We were still a family and they were still traditionally married, but she divorced him in order to separate their financial affairs. She also took her name back. Because Abel had started running an unlicensed business in a residential area, one of the neighbors filed a petition to get rid of us. My mom applied for a license to be able to operate a business on the property. The workshop stayed, but Abel kept running it into the ground, drinking his money. At the same time, my mother started moving up at the real-estate company she worked for, taking on more responsibilities and earning a better salary. His workshop became like a side hobby almost. He was supposed to pay for Andrew’s school fees and groceries, but he started falling behind even on that, and soon my mom was paying for everything. She paid the electricity. She paid the mortgage. He literally contributed nothing.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  We all shrugged. “We don’t know,” we said. “Nope, somebody knows. It’s somebody’s gun.” “Officer, we really don’t know,” Bongani said. He slapped Bongani hard across the face. “You’re bullshitting me!” Then he went down the line, slapping each of us across the face, berating us about the gun. We couldn’t do anything but stand there and take it. “You guys are trash,” the cop said. “Where are you from?” “Alex.” “Ohhhhh, okay, I see. Dogs from Alex. You come here and you rob people and you rape women and you hijack cars. Bunch of fucking hoodlums.” “No, we’re dancers. We don’t know—” “I don’t care. You’re all going to jail until we figure out whose gun this is.” At a certain point we realized what was going on. This cop was shaking us down for a bribe. “Spot fine” is the euphemism everyone uses. You go through this elaborate dance with the cop where you say the thing without saying the thing. “Can’t we do something?” you ask the officer. “What do you want me to do?” “We’re really sorry, Officer. What can we do?” “You tell me.” Then you’re supposed to make up a story whereby you indicate to the cop how much money you have on you. Which we couldn’t do because we didn’t have any money. So he took us to jail. It was a public bus. It could have been anyone’s gun, but the guys from Alex were the only ones who got arrested. Everyone else in the car was free to go. The cops took us to the police station and threw us in a cell and pulled us out one by one for questioning. When they pulled me aside I had to give my home address: Highlands North. The cop gave me the most confused look. “You’re not from Alex,” he said. “What are you doing with these crooks?” I didn’t know what to say. He glared at me hard. “Listen here, rich boy. You think it’s fun running around with these guys? This isn’t play-play anymore. Just tell me the truth about your friends and the gun, and I’ll let you go.” I told him no, and he threw me back in the cell. We spent the night, and the next day I called a friend, who said he could borrow the money from his dad to get us out. Later that day the dad came down and paid the money. The cops kept calling it “bail,” but it was a bribe. We were never formally arrested or processed. There was no paperwork.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I still didn’t know why any of this had happened; I’d been running on pure adrenaline. Once we stopped running I realized how much pain I was in. I looked down, and the skin on my arms was scraped and torn. I was cut up and bleeding all over. Mom was, too. My baby brother was fine, though, incredibly. My mom had wrapped herself around him, and he’d come through without a scratch. I turned to her in shock. “What was that?! Why are we running?!” “What do you mean, ‘Why are we running?’ Those men were trying to kill us.” “You never told me that! You just threw me out of the car!” “I did tell you. Why didn’t you jump?” “Jump?! I was asleep!” “So I should have left you there for them to kill you?” “At least they would have woken me up before they killed me.” Back and forth we went. I was too confused and too angry about getting thrown out of the car to realize what had happened. My mother had saved my life. As we caught our breath and waited for the police to come and drive us home, she said, “Well, at least we’re safe, thank God.” But I was nine years old and I knew better. I wasn’t going to keep quiet this time. “No, Mom! This was not thanks to God! You should have listened to God when he told us to stay at home when the car wouldn’t start, because clearly the Devil tricked us into coming out tonight.” “No, Trevor! That’s not how the Devil works. This is part of God’s plan, and if He wanted us here then He had a reason…” And on and on and there we were, back at it, arguing about God’s will. Finally I said, “Look, Mom. I know you love Jesus, but maybe next week you could ask him to meet us at our house. Because this really wasn’t a fun night.” She broke out in a huge smile and started laughing. I started laughing, too, and we stood there, this little boy and his mom, our arms and legs covered in blood and dirt, laughing together through the pain in the light of a petrol station on the side of the road in the middle of the night. [image file=image_rsrc2TA.jpg] Apartheid was perfect racism. It took centuries to develop, starting all the way back in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company landed at the Cape of Good Hope and established a trading colony, Kaapstad, later known as Cape Town, a rest stop for ships traveling between Europe and India. To impose white rule, the Dutch colonists went to war with the natives, ultimately developing a set of laws to subjugate and enslave them. When the British took over the Cape Colony, the descendants of the original Dutch settlers trekked inland and developed their own language, culture, and customs, eventually becoming their own people, the Afrikaners—the white tribe of Africa.

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

  Before the trip, the sheriff again threatened Walter with racial slurs and terrifying plans. It’s unclear how Tate was able to persuade Holman’s warden to house two pretrial detainees on death row, although Tate knew people at the prison from his days as a probation officer. The transfer of Myers and McMillian from the county jail to death row took place on August 1, 1987, less than a month before the scheduled execution of Wayne Ritter. — When Walter McMillian arrived on Alabama’s death row—just ten years after the modern death penalty was reinstituted—an entire community of condemned men awaited him. Most of the hundred or so death row prisoners who had been sentenced to execution in Alabama since capital punishment was restored in 1975 were black, although to Walter’s surprise nearly 40 percent of them were white. Everyone was poor, and everyone asked him why he was there. Condemned prisoners on Alabama’s death row unit are housed in windowless concrete buildings that are notoriously hot and uncomfortable. Each death row inmate was placed in a five-by-eight-foot cell with a metal door, a commode, and a steel bunk. The temperatures in August consistently reached over 100 degrees for days and sometimes weeks at a time. Incarcerated men would trap rats, poisonous spiders, and snakes they found inside the prison to pass the time and to keep safe. Isolated and remote, most prisoners got few visits and even fewer privileges. Existence at Holman centered on Alabama’s electric chair. The large wooden chair was built in the 1930s, and inmates had painted it yellow before attaching its leather straps and electrodes. They called it “Yellow Mama.” The executions at Holman resumed just a few years before Walter arrived. John Evans and Arthur Jones had recently been electrocuted in Holman’s execution chamber. Russ Canan, an attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta, had volunteered to represent Evans. Evans filmed what became an after-school special for kids where he shared the story of his life with schoolchildren and urged them to avoid the mistakes he had made. After courts refused to block the Evans execution following multiple appeals, Canan went to the prison to witness the execution at Evans’s request. It was worse than Russ could have ever imagined. He later filed a much-reviewed affidavit describing the entire horrific process: At 8:30 P.M . the first jolt of 1,900 volts of electricity passed through Mr. Evans’s body. It lasted thirty seconds. Sparks and flames erupted from the electrode tied to Mr. Evans’s left leg. His body slammed against the straps holding him in the electric chair and his fist clenched permanently. The electrode apparently burst from the strap holding it in place. A large puff of greyish smoke and sparks poured out from under the hood that covered Mr. Evans’s face.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  He was standing between me and the door, but I didn’t think anything of it. It didn’t occur to me to be scared. Abel had never tried to discipline me before. He’d never even given me a lecture. It was always “Mbuyi, your son did this,” and then my mother would handle it. And this was the middle of the afternoon. He was completely sober, which made what happened next all the more terrifying. “Why did you forge your mother’s signature?” he said. I started making up some excuse. “Oh, I, uh, forgot to bring the form home—” “Don’t lie to me. Why did you forge your mom’s signature?” I started stammering out more bullshit, oblivious to what was coming, and then out of nowhere it came. The first blow hit me in the ribs. My mind flashed: It’s a trap! I’d never been in a fight before, had never learned how to fight, but I had this instinct that told me to get in close. I had seen what those long arms could do. I’d seen him take down my mom, but more important, I’d seen him take down grown men. Abel never hit people with a punch; I never saw him punch another person with a closed fist. But he had this ability to hit a grown man across his face with an open hand and they’d crumple. He was that strong. I looked at his arms and I knew, Don’t be on the other end of those things. I ducked in close and he kept hitting and hitting, but I was in too tight for him to land any solid blows. Then he caught on and he stopped hitting and started trying to grapple and wrestle me. He did this thing where he grabbed the skin on my arms and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger and twisted hard. Jesus, that hurt. It was the most terrifying moment of my life. I had never been that scared before, ever. Because there was no purpose to it—that’s what made it so terrifying. It wasn’t discipline. Nothing about it was coming from a place of love. It didn’t feel like something that would end with me learning a lesson about forging my mom’s signature. It felt like something that would end when he wanted it to end, when his rage was spent. It felt like there was something inside him that wanted to destroy me.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  We had two shanties in the backyard that my grandmother would rent out to migrants and seasonal workers. We had a small peach tree in a tiny patch on one side of the house and on the other side my grandmother had a driveway. I never understood why my grandmother had a driveway. She didn’t have a car. She didn’t know how to drive. Yet she had a driveway. All of our neighbors had driveways, some with fancy, cast-iron gates. None of them had cars, either. There was no future in which most of these families would ever have cars. There was maybe one car for every thousand people, yet almost everyone had a driveway. It was almost like building the driveway was a way of willing the car to happen. The story of Soweto is the story of the driveways. It’s a hopeful place. — Sadly, no matter how fancy you made your house, there was one thing you could never aspire to improve: your toilet. There was no indoor running water, just one communal outdoor tap and one outdoor toilet shared by six or seven houses. Our toilet was in a corrugated-iron outhouse shared among the adjoining houses. Inside, there was a concrete slab with a hole in it and a plastic toilet seat on top; there had been a lid at some point, but it had broken and disappeared long ago. We couldn’t afford toilet paper, so on the wall next to the seat was a wire hanger with old newspaper on it for you to wipe. The newspaper was uncomfortable, but at least I stayed informed while I handled my business. The thing that I couldn’t handle about the outhouse was the flies. It was a long drop to the bottom, and they were always down there, eating on the pile, and I had an irrational, all-consuming fear that they were going to fly up and into my bum. One afternoon, when I was around five years old, my gran left me at home for a few hours to go run errands. I was lying on the floor in the bedroom, reading. I needed to go, but it was pouring down rain. I was dreading going outside to use the toilet, getting drenched running out there, water dripping on me from the leaky ceiling, wet newspaper, the flies attacking me from below. Then I had an idea. Why bother with the outhouse at all? Why not put some newspaper on the floor and do my business like a puppy? That seemed like a fantastic idea. So that’s what I did. I took the newspaper, laid it out on the kitchen floor, pulled down my pants, and squatted and got to it.