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 My People (2022)

  I will also suggest, if she plans to post a birthday greeting to Nelson Mandela on her Facebook page or elsewhere, that she might do so with the words that he and his fellow freedom fighters often used when they spoke about freedom and those who fought for it—here and there: “Long live!” Postscript: Julian BondThe New Yorker AUGUST 17, 2015 The opening lyric from that old civil rights song—“Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom”—may not have been written with Julian Bond in mind, but he personified it. As a member of the Georgia House of Representatives and the Georgia Senate, as a leader of the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center, as an activist and a professor and a friend, he answered the call of justice every day. Julian passed away over the weekend, at the age of seventy-five. I will miss him terribly. He and I were children of the civil rights movement and, in a way, grew up in it together. I first met Julian in the summer of 1960, at one of the informal gatherings of the burgeoning Atlanta Student Movement. (Well, it might have been a party, which was one of the ways that the demonstrators de-stressed.) I was home in Atlanta, waiting for my desegregation lawsuit against the University of Georgia to work its way through the courts, and Julian was a rising senior at Morehouse College. Even then, his style of writing and thinking was evident in his work. In March of that year, he had helped draft an article called “An Appeal for Human Rights,” which ran as a full-page advertisement in several Atlanta-area newspapers. The document was forthright, elegant, powerful. “Today’s youth will not sit by submissively while being denied all the rights and privileges and joys of life,” it read. “We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time.” Segregation, it concluded, was “robbing not only the segregated but the segregator of his human dignity.” (As Julian made clear in 1967, when I interviewed him for “Talk of the Town,” he didn’t have much patience for embellishment. One of the hardest things about serving in the Georgia legislature, he told me then, “was getting used to the flowery language.”) Although Julian’s main brief was as a theoretician and tactician, he also spent time on the front lines. He took to heart the teachings of Ella Baker, a leader from the older generation of black activists, who, in 1960, convened the meeting from which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) emerged, with Julian as a cofounder.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  One event above all others symbolized the tragic conflict between the inherent violence of the state and Muslim ideals. After Ali’s death, the Shii had pinned their hopes on Ali’s descendants. Hasan, Ali’s elder son, came to an agreement with Muawiyyah and retired from political life. But in 680, when Muawiyyah died, he passed the caliphate to his son Yazid. For the first time, a Muslim ruler had not been elected by his peers, and there were Shii demonstrations in Kufa in favor of Husain, Ali’s younger son. This uprising was ruthlessly quashed, but Husain had already set out from Medina to Kufa, accompanied by a small band of his followers and their wives and children, convinced that the spectacle of the Prophet’s family marching to end imperial injustice would remind the ummah of its Islamic priorities. But Yazid sent out the army, and they were massacred on the plain of Karbala, outside Kufa; Husain was the last to die, holding his infant son in his arms. All Muslims lament the murder of the Prophet’s grandson, but for the Shiah, Karbala epitomized the Muslim dilemma. How could Islamic justice be realistically implemented in a belligerent imperial state? Under the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), the wars of expansion gained new momentum, and the Middle East began to assume an Islamic face. The Dome of the Rock, built by Abd al-Malik in Jerusalem in 691, was as magnificent as any of Justinian’s buildings. Yet the Umayyad economy was in trouble: it was too reliant on plunder, and its investment in public buildings was not sustainable. Umar II (r. 717–20) tried to rectify this by cutting down on state expenditure, demobilizing surplus military units, and reducing the commanders’ allowances. He knew that the dhimmis resented the jizya tax, which they alone had to pay, and that many Muslims believed this arrangement violated Quranic egalitarianism. So even though it meant a drastic loss of income, Umar II became the first caliph to encourage the conversion of the dhimmis to Islam. He did not live long enough to see his reform through, however. Hisham I (724–43), his successor, launched new military offensives in Central Asia and North Africa, but when he tried to revive the economy by reimposing the jizya, there was a massive revolt of Berber converts in North Africa.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  There was also gossip that the Apollo was involved in drug trafficking and prostitution, or that it was part of a pornography ring. In December 1972, the Scientologists were expelled from the country, leaving a trail of confusion and recrimination behind them.6 PAULETTE COOPER WAS studying comparative religion for a summer at Harvard in the late 1960s when she became interested in Scientology, which was gaining attention. “ A friend came to me and said he had joined Scientology and discovered he was Jesus Christ,” she recalled. She decided to go undercover to see what the church was about. “I didn’t like what I saw,” she said. The Scientologists she encountered seemed to be in a kind of trance. When she looked into the claims that the church was making, she found many of them false or impossible to substantiate. “I lost my parents in Auschwitz,” Cooper said, explaining her motivation in deciding to write about Scientology at a time when there had been very little published and those who criticized the church came under concentrated legal and personal attacks. A slender, soft-spoken woman, Cooper published her first article in Queen , a British magazine, in 1970. “I got death threats,” she said. The church filed suit against her. She refused to be silent. “I thought if, in the nineteen-thirties people had been more outspoken, maybe my parents would have lived.” The following year, Cooper published a book, The Scandal of Scientology , that broadly attacked the teachings of Hubbard, revealing among other things that Hubbard had misrepresented his credentials and that defectors claimed to have been financially ripped off and harassed if they tried to speak out. Soon after her book came out, Cooper received a visit from Ron and Sara Hubbard’s daughter, Alexis, who was then studying at Smith College. Cooper had demanded that Alexis bring substantial identification to prove who she was, but when she opened the door, she drew a breath. It was as if Hubbard had been reincarnated as a freckled, twenty-two-year-old woman. Alexis asked Cooper whether or not she was legitimate. In her social circle, illegitimacy was a terrible stigma. Cooper was able to show her Ron and Sara’s marriage certificate. Alexis had been to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays to visit her mother. When she returned to college, she learned that there was a man who had been waiting to see her for four days. He identified himself as an FBI agent and said he had several pages of a letter he was required to read aloud to her. The letter said that Alexis was illegitimate. It was clearly written by Hubbard. “ Your mother was with me as a secretary in Savannah in late 1948,” the letter stated. He said he had to fire Sara because she was a “ street-walker” and a Nazi spy. “ In July 1949 I was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing a movie,” the letter continues.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "But why?" I demand and am given the reason: the poor man is expiring and is no longer occupied with anyone save his God. However, he exonerates me, he gives assurance of my innocence; he expressly forbids that I be pursued; he dies. Hardly has he closed his eyes when his associate hastens to bring me the news and begs me to be easy. Alas I how could I be? how was I not to weep bitterly for the loss of a man who had so generously offered to extricate me from misery! how was I not to deplore a theft which forced me back into the wretchedness whence I had only a moment before emerged! Frightful creature! I cried; if 'tis to this your principles lead you, is it any wonder they are abhorred and that honest folk punish them! But I was arguing from the injured party's viewpoint and Dubois, who had only reaped happiness therefrom and saw nothing but her interest in what she had undertaken, Dubois, I say, had doubtless reached a very different conclusion. To Dubreuil's associate, whose name was Valbois, I divulged everything, both what had been concerted against the man we had lost and what had happened to me. He sympathized with me, most sincerely regretted Dubreuil and blamed the overly nice scruples which had prevented me from lodging a complaint instantly I had been advised of Dubois' schemes; we agreed that this monster who needed but four hours to get to another country and security would arrive there before we would be able to organize her pursuit, that to follow her would involve considerable expense, that the inn-keeper, heavily compromised by the proceedings we would launch, by defending himself with vehemence might perhaps end by having me crushed, I... who seemed to be living in Grenoble as one who had missed the gallows by a hairsbreadth. These reasons convinced me and even terrified me to the point I resolved to leave the town without even saying farewell to my protector, Monsieur S * * *. Dubreuil's friend approved the idea; he did not conceal from me that if the entire adventure were to be revealed he would be obliged to make depositions which, his precautions notwithstanding, would involve me as much by my intimacy with Dubreuil as in reason of my last outing with his friend; in the light of which he urged me to leave at once without a word to anyone, and I could be perfectly sure that, on his side, he would never take steps against me, whom he believed innocent, and, in all that had just occurred, whom he could only accuse of weakness.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  We blubbered in a wild chorus behind bobbing headlights all the way home. Maybe all my snubbing kept me from seeing clear. Or maybe, as Mother always contended, I just drove too damn fast, for when the car finally surged in the garage, there was a dull thump under the rear axle, a hollow sound like a dropped cantaloupe. I threw the car in park and crawled around in the exhaust fumes looking for what I’d hit. By the back tire on the shotgun side, there was a blood smear. It looked black as an inkblot in the red taillights. Of course, Bumper didn’t come when called. He was nowhere in evidence. Mother later believed she saw some animal’s white hindquarters slithering off into a field of saw grass and blackberries in back of the garage. But there were snakes galore in those weeds, Mother said. Maybe even nutria rats. She found him bloody and panting shallow on the back porch at dawn. She wrapped him in a lemon-colored bath towel and fetched him to the animal hospital. We only had a hundred dollars between us and planned to put him to sleep. But the vet offered to try some surgery for free. He put pins in the cat’s hips and wired his broken jaw shut. For years the doctor had heard outrageous tales in bars about this animal’s unlikely survival. The old cat might just make it.

• From Manhunt (2022)

  It pissed rain on their little assembly. The sea boomed out of sight beyond the wall. Indi, standing between Beth and Fran among those who hadn’t known Luz well, shifted from foot to aching foot as the service wore on. There’ll be no one to sketch us if this place doesn’t win, she thought as one by one the Fort Dykers shared their anecdotes and memories. This will be it, and pocket by pocket the rest of us will follow until it’s just the Cisterhood forcing little boys into their little crossdresser Hitler Youth and finding reasons to accuse each other of masculine-coded behavior. They’ll win, and they won’t even like it. Steph was talking, one fist clenched in the fabric of her skirt, the other curled between her breasts as though she were holding something delicate against herself. “When we went out fishing she used to take the bait fish out of the bucket and make them talk,” she said in a choked rush. “Wiggle them around and do a funny voice. She used to … used to…” She dissolved into sniffling sobs. Zia put an arm around her and drew her close. Others spoke. Persephone mumbled a story about Luz doing her laundry when she couldn’t get out of bed. Rachel said simply that she and Keesha never would have met if Luz hadn’t brought her to the fort. A few were silent, but most of them said something. Most of them had known this woman, dead and gone now. Indi thought with a bittersweet pang of regret that every time she’d heard the words “queer community” used like a cudgel or posited as some benevolent given, every argument she’d had about lesbian utopianism or gay communes or whether or not sex should be allowed at Pride parades— fuck you, of course it should —on one of her scrupulously locked and hidden Twitter accounts, no one had ever had any idea what that meant. Community is when you never let go of each other. Not even after you’re gone. Beth’s hand slipped into hers. She squeezed it tight. Funerals always made her want to fuck. She was already wet, her cotton boy shorts soaked through where they touched her cunt. She looked sidelong at Beth, that long jaw and crooked nose, those scars like canals running through her sunburned skin. Her sandy hair and stuck-out ears. How many times had she sewn that face back together? How many times had she held its bloody pieces in her hands and pressed them into that strong, earnest shape? I love her , she thought suddenly. Stupid. She’s what, twenty-eight? Twenty-nine? A baby. She remembered how annoyed she’d been when Fran came back with Beth in tow in the middle of a scorching summer three years before, how ugly and obnoxious she’d found Beth at first. Scared of everything.

• From The Art of Memoir

  how it happened.” (Robert Graves was in the same regiment as poet Siegfried Sassoon, and in the latter’s copy of Good-Bye to All That in the New York Public Library sit marginal notes arguing the veracity of many points Graves made.) In my house, say, the recording angels stopped regularly filling photo albums when I was about four. Certificates of divorce and marriage and death never got saved. It’s all rumor and guesswork. Mary McCarthy in Catholic Girlhood claims losing her parents had broken the chain of “collective memory” that binds the more solvent family. Without a solid history, she and her brother spent a lifetime discussing the past, bent like a pair of bloodhounds to sniff out the old trails. That ongoing dialogue helped to fuel her work for a lifetime before she set pen to paper. The very difficulties [of researching our story] have provided an incentive. As orphans, my brother Kevin and I have a burning interest in our past, which we try to reconstruct together, like two amateur archaeologists, falling on any new scrap of evidence, trying to fit it in, questioning our relations, belaboring our own memories. It has been a kind of quest. Having gone through the profound discomfort of writing from personal history, I don’t think most writers amble into this arena to cash in on some grisly past, nor to settle scores, nor to jack up every hangnail into a battlefield amputation. Truth summons them, as it summons the best novelists and poets. And it’s not only memoirists who get it wrong. “What is the novelist’s sentimentality,” Tobias Wolff once said, “—whether expressed in unearned cheer or unearned cynicism—but a lie of the heart.” Most memoirists are driven to their projects for their own deeply felt psychological reasons. As Yeats said, “Mad Ireland hurt me into poetry,” so most of us have been hurt into memoir. The memoirists I know don’t cleave to veracity so as to keep kinfolks from suing nor to avoid landing on Oprah blinking and sweating once they’re unmasked. For most, knowing the truth matters more than how they come off telling it. They’ve spent lifetimes plumbing the past—weighing, questioning, digging around

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  But I finally figured he was saying names, surnames, in fact, the ones I’d seen scrawled in the ragged address book he carried all across Europe. He was still calling those names in a whisper when the light went out of him. Mother tapped on the nursing station window, eager to announce Daddy’s miracle turnaround. But the night nurse just kept painting her nails with sheer lacquer. Whole chunks of brain function stayed intact after a stroke, she told us. Usually times that had a strong feeling attached, as D-Day would. That was also why Daddy could still cuss like a sailor. He’d stored words like “motherfucker” in the region of the brain where a man’s most basic expressions—those rising out of rage or grief or stark fear—were kept. The next morning, I brought a stack of old Life magazines I found in the back closet. Sure enough, Daddy could name a B-17 fighter plane and an M-1 rifle. On the maps, he could tell Italy from Poland, and he placed a shaky finger on the thin face of General Montgomery when I asked who’d pinned the medal on him after the Battle of the Bulge. He frowned at General Patton—“Riding crop. Mean-assed. Bad.” But when I tried to steer him from those glossy pages smoothed across his bed tray to naming the implements on that tray, he lost it. “What do you call this, Daddy?” I held up a fork. He mimed eating with his good hand. “That’s right. You eat with it, but what’s its name?” He looked off to the side, as if some invisible straight man there could confirm what a bonehead I was. After a second, though, his head’s machinery must have started to scramble. His eyes tilted up as if he were searching for the right word. Meanwhile, in my own skull I leaned hard on the right word— fork fork fork —like a mantra. His eyes flashed. The good side of his mouth warped up in a half smile. “Bacon!” he said, as if some switch had been thrown. In my best nursery school voice, I said bingo, Daddy. Being in that hospital room for half an hour at a pop took all I could muster. Not that I did anything else of value. Crawfish season had ended. My typewriter’s machinery was a well of dust. I went on a few awkward dates to cowboy bars with fellows Lecia and David scared up for me. After one such debacle, I lay awake with a wicked case of the whirlies induced by tequila, resolving to devote myself to Daddy all day, to by-God master whatever it took. Next morning, I tried shaving him. With his own daddy’s old boar-bristle brush, I lathered up his neck, which was leathery as a Christmas turkey’s. But my hand shook holding the plastic razor. It felt light and insubstantial next to his throat cords.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  out, she finally decided, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that she would send me at least to England, having succeeded through the good offices of one of her theatrical friends in getting my name put down for one of the few children’s transports leaving Prague for London during those months. Vera remembered, said Austerlitz, that the happy excitement Agata felt at this first successful outcome of her efforts was overshadowed by her grief and anxiety as she imagined how I would feel, a boy not yet five years old who had always led a sheltered life, on my long railway journey and then among strangers in a foreign country. On the other hand, said Vera, Agata hoped that now the first step had been taken, some way for her to leave too would surely be found quite quickly, and then you could all be together in Paris. So she was torn between wishful thinking and her fear that she was doing something irresponsible and unforgivable, and who knows, Vera said to me, whether she might not have kept you with her after all had there been just a few more days left before you were to set off from Prague. I have only an indistinct, rather blurred picture of the moment of farewell at the Wilsonova Station, said Vera, adding, after a few moments’ reflection, that I had my things with me in a little leather suitcase, and food for the journey in a rucksack—un petit sac a dos avec quelques viatiques, said Austerlitz, those had been Vera’s exact words, summing up, as he now thought, the whole of his later life. Vera also remembered the twelve-year-old girl with the bandoneon to whose care they had entrusted me, a Charlie Chaplin comic bought at the last minute, the fluttering of white handkerchiefs like a flock of doves taking off into the air as the parents who were staying behind waved to their children, and her curious impression that the train, after moving off very slowly, had not really left at all, but in a kind of feint had rolled a little way out of the glazed hall before sinking into the ground. But from that day on Agata was a changed woman, Vera continued, said Austerlitz. What she had preserved of her cheerfulness and confidence, in defiance of all difficulties, was now overcast by a depression which she was clearly unable to dispel. I think she did make one more attempt to buy her freedom, said Vera, but after that she almost never left the building, she shrank from opening the windows, she would sit motionless for hours in the blue velvet armchair in the darkest corner of the drawing room, or lie on the sofa with her hands over her face. She was simply waiting to see what happened next, and above all she was waiting for post from England and Paris. She had several addresses for Maximilian—a hotel in the rue de l’Odéon, a small rented flat near the Glaciére Métro station, and a third place, said Vera, in a district I no longer remember—and she tormented herself by wondering whether at some crucial moment she had mixed up these addresses, so that it was her own fault if her correspondence had gone astray, while at the

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The definitive icon of Western Christianity is the image of a crucified man in an extremity of agony. It is an emblem of the cruelty that human beings have inflicted on one another from time immemorial. But it is also a pain that redeems the world. The Western Christian doctrine of atonement—one not held by the Greek Orthodox—is sometimes difficult to understand: it is hard to imagine how a compassionate God would demand such suffering as the price of our salvation. But the French philosopher Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142) suggested an alternative: when we look at the crucifix, our hearts break in sympathy and fellow feeling—and it is this interior movement of compassion and instinctive empathy that saves us. The ancient Greeks, founders of the Western rational tradition, had a uniquely tragic view of life. Each year on the festival of Dionysus, god of transformation, the leading playwrights of Athens presented tragic trilogies in a drama competition, which every citizen was obliged to attend. The plays usually dramatized one of the old myths adapted to reflect the problems and situation of the city that year. This event was both a spiritual exercise and a civic meditation, which put suffering onstage and compelled the audience to empathize with men and women struggling with impossible decisions and facing up to the disastrous consequences of their actions. The Greeks came to the plays in order to weep together, convinced that the sharing of grief strengthened the bond of citizenship and reminded each member of the audience that he was not alone in his personal sorrow. In his trilogy Oresteia, Aeschylus (525–456 BCE) showed that suffering was not only built into human experience but indispensable to the quest for wisdom. The three tragedies depict a seemingly unstoppable cycle of revenge killing. In the first play, Clytemnestra murders her husband, King Agamemnon, to avenge the death of their daughter; then the saga continues with the story of their son, Orestes, who slays his mother to avenge his father; the trilogy concludes with Orestes’ headlong flight from the Erinyes (also known as the Furies), the terrifying gods of the underworld who would hound a transgressor like a pack of wild dogs until he atoned for his sin with a horrible death. Suffering was a law of life, the chorus reminds the audience, but it was also the path to wisdom: Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again, and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints (2023)

  14 Kateri Tekakwitha: Mohawk Ascetic K ateri Tekakwitha’s short life encompassed a period of immense change among her people, the Mohawk. She is known today primarily through the accounts of French Jesuit missionaries who gathered testimony from her companions and family members. However, they saw through a European lens and wrote with a European audience in mind. In doing so, they misrepresented important periods in Tekakwitha’s life. By carefully examining her life and keeping her hagiographers’ own prejudices closely in mind, you can better understand Tekakwitha’s journey through a shifting cultural and religious landscape. Allan Greer, in his seminal work on Tekakwitha, Mohawk Saint, has done an excellent job of peeling back these layers and filling in details of the saint’s life from historians’ knowledge about Haudenosaunee customs and society. This lecture owes a great deal to his work. 103 14. Kateri Tekakwitha: Mohawk Ascetic Tekakwitha’s World In the mid-17th century, the area we know today as upstate New York and the Canadian border was very much in flux, caught between the French to the northeast, the Dutch and English to the south, and a variety of tribal nations with their own alliances and enmities. The Mohawk were the easternmost tribe of the Haudenosaunee, also known as the Five Nations or the Iroquois: a confederacy made up of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca tribes. Tekakwitha was born in 1656, in the village of Caughnawaga, the easternmost village in the Mohawk territories. They had more frequent contact with trading posts and European settlements, and they were also more vulnerable to attack, both from their long-standing friction with the Algonquins and as wars between the French and British drew in native allies. Because of this, Caughnawaga lost its people at a high rate and adopted a correspondingly high rate of captives to replace them. Tekakwitha’s mother was one such captive. She was an Algonquin woman and had lived near a French settlement for some time—enough to become familiar with Catholicism and be baptized herself. It’s possible that she passed some of her beliefs on to her small daughter before dying in the great smallpox outbreak of 1661 to 1663, which also took Tekakwitha’s father and brother. Tekakwitha herself survived the disease, but it left her with scars and weakened eyesight. The Haudenosaunee approach to child-rearing would have ensured Tekakwitha enjoyed a stable and loving childhood despite her losses, guided by the many aunts and other maternal figures of her longhouse. Girls were especially treasured, since longhouses and clan affiliations were marked through the mother’s family. When Tekakwitha was 11, her community relocated to a new village site. There was a small chapel, although scholars estimate only perhaps 8% of the village was baptized Christian converts—and most of these were assimilated captives who had been born into tribes with larger Christian populations, as Tekakwitha’s mother had. 104

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Epilogue: Garland EPILOGUE: GARLAND Beth fell asleep that night as soon as her head hit the pillow, and when she woke thrashing, half-tangled in the sheets, and began at once to sob, Indi stirred from her own exhausted sleep and held her, her tears falling hot onto Beth’s brow and cheek. They kissed and Beth thought how good the fine, dark stubble on Indi’s upper lip felt against her mouth, how right her salty tears were as they dissolved into her saliva. “You taste like licorice,” Indi whispered. The ocean of that soft, fat body in her arms, clawing for release, and afterward her own voice, muffled and congested in the dark. Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. Robbie couldn’t sleep. By the wrecked wing of the caretaker’s house he sat among the dead. There were others around him. They clung to the bodies covered in sheets, whispering in grief-choked voices, keening low and urgent. A woman he didn’t know screamed and beat her head against the muddy earth. There were still men out there in the night, but there were guards on the wall and floodlights bathing the forest verge and the wrecked trucks and bodies in their sodium-white glare. It was safe to feel the day, now. He gripped Fran’s hand where it stuck out from beneath the bloody sheet someone had used to cover her. Are you leaving? she’d asked, standing there in her nightgown in Indi’s backyard. He closed his eyes, crying now in silent, gulping sobs. I don’t want you to. Beth crossed the lawn just after sunrise. The others were burning the dead men and TERFs, dumping kerosene on stacks of bodies. By the sea wall, a few Legion survivors sat huddled together under armed guard, uniforms crusted with blood and salt, faces scratched, bruised, cut. Robbie had come to get her not long after dawn. One of the prisoners wanted to talk to her, he’d said. The one Fran had fucked. Zia and some of the others had found Ramona Pierce shot up and half-drowned by the rising tide, a hole in her head, and brought her into the custodian’s house, thinking to let her die in comfort. Instead, impossibly, she’d lived. She lay on a narrow canvas cot in the surviving part of the house, Robbie’s gray tom curled up in the crook of her arm. “You look good,” Beth joked from the doorway to the living room, beyond which she didn’t feel like stepping. “I’m sorry,” croaked the pale girl in the cot. The scabbed-over bullet hole in her skull looked like someone had used one of those hydraulic cow-slaughtering things on her. Stupid fucking tattoos. Dumbass septum piercing. She paused to take a labored breath. “Are you the one … one I shot? The woods, off the highway…” Beth tapped her scar, a funny ringing in her ears. “That’s me. You have something you want to say?” “This place,” Ramona wheezed. “It’s … I don’t know.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  He slaps the table hard with the flat of his palm so whiskey sloshes and the monkey tips over. “Goddammit. It’s Christmas,” Ben says. He sets the monkey back up straight, but doesn’t turn it on. Everybody settles back into listening. “I was sleeping out on the porch when I heard something up on the roof. A coon or something, I figured at first. So I drift back off. Pretty soon I heard the old lady get up. ‘Pete, he’s climbing again.’ Sure enough, we go outside, and there he was on the peak of that roof. Looking up the branches of a old long-needled pine like he’s got something treed in it. He looks down over the gutters at me with that old hat on his head and says, ‘You tell him to git down first.’” Daddy jerks his thumb up at the top of that invisible pine tree. “Who’d he think was up there?” Cooter says. “Ain’t no way to tell. Just somebody he thought up, I reckon. The old lady had gone in the house to get some honeycomb. She could coax him down with that pretty good. Most times. I got the ladder and started up. I just got high enough to make out the buttons on the back of his drawers and the sweat-stains around the band of that hat—they was a moon out—when Poppa started talking again.” Daddy stares up at the light fixture where the moths flicker around. His face twists into a mask of his daddy’s face. It’s Cherokee Irish and mean as a snake: “‘Haul your goddamn feathered ass off my land. Boy, go git my gun.’ And them’s the last words he spoke. He stomped on a rotted beam and fell straight through the roof. So skinny he didn’t even make a hole big enough for his head. Else he twisted going down. It caught him up under the jaws. And there he hung. Time I got up to him, he was gone. Just staring up the tree branches with his tongue all poked out. That silly-assed hat setting on his head.” Daddy taps a Camel on the tabletop for punctuation. Tap tap tap. Those taps are his way of saying The End. “That’s sure a awful way to go,” Ben says. “Ain’t no good way,” Shug says. “Sorry you had to be there, Pete. With you momma and all.” Shug knows better than to look at Daddy when he’s saying something this nice. There are shrugs all around, like saying something nice is water you have to rise out of and let slip off your shoulders. What’s rolling around in my head at this time is all the dying and near dying I’ve run into lately. I can picture Grandma the way I found her all slack-jawed in the bed, then Lecia glassy-eyed on the sand.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  “I’d tell myself the kids would show up next week, or my parents would track them down soon as they could find a detective to hire. Everybody who could do anything was off in the war.” She took a studio apartment in Manhattan and signed up for night classes in painting at the Art Students League, after which she drank till blackout. Days, she worked hungover at the labs. Six months after the kids disappeared, Mother’s daddy dropped dead unexpectedly. “Cerebral hemorrhage,” the death certificate read. The call came in to Bell Labs while she happened to be at the switchboard, filling in for a friend who’d gone to the women’s room. Mother felt awkward accepting the call for herself from the operator. Then the very dry voice of her aunt Audrey came worming through Mother’s headset, right into her ear. “Your daddy passed away last night,” it said, and Mother responded by yanking all the cords she could lay hold to from the switchboard, grabbing wires with both hands and just pulling blind, so every call hooked through that switchboard broke off suddenly into the monochromatic hum of dial tone. Mother got a Defense Department waiver to ride trains to Texas for the funeral. But troops bumped her off in Chicago, where she was stuck for days. Bumped again in Amarillo, she hitched a ride with a truck driver who carried her to the aunt’s white-picket fence. Grandma Moore had slipped into something like madness. She’d locked herself in the back pantry where they shelved canned peaches and dusty jars of chowchow. Mother peeked in, and Grandma looked up from her lace shuttle, her face on its delicate bones showing not the least surprise. “Everybody’s saying your daddy’s dead, Charlie Marie.” She’d been doing a floral pattern and went back to it. Her lips pursed. “But he isn’t dead. He’s just real, real cold.” Mother remembered the dry sound of silk thread sliding through, the knot creating a perfect clump of lilac on a lace branch. In the parlor, the fair-haired aunts were nonplussed by Grandma Moore’s decline. They were crisis vultures. “Somebody else’s trouble just thrilled them to death,” Mother told me. After supper, they hid from their husbands to smoke out on the gazebo. Mother was bringing out glasses of fresh lemonade when she overheard what must have been the family wisdom on her loss of those children. “Charlie Marie must have done something awful to run that man off,” one said. “And him taking the babies,” another said. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” piped in a third. The kids were found wholly by chance long after the funeral, when Mother had gone back to New York and Grandma Moore had returned to her version of sanity. My grandmother was finishing an egg cream from the wrought-iron chair of a Lubbock drugstore when her insurance man stopped by. He asked about my mother’s whole-life premium, which had gone unpaid for some time.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  He was dirty and smelled like crude oil when he hugged Lecia and me, one under each arm. Our principal didn’t pause, though, before shaking his hand, didn’t even dig out his hankie to wipe the oil off his palm after he shook. He was partial to white starched shirts, but knew when to set that aside. While Uncle Frank backed out, Daddy and Lecia and I stood together a minute at the head of the driveway waving bye-bye. I remember leaning across the front of his blue work shirt to tell Lecia that was some good crying she did, to which she lowered the paper towel so I could finally see her face. It was like a coarse brown curtain dropping to show a mask entirely different than the grinning one I’d expected. Her eyes and nose were red and her mouth was twisted up and slobbery. All of a sudden, I knew she wasn’t faking it, the grief I mean. It cut something out of me to see her hurt. And it put some psychic yardage between us that I was so far from sad and she was so deep in it. It must have pissed Lecia off too, somehow, that gap between her misery and my relief. Later that evening, Daddy was frying up a chicken, and she chased me down over something mean I’d said about Grandma. She was fast even then (in junior high, she would run anchor on the four-forty relay), so I didn’t make it a half turn around the yard before she caught me by the back collar and yanked me down from behind. The collar choked off my windpipe, and the fall knocked the breath out of me. Before I knew what hit me, she had me down on my back in the spiky St. Augustine grass. She sat on my chest with her full weight. Her knees dug into the ball sockets of both my shoulders. She said take it back. I sucked up enough wind to say I wouldn’t. I tried bucking my pelvis up to throw her off. Then I tried flinging my legs up to wrap around her shoulders, but she had me nailed. Still I wouldn’t take it back. All I had to fight back with was my stubbornness (which I’d built up by being a smart mouth and getting my ass whipped a lot). I never actually won a stand-up fight, with Lecia or anybody. Hence my tendency to sneak up blindside somebody weeks after the fact. But I could sure as hell provoke one and then drag it out by not giving in. I took a warped sort of pride in this, though I can see now it’s a pitiful thing to be proud of—being able to take an ass-stomping. I don’t know how long she had me pinned. Her knees dug twin bruises in my shoulders.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  The smell had seeped into the letters and endures there—damp paper, and gun oil, and chalk from the edges of a puzzling cedar box, which we eventually figured out was a turkey call. (Its lid, held in place by a wooden peg at one end, gives a jagged gobble when you slide it back and forth across the chalked edges of the box.) He kept his Colt pistol wrapped in a flesh-colored chamois cloth. Though he’d preached to me about the dangers of loaded weapons when I first learned to shoot, I found a single bullet in the firing chamber, which to this day I don’t believe he’d left there by accident. He was too careful for that. He put the bullet in there deliberately, for a reason I would today give a lot to know. Whose face was floating in your mind, Daddy, yours or some other’s, when you snapped the chamber into place and after some thought, perhaps, put the safety on? Even if I’d had the wherewithal to ask this question before his death, he would have probably answered with a shrug, staring into a cloud of Camel smoke. Maybe he would have started a story about his first squirrel gun, or a lecture about how much to lead a mallard with a shotgun before you picked it off. Like most people, he lied best by omission, and what he didn’t want you to know there was no point asking about. The envelopes are smudged with gun oil that’s turned the army-issue paper a transparent gray in spots. After the Normandy invasion, the envelopes are of uniform size, dated weekly with few exceptions. The story had it that my father’s mother had written his commanding officer complaining that she hadn’t heard from Daddy since he’d been shipped overseas. So Captain Pearse, a blueeyed West Point grad who would eventually arrange to have my father offered a battlefield commission, ordered him to write her every Sunday. On the seal you can see the young man’s mark, “Capt. P.,” his matter-of-fact block print the opposite of Daddy’s wobbly scrawl. Daddy’s hands always shook, so maybe he was himself some form of Nervous and just hid it better than most. The envelopes have no stamps, just the black cancellation mark of the army postal service, and the ones dated after 1944 have “Passed by the Base Censors” in one corner. The censors have razored out some words, leaving oblong slots in the pages where Daddy had tried dropping hints of his whereabouts to folks back home. The tone of the letters progresses from the early farm-boy bragging to a soldier’s gravity: “I gess you will faint when I tell you I saw [blank] a few days ago and today I ran into some of his outfit and they said he’d [blank]. I sure hated to hear it. Plese tell his Daddy that I cut his name on a piss elum tree right where it happened near the [blank] River.

• From My People (2022)

  Even my husband, a great physical specimen who is obsessive about his weight and otherwise diligent about his health, wondered aloud as we were driving somewhere recently why it seemed to him that more men were passing and leaving behind women who suddenly had to manage alone. Women like our dear friend Barbara Edelin, who was steadfast in her support of her husband of thirty-six years through each debilitating state of his health and who, along with him, planned the service to which we were now flying. So as I sat in the chapel waiting for the service to begin, I thought about the things I had begun to think about—silly things like what would become of my closetful of shoes, but more seriously, how I should live what days I have left that will leave something for which to be remembered. But before I could go there again, the service began, and for the next two hours, elevating, as well as instructive, reflections came from friends who knew Edelin in all of his incarnations. Deval Patrick, the boyish-looking governor of Massachusetts, was the first to give reflections. He remembered a man who was subjected to what he called “a nasty prosecution” in 1975 over a late-term abortion that he performed on a seventeen-year-old that eventually led to an acquittal and a landmark ruling on reproductive rights—and Edelin’s designation as a hero of the women’s movement. Giving a brief summary of Edelin’s pioneering career, the governor recalled that Edelin was the first black chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston City Hospital, the chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department at the Boston University School of Medicine, gynecologist in chief at Boston University Hospital, a dean at Boston University, a crusader against health disparities when we had few, and a mentor for a generation of health care professionals who learned from his work and his example. The governor went on to speak of a man with a “twinkle in his eye, as if he was anticipating, or even hoping for, some mischief, and that warm, almost shy smile. Ken was a loving man—as a husband, father, grandfather, friend . . . and leader.” But in his closing line, the governor set a tone and a theme that was to be repeated by those who followed, summarizing the essential core of a life well lived, saying of Edelin: “He was a man of justice, importantly—not because he had set out on a crusade, but because justice is what love looks like out in the open.” Each speaker—from the president of Planned Parenthood to the NAACP LDF executives who spoke of Edelin’s commitment to the board—inspired with words that grabbed at the heart and the mind. And there was a little bit of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” with words that had as much meaning, in a different way, as they had when Gaye himself sang, “Brother, brother, brother.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  There was much hand-wringing on the part of my grandmother Moore. She had injured her female parts somehow during Mother’s birth and couldn’t bear any other children. Nevertheless, about suppertime, Grandma got cheered by an idea. Like my mother after her, Grandma drew some parcel of relief from busy-ness. She recovered enough enthusiasm about the future to wash Mother’s hair and hard-comb it dry, after which she summoned the town photographer. If Charlie Marie was going to die, she said, then they’d better hurry up and get a picture of her for a keepsake. My grandfather threatened to leave if my grandmother took that sick child outside just to get enough light for a photograph, but Grandma had her jaw set. So it was that my mother’s fevered two-year-old self was stuffed in a bright red coat and propped out on the open front porch on a freezing January afternoon. Mother said that she saw the whole sky through a gray curtain. She remembered the wind blowing full tilt at her from the west like a wide white hand of hard air slapping toward her face. There were no breaks or hills to interrupt the wind from its long slide off the northern Rockies. It hit her from across a thousand miles of flat-assed nothing. In the foreground you can see a spotted cat appear to rub its hind parts on Mother’s shins. This gives the whole picture an aspect of haste. Mother doesn’t smile. She said that she didn’t feel like she was fixing to die or anything, only that a wooziness made her want to lie down but people kept standing her up. What made this story endure in our family is that it ends in a miracle. When the preacher arrived the next morning, dressed in his freshly brushed black coat and ready to give comfort, Mother was sitting upright in bed rolling up rag dolls from old quilt scraps and still sucking whiskey off the rock candy her daddy had gone into town to buy her at the crack of dawn. Grandma liked to say later that it was the fresh air that healed her. Our only visit to my grandmother’s house in Lubbock is seared into memory for me by Mother’s first serious threat to divorce Daddy. I don’t remember what they fought about that morning, only that at some point she chucked a pot of oatmeal against the yellow kitchen tiles, grabbed her straw purse, and pulled us out to the car without even bothering to change us out of our pajamas. I do remember that before Lecia would agree to go into Stuckey’s for breakfast, Mother had to buy us new dresses. (Even then, my sister had a sense of propriety I lacked: if I wet my underpants playing, back then, I just stepped out of them and kept running.) Somewhere past Dallas that afternoon, we stopped again for a paper bag full of fifteen-cent burgers.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  My father, who had received a maim on his limbs, that disabled him from following the more laborious branches of country drudgery, got, by making nets, a scanty subsistence, which was not much enlarged by my mother’s keeping a little day-school for the girls in her neighborhood. They had had several children; but none lived to any age except myself, who had received from nature a constitution perfectly healthy. My education, till past fourteen, was no better than very vulgar: reading, or rather spelling, an illegible scrawl, and a little ordinary plain work, composed the whole system of it; and then all my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice, and the shy timidity general to our sex, in the tender age of life, when objects alarm or frighten more by their novelty than anything else. But then, this is a fear too often cured at the expense of innocence, when Miss, by degrees, begins no longer to look on a man as a creature of prey that will eat her. My poor mother had divided her time so entirely between her scholars and her little domestic cares, that she had spared very little to my instruction, having, from her own innocence from all ill, no hint or thought of guarding me against any. I was now entering on my fifteenth year, when the worst of ills befell me in the loss of my fond, tender parents, who were both carried off by the small-pox, within a few days of each other; my father dying first, and thereby by hastening the death of my mother: so that I was now left an unhappy friendless orphan (for my father’s coming to settle there, was accidental, he being originally a Kentisrman). That cruel distemper which had proved so fatal to them, had indeed seized me, but with such mild and favourable symptoms, that I was presently out of danger, and what then I did not know the value of, was entirely unmarked I skip over here an account of the natural grief and affliction which I felt on this melancholy occasion. A little time, and the giddiness of that age, dissipated too soon my reflections on that irreparable loss; but nothing contributed more to reconcile me to it, than the notions that were immediately put into my head, of going to London, and looking out for a service, in which I was promised all assistance and advice from one Esther Davis, a young woman that had beer down to see her friends, and who, after the stay of a few days, was returned to her place.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  And I think Randy would probably agree with me. Or maybe he would argue with me. Maybe he’d be right to argue. After all, as I think about our Little League two-punch fight, I think I might have overreacted to Randy’s teasing. But, hey, I had been chronically bullied. I did have the grade school PTSD of a battered kid. So maybe I had been reflexively conditioned to meet any aggression, however mild, moderate, or wild, with my own aggression. I don’t know for sure. I will never know for sure. Because on December 8, 2016, Randy J. Peone died in a car wreck on a narrow two-lane highway north of Spokane, Washington. He was not intoxicated. The roads were clean and clear. The sky was blue. Visibility was good. Rowdy was alone in his car, so nobody knows for sure why he drifted across the center line and struck a car in the opposite lane. One of his brothers suspects that Randy might have been distracted by his phone. He liked to text and drive. The other drivers were hospitalized for their injuries but survived. There were also three children in the other cars, but they were not injured. Randy sustained massive head and internal injuries and died that night without ever regaining consciousness. He had not been wearing his seat belt. In 2016, what kind of foolish, impulsive, and risk-embracing idiot refuses to wear his seat belt? Come on, Randy! What were you thinking? I did not receive the news about Randy’s death until the next morning. I had been writing and, as usual, ignoring my cell phone. But then my sister called my home landline at the same moment Randy’s sister-in-law sent an urgent e-mail. I immediately called Randy’s sister-in-law, and she told me the terrible news. I had not spoken to Randy in many years. I had not seen him in an even longer period. But I was instantly transported back in time, and I wept and wailed like a twelve-year-old boy whose best friend had just died. I was Sherman Alexie Jr., mourning the sudden death of Randy Peone. And I was Arnold Spirit Jr., mourning the sudden death of Rowdy. My real and fictional lives blended in torturous ways. “Oh my God,” I said to his sister-in-law. “I loved him. I loved him. I loved him.”