Grief

Passages

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

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• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  As the Farm grew, it was found necessary to make some provision for the education of its boys and girls. There were, among these, Hindu, Musalman, Parsi and Christian boys and some Hindu girls. It was not possible, and I did not think it necessary, to engage special teachers for them. It was not possible, for qualified Indian teachers were scarce, and even when available, none would be ready to go to a place 21 miles distant from Johannesburg on a small salary. Also we were certainly not overflowing with money. And I did not think it necessary to import teachers from outside the Farm. I did not believe in the existing system of education, and I had a mind to find out by experience and experiment the true system. Only this much I knew-that, under ideal conditions, true education could be imparted only by the parents, and that then there should be the minimum of outside help, that Tolstoy Farm was a family, in which I occupied the place of the father, and that I should so far as possible shoulder the responsibility for the training of the young. The conception no doubt was not without its flaws. All the young people had not been with me since their childhood, they had been brought up in different conditions and environments, and they did not belong to the same religion. How could I do full justice to the young people, thus circumstanced, even if I assumed the place of paterfamilias? But I had always given the first place to the culture of the heart or the building of character, and as I felt confident that moral training could be given to all alike, no matter how different their ages and their upbringing, I decided to live amongst them all the twenty-four hours of the day as their father. I regarded character building as the proper foundation for their education and, if the foundation was firmly laid, I was sure that the children could learn all the other things themselves or with the assistance of friends. But as I fully appreciated the necessity of a literary training in addition, I started some classes with the help of Mr. Kallenbach and Sjt. Pragji Desai. Nor did I underrate the building up of the body. This they got in the course of their daily routine. For there were no servants on the Farm, and all the work, from cooking down to scavenging, was done by the immates. There were many fruit trees to be looked after, and enough gardening to be done as well. Mr. Kallenbach was fond of gardening and had gained some experience of this work in one of the Governmental model gardens. It was obligatory on all, young and old, who were not engaged in the kitchen, to give some time to gardening. The children had the lion’s share of this work, which included digging pits, felling timber and lifting loads. This gave them ample exercise.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Prince did not apply to Harvard, nor Princeton, nor Yale, nor Columbia, nor Stanford. He only wanted The Mecca. I asked Dr. Jones if she regretted Prince choosing Howard. She gasped. It was as though I had pushed too hard on a bruise. “No,” she said. “I regret that he is dead.” She said this with great composure and greater pain. She said this with all of the odd poise and direction that the great American injury demands of you. Have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the ’60s, a hard, serious look? Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion. They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me. I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all. Perhaps it is life extension, a kind of loan allowing you to take the assaults heaped upon you now and pay down the debt later. Whatever it is, that same look I see in those pictures, noble and vacuous, was the look I saw in Mable Jones. It was in her sharp brown eyes, which welled but did not break. She held so much under her control, and I was sure the days since her Rocky was plundered, since her lineage was robbed, had demanded nothing less. And she could not lean on her country for help. When it came to her son, Dr. Jones’s country did what it does best—it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Dr. Jones was asleep when the phone rang. It was 5 A.M. and on the phone was a detective telling her she should drive to Washington. Rocky was in the hospital. Rocky had been shot. She drove with her daughter. She was sure he was still alive. She paused several times as she explained this. She went directly to the ICU. Rocky was not there. A group of men with authority—doctors, lawyers, detectives, perhaps—took her into a room and told her he was gone. She paused again. She did not cry. Composure was too important now. “It was unlike anything I had felt before,” she told me. “It was extremely physically painful. So much so that whenever a thought of him would come to mind, all I could do was pray and ask for mercy. I thought I was going to lose my mind and go crazy. I felt sick. I felt like I was dying.” I asked if she expected that the police officer who had shot Prince would be charged. She said, “Yes.” Her voice was a cocktail of emotions. She spoke like an American, with the same expectations of fairness, even fairness belated and begrudged, that she took into medical school all those years ago. And she spoke like a black woman, with all the pain that undercuts those exact feelings. I now wondered about her daughter, who’d been recently married. There was a picture on display of this daughter and her new husband. Dr. Jones was not optimistic. She was intensely worried about her daughter bringing a son into America, because she could not save him, she could not secure his body from the ritual violence that had claimed her son. She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. “And we can’t get the message,” she said. “We don’t understand that we are embracing our deaths.” I asked Dr. Jones if her mother was still alive. She told me her mother passed away in 2002, at the age of eighty-nine. I asked Dr. Jones how her mother had taken Prince’s death, and her voice retreated into an almost-whisper, and Dr. Jones said, “I don’t know that she did.”

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Therewith she despatched her maid for a piece of cloth of silk, which she had in a coffer of hers, and spreading it on the earth, laid Gabriotto's body thereon, with his head upon a pillow. Then with many tears she closed his eyes and mouth and weaving him a chaplet of roses, covered him with all they had gathered, he and she; after which she said to the maid, 'It is but a little way hence to his house; wherefore we will carry him thither, thou and I, even as we have arrayed him, and lay him before the door. It will not be long ere it be day and he will be taken up; and although this may be no consolation to his friends, yet to me, in whose arms he died, it will be a pleasure.' So saying, once more with most abundant tears she cast herself upon his face and wept a great while. Then, being urged by her maid to despatch, for that the day was at hand, she rose to her feet and drawing from her finger the ring wherewith Gabriotto had espoused her, she set it on his and said, weeping, 'Dear my lord, if thy soul now seeth my tears or if any sense or cognizance abide in the body, after the departure thereof, benignly receive her last gift, whom, living, thou lovedst so well.' This said, she fell down upon him in a swoon, but, presently coming to herself and rising, she took up, together with her maid, the cloth whereon the body lay and going forth the garden therewith, made for his house.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now among the others there was a certain Guiglielmino da Medicina, who had been with Guidotto in that affair[278] and knew very well whose house it was that he had plundered, and he, seeing the person in question[279] there among the rest, accosted him, saying, 'Bernabuccio, hearest thou what Giacomino saith?' 'Ay do I,' answered Bernabuccio, 'and I was presently in thought thereof, more by token that I mind me to have lost a little daughter of the age whereof Giacomino speaketh in those very troubles.' Quoth Guiglielmino, 'This is she for certain, for that I was once in company with Guidotto, when I heard him tell where he had done the plundering and knew it to be thy house that he had sacked; wherefore do thou bethink thee if thou mayst credibly recognize her by any token and let make search therefor; for thou wilt assuredly find that she is thy daughter.' [Footnote 278: _A questo fatto_, _i.e._ at the storm of Faenza.] [Footnote 279: _i.e._ the owner of the plundered house.] Accordingly, Bernabuccio bethought himself and remembered that she should have a little cross-shaped scar over her left ear, proceeding from a tumour, which he had caused cut for her no great while before that occurrence; whereupon, without further delay, he accosted Giacomino, who was still there, and besought him to carry him to his house and let him see the damsel. To this he readily consented and carrying him thither, let bring the girl before him. When Bernabuccio set eyes on her, himseemed he saw the very face of her mother, who was yet a handsome lady; nevertheless, not contenting himself with this, he told Giacomino that he would fain of his favour have leave to raise her hair a little above her left ear, to which the other consented. Accordingly, going up to the girl, who stood shamefast, he lifted up her hair with his right hand and found the cross; whereupon, knowing her to be indeed his daughter, he fell to weeping tenderly and embracing her, notwithstanding her resistance; then, turning to Giacomino, 'Brother mine,' quoth he, 'this is my daughter; it was my house Guidotto plundered and this girl was, in the sudden alarm, forgotten there of my wife and her mother; and until now we believed that she had perished with the house, which was burned me that same day.'

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  have ended his life, had stopped at sixteen minutes and twenty-six seconds past five o’clock on June 27, 1844. Mormons the world over have committed this time and date to memory, marking the death of their great and beloved prophet. Joseph Smith was thirty-eight years old. Defying the odds, Taylor survived the grave injuries he sustained in the Carthage jail and later became the church’s third president and prophet, succeeding Brigham Young in 1877. Nine years after that, Taylor would receive a notorious, furiously disputed revelation in which God would affirm to him the righteousness of the principle of plural marriage—a revelation that would ultimately give birth to the modern fundamentalist movement, lead to the settlement of Short Creek, and transform the life of Dan Lafferty. THIRTEEN THE LAFFERTY BOYS It should be obvious to any man who is not one himself that the land is overrun with messiahs. . . . It should be a matter of common observation that this clamour of voices represents the really vigorous wing of American religious life. Here is religion in action, and religion actively in the making. . . . The truth is, of course, that the land is simply teeming with faith—that marked credulity that accompanies periods of great religious awakening and seems to be with us a permanent state of mind. By no stretch of the vocabulary could our age be called an age of doubt; it is rather an age of incredible faith. CHARLES W. FERGUSON, THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES After Dan Lafferty read The Peace Maker and resolved to start living the principle of plural marriage, he announced to his wife, Matilda, that he intended to wed her oldest daughter—his stepdaughter. At the last minute, however, he abandoned that plan and instead married a Romanian immigrant named Ann Randak, who took care of some of Robert Redford’s horses on a ranch up Spanish Fork Canyon, in the mountains east of the Dream Mine. Ann and Dan had met when he’d borrowed a horse from her to ride in a local parade. She wasn’t LDS, says Dan, “but she was open to new experiences. Becoming my plural wife was her idea.” Ann, he adds, “was a lovely girl. I called her my gypsy bride.” Living according to the strictures laid down in The Peace Maker felt good to Dan—it felt right, as though this really was the way God intended men and women to live. Inspired, Dan sought out other texts about Mormonism as it was practiced in the early years of the church.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  The whole of Mormondom was wobbling on the brink. With the death of Taylor in 1887, an eighty-two-year-old apostle named Wilford Woodruff had been installed as the fourth Mormon prophet. And he recognized, with great pain, that the Kingdom of God had no choice but to surrender to Washington’s demands. After taking to his bed on the evening of September 23, 1890, Woodruff reported, he “struggled all night with the Lord about what should be done with the existing circumstances of the church.” In the morning he called together five trusted Mormon leaders and, “with broken spirit,” informed them that God had revealed to him the necessity of relinquishing “the practice of that principle for which the brethren had been willing to lay down their lives.” To the shock and utter horror of the other men in the room, President Woodruff explained that “it was the will of the Lord” that the church stop sanctioning the doctrine of plural marriage. On October 6, 1890, Woodruff’s momentous revelation was formalized in a brief document that became known as “the Woodruff Manifesto,” or simply “the Manifesto.” It read, in part, Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise. . . . And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land. WILFORD WOODRUFF President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The impact of the Manifesto shook Mormondom to its roots, but it did not end polygamy—it merely drove it underground. For the next two decades members of the Mormon First Presidency privately advised Saints that polygamy should

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 P.M. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself. This must seem strange to you. We live in a “goal-oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "What is there to tell? He had risen from the ranks. He loved the army. And he had never married. He was twenty years older than me. He was a very intelligent man: and alone in the army, as such a man is: a passionate man in his way: and a very clever officer. I lived under his spell while I was with him. I sort of let him run my life. And I never regret it." "And did you mind very much when he died?" "I was as near death myself. But when I came to, I knew another part of me was finished. But then I had always known it would finish in death. All things do, as far as that goes." She sat and ruminated. The thunder crashed outside. It was like being in a little ark in the Flood. "You seem to have such a lot _behind_ you," she said. "Do I? It seems to me I've died once or twice already. Yet here I am, pegging on, and in for more trouble." She was thinking hard, yet listening to the storm. "And weren't you happy as an officer and a gentleman, when your Colonel was dead?" "No! They were a mingy lot." He laughed suddenly. "The Colonel used to say: Lad, the English middle classes have to chew every mouthful thirty times because their guts are so narrow, a bit as big as a pea would give them a stoppage. They're the mingiest set of lady-like snipe ever invented: full of conceit of themselves, frightened even if their boot-laces aren't correct, rotten as high game, and always in the right. That's what finishes me up. Kow-tow, kow-tow, arse-licking till their tongues are tough: yet they're always in the right. Prigs on top of everything. Prigs! A generation of lady-like prigs with half a ball each." Connie laughed. The rain was rushing down. "He hated them!" "No," said he. "He didn't bother. He just disliked them. There's a difference. Because, as he said, the Tommies are getting just as priggish and half-balled and narrow-gutted. It's the fate of mankind, to go that way." "The common people too, the working people?"

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  And he wanted Clifford to marry and produce an heir. Clifford felt his father was a hopeless anachronism. But wherein was he himself any further ahead, except in a wincing sense of the ridiculousness of everything, and the paramount ridiculousness of his own position. For willy-nilly he took his baronetcy and Wragby with the last seriousness. The gay excitement had gone out of the war ... dead. Too much death and horror. A man needed support and comfort. A man needed to have an anchor in the safe world. A man needed a wife. The Chatterleys, two brothers and a sister, had lived curiously isolated, shut in with one another at Wragby, in spite of all their connections. A sense of isolation intensified the family tie, a sense of the weakness of their position, a sense of defencelessness, in spite of, or because of the title and the land. They were cut off from those industrial Midlands in which they passed their lives. And they were cut off from their own class by the brooding, obstinate, shut-up nature of Sir Geoffrey, their father, whom they ridiculed, but whom they were so sensitive about. The three had said they would all live together always. But now Herbert was dead, and Sir Geoffrey wanted Clifford to marry. Sir Geoffrey barely mentioned it: he spoke very little. But his silent, brooding insistence that it should be so was hard for Clifford to bear up against. But Emma said No! She was ten years older than Clifford, and she felt his marrying would be a desertion and a betrayal of what the young ones of the family had stood for. Clifford married Connie, nevertheless, and had his month's honeymoon with her. It was the terrible year 1917, and they were intimate as two people who stand together on a sinking ship. He had been virgin when he married: and the sex part did not mean much to him. They were so close, he and she, apart from that. And Connie exulted a little in this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's "satisfaction." Clifford anyhow was not just keen on his "satisfaction," as so many men seemed to be. No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct: one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. Though Connie did want children: if only to fortify her against her sister-in-law Emma. But early in 1918 Clifford was shipped home smashed, and there was no child. And Sir Geoffrey died of chagrin. CHAPTER II Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920. Miss Chatterley, still disgusted at her brother's defection, had departed and was living in a little flat in London.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  She cries for the father she lost years ago, for the little girl who believed that her sad mother was the only one who could love her. She mourns her inability to carry and give birth to her baby. Alice is filled with fear that she won’t be able to love her newborn, and we realize that she feels like an unlovable girl herself. “What if she doesn’t know that I’m her mother?” She wipes her tears. “What if she doesn’t love me?” There is so much pain buried inside her, sadness that she is used to covering up with irritation and anger. She doesn’t want anyone to know that just like her mother, she secretly mourns. She doesn’t want her daughter to have to experience her grief, the way she carried her mother’s grief. She knows what a burden that was on her, and she is worried that her daughter will have to live that legacy. “I TOLD ART about our session,” Alice says when she walks into my office the following week. “We had a long conversation about breastfeeding and hormones, and it’s like I had another session with him after my session with you.” She adds with a smile, “Victory. We made a decision.” Alice pulls a bottle of water from her bag. She places it on the table. “Do you notice how anxious I am?” she asks. “I want everything in place before our baby is born. And I made the decision that I won’t take hormones. One thing is crossed off my list and it’s a relief, so thank you.” “Tell me more,” I ask. “How did you make that decision?” “Suddenly, it wasn’t a hard decision to make. I told Art that I realized my wish to breastfeed was based on the fear that I wouldn’t be able to love the baby without those hormones. I told him how upsetting it was for me to realize that I doubt myself as a woman, and that under the surface this was about my feelings that my father didn’t love me. Art knows the whole story, and a lot has changed between my father and me since I met him. I think he helped me to see my father as a full person. You will appreciate this,” she says playfully. “I think I fell in love with Art when I realized how afraid he was of losing his daughter, Lili, in his divorce. Isn’t that a good psychological link?” she asks with a smile. “He was the father I never had, and I betrayed my mother for the first time when I fell in love with him,” she says.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  It was her mother’s voice, sounding like a wounded animal. Dana was gazing out the window when she heard the knock. The teacher went to open the door, and Dana saw the nurse whispering something in the teacher’s ear. They both seemed serious and then the teacher said, “Dana Goren, the nurse needs you in her office.” My mother heard her own mother yelling, sobbing, screaming, “My son, where is my son? Bring me back my son.” The whole neighborhood heard her and people came over and gathered in the house, crying and praying to God that this was all a big mistake. Suddenly, her mother was lying on the floor. Dana walked silently with the nurse to her office, and as the door opened she saw her parents. They asked her to sit next to them. “From there I don’t remember much. I remember that I didn’t really understand what was going on. Everyone was upset and I was invisible. I knew that something terrible had happened.” Dana is crying. I cry with her, and it feels as if this is the first time I have heard something so terrible, so painful, so devastating. It is the first time I have had to think about a younger sister losing her brother, and, in so many ways, it is indeed the first time I have allowed myself to imagine the unimaginable. Like my mother, I had never let myself think about that experience, to live through it or to feel it. Dana took me to a place where a family secret was buried. Not remembering allows us to keep things “far from home” and to avoid wading into territory that might otherwise be too dangerous. I went there with Dana without fully realizing where I was going, silently following her to visit a hidden grave. Dana weeps for days, for months. She cries and I sometimes cry with her, explaining to her what she is crying about, how confused and scared she is, how it makes her feel guilty and ugly and dirty. How she had watched her parents fall apart and couldn’t do anything. How she had died with her brother. Slowly, she begins to feel less overwhelmed and starts reengaging in life. During the last year of Dana’s therapy, I give birth to my third child, Mia. “She will have an older brother,” my mother cries when she hears the news. I know she remembers herself as a younger sister, and I find myself thinking about Dana. A few days later I get an email from Dana. “Welcome, baby girl,” she writes to my new daughter. “I’m writing to you, new sister, as a younger sister who has been brought back to life.”

• From The Story of My Experiments with Truth (An Autobiography) (1927)

  HOMEWARD Mr. Kallenbach had accompained me to England with a view to going to India. We were staying together and of course wanted to sail by the same boat. Germans, however, were under such strict surveillance that we had our doubts about Mr. Kallenbach getting a passport. I did my best to get it, and Mr. Roberts, who was in favour of his getting his passport, sent a cable to the Viceroy in this behalf. But straight came Lord Hardinge’s reply: ‘Regret Government of India not prepared to take any such risk.’ All of us understood the force of the reply. It was a great wrench for me to part from Mr. Kallenbach, but I could see that his pang was greater. Could he have come to India, he would have been leading today the simple happy life of a farmer and weaver. Now he is in South Africa, leading his old life and doing brisk business as an architect. We wanted a third class passage, but as there was none available on P. and O. boats, we had to go second. We took with us the dried fruit we had carried from South Africa, as most of it would not be procurable on the boat, where fresh fruit was easily available. Dr. Jivraj Mehta had bandaged my ribs with ‘Mede’s Plaster’ and had asked me not to remove it till we reached the Red Sea. For two days I put up with the discomfort, but finally it became too much for me. It was with considerable difficulty that I managed to undo the plaster and regain the liberty of having a proper wash and bath. My diet consisted mostly of nuts and fruits. I found that I was improving every day and felt very much better by the time we entered the Suez Canal. I was weak, but felt entirely out of danger, and I gradually went on increasing my

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. “There he was,” she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. “He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is true of me. I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.” And then she talked again of all that she had, through great industry, through unceasing labor, acquired in the long journey from grinding poverty. She spoke of how her children had been raised in the lap of luxury—annual ski trips, jaunts off to Europe. She said that when her daughter was studying Shakespeare in high school, she took her to England. And when her daughter got her license at sixteen, a Mazda 626 was waiting in front. I sensed some connection to this desire to give and the raw poverty of her youth. I sensed that it was all as much for her as it was for her children. She said that Prince had never taken to material things. He loved to read. He loved to travel. But when he turned twenty-three, she bought him a jeep. She had a huge purple bow put on it. She told me that she could still see him there, looking at the jeep and simply saying, Thank you, Mom. Without interruption she added, “And that was the jeep he was killed in.” After I left, I sat in the car, idle for a few minutes. I thought of all that Prince’s mother had invested in him, and all that was lost. I thought of the loneliness that sent him to The Mecca, and how The Mecca, how we, could not save him, how we ultimately cannot save ourselves. I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I’d once scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life. Perhaps they had known something terrible about the world. Perhaps they so willingly parted with the security and sanctity of the black body because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place. And all those old photographs from the 1960s, all those films I beheld of black people prostrate before clubs and dogs, were not simply shameful, indeed were not shameful at all—they were just true. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  The manuscript for Macho Sluts was assembled during the last few years of my stay (or should I say exile?) in New York City. I had moved there from San Francisco after my community and a long-term relationship fell apart. All of the gay men I’d befriended were getting sick and many had already died in what was to become the AIDS epidemic. Yes, there was a very sexy woman/boy involved who drew me to the East Coast. But once that insanely passionate affair was over, I never put down roots there. The fast-moving city was fascinating, challenging, and amazing, but I came to realize that the Bay Area was always going to be my sexual and spiritual home. I had already been through quite a bit of the Feminist Sex Wars. I’d founded a lesbian-feminist S/M support group called Samois, named after the estate of the lesbian dominatrix in the Story of O. You had to be persistent and widely-read to find any reference to BDSM between women in the late 1970s. The Story of O was one of the few classics that everybody knew about. Samois was a high-maintenance group. My lover and I built close ties to the gay men’s leather community and other friends who were bisexual women or straight players. We also had transsexual women friends. This was important to us because we wanted to know about the whole community, not just one corner of it. We saw ourselves as sex radicals who analyzed and opposed all of the ways that the larger society tried to repress Eros. That meant that we wanted more freedom for sex workers, gay men and lesbians, bisexual people, transsexuals, young people, swingers (as they were then called), etc. This broad agenda was not shared by very many feminists then, and I’m not sure it is today. Many of the women who came to Samois were separatists. The only places we could find to meet were in our own homes. The local Women’s Center refused to rent a room to us. The photographs in our hallway that depicted a polymorphously perverse range of S/M techniques and practitioners were very controversial. I was always suspect in the group because I was a sort of spokesperson for lesbian S/M, the face most identified with our cause, and frankly, because I was a leader and did so much work on its behalf. This notoriety sprang mostly from the publication of Sapphistry: The Book of Lesbian Sexuality, a sex manual I’d written and published that caused a shit storm of angry reaction because it had chapters on transsexuality, butch/femme sexuality, and S/M. The bulk of pages that dealt with vanilla sex were largely ignored. By the way, that subtitle was the publisher’s idea, not mine. I never thought one book could tell the whole story of lesbian sexuality.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  So how am I, and how are you, to understand the three decades that I spent loving dykes, living in the lesbian community, and writing about the world from a queer woman’s point of view? I know that for many people, the political stances that I took were radical only as long as they were taken by a woman. It’s commonly believed that there’s nothing radical about a man defending pornography, for example. I’m sure Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, John Rechy, John Preston, Edmund White, Alan Dershowitz, and a bunch of ACLU attorneys would agree. Anti-porn feminists are rejoicing that my gender transition invalidates the critique of their movement that I pioneered—even if no cisgendered man would take part in that debate using the language and concepts that I used. Anti-S/M feminists have frequently said that my defense of this sexuality just proves that it’s male violence—male violence that polluted the lesbian community at my instigation, as a sort of double agent of the patriarchy. This sets aside hundreds of thousands of women-born-women who make up the modern lesbian leather community. Thank goodness, whether you like what I’ve done with my life or not, you can still benefit from the work of authors like Carol Queen, Tristan Taormino, and their compatriots. The explosion of well-written, sexually explicit fiction that followed the Feminist Sex Wars is still taking place, and everybody with an open mind and some open pages is better off for it. I knew that this would happen when I decided to transition. It made the whole process many times harder than it would otherwise have been. I felt as if I were pouring gasoline on a lifetime of work and lighting it on fire. But after spending decades urging others to come out about their sexuality, to be honest about their desires, and to bring their fantasies into reality, how could I live a lie myself, just to preserve that legacy? It was a double-bind that continues to torture me. I wish I could say that I never have second thoughts, but of course I do. Any major life change requires you to pick something you’ll gain—and give up other things. I have grieved the loss of my dyke identity more bitterly than any of my readers or friends. All I can tell you is that I never intended to deceive anybody. I had no hidden agenda around seducing lesbians to accept sexual values that were secretly contaminated with maleness. I think the political debates I’ve entered and won stand on their own merits, regardless of the gender of the speaker. At every phase of my life, I’ve been as honest as I could about who I was, what motivated me, and what I intended or wanted for the important people in my life.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  ensure that the agony of Brenda’s family is refreshed on a regular basis. “The trials dragging on and on have been hard,” admits LaRae Wright, Brenda’s mother. “Some of our children have had quite a struggle. And my husband, especially. But that’s just the way it goes. We’re doing okay now. And we’re glad that Brenda’s in a better place, out of this cruel world.” “Brenda would be forty-two now,” says Betty Wright McEntire, Brenda’s older sister. “We all still miss her a lot. When they had that first trial, the prosecutors asked us not to attend. They were worried about my dad. They didn’t think he could handle it.” Immediately following the murders, detectives removed most of Brenda’s possessions from the apartment she’d shared with Allen Lafferty, as evidence. “After the police had gone through it all, they put the things they didn’t need for the investigation into a storage unit,” Betty says. “But Allen never paid the rental fee, so the storage company called, and my mother and I drove down to American Fork to take possession of Brenda’s stuff. Eventually my dad started looking through it—her journals and scrapbooks and personal items. And that’s when he fell apart. He just cried and cried. “Reading what she wrote in her journals, my dad started thinking, ‘Why didn’t I do something to save her? Why didn’t I get her out of there?’ As her father, he thought he should have been able to protect her somehow, but he couldn’t. And now his little girl was gone, and his first grandchild, too. I think he struggled with that for a long time.” Capital murder cases must inevitably proceed carefully and deliberately to avoid any chance of a wrongful execution. But the long, slow machinations of American jurisprudence have done little to ease the ongoing suffering of Brenda’s father, mother, or siblings. During the original trial back in 1985, Ron’s court-appointed attorney had attempted to mount an insanity defense, hoping for a manslaughter conviction rather than first-degree murder, but Ron had objected to such a stratagem, even though it stood a reasonable chance of saving him from the firing squad. He’d refused to allow any psychiatric testimony to be presented on his behalf. The judge on that occasion, J. Robert Bullock, was concerned that Ron might not fully comprehend the probable outcome of his refusal to consider an insanity defense, so he demanded, “You do understand, Mr. Lafferty, that you are probably leaving the jury with only two choices: to find you guilty of first-

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Oh, no, my Lady! That was only my silly cry. And I kept expecting him back. Especially at nights. I kept waking up thinking: Why he's not in bed with me!--It was as if my _feelings_ wouldn't believe he'd gone. I just felt he'd _have_ to come back and lie against me, so I could feel him with me. That was all I wanted, to feel him there with me, warm. And it took me a thousand shocks before I knew he wouldn't come back, it took me years." "The touch of him," said Connie. "That's it, my Lady! the touch of him! I've never got over it to this day, and never shall. And if there's a heaven above, he'll be there, and will lie up against me so I can sleep." Connie glanced at the handsome, brooding face in fear. Another passionate one out of Tevershall! The touch of him! For the bonds of love are ill to loose! "It's terrible, once you've got a man into your blood!" she said. "Oh, my Lady! And that's what makes you feel so bitter. You feel folks _wanted_ him killed. You feel the pit fair _wanted_ to kill him. Oh, I felt, if it hadn't been for the pit, an' them as runs the pit, there'd have been no leaving me. But they all _want_ to separate a woman and a man, if they're together." "If they're physically together," said Connie. "That's right my Lady! There's a lot of hard-hearted folks in the world. And every morning when he got up and went to th' pit, I felt it was wrong, wrong. But what else could he do? What can a man do?" A queer hate flared in the woman. "But can a touch last so long?" Connie asked suddenly. "That you could feel him so long?" "Oh my Lady, what else is there to last? Children grows away from you. But the man, well--! But even _that_ they'd like to kill in you, the very thought of the touch of him. Even your own children! Ah well! We might have drifted apart, who knows. But the feeling's something different. It's 'appen better never to care. But there, when I look at women who's never really been warmed through by a man, well, they seem to me poor dool-owls after all, no matter how they may dress up and gad. No, I'll abide by my own. I've not much respect for people." CHAPTER XII

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She went to him, saying never a word, but she thought: “ He’s dying — my Father.’ And she took his large hand in hers and stroked it, but still without speaking, because when one loves there is nothing left in the world to say, when the best belovéd lies dying. He looked at her with the pleading eyes of a dog who is dumb, but who yet asks forgiveness. And she knew that his eyes were asking for- giveness for something beyond her poor comprehension; so she nodded, and just went on stroking his hand. Mr. Hopkins asked quietly: “Where shall we take him?’ And as quietly Stephen answered: ‘ To the study.’ Then she herself led the way to the study, walking steadily, just as though nothing had happened, just as though when she got there she would find her father lolling back in his arm- chair, reading. But she thought all the while: ‘ He’s dying — my Father —’ Only the thought seemed unreal, preposterous. It seemed like the thinking of somebody else, a thing so unreal as to be preposterous. Yet when they had set him down in the study, her own voice it was that she heard giving orders. ‘ Tell Miss Puddleton to go at once to my Mother and break the news gently — I'll stay with Sir Philip. One of you please send a housemaid to me with a sponge and some towels and a basin of cold water. Burton’s gone for Doctor Evans, you say? That’s quite right. Now Pd like you to go up and fetch down a mattress, the one from the blue room will do -— get it quickly. Bring some blankets as well and a couple of pillows — and I may need a little brandy.’ They ran to obey, and before very long she had helped to lift him on to the mattress. He groaned a little, then he actually smiled as he felt her strong arms around him. She kept wiping the blood away from his mouth, and her fingers were stained; she looked at her fingers, but without comprehension — they could not be hers THE WELL OF LONELINESS 129 - like her thoughts, they must surely be somebody else’s. But now his eyes were growing more restless — he was looking for some one, he was looking for her mother. ‘ Have you told Miss Puddleton, Williams? ’ she whispered. The man nodded. Then she said: ‘ Mother’s coming, darling; you lie still,’ and her voice was softly persuasive as though she were speaking to a small, suffering child. ‘ Mother’s coming; you lie quite still, darling.’

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "I must go an' look if th' car's there." He strode over the low brambles and bracken, leaving a trail through the fern. For a minute or two he was gone. Then he came striding back. "Car's not there yet," he said. "But there's the baker's cart on t' road." He seemed anxious and troubled. "Hark!" They heard a car softly hoot as it came nearer. It slowed up on the bridge. She plunged with utter mournfulness in his track through the fern, and came to a huge holly hedge. He was just behind her. "Here! Go through there!" he said, pointing to a gap. "I shan't come out." She looked at him in despair. But he kissed her and made her go. She crept in sheer misery through the holly and through the wooden fence, stumbled down the little ditch and up into the lane, where Hilda was just getting out of the car in vexation. "Why, you're there!" said Hilda. "Where's _he_?" "He's not coming." Connie's face was running with tears as she got into the car with her little bag. Hilda snatched up the motoring helmet with the disfiguring goggles. "Put it on!" she said. And Connie pulled on the disguise, then the long motoring coat, and she sat down, a goggling, inhuman, unrecognisable creature. Hilda started the car with a business-like motion. They heaved out of the lane, and were away down the road. Connie had looked round, but there was no sight of him. Away! away! She sat in bitter tears. The parting had come so suddenly, so unexpectedly. It was like death. "Thank goodness you'll be away from him for some time!" said Hilda, turning to avoid Crosshill village. CHAPTER XVII "You see, Hilda," said Connie after lunch, when they were nearing London, "you have never known either real tenderness or real sensuality: and if you do know them, with the same person, it makes a great difference." "For mercy's sake don't brag about your experiences!" said Hilda. "I've never met the man yet who was capable of intimacy with a woman, giving himself up to her. That was what I wanted. I'm not keen on their self-satisfied tenderness, and their sensuality. I'm not content to be any man's little petsywetsy, nor his _chair à plaisir_ either. I wanted a complete intimacy, and I didn't get it. That's enough for me." Connie pondered this. Complete intimacy! She supposed that meant revealing everything concerning yourself to the other person, and his revealing everything concerning himself. But that was a bore. And all that weary self-consciousness between a man and a woman! a disease! "I think you're too conscious of yourself all the time, with everybody," she said to her sister. "I hope at least I haven't a slave nature," said Hilda. "But perhaps you have! Perhaps you are a slave to your own idea of yourself." Hilda drove in silence for some time after this piece of unheard-of insolence from that chit Connie.