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 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  One of these old ladies, who ran the cleaners across the street, tried to give Muriel a used woolen skirt one day. “For nothing,” she insisted, pressing it into Muriel’s hands. “No money, for nothing. Try it on, is nice. Make you look nice, show you legs little bit.” I had gone in and out of that store in dungarees for years, and this little old Ukrainian lady had never tried to reform me. She knew the difference, even if Muriel did not. Somehow, I knew that difference would be a weapon in my arsenal when the “time” came. And the “time” would certainly come in one way or another. The “time” when I would have to protect myself alone, although I did not know how or when. For Flee and me, the forces of social evil were not theoretical, not long distance nor solely bureaucratic. We met them every day, even in our straight clothes. Pain was always right around the corner. Difference had taught me that, out of the mouth of my mother. And knowing that, I fancied myself on guard, safe. I still had to learn that knowing was not enough. Every one of the women in our group took for granted, and would have said if asked, that we were all on the side of right. But the nature of that right everyone was presumed to be on the side of was always unnamed. It was just another way of silently avoiding having to examine what our living positions were within our small group of lesbians, dependent as we were upon each other for support. We were too afraid those differences might in fact be irreconcilable, for we had never been taught any tools for dealing with them. Our individuality was very precious to each one of us, but so was the group, and the other outsiders whom we had found to share some more social aspects of our lonelinesses. Being gay-girls without set roles was the one difference we allowed ourselves to see and to bind us to each other. We were not of that other world and we wanted to believe that, by definition, we were therefore free of that other world’s problems of capitalism, greed, racism, classism, etc. This was not so. But we continued to visit each other and eat together and, in general, share our lives and resources, as if it were. One evening coming home from work I ran into Nicky and Joan on Houston Street and invited them home to dinner on the spot.

• From The Sexual Outlaw (1977)

  Breathing again, but with a vision of gaping violence branded on my mind, I rush out of the park. But what of the other sexhunters who will soon be cruising this invaded area? In a phone booth on the boulevard, I call the cops. Where did this happen? Silence when I answer; the cop knows it's a gay park. As soon as available, he'll send someone to talk to me where I am. No, not to me—to the park; that's where the threat is. The steely voice insists that I wait at the booth. Half an hour. Nothing. I realize he's not going to send anyone. I drive back to the park; maybe he sent the squad car there. No. I call again from the same booth. Okay, he'll send someone to where I am. Fifteen minutes later a squad car arrives. Where did this happen? I tell them. They look hostilely at me. I insist they go there. Okay, follow them there and show them where the attack occurred. I return to my car, make a U-turn. When I reach the park—a familiar area suddenly turned ugly—the cops are flashing lights cursorily. I park where I was earlier, to wait for them to take my report, get a description, see the deep dents on my car. Instead, reality is again challenged—as it will be still again in a few moments: The cop car makes a sharp U-turn into the wrong way of the one-way road and drives out of the park. I'm alone again in the menaced area. I drive down the road, and—impossible!—at the bottom I'm intercepted by the car of the same two laughing men. Both spring out again with their raised clubs. I reverse, swerve around, and thrust my car dangerously into the boulevard. I drive to Western, where for weeks cops in twenty-four-hour shifts have been patrolling massage parlors in order to close them down. Can't leave their posts, a cop tells me. Besides, no crime actually happened! I call the watch commander at police headquarters. Busy, a cop tells me; what's wrong? I tell him about the dual attack. I tell him that the maniacal men are still prowling the area. A cold voice accuses from the telephone: “What were you doing in a queer park at midnight?” 1:06 A.M. Outside the Tool Bar. T HE ABRUPT, SEVERED encounter with the youngman he was with last night, even “worked out” with, sent Jim moodily out of the park; he drove to the area of the costume bars. Outside the Tool Bar, a man is standing by a motorcycle. Jim is attracted to him, despite the hint of a leather costume; he knows that does not necessarily mean the person is into S & M. Jim moves into a narrow corridor between a locked office building and an unfinished house. The motorcyclist follows him. “You wanna get fucked?” he asks him in a low voice. “No.”

• From The City of God

  443 Lecture 21—Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21) ›A speculative attitude anesthetizes us from the human face of suffering, makes us not think of others as our equals, and seduces us into a problematic “God’s eye” view. Here the danger of reflection on hell is what it does to us in this world. „Some continuity exists between sinning on earth and suffering in hell, but a great deal of disruption as well. Augustine tries not to let speculation have the upper hand; he tries to make it useful to think about these things for our lives in the here and now. Not apocalyptic voyeurism but an existential attempt to make sense of beliefs he takes to be essential to the Christian faith is driving his account. Questions to Consider 1. What does the saints’ beatific knowledge of the damned consist of, for Augustine? Should the saints have any knowledge of the damned at all? Why or why not? 2. Having read Augustine, ask if he is right: Should Christians understand hell as self-inflicted? Is hell good writ little? Why is hell eternal punishment for a temporal crime? 3. In hell, what exactly does the suffering consist in? Does the soul burn or the body?

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Boy, we sure is lucky, all right. Don’t know what I done to be so lucky.’ She laughed. ‘You going to find out one day,’ she said, ‘you mark my words.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Roy. ‘But it’ll be too late, then,’ she said. ‘It’ll be too late when you come to be… sorry.’ Her voice had changed. For a moment her eyes met John’s eyes, and John was frightened. He felt that her words, after the strange fashion God sometimes chose to speak to men, were dictated by Heaven and were meant for him. He was fourteen—was it too late? And this uneasiness was reinforced by the impression, which at that moment he realized had been his all along, that his mother was not saying everything she meant. What, he wondered, did she say to Aunt Florence when they talked together? Or to his father? What were her thoughts? Her face would never tell. And yet, looking down at him in a moment that was like a secret, passing sign, her face did tell him. Her thoughts were bitter. ‘I don’t care,’ Roy said, rising. ‘When I have children I ain’t going to treat them like this.’ John watched his mother; she watched Roy. ‘I’m sure this ain’t no way to be. Ain’t got no right to have a houseful of children if you don’t know how to treat them.’ ‘You mighty grown up this morning,’ his mother said. ‘You be careful.’ ‘And tell me something else,’ Roy said, suddenly leaning over his mother, ‘tell me how come he don’t never let me talk to him like I talk to you? He’s my father, ain’t he? But he don’t never listen to me—no, I all the time got to listen to him.’ ‘Your father,’ she said, watching him, ‘knows best. You listen to your father, I guarantee you you won’t end up in no jail.’ Roy sucked his teeth in fury. ‘I ain’t looking to go to no jail. You think that’s all that’s in the world is jails and churches? You ought to know better than that, Ma.’ ‘I know,’ she said, ‘there ain’t no safety except you walk humble before the Lord. You going to find it out, too, one day. You go on, hardhead. You going to come to grief.’ And suddenly Roy grinned. ‘But you be there, won’t you, Ma—when I’m in trouble?’ ‘You don’t know,’ she said, trying not to smile, ‘how long the Lord’s going to let me stay with you.’ Roy turned and did a dance step. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I know the Lord ain’t as hard as Daddy. Is he, boy?’ he demanded of John, and struck him lightly on the forehead. ‘Boy, let me eat my breakfast,’ John muttered—though his plate had long been empty, and he was pleased that Roy had turned to him. ‘That sure is a crazy boy,’ ventured Sarah, soberly. ‘Just listen,’ cried Roy, ‘to the little saint!

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  We know you’s able to do it, Lord, in Jesus’ name, Amen.’ This was the first prayer Florence heard, the only prayer she was ever to hear in which her mother demanded the protection of God more passionately for her daughter than she demanded it for her son. It was night, the windows were shut tightly with the shades drawn, and the great table was pushed against the door. The kerosene lamps burned low and made great shadows on the newspaper-covered wall. Her mother, dressed in the long, shapeless, colourless dress that she wore every day but Sunday, when she wore white, and with her head tied up in a scarlet cloth, knelt in the centre of the room, her hands hanging loosely folded before her, her black face lifted, her eyes shut. The weak, unsteady light placed shadows under her mouth and in the sockets of her eyes, making the face impersonal with majesty, like the face of a prophetess, or like a mask. Silence filled the room after her ‘Amen,’ and in the silence they heard, far up the road, the sound of a horse’s hoofs. No one moved. Gabriel, from his corner near the stove, looked up and watched his mother. ‘I ain’t afraid,’ said Gabriel. His mother turned, one hand raised. ‘You hush, now!’ Trouble had taken place in town to-day. Their neighbour Deborah, who was sixteen, three years older than Florence, had been taken away into the fields the night before by many white men, where they did things to her to make her cry and bleed. To-day, Deborah’s father had gone to one of the white men’s houses, and said that he would kill him and all the other white men he could find. They had beaten him and left him for dead. Now, everyone had shut their doors, praying and waiting, for it was said that the white folks would come to-night and set fire to all the houses, as they had done before. In the night that pressed outside they heard only the horse’s hoofs, which did not stop; there was not the laughter they would have heard had there been many coming on this road, and no calling out of curses, and no one crying for mercy to white men, or to God. The hoofbeats came to the door and passed, and rang, while they listened, ever more faintly away. Then Florence realized how frightened she had been. She watched her mother rise and walk to the window. She peered out through a corner of the blanket that covered it. ‘They’s gone,’ she said, ‘whoever they was.’

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  When I wasn’t getting whippings, I hid out at the library on 135th Street, and forged notes from my mother to get books from the “closed shelf,” and read about sex and having babies, and waited to become pregnant. None of the books were very clear to me about the relationship between having your period and having a baby, but they were all very clear about the relationship between penises and getting pregnant. Or maybe the confusion was all in my own mind, because I had always been a very fast but not a very careful reader. So four years later, in my fifteenth year, I was a very scared little girl, still half-afraid that one of that endless stream of doctors would look up into my body and discover my four-year-old shame and say to my mother, “Aha! So that’s what’s wrong! Your daughter is about to become pregnant!” On the other hand, if I let Mother know that I knew what was happening and what these medical safaris were all about, I would have to answer her questions about how and wherefore I knew, since she hadn’t told me, divulging in the process the whole horrible and self-incriminating story of forbidden books and forged library notes and rooftops and stairwell conversations. It was a year after the rooftop incident, when we had moved farther uptown. The kids at St. Catherine’s seemed to know a lot more about sex than at St. Mark’s. In the eighth grade, I had stolen money and bought my classmate Adeline a pack of cigarettes and she had confirmed my bookish suspicions about how babies were made. My response to her graphic descriptions had been to think to myself, there obviously must be another way that Adeline doesn’t know about, because my parents have children and I know they never did anything like that! But the basic principles were all there, and sure enough they were the same as I had gathered from The Young People’s Family Book . So in my fifteenth summer, on examining table after examining table, I kept my legs open and my mouth shut, and when I saw blood on my pants one hot July afternoon, I rinsed them out secretly in the bathroom and put them back on wet because I didn’t know how to break the news to my mother that both her worries and mine were finally over. (All this time I had at least understood that having your period was a sign you were not pregnant.) What then happened felt like a piece of an old and elaborate dance between my mother and me.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  He thought of the dog returned to his vomit, of the man who had been cleansed, and who fell, and who was possessed by seven devils, the last state of that man being worse than his first. And he thought at last, kneeling by his cold bedside, but with the heart within him almost too sick for prayer, of Onan, who had scattered his seed on the ground rather than continue his brother’s line. Out of the house of David, the son of Abraham. And he called again on the name of Jesus; and fell asleep again. And he dreamed that he was in a cold, high place, like a mountain. He was high, so high that he walked in mist and cloud, but before him stretched the blank ascent, the steep side of the mountain. A voice said: ‘Come higher.’ And he began to climb. After a little, clinging to the rock, he found himself with only clouds above him and mist below—and he knew that beyond the wall of mist reigned fire. His feet began to slip; pebbles and rocks began ringing beneath his feet; he looked up, trembling, in terror of death, and he cried: ‘Lord, I can’t come no higher.’ But the voice repeated after a moment, quiet and strong and impossible to deny: ‘Come on, son. Come higher.’ Then he knew that, if he would not fall to death, he must obey the voice. He began to climb again, and his feet slipped again; and when he thought that he would fall there suddenly appeared before him green, spiny leaves; and he caught on to the leaves, which hurt his hand, and the voice said again: ‘Come higher.’ And so Gabriel climbed, the wind blowing through his clothes, and his feet began to bleed, and his hands were bleeding; and still he climbed, and he felt that his back was breaking; and his legs were growing numb and they were trembling, and he could not control them; and still before him there was only cloud, and below him the roaring mist. How long he climbed in this dream of his, he did not know. Then, of a sudden, the clouds parted, he felt the sun like a crown of glory, and he was in a peaceful field. He began to walk. Now he was wearing long, white robes. He heard singing: ‘Walked in the valley, it looked so fine, I asked my Lord was all this mine.’ But he knew that it was his. A voice said: ‘Follow me.’ And he walked, and he was again on the edge of a high place, but bathed and blessed and glorified in the blazing sun, so that he stood like God, all golden, and looked down, down, at the long race he had run, at the steep side of the mountain he had climbed. And now up this mountain, in white robes, singing, the elect came. ‘Touch them not,’ the voice said, ‘my seal is on them.’

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  This did not mean that I loved black people; on the contrary, I despised them, possibly because they failed to produce Rembrandt. In effect, I hated and feared the world. And this meant, not only that I thus gave the world an altogether murderous power over me, but also that in such a self-destroying limbo I could never hope to write. One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art. The difficulty then, for me, of being a Negro writer was the fact that I was, in effect, prohibited from examining my own experience too closely by the tremendous demands and the very real dangers of my social situation. I don’t think the dilemma outlined above is uncommon. I do think, since writers work in the disastrously explicit medium of language, that it goes a little way towards explaining why, out of the enormous resources of Negro speech and life, and despite the example of Negro music, prose written by Negroes has been generally speaking so pallid and so harsh. I have not written about being a Negro at such length because I expect that to be my only subject, but only because it was the gate I had to unlock before I could hope to write about anything else. I don’t think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as though it were a thing apart. But in the work of Faulkner, in the general attitude and certain specific passages in Robert Penn Warren, and, most significantly, in the advent of Ralph Ellison, one sees the beginnings—at least—of a more genuinely penetrating search. Mr. Ellison, by the way, is the first Negro novelist I have ever read to utilize in language, and brilliantly, some of the ambiguity and irony of Negro life.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  For when her mother died, the world fell down; her aunt, her mother’s older sister, arrived, and stood appalled at Elizabeth’s vanity and uselessness; and decided, immediately, that her father was no fit person to raise a child, especially, as she darkly said, an innocent little girl. And it was this decision on the part of her aunt, for which Elizabeth did not forgive her for many years, that precipitated the third disaster, the separation of herself from her father—from all that she loved on earth. For her father ran what her aunt called a ‘house’—not the house where they lived, but another house, to which, as Elizabeth gathered, wicked people often came. And he had also, to Elizabeth’s rather horrified confusion, a ‘stable.’ Low, common niggers, the lowest of the low, came from all over (and sometimes brought their women and sometimes found them there) to eat, and drink cheap moonshine, and play music all night long—and to do worse things, her aunt’s dreadful silence then suggested, which were far better left unsaid. And she would, she swore, move Heaven and earth before she would let her sister’s daughter grow up with such a man. Without, however, so much as looking at Heaven, and without troubling any more of the earth than that part of it which held the courthouse, she won the day. Like a clap of thunder, or like a magic spell, like light one moment and darkness the next, Elizabeth’s life had changed. Her mother was dead, her father banished, and she lived in the shadow of her aunt. Or, more exactly, as she thought now, the shadow in which she had lived was fear—fear made more dense by hatred. Not for a moment had she judged her father; it would have made no difference to her love for him had she been told, and even seen it proved, that he was first cousin to the Devil. The proof would not have existed for her, and if it had she would not have regretted being his daughter, or have asked for anything better than to suffer at his side in Hell. And when she had been taken from him her imagination had been wholly unable to lend reality to the wickedness of which he stood accused— she, certainly, did not accuse him. She screamed in anguish when he put her from him and turned to go, and she had to be carried to the train. And later, when she understood perfectly all that had happened then, still in her heart she could not accuse him. Perhaps his life had been wicked, but he had been very good to her.

• From The City of God

  444 Augustine’s Vision of Hell (Book 21) I n these last three books Augustine is talking about the relationship between the provisional and the final, the relationship between our ultimate determinate situation, fixed for all eternity, and our mutable condition now, amidst the flux of time. In these final books, then a myriad of themes come together, and we can only gesture at them all here. But centrally they all address the relationship between our partial and provisional life here and now, and the full life we are promised, Augustine thinks, in the world to come. In Book 21, the topic of this lecture, he focuses on the idea of Hell, and he especially explores this relationship in terms of its poles of continuity and distance—between sinning in time and being damned in Hell. This has speculative import for how we imagine that life to come, of course; but as the previous book might suggest to you, Augustine’s main interest here lies in what these inquiries about some other condition have to say about how we should live our lives here, in the inescapably partial and blessedly—and terrifyingly—ever- revisable now. In a way, this is akin to the way we can learn about our current condition, our hopes and fears, our assumptions, by reading science fiction novels. Though such works are putatively about some distant future, there is always a fair amount of revelatory leaven regarding the present lurking therein, from which we can learn a great deal about ourselves and our world today. Here we will ask the following questions about this kind of science fiction investigation of Hell. What reasons does Augustine give, in this book, for thinking Hell is real? What is the deepest nature of suffering in Hell, for Augustine? Why does he think that an eternal punishment Lecture 21 Transcript

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  He discovered that whenever Deborah spoke of Royal, a fear deep within him listened and waited. Many times he had thought to unburden his heart to her. But she gave him no opportunity, never said anything that might allow him the healing humility of confession—or that might, for that matter, have permitted him at last to say how much he hated her for her barrenness. She demanded of him what she gave—nothing—nothing, at any rate, with which she could be reproached. She kept his house and shared his bed; she visited the sick, as she had always done, and she comforted the dying, as she had always done. The marriage for which he had once dreamed the world would mock him had so justified itself—in the eyes of the world—that no one now could imagine, for either of them, any other condition or alliance. Even Deborah’s weakness, which grew more marked with the years, keeping her more frequently in her bed, and her barrenness, like her previous dishonour, had come to seem mysterious proofs of how completely she had surrendered herself to God. He said: ‘Amen,’ cautiously, after her last remark, and cleared his throat. ‘I declare,’ she said, with the same cheerfulness, ‘sometime he remind me of you when you was a young man.’ And he did not look at her, though he felt her eyes on him; he reached for his Bible and opened it. ‘Young men,’ he said, ‘is all the same, don’t Jesus change their hearts.’ Royal did not go to war, but he went away that summer to work on the docks in another town. Gabriel did not see him any more until the war was over. On that day, a day he was never to forget, he went when work was done to buy some medicine for Deborah, who was in bed with a misery in her back. Night had not yet fallen and the streets were grey and empty—save that here and there, polished in the light that spilled outward from a pool-room or a tavern, white men stood in groups of half-a-dozen. As he passed each group, silence fell, and they watched him insolently, itching to kill; but he said nothing, bowing his head, and they knew, anyway, that he was a preacher. There were no black men on the streets at all, save him. There had been found that morning, just outside of town, the dead body of a soldier, his uniform shredded where he had been flogged, and, turned upward through the black skin, raw, red meat.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 24. --Of the Meaning of the Sacrifice Abraham Was Commanded to Offer When He Supplicated to Be Taught About Those Things He Had Believed. In the same vision, God in speaking to him also says, "I am God that brought thee out of the region of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it. " [910]And when Abram asked whereby he might know that he should inherit it, God said to him, "Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she-goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtle-dove, and a pigeon. And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid each piece one against another; but the birds divided he not. And the fowls came down," as it is written, "on the carcasses, and Abram sat down by them. But about the going down of the sun, great fear fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And He said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land not theirs, and they shall reduce them to servitude and shall afflict them four hundred years:but the nation whom they shall serve will I judge; and afterward shall they come out hither with great substance. And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; kept in a good old age. But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again:for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full. And when the sun was setting, there was a flame, and a smoking furnace, and lamps of fire, that passed through between those pieces. In that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed will I give this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river Euphrates:the Kenites, and the Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Rephaims, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Hivites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites. " [911]

• From The City of God

  Chapter 22. --Of Jeroboam, Who Profaned the People Put Under Him by the Impiety of Idolatry, Amid Which, However, God Did Not Cease to Inspire the Prophets, and to Guard Many from the Crime of Idolatry. But Jeroboam king of Israel, with perverse mind, not believing in God, whom he had proved true in promising and giving him the kingdom, was afraid lest, by coming to the temple of God which was in Jerusalem, where, according to the divine law, that whole nation was to come in order to sacrifice, the people should be seduced from him, and return to David's line as the seed royal; and set up idolatry in his kingdom, and with horrible impiety beguiled the people, ensnaring them to the worship of idols with himself. Yet God did not altogether cease to reprove by the prophets, not only that king, but also his successors and imitators in his impiety, and the people too. For there the great and illustrious prophet Elijah and Elisha his disciple arose, who also did many wonderful works. Even there, when Elijah said, "O Lord, they have slain Thy prophets, they have digged down Thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life," it was answered that seven thousand men were there who had not bowed the knee to Baal. [1131] [1131] 1 Kings xix. 10, 14, 15.

• From The City of God

  If any one forbears to reprove and find fault with those who are doing wrong, because he seeks a more seasonable opportunity, or because he fears they may be made worse by his rebuke, or that other weak persons may be disheartened from endeavoring to lead a good and pious life, and may be driven from the faith; this man's omission seems to be occasioned not by covetousness, but by a charitable consideration. But what is blame-worthy is, that they who themselves revolt from the conduct of the wicked, and live in quite another fashion, yet spare those faults in other men which they ought to reprehend and wean them from; and spare them because they fear to give offence, lest they should injure their interests in those things which good men may innocently and legitimately use,--though they use them more greedily than becomes persons who are strangers in this world, and profess the hope of a heavenly country. For not only the weaker brethren who enjoy married life, and have children (or desire to have them), and own houses and establishments, whom the apostle addresses in the churches, warning and instructing them how they should live, both the wives with their husbands, and the husbands with their wives, the children with their parents, and parents with their children, and servants with their masters, and masters with their servants,--not only do these weaker brethren gladly obtain and grudgingly lose many earthly and temporal things on account of which they dare not offend men whose polluted and wicked life greatly displeases them; but those also who live at a higher level, who are not entangled in the meshes of married life, but use meagre food and raiment, do often take thought of their own safety and good name, and abstain from finding fault with the wicked, because they fear their wiles and violence. And although they do not fear them to such an extent as to be drawn to the commission of like iniquities, nay, not by any threats or violence soever; yet those very deeds which they refuse to share in the commission of they often decline to find fault with, when possibly they might by finding fault prevent their commission. They abstain from interference, because they fear that, if it fail of good effect, their own safety or reputation may be damaged or destroyed; not because they see that their preservation and good name are needful, that they may be able to influence those who need their instruction, but rather because they weakly relish the flattery and respect of men, and fear the judgments of the people, and the pain or death of the body; that is to say, their non-intervention is the result of selfishness, and not of love.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Her face, as she watched, was full of pain and fear, of tension barely supported, and of pity that could scarcely have been expressed had she filled all the world with her weeping. His father muttered sweet, delirious things to Roy, and his hands, when he dipped them again in the basin and wrung out the cloth, were trembling. Aunt Florence, still wearing her hat and carrying her handbag, stood a little removed, looking down at them with a troubled, terrible face. Then Sarah bounded into the room before him, and his mother looked up, reached out for the package, and saw him. She said nothing, but she looked at him with a strange, quick intentness, almost as though there were a warning on her tongue which at the moment she did not dare to utter. His Aunt Florence looked up, and said: ‘We been wondering where you was, boy. This bad brother of yours done gone out and got hisself hurt.’ But John understood from her tone that the fuss was, possibly, a little greater than the danger—Roy was not, after all, going to die. And his heart lifted a little. Then his father turned and looked at him. ‘Where you been, boy,’ he shouted, ‘all this time? Don’t you know you’s needed here at home?’ More than his words, his face caused John to stiffen instantly with malice and fear. His father’s face was terrible in anger, but now there was more than anger in it. John saw now what he had never seen there before, except in his own vindictive fantasies: a kind of wild, weeping terror that made the face seem younger, and yet at the same time unutterably older and more cruel. And John knew, in the moment his father’s eyes swept over him, that he hated John because John was not lying on the sofa where Roy lay. John could scarcely meet his father’s eyes, and yet, briefly, he did, saying nothing, feeling in his heart an odd sensation of triumph, and hoping in his heart that Roy, to bring his father low, would die. His mother had unwrapped the package and was opening a bottle of peroxide. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘you better wash it with this now.’ Her voice was calm and dry; she looked at his father briefly, her face unreadable, as she handed him the bottle and the cotton. ‘This going to hurt,’ his father said—in such a different voice, so sad and tender!—turning again to the sofa. ‘But you just be a little man and hold still; it ain’t going to take long.’ John watched and listened, hating him. Roy began to moan.

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

  CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. But the Lord after having inspired such great fear, and prepared men to resist those who depart from a right confession, commanded them for the rest to take no care what they should answer, because for those who are faithfully disposed, the Holy Spirit frames fit words, as their teacher, and dwelling within them. Whence it follows, And when they shall bring you into synagogues, take no thought how or what ye shall answer. GLOSS. (inter.) Now he says, how, with respect to the manner of speaking, what, with respect to the manner of intention. How ye shall answer to those who ask, or what ye shall say to those who wish to learn. BEDE. For when we are led for Christ’s sake before judges, we ought to offer only our will for Christ, but in answering, the Holy Spirit will supply His grace, as it is added, For the Holy Spirit will leach you, &c. CHRYSOSTOM. (Hom. 33. in Matt.) But elsewhere it is said, Be ready to answer every one who shall ask you for a reason of the hope that is in you. When indeed a contest or strife arises among friends, He bids us take thought, but when there are the terrors of a court of justice and fear on every side, He gives His own strength so as to inspire boldness and utterance, but not dismay. THEOPHYLACT. Since then our weakness is twofold, and either from fear of punishment we shun martyrdom, or because we are ignorant and can not give a reason of our faith, he has excluded both; the fear of punishment in that He said, Fear not them which kill the body, but the fear of ignorance, when He said, Take no thought how or what ye shall answer, &c. 12:13–1513. And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me. 14. And he said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over you? 15. And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. AMBROSE. The whole of the former passage is given to prepare us for undergoing suffering for confessing the Lord, or for contempt of death, or for the hope of reward, or for denunciation of the punishment that will await him to whom pardon will never be granted. And since covetousness is generally wont to try virtue, for destroying this also, a precept and example is added, as it is said, And one of the company said to him, Speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  What father would scratch up his daughter like that? “Don’t go back there, please Gennie.” Gennie looked at me as if I couldn’t understand anything, but her voice wasn’t as impatient as usual. She looked tired. “I can’t go back there, she doesn’t have room for me anymore. She’s fixed over the bedroom and everything, and besides she said I had to choose and I did. She said if I went to Phillip’s I couldn’t come back. And now Ella’s gone down south to see her mother, and my father and Uncle Leddie are drinking all the time. And when Phillip drinks he doesn’t know what…” It looked like Gennie was going to cry and suddenly I was terribly scared. I heard my mother in the living room, warning, in a raised voice: “It’s nine-thirty P.M. in the night, are you children finished? You sure it’s study you studying this time of night?” “Gennie, why don’t you at least call your mother?” I was pleading with her. She would have to go soon. In another minute my mother was going to come in, storming nicely. Gennie stood up with a sudden dash of her old spirit. “I said no already, didn’t I? I can’t talk to my mother about Phil. He’s crazy sometimes.” She fingered the scratches on her face. “All right, I’m going. Look, I’ll meet you at Hunter after your exams on Friday, okay? What time are you done?” She was pulling on her coat. “Twelve o’clock. What are you going to do, Gennie?” I was worried by the way she looked. I was also relieved that she was going. I could already anticipate the scene between my mother and me as soon as Gennie left. “Never mind about me. I’m going over to Jean’s house. Good luck with your midterms. I’ll see you on Friday near the 68th Street entrance at noon.” I walked her to the front door, and we ran the gauntlet of the living room together. “How’d’do, Genevieve,” my father said, sternly, and returned his eyes to his newspaper. He did not get involved in these matters unless I gave my mother a hard time. “Good night, dear,” my mother said, sweetly. “Your father doesn’t mind you traveling by yourself so late at night?” “No, ma’am. I’m just taking a bus straight to my mother’s house,” Gennie lied, smoothly, giving my mother one of her most radiant smiles. “Well, it’s very late.” My mother gave the slightest of her reproachful hums. “You get home safely, now, and say goodnight to your mother for me.” I saw my mother shrewdly eyeing Gennie’s scratched face, and I hurried her into the hallway. “Bye, Gennie. Please be careful.” “Don’t be silly, I don’t need to be careful, I just need some sleep.”

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Perhaps it would go away, deprived of her attention. I learned later that Phyllis’s high school senior class trip had been to Washington, but the nuns had given her back her deposit in private, explaining to her that the class, all of whom were white, except Phyllis, would be staying in a hotel where Phyllis “would not be happy,” meaning, Daddy explained to her, also in private, that they did not rent rooms to Negroes. “We will take among-you to Washington, ourselves,” my father had avowed, “and not just for an overnight in some measly fleabag hotel.” American racism was a new and crushing reality that my parents had to deal with every day of their lives once they came to this country. They handled it as a private woe. My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in america and the fact of american racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature. We were told we must never trust white people, but why was never explained, nor the nature of their ill will. Like so many other vital pieces of information in my childhood, I was supposed to know without being told. It always seemed like a very strange injunction coming from my mother, who looked so much like one of those people we were never supposed to trust. But something always warned me not to ask my mother why she wasn’t white, and why Auntie Lillah and Auntie Etta weren’t, even though they were all that same problematic color so different from my father and me, even from my sisters, who were somewhere in-between. In Washington, D. C. we had one large room with two double beds and an extra cot for me. It was a back-street hotel that belonged to a friend of my father’s who was in real estate, and I spent the whole next day after Mass squinting up at the Lincoln Memorial where Marian Anderson had sung after the D.A.R. refused to allow her to sing in their auditorium because she was Black. Or because she was “Colored,” my father said as he told us the story. Except that what he probably said was “Negro,” because for his times, my father was quite progressive. I was squinting because I was in that silent agony that characterized all of my childhood summers, from the time school let out in June to the end of July, brought about by my dilated and vulnerable eyes exposed to the summer brightness. I viewed Julys through an agonizing corolla of dazzling whiteness and I always hated the Fourth of July, even before I came to realize the travesty such a celebration was for Black people in this country.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  There were two North Africans, vivid, brutish, and beautiful, who alternated between gaiety and fury, not at the fact of their arrest but at the state of the cell. None poured as much emotional energy into the fact of their arrest as I did; they took it, as I would have liked to take it, as simply another unlucky happening in a very dirty world. For, though I had grown accustomed to thinking of myself as looking upon the world with a hard, penetrating eye, the truth was that they were far more realistic about the world than I, and more nearly right about it. The gap between us, which only a gesture I made could have bridged, grew steadily, during thirty-six hours, wider. I could not make any gesture simply because they frightened me. I was unable to accept my imprisonment as a fact, even as a temporary fact. I could not, even for a moment, accept my present companions as my companions. And they, of course, felt this and put it down, with perfect justice, to the fact that I was an American. There was nothing to do all day long. It appeared that we would one day come to trial but no one knew when. We were awakened at seven-thirty by a rapping on what I believe is called the Judas, that small opening in the door of the cell which allows the guards to survey the prisoners. At this rapping we rose from the floor—we slept on straw pallets and each of us was covered with one thin blanket—and moved to the door of the cell. We peered through the opening into the center of the prison, which was, as I remember, three tiers high, all gray stone and gunmetal steel, precisely that prison I had seen in movies, except that, in the movies, I had not known that it was cold in prison. I had not known that when one’s shoelaces and belt have been removed one is, in the strangest way, demoralized. The necessity of shuffling and the necessity of holding up one’s trousers with one hand turn one into a rag doll. And the movies fail, of course, to give one any idea of what prison food is like. Along the corridor, at seven-thirty, came three men, each pushing before him a great garbage can, mounted on wheels. In the garbage can of the first was the bread—this was passed to one through the small opening in the door. In the can of the second was the coffee. In the can of the third was what was always called la soupe, a pallid paste of potatoes which had certainly been bubbling on the back of the prison stove long before that first, so momentous revolution.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 9. --Of the Perturbations of the Soul Which Appear as Right Affections in the Life of the Righteous. But so far as regards this question of mental perturbations, we have answered these philosophers in the ninth book [687] of this work, showing that it is rather a verbal than a real dispute, and that they seek contention rather than truth. Among ourselves, according to the sacred Scriptures and sound doctrine, the citizens of the holy city of God, who live according to God in the pilgrimage of this life, both fear and desire, and grieve and rejoice. And because their love is rightly placed, all these affections of theirs are right. They fear eternal punishment, they desire eternal life; they grieve because they themselves groan within themselves, waiting for the adoption, the redemption of their body; [688] they rejoice in hope, because there "shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. " [689]In like manner they fear to sin, they desire to persevere; they grieve in sin, they rejoice in good works. They fear to sin, because they hear that "because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. " [690]They desire to persevere, because they hear that it is written, "He that endureth to the end shall be saved. " [691]They grieve for sin, hearing that "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. " [692]They rejoice in good works, because they hear that "the Lord loveth a cheerful giver. " [693]In like manner, according as they are strong or weak, they fear or desire to be tempted, grieve or rejoice in temptation. They fear to be tempted, because they hear the injunction, "If a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. " [694]They desire to be tempted, because they hear one of the heroes of the city of God saying, "Examine me, O Lord, and tempt me:try my reins and my heart. " [695]They grieve in temptations, because they see Peter weeping; [696] they rejoice in temptations, because they hear James saying, "My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations. " [697]