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 Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  It amused her to observe that all her friends seemed determined to send her to Delaford;—a place, in which, of all others, she would now least chuse to visit, or wish to reside; for not only was it considered as her future home by her brother and Mrs. Jennings, but even Lucy, when they parted, gave her a pressing invitation to visit her there. Very early in April, and tolerably early in the day, the two parties from Hanover Square and Berkeley Street set out from their respective homes, to meet, by appointment, on the road. For the convenience of Charlotte and her child, they were to be more than two days on their journey, and Mr. Palmer, travelling more expeditiously with Colonel Brandon, was to join them at Cleveland soon after their arrival. Marianne, few as had been her hours of comfort in London, and eager as she had long been to quit it, could not, when it came to the point, bid adieu to the house in which she had for the last time enjoyed those hopes, and that confidence, in Willoughby, which were now extinguished for ever, without great pain. Nor could she leave the place in which Willoughby remained, busy in new engagements, and new schemes, in which she could have no share, without shedding many tears. Elinor’s satisfaction, at the moment of removal, was more positive. She had no such object for her lingering thoughts to fix on, she left no creature behind, from whom it would give her a moment’s regret to be divided for ever, she was pleased to be free herself from the persecution of Lucy’s friendship, she was grateful for bringing her sister away unseen by Willoughby since his marriage, and she looked forward with hope to what a few months of tranquility at Barton might do towards restoring Marianne’s peace of mind, and confirming her own. Their journey was safely performed. The second day brought them into the cherished, or the prohibited, county of Somerset, for as such was it dwelt on by turns in Marianne’s imagination; and in the forenoon of the third they drove up to Cleveland. Cleveland was a spacious, modern-built house, situated on a sloping lawn. It had no park, but the pleasure-grounds were tolerably extensive; and like every other place of the same degree of importance, it had its open shrubbery, and closer wood walk, a road of smooth gravel winding round a plantation, led to the front, the lawn was dotted over with timber, the house itself was under the guardianship of the fir, the mountain-ash, and the acacia, and a thick screen of them altogether, interspersed with tall Lombardy poplars, shut out the offices.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  With strong concern, and with many reproaches for not being called to their aid, did Mrs. Jennings hear in the morning of what had passed. Her former apprehensions, now with greater reason restored, left her no doubt of the event; and though trying to speak comfort to Elinor, her conviction of her sister’s danger would not allow her to offer the comfort of hope. Her heart was really grieved. The rapid decay, the early death of a girl so young, so lovely as Marianne, must have struck a less interested person with concern. On Mrs. Jennings’s compassion she had other claims. She had been for three months her companion, was still under her care, and she was known to have been greatly injured, and long unhappy. The distress of her sister too, particularly a favourite, was before her;—and as for their mother, when Mrs. Jennings considered that Marianne might probably be to her what Charlotte was to herself, her sympathy in her sufferings was very sincere. Mr. Harris was punctual in his second visit;—but he came to be disappointed in his hopes of what the last would produce. His medicines had failed;—the fever was unabated; and Marianne only more quiet—not more herself—remained in a heavy stupor. Elinor, catching all, and more than all, his fears in a moment, proposed to call in further advice. But he judged it unnecessary: he had still something more to try, some more fresh application, of whose success he was as confident as the last, and his visit concluded with encouraging assurances which reached the ear, but could not enter the heart of Miss Dashwood. She was calm, except when she thought of her mother; but she was almost hopeless; and in this state she continued till noon, scarcely stirring from her sister’s bed, her thoughts wandering from one image of grief, one suffering friend to another, and her spirits oppressed to the utmost by the conversation of Mrs. Jennings, who scrupled not to attribute the severity and danger of this attack to the many weeks of previous indisposition which Marianne’s disappointment had brought on. Elinor felt all the reasonableness of the idea, and it gave fresh misery to her reflections.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “You have probably entirely forgotten a conversation—(it is not to be supposed that it could make any impression on you)—a conversation between us one evening at Barton Park—it was the evening of a dance—in which I alluded to a lady I had once known, as resembling, in some measure, your sister Marianne.” “Indeed,” answered Elinor, “I have not forgotten it.” He looked pleased by this remembrance, and added, “If I am not deceived by the uncertainty, the partiality of tender recollection, there is a very strong resemblance between them, as well in mind as person. The same warmth of heart, the same eagerness of fancy and spirits. This lady was one of my nearest relations, an orphan from her infancy, and under the guardianship of my father. Our ages were nearly the same, and from our earliest years we were playfellows and friends. I cannot remember the time when I did not love Eliza; and my affection for her, as we grew up, was such, as perhaps, judging from my present forlorn and cheerless gravity, you might think me incapable of having ever felt. Hers, for me, was, I believe, fervent as the attachment of your sister to Mr. Willoughby and it was, though from a different cause, no less unfortunate. At seventeen she was lost to me for ever. She was married—married against her inclination to my brother. Her fortune was large, and our family estate much encumbered. And this, I fear, is all that can be said for the conduct of one, who was at once her uncle and guardian. My brother did not deserve her; he did not even love her. I had hoped that her regard for me would support her under any difficulty, and for some time it did; but at last the misery of her situation, for she experienced great unkindness, overcame all her resolution, and though she had promised me that nothing—but how blindly I relate! I have never told you how this was brought on. We were within a few hours of eloping together for Scotland. The treachery, or the folly, of my cousin’s maid betrayed us. I was banished to the house of a relation far distant, and she was allowed no liberty, no society, no amusement, till my father’s point was gained. I had depended on her fortitude too far, and the blow was a severe one—but had her marriage been happy, so young as I then was, a few months must have reconciled me to it, or at least I should not have now to lament it. This however was not the case. My brother had no regard for her; his pleasures were not what they ought to have been, and from the first he treated her unkindly. The consequence of this, upon a mind so young, so lively, so inexperienced as Mrs. Brandon’s, was but too natural. She resigned herself at first to all the misery of her situation; and happy had it been if she had not lived to overcome those regrets which the remembrance of me occasioned. But can we wonder that, with such a husband to provoke inconstancy, and without a friend to advise or restrain her (for my father lived only a few months after their marriage, and I was with my regiment in the East Indies) she should fall? Had I remained in England, perhaps—but I meant to promote the happiness of both by removing from her for years, and for that purpose had procured my exchange. The shock which her marriage had given me,” he continued, in a voice of great agitation, “was of trifling weight—was nothing to what I felt when I heard, about two years afterwards, of her divorce. It was that which threw this gloom,—even now the recollection of what I suffered—”

• From The City of God

  [1269] Terent. Adelph. v. 4. [1270] Eunuch, i. 1. [1271] In Verrem, ii. 1. 15. [1272] Matt. x. 36. Chapter 6. --Of the Error of Human Judgments When the Truth is Hidden. What shall I say of these judgments which men pronounce on men, and which are necessary in communities, whatever outward peace they enjoy? Melancholy and lamentable judgments they are, since the judges are men who cannot discern the consciences of those at their bar, and are therefore frequently compelled to put innocent witnesses to the torture to ascertain the truth regarding the crimes of other men. What shall I say of torture applied to the accused himself? He is tortured to discover whether he is guilty, so that, though innocent, he suffers most undoubted punishment for crime that is still doubtful, not because it is proved that he committed it, but because it is not ascertained that he did not commit it. Thus the ignorance of the judge frequently involves an innocent person in suffering. And what is still more unendurable--a thing, indeed, to be bewailed, and, if that were possible, watered with fountains of tears--is this, that when the judge puts the accused to the question, that he may not unwittingly put an innocent man to death, the result of this lamentable ignorance is that this very person, whom he tortured that he might not condemn him if innocent, is condemned to death both tortured and innocent. For if he has chosen, in obedience to the philosophical instructions to the wise man, to quit this life rather than endure any longer such tortures, he declares that he has committed the crime which in fact he has not committed. And when he has been condemned and put to death, the judge is still in ignorance whether he has put to death an innocent or a guilty person, though he put the accused to the torture for the very purpose of saving himself from condemning the innocent; and consequently he has both tortured an innocent man to discover his innocence, and has put him to death without discovering it. If such darkness shrouds social life, will a wise judge take his seat on the bench or no? Beyond question he will. For human society, which he thinks it a wickedness to abandon, constrains him and compels him to this duty. And he thinks it no wickedness that innocent witnesses are tortured regarding the crimes of which other men are accused; or that the accused are put to the torture, so that they are often overcome with anguish, and, though innocent, make false confessions regarding themselves, and are punished; or that, though they be not condemned to die, they often die during, or in consequence of, the torture; or that sometimes the accusers, who perhaps have been prompted by a desire to benefit society by bringing criminals to justice, are themselves condemned through the ignorance of the judge, because they are unable to prove the truth of their accusations though they are true, and because the witnesses lie, and the accused endures the torture without being moved to confession. These numerous and important evils he does not consider sins; for the wise judge does these things, not with any intention of doing harm, but because his ignorance compels him, and because human society claims him as a judge. But though we therefore acquit the judge of malice, we must none the less condemn human life as miserable. And if he is compelled to torture and punish the innocent because his office and his ignorance constrain him, is he a happy as well as a guiltless man? Surely it were proof of more profound considerateness and finer feeling were he to recognize the misery of these necessities, and shrink from his own implication in that misery; and had he any piety about him, he would cry to God "From my necessities deliver Thou me. " [1273]

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

  The streetlights glowed faintly like distant moons. The streets were empty and eerily quiet, as if the whole world had died, not only my father in that dim oxygenated room on the terminal ward of the Medical Center in New York. During the week after my father’s death, I stayed at my mother’s house. Most of the time she was sedated against her frenzied and awful grief, and Helen and I handled the flow of people passing through the house. Phyllis was married and expecting her second child in two weeks, and could only attend the funeral. She lent me a dark grey coat to wear to the church. During the week, I fought hard to remind myself that I was now a stranger in this house. But it did give me a new perspective on my mother. There had only been one human being whom she had ever entertained upon the earth as her equal; this was my father, and now he was dead. I saw the desolate loneliness that this exclusiveness had won her, and against which she only occasionally closed her hawk-grey eyes. But she looked through me and my sisters as if we were glass. I saw my mother’s pain, and her blindness, and her strength, and for the first time I began to see her as separate from me, and I began to feel free of her. My sister Helen withdrew into her flippant shell for protection, and endlessly played a record which she had just gotten on the phonograph in the parlor. Day and night, over and over, for seven days: I get the blues when we dance I get the blues in advance For I know you’ll be gone and I’ll be here all alone So I get the blues in advance. Some get the blues from a song Some when love has come and gone You don’t know how I cry When you tell me goodbye… Returning to Stamford after the funeral, I realized that I needed to be even further away from New York. I decided to make as much money as I could and go to Mexico as soon as possible. To that end and because Cora invited me, I gave up my room on Mill River Road with its creaky bed, and moved my belongings into the sunporch on Walker Road. The ten dollars a week room and board was less than what I was spending for both before. Cora said the extra cash was a help to her already strained budget, and besides, I was eating her out of house and home anyway. Ginger told me that a new girl, Ada, had been hired to run my machine at the plant.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  “I would by no means speak disrespectfully of any relation of yours, madam. Miss Lucy Steele is, I dare say, a very deserving young woman, but in the present case you know, the connection must be impossible. And to have entered into a secret engagement with a young man under her uncle’s care, the son of a woman especially of such very large fortune as Mrs. Ferrars, is perhaps, altogether a little extraordinary. In short, I do not mean to reflect upon the behaviour of any person whom you have a regard for, Mrs. Jennings. We all wish her extremely happy; and Mrs. Ferrars’s conduct throughout the whole, has been such as every conscientious, good mother, in like circumstances, would adopt. It has been dignified and liberal. Edward has drawn his own lot, and I fear it will be a bad one.” Marianne sighed out her similar apprehension; and Elinor’s heart wrung for the feelings of Edward, while braving his mother’s threats, for a woman who could not reward him. “Well, sir,” said Mrs. Jennings, “and how did it end?” “I am sorry to say, ma’am, in a most unhappy rupture:—Edward is dismissed for ever from his mother’s notice. He left her house yesterday, but where he is gone, or whether he is still in town, I do not know; for we of course can make no inquiry.” “Poor young man!—and what is to become of him?” “What, indeed, ma’am! It is a melancholy consideration. Born to the prospect of such affluence! I cannot conceive a situation more deplorable. The interest of two thousand pounds—how can a man live on it?—and when to that is added the recollection, that he might, but for his own folly, within three months have been in the receipt of two thousand, five hundred a-year (for Miss Morton has thirty thousand pounds,) I cannot picture to myself a more wretched condition. We must all feel for him; and the more so, because it is totally out of our power to assist him.” “Poor young man!” cried Mrs. Jennings, “I am sure he should be very welcome to bed and board at my house; and so I would tell him if I could see him. It is not fit that he should be living about at his own charge now, at lodgings and taverns.” Elinor’s heart thanked her for such kindness towards Edward, though she could not forbear smiling at the form of it.

• From Sense and Sensibility (1811)

  He could say no more, and rising hastily walked for a few minutes about the room. Elinor, affected by his relation, and still more by his distress, could not speak. He saw her concern, and coming to her, took her hand, pressed it, and kissed it with grateful respect. A few minutes more of silent exertion enabled him to proceed with composure. “It was nearly three years after this unhappy period before I returned to England. My first care, when I did arrive, was of course to seek for her; but the search was as fruitless as it was melancholy. I could not trace her beyond her first seducer, and there was every reason to fear that she had removed from him only to sink deeper in a life of sin. Her legal allowance was not adequate to her fortune, nor sufficient for her comfortable maintenance, and I learnt from my brother that the power of receiving it had been made over some months before to another person. He imagined, and calmly could he imagine it, that her extravagance, and consequent distress, had obliged her to dispose of it for some immediate relief. At last, however, and after I had been six months in England, I did find her. Regard for a former servant of my own, who had since fallen into misfortune, carried me to visit him in a spunging-house, where he was confined for debt; and there, in the same house, under a similar confinement, was my unfortunate sister. So altered—so faded—worn down by acute suffering of every kind! hardly could I believe the melancholy and sickly figure before me, to be the remains of the lovely, blooming, healthful girl, on whom I had once doted. What I endured in so beholding her—but I have no right to wound your feelings by attempting to describe it—I have pained you too much already. That she was, to all appearance, in the last stage of a consumption, was—yes, in such a situation it was my greatest comfort. Life could do nothing for her, beyond giving time for a better preparation for death; and that was given. I saw her placed in comfortable lodgings, and under proper attendants; I visited her every day during the rest of her short life: I was with her in her last moments.” Again he stopped to recover himself; and Elinor spoke her feelings in an exclamation of tender concern, at the fate of his unfortunate friend.

• From The City of God

  351 Augustine’s Scriptural History (Books 15–17) “O n or about December 1910, human character changed,” wrote the great modernist Virginia Woolf in 1924. For her, the change in human nature was akin to exile from the Garden of Eden. Modernist writers were not simply dismissive of religion. They were obsessed by the problem of reestablishing fruitful contact with our new knowledge in a way that transmuted antiquity into something inhabitable today. They imagined that the answer would be universally applicable; because they assumed there was only one path of modernization, there would be only one way to be religious in modernity. Modernist Approach to History „According to Karl Marx, “Men make their own history ... under ... circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”; that is, how we think in the present—the very framework into which we fit new events—is powerfully, almost determinately, informed by the past. Yet, many thinkers believe that we have entered an entirely new age that is historically unprecedented. For these thinkers, history can teach us nothing, or next to nothing. „The new situation is called “modernity,” and the first thinkers who formulated it meant it to express a crisis of relation to our traditions—a feeling of irrevocable loss. They saw religion as a set of antiquated intuitions and passions steeped in a reactionary, resentful nostalgia for an earlier, wholly imagined, integrity of feeling, thought, action, character, and cosmos. Lecture 17 352 Books That Matter: The City of God „Today our challenge is pluralism—the challenge of inhabiting a world filled with many kinds of belief and unbelief. Modernity is not the only formulation of this problem, nor has modernity let us escape it. Other ages confronted analogous problems and their accomplishments may have something useful to teach us today. „Such is the case with Augustine. He too underwent the wrenching transition from the end of one age to the beginning of another. All his writing is gripped by the question of how to render useful a heritage now grown radically problematic but that retained some claim of continuity and that he wanted to pass on to the future. Augustinian Theology of History „Augustine is one of the greatest of thinkers to reflect on the purpose for writing and reading history. His vision of history decisively shaped the next thousand years and more of European historiography. ›When compared with such classical historical thinkers as Herodotus and Thucydides, he was far more like us, particularly in his rejection of the idea that human history is trapped in repetitive patterns that we can come to understand, anticipate, and master. ›He is also like us in his affirmation of the uniqueness and singularity of human history whose significance is granted not by the patterns it reveals, but in the story it embodies and the way it unfolds a singular revelation of God. God’s determinate historical presence in Jesus serves as both an exemplary pattern of a human life and announces the salvation of humanity to a fallen world.

• From The City of God

  389 This is the part of Augustine’s legacy that was widely shared in the first few centuries after the coming of Jesus, and it is the part that, authorized by Augustine after his life, became a major part of the buttresses of what we call Christian supersessionism—the idea that Christianity succeeds Judaism, replaces it as God’s favored community, as God’s elect. This was a very dangerous idea in its worldly effects, and many Christians think theologically mistaken. This supersessionism warranted a great deal of anti-Judaic violence over the centuries. And then sometime in the past millennium, it curdled into the more savage idea of antisemitism—namely, the idea that the people Israel, the Jews as a race, as a physical collection of humans, are in some way marked out as wicked and evil. This stands behind many Christian pogroms against the Jews in the Middle Ages and up to today, and also behind the more gruesome forms of antisemitism, including but not limited to the Holocaust or Shoah, that have marked the past few centuries of history, first in Europe and the Americas, but now, alas, extending far beyond the West. Now, that is a grim legacy of Augustine’s thinking, but there’s another part of the legacy of Augustine’s allegorical reading of Judaism, one more unusual in his age and less adopted by those who came after. And this is his insistence not only that the Jews of his day are an important reminder of God’s promise to Christianity, but that they still themselves are a salvifically significant people. The most anti-Jewish of Augustine’s contemporaries, remember, were Manicheans, and Gnostics, and other more radical Platonists who suspected any attempt to inhabit or affirm the literal bodies that we have. And they saw Judaism and its attachment to ritual and fleshly existence, and they saw that as deeply problematic. As we have seen, Augustine’s views are far more aligned with Jewish practice here. He, too, saw God caring for body and soul, and insisted on our collective concern for both. Besides, he points out, Jesus and the apostles, including Paul, lived according to the law—the Torah—throughout their lives. Lecture 18 Transcript—Translating the Imperium (Book 18)

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

  I’m going to get my money!” Eudora hugged me tightly for a moment, then pushed me away. There was a strange acrid smell upon her. “Goodbye, Chica. Go on back to Frieda’s house. This doesn’t concern you. And have a good trip. When you come back next time we’ll go to Jalisco, to Guadalajara, or maybe up to Yucatan. They’re starting a new dig there I’m going to cover…” “Eudora, I can’t leave you like this. Please. Let me stay!” If only I could hold her. I reached out to touch her again, and Eudora whirled away, almost tripping over the table. “No, I said.” Her voice was nasty, harsh, like gravel. “Get out! What makes you think you can come into someone’s life on a visa and expect…” I flinched in horror at her tone. Then I recognized the smell as tequila, and I realized she had been drinking already. Maybe it was the look on my face that stopped her. Eudora’s voice changed. Slowly, carefully—almost gently—she said, “You can’t handle this, Chica. I’ll be all right. But I want you to leave, right now, because it’s going to get worse, and I do not want you around to see it. Please. Go.” It was as clear and as direct as anything Eudora had ever said to me. There was anger and sadness beneath the surface of her words that I still did not understand. She picked up the bottle from the table and flopped into the armchair heavily, her back to me. I had been dismissed. I wanted to burst into tears. Instead, I picked up my suitcase. I stood there, feeling like I’d been kicked in the stomach, feeling afraid, feeling useless. Almost as if I’d spoken, Eudora’s voice came muffled through the back of the armchair. “I said I’ll be all right. Now go.” I moved forward and kissed the top of her tousled head, her spice-flower smells now mixed with the acrid smell of tequila. “All right, Eudora, I’m going. Goodbye. But I’m coming back. In three weeks, I’ll be back.” It was not only a cry of pain, but a new determination to finish something I had begun, to stick with—what? A commitment my body had made? or with the tenderness which flooded through me at the curve of her head over the back of the chair? To stick with something that had passed between us, and not lose myself. And not lose myself. Eudora had not ignored me. Eudora had not made me invisible. Eudora had acted directly towards me. She had sent me away. I was hurt, but not lost.

• From The City of God

  The Romans, then, conquered that they might, with hands stained in the blood of their fathers-in-law, wrench the miserable girls from their embrace,--girls who dared not weep for their slain parents, for fear of offending their victorious husbands; and while yet the battle was raging, stood with their prayers on their lips, and knew not for whom to utter them. Such nuptials were certainly prepared for the Roman people not by Venus, but Bellona; or possibly that infernal fury Alecto had more liberty to injure them now that Juno was aiding them, than when the prayers of that goddess had excited her against AEneas. Andromache in captivity was happier than these Roman brides. For though she was a slave, yet, after she had become the wife of Pyrrhus, no more Trojans fell by his hand; but the Romans slew in battle the very fathers of the brides they fondled. Andromache, the victor's captive, could only mourn, not fear, the death of her people. The Sabine women, related to men still combatants, feared the death of their fathers when their husbands went out to battle, and mourned their death as they returned, while neither their grief nor their fear could be freely expressed. For the victories of their husbands, involving the destruction of fellow-townsmen, relatives, brothers, fathers, caused either pious agony or cruel exultation. Moreover, as the fortune of war is capricious, some of them lost their husbands by the sword of their parents, while others lost husband and father together in mutual destruction. For the Romans by no means escaped with impunity, but they were driven back within their walls, and defended themselves behind closed gates; and when the gates were opened by guile, and the enemy admitted into the town, the Forum itself was the field of a hateful and fierce engagement of fathers-in-law and sons-in-law. The ravishers were indeed quite defeated, and, flying on all sides to their houses, sullied with new shame their original shameful and lamentable triumph. It was at this juncture that Romulus, hoping no more from the valor of his citizens, prayed Jupiter that they might stand their ground; and from this occasion the god gained the name of Stator. But not even thus would the mischief have been finished, had not the ravished women themselves flashed out with dishevelled hair, and cast themselves before their parents, and thus disarmed their just rage, not with the arms of victory, but with the supplications of filial affection. Then Romulus, who could not brook his own brother as a colleague, was compelled to accept Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines, as his partner on the throne. But how long would he who misliked the fellowship of his own twin-brother endure a stranger? So, Tatius being slain, Romulus remained sole king, that he might be the greater god. See what rights of marriage these were that fomented unnatural wars. These were the Roman leagues of kindred, relationship, alliance, religion. This was the life of the city so abundantly protected by the gods. You see how many severe things might be said on this theme; but our purpose carries us past them, and requires our discourse for other matters.

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

  Marie’s problems were external, and solvable on some manageable plane: evading Jim’s search for her, finding a new job, fending off inquisitive family and friends. We had a good time in Detroit. Back in New York, Muriel stayed at the apartment to feed the cats and to straighten out her messes in the kitchen, which over the summer, through both of our lacks of concern, had become an archeological dig of remains from other people’s lives. She tidied up our collections of tools and nails and old wood, and the potentially lovely results of our once idyllic Sunday scavenging through the city. She also refinished the wooden cabinet which we had been building to store the stuff. To top it all off, as a surprise, she decided to paint the whole kitchen. But Muriel had difficulty in finishing any project. I got back from Detroit two days later. It was late afternoon as I dragged my valise back up the familiar flights of stairs and unlocked my front door. Open cans of dried-out paint stinking in the summer heat. The half-painted kitchen, brilliant yellow on one wall, pale cream on the others. And the kittens, who had gotten into the turpentine looking for something to eat. Little Crazy Lady and Scarey Lou were quite dead and rigid on the floor under the kitchen table. I packed their small bodies into a toolbox lined with an old pillowcase, and took them down Seventh Street to the East River Park in the beginning twilight. I left them there, in a scrambled grave, under a bush as close to the muddy river waters as I could get, piling stones and dirt around the heap to keep the dogs away. The ballplayers in the park opposite watched curiously. On my walk home through the late summer evening, I thought of the rapid transition from Detroit back to the same old New York. But something had given inside of me. I did not stop by Sixth Street to ask Muriel what had happened. No need; she’d loved the kittens, and she’d let them die. Suddenly, and curiously without drama, the two stiff little black bodies in the toolbox under the bush became tangible evidence I needed, the last sacrifice. When two women construct a relationship they enter together, the anticipated satisfactions are mutual if not similar. Sometimes that relationship becomes unsatisfactory, or ceases to fulfill those separate needs. When that happens, unless there is a mutual agreement to simultaneously dissolve the relationship, there must always be one person who decides to make the first move. The woman who moves first is not necessarily the most injured nor the most at fault. The first week in September. The Journal-American was predicting that Elvis Presley, whose voice decorated every jukebox and radio, would be only a flash-in-the-pan. Muriel’s clothes were still at the house, although I saw little of her.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  This failure is part of the previously noted failure to convey any sense of Negro life as a continuing and complex group reality. Bigger, who cannot function therefore as a reflection of the social illness, having, as it were, no society to reflect, likewise refuses to function on the loftier level of the Christ-symbol. His kinsmen are quite right to weep and be frightened, even to be appalled: for it is not his love for them or for himself which causes him to die, but his hatred and his self-hatred; he does not redeem the pains of a despised people, but reveals, on the contrary, nothing more than his own fierce bitterness at having been born one of them. In this also he is the “native son,” his progress determinable by the speed with which the distance increases between himself and the auction-block and all that the auction-block implies. To have penetrated this phenomenon, this inward contention of love and hatred, blackness and whiteness, would have given him a stature more nearly human and an end more nearly tragic; and would have given us a document more profoundly and genuinely bitter and less harsh with an anger which is, on the one hand, exhibited and, on the other hand, denied. Native Son finds itself at length so trapped by the American image of Negro life and by the American necessity to find the ray of hope that it cannot pursue its own implications. This is why Bigger must be at the last redeemed, to be received, if only by rhetoric, into that community of phantoms which is our tenaciously held ideal of the happy social life. It is the socially conscious whites who receive him—the Negroes being capable of no such objectivity—and we have, by way of illustration, that lamentable scene in which Jan, Mary’s lover, forgives him for her murder; and, carrying the explicit burden of the novel, Max’s long speech to the jury.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Let us pray.…’ His father’s hands were at his waist, and he took off his belt. Tears were in his eyes. ‘Gabriel,’ cried Aunt Florence, ‘ain’t you done playing the fool for to-night?’ Then his father raised his belt, and it fell with a whistling sound on Roy, who shivered, and fell back, his face to the wall. But he did not cry out. And the belt was raised again, and again. The air rang with the whistling, and the crack! against Roy’s flesh. And the baby, Ruth, began to scream. ‘ My Lord, my Lord, ’ his father whispered, ‘ my Lord, my Lord .’ He raised the belt again, but Aunt Florence caught it from behind, and held it. His mother rushed over to the sofa and caught Roy in her arms, crying as John had never seen a woman, or anybody, cry before. Roy caught his mother around the neck and held on to her as though he were drowning. His Aunt Florence and his father faced each other. ‘Yes, Lord,’ Aunt Florence said, ‘you was born wild, and you’s going to die wild. But ain’t no use to try to take the whole world with you. You can’t change nothing, Gabriel. You ought to know that by now.’ John opened the church door with his father’s key at six o’clock. Tarry service officially began at eight, but it could begin at any time, whenever the Lord moved one of the saints to enter the church and pray. It was seldom, however, that anyone arrived before eight-thirty, the Spirit of the Lord being sufficiently tolerant to allow the saints time to do their Saturday-night shopping, clean their houses, and put their children to bed. John closed the door behind him and stood in the narrow church aisle, hearing behind him the voices of children playing, and ruder voices, the voices of their elders, cursing and crying in the streets. It was dark in the church; street lights had been snapping on all around him on the populous avenue; the light of the day was gone. His feet seemed planted on this wooden floor; they did not wish to carry him one step further.

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

  Suppose I get on the same bus as she does coming uptown from the office? What shall I tell them when I get home? My mother was home when I got in. An unwillingness to share any piece of my private world, even the pain, made me lie. I said Gennie was in the hospital because she had swallowed poison, by accident. Iodine, from the medicine chest. “But what kind of house is that for a young girl to grow up in? How could she make such a mistake, poor thing? Wasn’t her stepmother home?” “I don’t know, Mother. That’s all her father told me.” Under my mother’s curious gaze I kept my face carefully blank. Early early the next morning. Using my church collection for carfare. The hospital odor and the muted sound of the p.a. Nobody around, nobody to stop me. The hospital bed in the glass cubicle. You can’t just die like this, Gennie, we haven’t had our summer yet. Don’t you remember? You promised . She can’t die. Too much poison, they say. She stuffed rat poison into the gelatin capsules, ate them, one by one. We had bought two dozen capsules on Friday. A crumpled flower on the hospital bed. Arsenic is a corrosive. She lingered, metallic-smelling foam at the corners of her mouth, blackened and wet. Her Gennie braids askew, unraveling. The last five inches of them revealed as a hairpiece. How could it be that I never knew? Gennie had plaited false hair into her braids. She was so proud of her long hair. Sometimes she wound them around her head like a crown. Now they were unraveling on the hospital pillow as she tossed her head from side to side, her eyes closed in the emptiness and quiet of the early Sunday morning hospital light. I took her hand. “I’m supposed to be at church, Gennie, but I had to come see you.” She smiled, her eyes still closed. She turned her head towards me. Her breath was foul and shallow. “Don’t die, Gennie. Do you still want to?” “Of course, I do. Didn’t I tell you I was going to?” I bent close to her and touched her forehead. “Oh why, Gennie, why?” I whispered. Her great black eyes flashed open. Her head moved on the pillow in a parody of her old arrogance. Her brows came down in the center. “Why what?” she snapped. “Now don’t be silly. You know why.” But I did not know why. I scanned her face turned toward me, eyes closed again. The wrinkle-frown still between the thick brows. I did not know why.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Now, somewhere at the other end of the earth, her husband lay buried. He slept in a land his fathers had never seen. She wondered often if his grave was marked—if there stood over it, as in pictures she had seen, a small white cross. If the Lord had ever allowed her to cross that swelling ocean she would have gone, among all the millions buried there, to seek out his grave. Wearing deep mourning, she would have laid on it, perhaps, a wreath of flowers, as other women did; and stood for a moment, head bowed, considering the un-speaking ground. How terrible it would be for Frank to rise on the day of judgment so far from home! And he surely would not scruple, even on that day, to be angry at the Lord. ‘Me and the Lord,’ he had often said, ‘don’t always get along so well. He running the world like He thinks I ain’t got good sense.’ How had he died? Slow or sudden? Had he cried out? Had death come creeping on him from behind, or faced him like a man? She knew nothing about it, for she had not known that he was dead until long afterwards, when boys were coming home and she had begun searching for Frank’s face in the streets. It was the woman with whom he had lived who had told her, for Frank had given this woman’s name as his next-of-kin. The woman, having told her, had not known what else to say, and she stared at Florence in simple-minded pity. This made Florence furious, and she barely murmured: ‘Thank you,’ before she turned away. She hated Frank for making this woman official witness to her humiliation. And she wondered again what Frank had seen in this woman, who, though she was younger than Florence, had never been so pretty, and who drank all the time, and who was seen with many men. But it had been from the first her great mistake—to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  Wallace, bought the tickets and threw them on the ground at Mr. Warde’s feet, advising him not to show his black face in Georgia again. The quartet, meanwhile, had gotten together six dollars doing odd jobs, which was enough, perhaps, for three of them to eat on the road. They split up, three leaving that Friday and the other two staying on about ten days longer, working for a construction company. Mr. Warde stopped off to visit his family, promising to see The Melodeers in New York, but he had not arrived as this was being written. The Melodeers laugh about their trip now, that good-natured, hearty laughter which is, according to white men, the peculiar heritage of Negroes, Negroes who were born with the fortunate ability to laugh all their troubles away. Somewhat surprisingly, they are not particularly bitter toward the Progressive Party, though they can scarcely be numbered among its supporters. “They’re all the same,” David tells me, “ain’t none of ’em gonna do you no good; if you gonna be foolish enough to believe what they say, then it serves you good and right. Ain’t none of ’em gonna do a thing for me. ” Notes of a Native Son Notes of a Native Son On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass. The day of my father’s funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father’s end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father’s vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along. I had inclined to be contemptuous of my father for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives. When his life had ended I began to wonder about that life and also, in a new way, to be apprehensive about my own.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  His mother, too, was silent, but he had seen her pray before, and her silence made him feel that she was weeping. And why did she weep? And why did they come here, night after night after night, calling out to a God who cared nothing for them—if, above this flaking ceiling, there was any God at all? Then he remembered that the fool has said in his heart, There is no God—and he dropped his eyes, seeing that over his Aunt Florence’s head Praying Mother Washington was looking at him. Frank sang the blues, and he drank too much. His skin was the colour of caramel candy. Perhaps for this reason she always thought of him as having candy in his mouth, candy staining the edges of his straight, cruel teeth. For a while he wore a tiny moustache, but she made him shave it off, for it made him look, she thought, like a half-breed gigolo. In details such as this he was always very easy—he would always put on a clean shirt, or get his hair cut, or come with her to Uplift meetings whete they heard speeches by prominent Negroes about the future and duties of the Negro race. And this had given her, in the beginning of their marriage, the impression that she controlled him. This impression had been entirely and disastrously false. When he had left her, more than twenty years before, and after more than ten years of marriage, she had felt for that moment only an exhausted exasperation and a vast relief. He had not been home for two days and three nights, and when he did return they quarrelled with more than their usual bitterness. All of the rage she had accumulated during their marriage was told him in that evening as they stood in their small kitchen. He was still wearing overalls, and he had not shaved, and his face was muddy with sweat and dirt. He had said nothing for a long while, and then he had said: ‘All right, baby. I guess you don’t never want to see me no more, not a miserable, black sinner like me.’ The door closed behind him, and she heard his feet echoing down the long hall, away. She stood alone in the kitchen, holding the empty coffee-pot that she had been about to wash. She thought: ‘He’ll come back, and he’ll come back drunk.’ And then she had thought, looking about the kitchen: ‘Lord, wouldn’t it be a blessing if he didn’t never come back no more.’ The Lord had given her what she said she wanted, as was often, she had found, His bewildering method of answering prayer. Frank never did come back. He lived for a long while with another woman, and when the war came he died in France.

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

  But swift-moving Louisa caught me, one hand on my arm, before I could open the door. Louisa took off her rimless glasses and she did not look like anybody’s mother at all. She looked too young, and too pretty, and too tired, and her red-rimmed eyes were full of tears and pleading. She was thirty-four years old and tomorrow we were going to bury her only child, a sixteen-year old suicide. “You-all were best friends,” insistent, less proper, her fingers tight through my coat sleeve. “Do you know why she did it?” Louisa had a mole on her face beside her nose, almost exactly the same place as Gennie’s had been. It was magnified by the tears rolling down her cheeks. I looked away, my hand still on the doorknob. “No, ma’am.” I looked up, again. I remembered my mother’s words, resisting them, “That man call himself father was using that girl for I don’t know what.” “I have to go now.” I opened the door, stepped over the floor-anchored metal rod upon which I had tripped so many times before, and closed the door behind me. I heard the metallic clang of the police lock rod as it slid back into place, mingled with the muffled sounds of Louisa’s sobbing. Gennie was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery on the first day of April. The Amsterdam News story about her death announced that she was not pregnant and so no reason for her suicide could be established. Nothing else. The sound of dirt clods flying hollow against the white coffin. The sound of birds who knew death as no reason for silence. A black-clad man mouthing words in a foreign tongue. No hallowed ground for suicides. The sound of weeping women. The wind. The forward edge of spring. The sound of grass growing, flowers beginning to blossom, the branching of a far-off tree. Clods against the white coffin . We drove away from the grave, down a winding hill. The last thing I saw of that place was two large gravemen with unshaven faces pulling the lowering straps from the grave. They tossed the still living flowers into a waiting bin, and shoveled earth into the grave. Two grave-hands, putting the finishing touches on a raw mound of earth, outlined against the suddenly grey and lowering April sky. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 15 Two weeks after I graduated from high school, I moved out of my parents’ home. I hadn’t planned it that way; that’s just the way it worked out. I went to stay with a friend of Jean’s who had her own apartment on the Lower East Side, on Rivington Street. I worked at Beth David hospital nights as a nurses’ aide, and had an affair with a boy named Peter. I met Peter at a Labor Youth League party in February and we made a date.

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

  Among-you children do things different in this place and you think we stupid. But this old head of mine, I know what I know. There was something totally wrong there from the start, you mark my words. That man call himself father was using that girl for I don’t know what.” The merciless quality of my mother’s fumbling insights turned her attempt at comfort into another assault. As if her harshness could confer invulnerability upon me. As if in the flames of truth as she saw it, I could eventually be forged into some pain-resistant replica of herself. But all this was so beside the point. Across the darkening air shaft Mrs. Washer pulled down her window-shade. Gennie was dead. Dead dead dead, a nickel a rabbit’s head . When my father came home, he knew, too. “Next time, don’t lie to us. Was your girlfriend in trouble?” Days later, I sat on the low bench beside Louisa’s window, newly opened after its end-of-winter untaping. It was an early spring afternoon. The season had begun unusually warm. The street outside was runny with old rain, the still slick pavement reflecting oily rainbows. Louisa perched upon her window ledge. One high hip nudged against the wooden window frame, her stockinged leg moving back and forth ever so slightly. The other drooped down over the edge of the bench where I was sitting. “You and Gene were such good friends.” Louisa’s tones were clipped and longing. “Matter of fact, she saw you more than…” she fingered the spirals of Gennie’s notebook which I had just given her, keeping the diary for myself. Louisa’s eyes were dry and desperately conversational. I suddenly remembered Gennie saying her mother had once been a schoolteacher down south and prided herself on proper speech. “…than she saw anybody else.” Louisa finished abruptly. I savored this piece of information in silence. Gennie’s best friend . “You looked enough alike to be sisters, people said.” Except Gennie was lighter and thinner and beautiful . Something about Louisa’s eyes warned me and I stood up quickly. “I gotta go, Miz Thompson, my mother…” I reached for my coat on the couch. It had once been Louisa’s daybed, the one where Gennie and I lay laughing and talking and smoking. When Gennie left, Louisa had redone the tiny apartment and taken over the bedroom. I suddenly saw again Gennie’s scratched face and tired eyes as she snapped at me that night, “I can’t go back, there’s no room for me anymore… I can’t talk to my mother about Phillip…” I buttoned my coat hurriedly. “She’s waiting for me to go marketing, because my sisters have a rehearsal at school.”