Hope

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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The theme of the Apocalypse is: "I come quickly," and the proper attitude of the church toward it is the holy longing of a bride for her spouse, as expressed in the response (Rev. 22:20): "Amen: come, Lord Jesus." It gives us the assurance that Christ is coming in every great event, and rules and overrules all things for the ultimate triumph of his kingdom; that the state of the church on earth is one of continual conflict with hostile powers, but that she is continually gaining victories and will at last completely and finally triumph over all her foes and enjoy unspeakable bliss in communion with her Lord. From the concluding chapters Christian poetry has drawn rich inspiration, and the choicest hymns on the heavenly home of the saints are echoes of John’s description of the new Jerusalem. The whole atmosphere of the book is bracing, and makes one feel fearless and hopeful in the face of the devil and the beasts from the abyss. The Gospels lay the foundation in faith, the Acts and Epistles build upon it a holy life; the Apocalypse is the book of hope to the struggling Christian and the militant church, and insures final victory and rest. This has been its mission; this will be its mission till the Lord come in his own good time.1252 Analysis of Contents. The Apocalypse consists of a Prologue, the Revelation proper, and an Epilogue. We may compare this arrangement to that of the Fourth Gospel, where John 1:1–18 forms the Prologue, John 21 the Epilogue, and the intervening chapters contain the evangelical history from the gathering of the disciples to the Resurrection. I. The Prologue and the Epistles to the Seven Churches, Rev. 1–3. The introductory notice; John’s salutation and dedication to the Seven Churches in Asia; the vision of Christ in his glory, and the Seven Churches; the Seven Epistles addressed to them and through them to the whole church, in its various states.1253 II. The Revelation proper or the Prophetic Vision of the Church of the Future, 4:1–22:5. It consists chiefly of seven Visions, which are again subdivided according to a symmetrical plan in which the numbers seven, three, four, and twelve are used with symbolic significance. There are intervening scenes of rest and triumph. Sometimes the vision goes back to the beginning and takes a new departure. (1) The Prelude in heaven, Rev. 4 and 5. (a) The appearance of the throne of God (Rev. 4). (b) The appearance of the Lamb who takes and opens the sealed book (Rev. 5). (2) The vision of the seven seals, with two episodes between the sixth and seventh seals, 6:1–8:1. (3) The vision of the seven trumpets of vengeance, 8:2–11:19. (4) The vision of the woman (the church) and her three enemies, 12:1–13:18. The three enemies are the dragon (12:3–17), the beast from the sea (12:18–13:10), and the beast from the earth, or the false prophet (13:11–18).

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Church Terrell, and other nineteenth-century Black women who make cameos in this book were colleagues, who in many cases knew each other. Mary Church Terrell is offered here as an ideological bridge between the early race women and later ones like Pauli Murray and Toni Cade Bambara. Terrell and Murray met while doing desegregation campaigning in Washington, D.C., in the 1940s, and Terrell was always among Murray’s own lists of influential Black leaders. Murray herself was connected with the advent of the Black feminist movement of the 1970s and was a key legal and social theorist, alongside colleagues like Toni Cade Bambara. There are many maps and linkages that could be drawn when telling the stories of Black women intellectuals. This is one intellectual map, offering one set of geographic and genealogical routes that can be taken to more clearly understand the long and rich history of African American women’s knowledge production. My hope is that this map, this genealogy, leads us all, as Hopkins foresaw, in luminous and unexpected directions.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  Isaiah 4 A Remnant Prepared 1 A ND IN that day seven women will take hold of one man, saying, “We will eat our own food and wear [and provide] our own clothes; only let us be called by your name; take away our shame [of being unmarried].” 2 In that day the Branch of the LORD will be splendid and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be excellent and lovely to those of Israel who have survived. [Jer 23:5 ; 33:15 ; Zech 3:8 ; 6:12 ] 3 It will come to pass that he who is left in Zion and remains in Jerusalem will be called holy (set apart for God)—everyone who is recorded for [eternal] life in Jerusalem. [Joel 3:17 ; Phil 4:3 ] 4 When the Lord has washed away the [moral] filth of the daughters of Zion and has cleansed the bloodstains of Jerusalem from her midst, by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning, 5 then the LORD will create over the entire site of Mount Zion and over her assemblies, a cloud by day, smoke, and the brightness of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory and brilliance will be a canopy [a defense, a covering of His divine love and protection]. 6 And there will be a pavilion for shade from the heat by day, and a refuge and a shelter from the storm and the rain. Isaiah 5 Parable of the Vineyard 1 N OW LET me sing for my greatly Beloved [LORD ] A song of my Beloved about His vineyard (His chosen people). My greatly Beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile slope (the promised land, Canaan). [Song 6:3 ; Matt 21:33–40 ] 2 He dug it all around and cleared away its stones, And planted it with a the choicest vine (the people of Judah). And He built a tower in the center of it; And also hewed out a b wine vat in it. Then He expected it to produce [the choicest] grapes, But it produced only worthless ones. 3 “And now, says the LORD , O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, Judge between Me and My vineyard (My people). 4 “What more could have been done for My vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to produce good grapes, why did it yield worthless ones? 5 “So now let me tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard: I will take away its thorn-hedge, and it will be burned up; I will break down its c stone wall and it will be trampled down [by enemies]. 6 “I will turn it into a wasteland; It will not be pruned or cultivated, But briars and thorns will come up.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  “For I will forgive their wickedness, and I will no longer remember their sin.” [Heb 8:8–12 ; 10:16 , 17 ] 35 Thus says the LORD , Who gives the sun for light by day And the fixed order of the moon and of the stars for light by night, Who stirs up the sea’s roaring billows or stills the waves when they roar; The LORD of hosts is His name: 36 “If this fixed order departs From before Me,” says the LORD , “Then the descendants of Israel also will cease From being a nation before Me forever.” 37 Thus says the LORD , “If the heavens above can be measured And the foundations of the earth searched out below, Then I will also cast off and abandon all the descendants of Israel For all that they have done,” says the LORD . 38 “Behold, the days are coming,” says the LORD , “when the city [of Jerusalem] will be rebuilt for the LORD from the f Tower of Hananel to the Corner Gate. 39 “The measuring line will go out farther straight ahead to the hill Gareb; then it will turn to g Goah. 40 “And the whole valley (Hinnom) of the dead bodies and [the hill] of the ashes [long dumped there from the temple sacrifices], and all the fields as far as the brook Kidron, to the corner of the Horse Gate toward the east, shall be holy to the LORD . It (the city) will not be uprooted or overthrown anymore to the end of the age.” [Zech 14:10 , 11 ] Jeremiah 32 Jeremiah Imprisoned 1 T HE WORD that came to Jeremiah from the LORD in the tenth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of a Nebuchadnezzar. 2 Now at that time the army of the king of Babylon was besieging Jerusalem, and Jeremiah the prophet was shut up in the court of the guard, which was in the house of the king of Judah. 3 For Zedekiah [the last] king of Judah had locked him up, saying, “Why do you prophesy [disaster] and say, ‘Thus says the LORD , “Behold, I am giving this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it; 4 and Zedekiah king of Judah will not escape from the hand of the b Chaldeans, but he will surely be given into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he will speak with him face to face and see him eye to eye; 5 and he will lead Zedekiah to Babylon, and he will be there until I visit him [for evaluation and judgment],” says the LORD .

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Her historical impulse to set the record straight as it related to issues of Black participation in the Civil War and her own American origins fits within the range of impulses that have characterized race women’s turn to autobiography, including a need to revise “official,” exclusionist historical narratives; a desire to theorize about race and gender identity as they relate to Black female subjectivity; and an opportunity to explore forms of embodied discourse that might allow them to counter the sexual silences demanded by the politics of respectability and the culture of dissemblance. However, the text also had a more immediate aim: to recuperate Murray’s public image after she became a target of the Red Scare. In 1952, Murray applied for a job as “research assistant to the Director of the Codification of Laws of Liberia,” “the program President Truman initiated to provide technical assistance to underdeveloped nations.” 66 Participation in this project was at the heart of Murray’s own emergent understanding of African American racial identity. In the unpublished prologue to Proud Shoes, Murray wrote that she was drawn to Liberia because it had cultural traditions that drew upon both American and African roots. Thus, the research position would offer a chance to study how African Americans who had expatriated to Liberia dealt with the challenge of both losing and regaining elements of their African heritage. 67 For Murray, Liberia was evidence not of Black or African resistance to failed American idealism, but rather evidence of Black Americans fundamental affinity for their American homeland. 68 In the introduction to the 1978 edition of Proud Shoes, Murray noted that despite a sojourn to Ghana in the ensuing years between the book’s first publication, she remained firm in her “conviction that [she] was of the New World, irrevocably bound to the destiny of [her] native America.” 69 Nevertheless, Murray’s participation in her twenties with the Socialist party and the Lovestoneite Movement made her candidacy unviable and caused her “past associations” to be subjected to relentless scrutiny. 70 Murray chose to respond to these aspersions by upending and refiguring what was meant by “past.” 71 Her white ancestors had been a part of the North Carolina planter class, and one of them had donated much of the land on which the University of North Carolina now sits. Enamored of her white forebears, Murray believed that her family’s relationship to the peculiar institution of slavery had given her a “peculiarly American background,” a long and identifiable procession of mixed race ancestry of which she was quite proud. Recuperating Fannie Barrier Williams’s language of peculiarity and its invocations of the ways that slavery had affected Black women’s reproductive choices, Murray chose to use her mixed race heritage for decidedly different ends.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Both Garza and Khan-Cullors are queer Black women, and they have insisted that the Black Lives Matter leadership and organizing model move, as Garza mentioned in her herstory, beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all. Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, Black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum. 2 In this regard, these new Black women leaders—including Johnetta Elzie, Brittany Packnett, Brittany Ferrell, Alexis Templeton, Charlene Carruthers, Samantha Master, Elle Hearns, Jasmine Abdullah Richards, and Melina Abdullah 3 —are shaping a movement that rejects the kind of masculinist posturing that caused so much grief for women like Ida B. Wells in the nineteenth century and Pauli Murray in the twentieth century. This movement is inherently Cooperian in its insistence that Black women’s bodies and lives (cis and trans) offer a space of possibility and place through which to cathect our best thinking about how to get free. Yet, Garza’s fears about the erasure of Black women’s intellectual and political labor are well-founded and avoiding this common trap with Black women’s contributions requires a critical vigilance to document, respect, engage, and take seriously the thinking of Black women who continue to lead our movements. My goal in Beyond Respectability is to take seriously the work of Black women thinkers and to demonstrate the value that Black women’s long histories of knowledge production on behalf of Black people can have to contemporary intellectual conversations. Despite the fact that Black feminism, as a critical locus of Black women’s twentieth-century knowledge production, has become a fully institutionalized field of academic specialization since the late 1970s, my contention in this book is that there is still a requisite and tacit failure to take Black women’s work, as thinkers and theorists on broader questions affecting Black people, seriously. Yes, Black feminist women’s arguments about the centrality of gender to racial concerns have gained major academic currency, as evidenced by the broad use of intersectional discourse in numerous fields and disciplines. And yes, this new Black Lives Matter Movement, particularly as conceived by Garza, Tometi, and Khan-Cullors has made Black feminist politics the currency of Black radical thought. But the fact that Alicia Garza’s comments written in the second decade of the twenty-first century, sound eerily similar to commentary from Anna Julia Cooper writing in the nineteenth century, and Pauli Murray, Toni Cade Bambara, and bell hooks writing in the twentieth suggests that not enough has changed. bell hooks attended college in the early 1970s, just as Women’s Studies programs and courses on Black women’s literature and history entered the academy.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  generation of Black leaders, including the many queer, trans, and gender nonconforming leaders among them, are working out in praxis Bambara’s notions of revolutionary Blackhood, unencumbered by the traditional dictates of respectable gender ideology. Throughout this book, I talk about the named lists of Black women that other Black women intellectuals created as a form of archive and memorial to their colleagues who joined them in the project of uplifting African American communities. It is fitting to end this study, in which I interrogate how exclusionary gender politics and conservative ideas about knowledge production continue to shape our ideas about Black intellectual life, by offering a named list of my own. These are women whose lives and work did not make it into this study in any substantive way. They are women that I encountered in various forms along the way—newly discovered archival material, a mention in a book or newspaper article, or another encounter with their already prodigious legacy—but whose lives and thought work I could not do justice to within the bounds of this study. Still they are a part of the story that this book tells. Their names and their work constitute additional markers in the intellectual genealogy and geography that this book has built, and they provide some direction as to where future scholarship might proceed: Sojourner Truth. Sarah Mapps Douglass. Hallie Quinn Brown. Jane Edna Hunter. Mary McLeod Bethune. Sadie Daniel. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander. Ella Baker. Fannie Lou Hamer. Lorraine Hansberry. Jessie Fauset. Callie House. Gertrude Elise Johnson MacDougald Ayer. Dorothy Height. Era Bell Thompson. Ellen Tarry. Claudia Jones. Fanny Jackson Coppin. Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Lucille Clifton. Maritcha Lyons. Angela Davis. Assata Shakur. Frances Beale. Patricia Roberts-Harris. The women under examination in this book and the women listed here attest that Black women’s intellectual leadership traditions are long, robust, multigenerational, and continuing. Still, the intellectual contributions of many of these women languish in relative obscurity because of an enduring politics of racial manhood that places the mantle for race leadership in the hands of men—always men—who are deemed more capable, more critical, and more appropriate. I hope that through the careful excavation of Black women’s ideas, this book reinvigorates and augments the study of Black women’s intellectual traditions pioneered by Gertrude Mossill, Victoria Earle Matthews, Alice Walker, Barbara Smith, Mary Helen Washington, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Hazel Carby, and others. Black women are serious thinkers, and it is our scholarly duty to take them seriously.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Like the Club era, these community-based spaces, wherein Black women produced knowledge about themselves, constituted a kind of Black female counter-public space that allowed Black women to contest official, dominant narratives that undermined them morally, intellectually, and politically. However, unlike the clubwomen, Bambara did not seek to bring these groups under an organizational umbrella. Instead, she took a more traditional discursive approach, producing an anthology of writings through which Black women could testify to their embodied experiences. Farah Jasmine Griffin notes that the multiplicity of voices in this text, the dialogues between a range of differently situated Black women, is one of the most remarkable features of Black Woman: “[I]ts chorus of voices reminds us of the extra-academic origins of black women’s intellectual work and of its concern with something other than curriculum, canons, fields, careers and academic publication. And while the academy is certainly an important site of struggle, it is not the only place where socially and politically engaged intellectuals ought to find themselves.” 48 In short, the text reminds us that within Black women’s intellectual history, “the sites of intellectual work are always shifting.” 49 The extra-academic nature of the text and its willingness to offer a range of perspectives—both feminist and nonfeminist, nationalist and antinationalist—within its pages offers a discursive representation of a robust Black women’s public sphere. Moreover, it demonstrates in practice that Black women’s knowledge production is not beholden to the academy. By drawing on the works of a range of women to constitute her anthology, Bambara offered a robust model for what Black women’s public intellectual work looked like. Her text also marked one of the clearest generational shifts in the rhetoric about race womanhood. She noted that “unlike the traditional sororities and business clubs,” her contributors “[seemed] to use the Black Liberation struggle rather than the American Dream as their yardstick, their gauge, their vantage point.” 50 This represented a marked shift from the rhetoric of liberal race women like Williams and Murray, whose lives bookend the paradigmatic frame of American peculiarity as a critique of American exceptionalism. Unlike Murray, whose primary quest was for American acceptance, Bambara’s race women used Black freedom as the measuring stick for determining racial progress, noting that, in fact, these two ideals were not congruent. Moreover, the textual debate between Black nationalist women and Black feminist women challenged the distinctive integrationist versus nationalist binary that Cruse had set forth in Crisis. 51 Ironically, however, the major gains made by Black women in politics in the 1970s signals that public Black women, in fact, were using the American Dream as a yardstick. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm ran for president on the Democratic Party ticket. That same year, Barbara Jordan was elected to the House of Representatives, becoming the first woman ever to represent the state of Texas. By the mid 1970s, Barbara Jordan became a kind of guardian of the public trust.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  5 For You are my hope; O Lord GOD , You are my trust and the source of my confidence from my youth. 6 Upon You have I relied and been sustained from my birth; You are He who took me from my mother’s womb and You have been my benefactor from that day. My praise is continually of You. 7 I am as a wonder to many, For You are my strong refuge. 8 My mouth is filled with Your praise And with Your glory all day long. 9 Do not cast me off nor send me away in the time of old age; Do not abandon me when my strength fails and I am weak. 10 For my enemies have spoken against me; Those who watch for my life have consulted together, 11 Saying, “God has abandoned him; Pursue and seize him, for there is no one to rescue him .” 12 O God, do not be far from me; O my God, come quickly to help me! 13 Let those who attack my life be ashamed and consumed; Let them be covered with reproach and dishonor, who seek to injure me. 14 But as for me, I will wait and hope continually, And will praise You yet more and more. 15 My mouth shall tell of Your righteousness And of Your [deeds of] salvation all day long, For their number is more than I know. 16 I will come with the mighty acts of the Lord GOD [and in His strength]; I will make mention of Your righteousness, Yours alone. 17 O God, You have taught me from my youth, And I still declare Your wondrous works and miraculous deeds. 18 And even when I am old and gray-headed, O God, do not abandon me, Until I declare Your [mighty] strength to this generation, Your power to all who are to come. 19 Your righteousness, O God, reaches to the [height of the] heavens, You who have done great things; O God, who is like You, [who is Your equal]? 20 You who have shown b me many troubles and distresses Will revive and renew me again, And will bring me up again from the depths of the earth. 21 May You increase my greatness (honor) And turn to comfort me. 22 I will also praise You with the harp, Your truth and faithfulness, O my God; To You I will sing praises with the lyre, O Holy One of Israel. 23 My lips will shout for joy when I sing praises to You, And my soul, which You have redeemed. 24 My tongue also will speak of Your righteousness all day long; For they are ashamed, for they are humiliated who seek my injury. Psalm 72 The Reign of the Righteous King. A Psalm of Solomon. 1 G IVE THE king [knowledge of] Your judgments, O God, And [the spirit of] Your righteousness to the king’s son [to guide all his ways].

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  14 For the palace has been abandoned, the populated city deserted; The hill [of the city] and the watchtower have become caves [for wild animals] forever, A delight for wild donkeys, a pasture for flocks, 15 Until the Spirit is poured out upon us from on high, And the wilderness becomes a fertile field, And the fertile field is valued as a forest. [Ps 104:30 ; Ezek 36:26 , 27 ; 39:29 ; Zech 12:10 ] 16 Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, And righteousness will live in the fertile field. 17 And the effect of righteousness will be peace, And the result of righteousness will be quietness and confident trust forever. 18 Then my people will live in a peaceful surrounding, And in secure dwellings and in undisturbed resting places. 19 But it will hail, when the forest comes down, And the [capital] city will fall in utter humiliation. 20 Blessed (happy, fortunate) are you who cast your seed upon all waters [b when the river overflows its banks and irrigates the land], You who allow the ox and the donkey to roam freely. Isaiah 33 The Judgment of God 1 W OE (JUDGMENT is coming) to you, O destroyer, You who were not destroyed, And he who is treacherous, while others did not deal treacherously with him. As soon as you finish destroying, you will be destroyed; As soon as you stop dealing treacherously, others will deal treacherously with you. 2 O LORD , be gracious to us; we have waited [expectantly] for You. Be the arm of Your servants every morning [that is, their strength and their defense], Our salvation also in the time of trouble. 3 At the sound of the tumult, the peoples flee; At the lifting up of Yourself nations scatter. 4 Your spoil [of Israel’s foe] is gathered [by the people of Jerusalem] as the caterpillar gathers; As locusts swarming so people swarm on it. 5 The LORD is exalted, for He dwells on high; He has filled Zion with justice and righteousness. 6 And He will be the security and stability of your times, A treasure of salvation, wisdom and knowledge; The fear of the LORD is your treasure. 7 Now look, their brave men shout outside; The ambassadors [seeking a treaty] of peace weep bitterly. 8 The highways are deserted, the traveler has ceased [to appear]. The enemy has broken the covenant, he has rejected the a cities, He has no regard for [any] man. 9 The land mourns and dries out, Lebanon is shamed and [its lush foliage] withers; b Sharon is like a desert plain, And c Bashan and [Mount] Carmel shake off their leaves. 10 “Now I will arise,” says the LORD . “Now I will be exalted; now I will be lifted up. 11 “You have conceived dried grass, you will give birth to stubble; My breath is a fire that will consume you.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  She’d settle in, find a place for us, and I’d follow her as soon as I could. I told Lori about my escape fund, the seventy-five dollars I’d saved. From now on, I said, it would be our joint fund. We’d take on extra work after school and put everything we earned into the piggy bank. Lori could take it to New York and use it to get established, so that by the time I arrived, everything would be set. Lori had always made very good posters, for football rallies, for the plays the drama club put on, and for candidates running for student council. Now she started doing commissioned posters for a dollar-fifty apiece. She was too shy to solicit orders, so I did it for her. Lots of kids at Welch High wanted customized posters to hang on their bedroom walls—of their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s name, of their car or their astrological sign or their favorite band. Lori designed the names in big fat overlapping three-dimensional letters like the kind on rock albums, then painted them in Day-Glo colors, outlined in india ink so the letters popped, and surrounded them with stars and dots and squiggly lines that made the letters seem like they were moving. The posters were so good that word of mouth spread, and soon Lori had such a backlog of orders that she was up working until one or two every morning. I made money babysitting and doing other kids’ homework. I did book reports, science essays, and math. I charged a dollar per assignment and guaranteed at least an A– or the customer was entitled to a full refund. After school, I babysat for a dollar an hour and could usually do the homework then. I also tutored kids for two dollars an hour. We told Brian about the escape fund, and he pitched in, even though we hadn’t included him in our plans because he was only in the seventh grade. He mowed lawns or chopped wood or cut hillside weeds with a scythe. He worked after school until the sun went down and all day Saturday and Sunday and came home with his arms and face scratched from the brush he’d cleared. Without looking for thanks or praise, he quietly added his earnings to the pig, which we named Oz. We kept Oz on the old sewing machine in the bedroom. Oz had no plugged hole on the bottom, and the slot on the top was too narrow to work bills out, even if you used a knife, so once you’d put money into Oz, it stayed there. We tested it to make sure. We couldn’t count the money, but because Oz was translucent, we could see our cash accumulating inside when we held him up to the light. • • • One day that winter, when I came home from school, a gold Cadillac Coupe DeVille was parked in front of the house.

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  I worry that Jesus drinks himself to sleep when he hears me talk like this. But about a month before my friend Pammy died, she said something that may have permanently changed me. We had gone shopping for a dress for me to wear that night to a nightclub with the man I was seeing at the time. Pammy was in a wheelchair, wearing her Queen Mum wig, the Easy Rider look in her eyes. I tried on a lavender minidress, which is not my usual style. I tend to wear big, baggy clothes. People used to tell me I dressed like John Goodman. Anyway, the dress fit perfectly, and I came out to model it for her. I stood there feeling very shy and self-conscious and pleased. Then I said, “Do you think it makes my hips look too big?” and she said to me slowly, “Annie? I really don’t think you have that kind of time.” And I don’t think you have that kind of time either. I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good enough at it, and I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect. You don’t want to spend your time around people who make you hold your breath. You can’t fill up when you’re holding your breath. And writing is about filling up, filling up when you are empty, letting images and ideas and smells run down like water—just as writing is also about dealing with the emptiness. The emptiness destroys enough writers without the help of some friend or spouse. There are always a couple of rank beginners in my classes, and they need people to read their drafts who will rise to the occasion with respect and encouragement. Beginners always try to fit their whole lives into ten pages, and they always write blatantly about themselves, even if they make the heroine of their piece a championship racehorse with an alcoholic mother who cries a lot. But beginners are learning to play, and they need encouragement to keep their hands moving across the page. If you look around, I think you will find the person you need. Almost every writer I’ve ever known has been able to find someone who could be both a friend and a critic. You’ll know when the person is right for you and when you are right for that person. It’s not unlike finding a mate, where little by little you begin to feel that you’ve stepped into a shape that was waiting there all along. LettersWhen you don’t know what else to do, when you’re really stuck and filled with despair and self-loathing and boredom, but you can’t just leave your work alone for a while and wait, you might try telling part of your history—part of a character’s history—in the form of a letter.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  The mother, being needy, was pleased with the offer; algates, having the spirit of a gentlewoman, she said, 'Madam, tell me what I can do for you; if it consist with my honour, I will willingly do it, and you shall after do that which shall please you.' Then said the countess, 'It behoveth me that you let tell the count my husband by some one in whom you trust, that your daughter is ready to do his every pleasure, so she may but be certified that he loveth her as he pretendeth, the which she will never believe, except he send her the ring which he carrieth on his finger and by which she hath heard he setteth such store. An he send you the ring, you must give it to me and after send to him to say that your daughter is ready do his pleasure; then bring him hither in secret and privily put me to bed to him in the stead of your daughter. It may be God will vouchsafe me to conceive and on this wise, having his ring on my finger and a child in mine arms of him begotten, I shall presently regain him and abide with him, as a wife should abide with her husband, and you will have been the cause thereof.' This seemed a grave matter to the gentlewoman, who feared lest blame should haply ensue thereof to her daughter; nevertheless, bethinking her it were honourably done to help the poor lady recover her husband and that she went about to do this to a worthy end and trusting in the good and honest intention of the countess, she not only promised her to do it, but, before many days, dealing with prudence and secrecy, in accordance with the latter's instructions, she both got the ring (albeit this seemed somewhat grievous to the count) and adroitly put her to bed with her husband, in the place of her own daughter. In these first embracements, most ardently sought of the count, the lady, by God's pleasure, became with child of two sons, as her delivery in due time made manifest. Nor once only, but many times, did the gentlewoman gratify the countess with her husband's embraces, contriving so secretly that never was a word known of the matter, whilst the count still believed himself to have been, not with his wife, but with her whom he loved; and whenas he came to take leave of a morning, he gave her, at one time and another, divers goodly and precious jewels, which the countess laid up with all diligence.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  In 1959 abortion was still criminal. Unmarried women could not legally procure contraception, and pharmacists, according to sociologist Kristin Luker, author of When Sex Goes to School, would refuse to sell condoms to men they thought were single. Although, even then, over half of women and three-quarters of men had intercourse before their wedding day, there was broad public agreement that sex should be reserved for marriage. That was about to change—radically and quickly. The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 was the first salvo in the sexual revolution. That was followed three years later by the publication of The Feminine Mystique, which launched a new wave of feminism. A decade after that, the Supreme Court guaranteed women’s right to abortion. As sex became untethered from reproduction, the notion of “waiting until marriage,” or even until adulthood, grew increasingly obsolete: between 1965 and 1980 the percentage of sixteen-year-old girls who’d ever had intercourse doubled. A group of activists, led by Mary Calderone, the physician who founded the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), hoped those changes would herald an age of positive, value-neutral, medically accurate sex education. That was not to be. Instead, according to Jeffrey Moran, author of Teaching Sex, to ensure minors’ ongoing access to contraception, congressional liberals skewed negative, popularizing the idea that teen sex, while perhaps inevitable, was inherently risky and a “crisis” requiring damage control. They argued that the “epidemic” of teen motherhood triggered by the new sexual freedom was, particularly among African Americans, responsible for spiraling poverty. (In truth, although the birth rate among black girls was three times higher than among whites, the overall teen birth rate dropped steadily through the 1960s and 1970s.) The only pragmatic response was to teach kids to protect themselves. So the Adolescent Health Services and Pregnancy Prevention and Care Act of 1978, introduced by Senator Edward Kennedy, while perpetually underfunded, championed educational programs that would focus on risk management, contraception, abortion education, counseling, and “values clarification.” It also established a murky, nonspecific idea of “readiness,” rather than marriage, as the expected standard for sexual behavior. That, Moran wrote, infuriated conservatives. As Diane Ravitch, an educational consultant and activist, railed (inaccurately, by the way), “Is it appropriate for the government to teach its citizenry how to masturbate? To explain how to perform cunnilingus? To reassure them that infidelity is widespread?”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  They hoped against hope for the conversion of their people. When that hope vanished more and more, when some of their teachers had suffered martyrdom (Heb. 13:7), when James, their revered leader, was stoned by the Jews (62), and when the patriotic movement for the deliverance of Palestine from the hated yoke of the heathen Romans rose higher and higher, till it burst out at last in open rebellion (66), it was very natural that those timid Christians should feel strongly tempted to apostatize from the poor, persecuted sect to the national religion, which they at heart still believed to be the best part of Christianity. The solemn services of the Temple, the ritual pomp and splendor of the Aaronic priesthood, the daily sacrifices, and all the sacred associations of the past had still a great charm for them, and allured them to their embrace. The danger was very strong, and the warning of the Epistle fearfully solemn. Similar dangers have occurred again and again in critical periods of history. Time and Place of Composition. The Epistle hails and sends greetings from some place in Italy, at a time when Timothy, Paul’s disciple, was set at liberty, and the writer was on the point of paying, with Timothy, a visit to his readers (13:23, 24). The passage, "Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them" (13:3), does not necessarily imply that he himself was in prison, indeed 13:23 seems to imply his freedom. These notices naturally suggest the close of Paul’s first Roman imprisonment, in the spring of the year 63, or soon after; for Timothy and Luke were with him there, and the writer himself evidently belonged to the circle of his friends and fellow-workers. There is further internal evidence that the letter was written before the destruction of Jerusalem (70), before the outbreak of the Jewish war (66), before the Neronian persecution (in July, 64), and before Paul’s martyrdom. None of these important events are even alluded to;1224 on the contrary, as already remarked, the Temple was still standing, with its daily sacrifices regularly going on, and the doom of the theocracy was still in the future, though "nigh unto a curse," "becoming old and ready to vanish away;" it was "shaken" and about to be removed; the day of the fearful judgment was drawing nigh.1225 The place of composition was either Rome or some place in Southern Italy, if we assume that the writer had already started on his journey to the East.1226 Others assign it to Alexandria, or Antioch, or Ephesus.1227 Authorship.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  Sean didn’t want to be gay, and waking up beside me was too much evidence for him that he was becoming homosexual. I suggested that we start therapy together and go straight together—slowly, I hoped. Through Ava I found a psychotherapist named Dale who specialized in a treatment based on the idea that everyone at all times was playing a game. Sean and I were placed in separate groups in which all the other members were heterosexual. A group met once a week with Dale in her office, and one other evening without her in the apartment of a member. Unhappy marriages, celibacy, impotence, adultery, alcoholism, divorce, career frustration, the coldness of men and the hysteria of women, bankruptcy, friendships riddled by spite and envy—we watched the painful surfacing of all these problems. Like a team of midwives, we encouraged the birth of each memory. What came harder was the shrink’s theory that we must re-create among ourselves the hostilities that had divided but perpetuated our families. Listening to each other’s stories was no problem; that called on the familiar American skills of shocking confession and compassionate audition. But it was trickier to point a finger at a fellow member, a housewife from Scarsdale, and shout, “You’re trying to guilt-trip us by playing Poor Me.” We usually sought the origins of our pain in the unresolved conflicts of childhood. Those of us who had bad memories had to keep rereading the same old tea leaves. I was let off lightly. Since I was a homosexual, everyone knew what caused my disease (absent father and overprotective mother), so no one poked about for further explanations. My only enemy was Simon, a recent Russian immigrant in his sixties. He’d entered therapy to convince his wife that he was making an effort to curb his rages, but he still beat her regularly. He’d even knocked out a tooth. As a Russian, Simon wasn’t used to the American way of coddling people. He hated our welfare system, detested out-of-work blacks and thought they should all be sent back to Africa. He thought sexual perversion should be punished by castration or lobotomy, but he was convinced by the other group members that I was making an honest effort to go straight. In his mind the cure was simple. I should go out with girls, buy them candy, strike them, no doubt, finally marry them. Whenever I started spinning my analytic gossamer, he’d say, “But wot about de goils? I wanna hear about de goils.” I embraced Dale’s system with passion and rigor. I thought about the games people play not only during my sessions but also at work. In my own modest way, I even set up shop as a therapist for a few of my fellow employees. We were all so idle—and so frustrated from the company’s duplication (or negation) of our efforts—that we had the time and spleen conducive to auto-analysis.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  2 “Speak a tenderly to Jerusalem, And call out to her, that her time of compulsory service in warfare is finished, That her wickedness has been taken away [since her punishment is sufficient], That she has received from the LORD ’s hand Double [punishment] for all her sins.” 3 A voice of one is calling out, “Clear the way for the LORD in the wilderness [remove the obstacles]; Make straight and smooth in the desert a highway for our God. [Mark 1:3 ] 4 “Every valley shall be raised, And every mountain and hill be made low; And let the rough ground become a plain, And the rugged places a broad valley. 5 “And the glory and majesty and splendor of the LORD will be revealed, And all humanity shall see it together; For the mouth of the LORD has spoken it.” [Luke 3:5 , 6 ] 6 A voice says, “Call out [prophesy].” Then he answered, “What shall I call out?” [The voice answered:] All humanity is [as frail as] grass, and all that makes it attractive [its charm, its loveliness] is [momentary] like the flower of the field. 7 The grass withers, the flower fades, When the breath of the LORD blows upon it; Most certainly [all] the people are [like] grass. 8 The grass withers, the flower fades, But the word of our God stands forever. [James 1:10 , 11 ; 1 Pet 1:24 , 25 ] 9 O Zion, herald of good news, Get up on a high mountain. O Jerusalem, herald of good news, Lift up your voice with strength, Lift it up, do not fear; Say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” [Acts 10:36 ; Rom 10:15 ] 10 Listen carefully, the Lord GOD will come with might, And His arm will rule for Him. Most certainly His reward is with Him, And His restitution accompanies Him. [Rev 22:7 , 12 ] 11 He will protect His flock like a shepherd, He will gather the lambs in His arm, He will carry them in His bosom; He will gently and carefully lead those nursing their young. 12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, And marked off the heavens with a span [of the hand], And calculated the dust of the earth with a b measure, And weighed the mountains in a balance And the hills in a pair of scales? 13 Who has directed the Spirit of the LORD , Or has taught Him as His counselor? [Rom 11:34 ] 14 With whom did He consult and who enlightened Him? Who taught Him the path of justice and taught Him knowledge And informed Him of the way of understanding? 15 In fact, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, And are regarded as a speck of dust on the scales; Now look, He lifts up the islands like fine dust.

• From Amplified Holy Bible (2015)

  Be ashamed and humiliated for your [wicked] ways, O house of Israel!” 33 ‘Thus says the Lord GOD , “On the day that I cleanse you from all your sins I will also cause the cities [of Israel] to be inhabited, and the ruins will be rebuilt. 34 “The desolate land will be cultivated instead of being a desolation in the sight of everyone who passes by. 35 “Then they will say, ‘This land that was deserted and desolate has become like the garden of Eden; and the waste, desolate, and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited.’ 36 “Then the nations that are left around you will know that I the LORD have rebuilt the ruined places and planted that which was desolate. I the LORD have spoken, and will do it.” 37 ‘Thus says the Lord GOD , “This too I will let the house of Israel ask Me to do for them: I will increase their people like a flock. 38 “Like the flock for sacrifices, like the flock at Jerusalem during her appointed feasts, so will the desolate cities be filled with flocks of people. Then they will know [with confident assurance] that I am the LORD .” ’ ” Ezekiel 37 Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones 1 T he hand of the LORD was upon me, and He brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the valley; and it was full of bones. 2 He caused me to pass all around them, and behold, there were very many [human bones] in the open valley; and lo, they were very dry. 3 And He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord GOD , You know.” [1 Cor 15:35 ] 4 Again He said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD .’ [John 5:28 ] 5 “Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones, ‘Behold, I will make a breath enter you so that you may come to life. 6 ‘I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on you, cover you with skin, and I will put breath in you so that you may come alive; and you will know that I am the LORD .’ ” 7 So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a [thundering] noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. 8 And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on the bones, and flesh grew and skin covered them; but there was no breath in them.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  Thus, Cooper’s racial conceptions remained profoundly rooted in and on the body, despite critical disagreements with Delany’s requirements for African blood quantum. Racial purity and formal recognition by white bodies of power were not prerequisites for the concession and acknowledgment of Black dignity. Black women could show up, move through the world, and make profound contributions when violent and oppressive conditions ceased to inhibit their access to full bodily integrity. In this way, the Black female body became integral to how Black women theorized the politics of racial uplift. Unlike her contemporary W. E. B. Du Bois—who famously conceptualized the black body as a site of internal striving—“two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder”9—Cooper embraced racial embodiment as possibility rather than as perturbation. Where Du Bois characterized the Black body as racked with an epic internal struggle over identity, Cooper, using the Black female body as a point of reference, saw intersecting identities—primarily of race and gender, but also of class and nation—as a point of possibility. In Cooper’s account of racial identity, a Black female experience of embodiment brought these competing national identities into generative tension, whereas in Du Bois’s’ account, competing identities threatened to dismember the Black self: In this last decade of our century, changes of such moment are in progress, such new and alluring vistas are opening out before us, such original and radical suggestions for the adjustment of labor and capital, of government and the governed, of the family, the church and the state, that to be a possible factor, though an infinitesimal [one] in such a movement is pregnant with hope and weighty with responsibility. To be a woman in such an age carries with it a privilege and an opportunity never implied before. But to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in all the ages.10 Here, Cooper constructs Black women’s intersectional position as its own kind of “crisis” of “possibility,” as a space of “hope,” “responsibility,” and even “privilege.” She inverts the logic of marginalization that one would typically assume in an argument about Black women’s position at the intersection of race and gender.11 She invokes the symbolism of a pregnant female body heavy with the weight of racial responsibility. Black women’s capacity to reproduce children who would inherit the slave status of the mother had tethered their material value to their reproductive capacity, simultaneously rendering them vulnerable to endless sexual exploitation. Cooper, however, in her invocation of an expectant female body, offers new creative and procreative possibilities to Black women. At the most literal level, emancipated Black womanhood meant Black women could produce citizens rather than slaves.

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  But that revolution could begin only with Black men and Black women obtaining a “sound analysis.” This sound analysis regarding “roles” would lead Black people “to submerge all breezy definitions of manhood/womanhood (or reject them out of hand if you’re not squeamish about being called neuter) until realistic definitions emerge through a commitment to Blackhood.”62 Bambara thus concluded that Black communities would create structures to govern gender based upon racial dictates and political priorities, but those structures could not in any way be predicated on the subordination of femininity vis-à-vis female bodies to masculinity or male bodies. Moreover, her conception of Blackhood disentangled respectable gender categories from the articulation of Blackness. She argued for a new way to articulate and make legible Black humanity, not predicated on an investment in binary gender identities or limiting notions of manhood and womanhood. If the end of Reconstruction had made the articulation of respectable gender identities an urgent project, the immediacy of the political concerns of the Black Power era urged and necessitated new articulations of Blackness and gender. Though Bambara does not elaborate any further here on the meaning and function of “Blackhood,” she implicitly argues that the ways we understand race are inextricably linked to the ways we understand and articulate gender. Black communities needed entirely new conceptions of gender, ones rooted in the primacy of preserving Black life, in order to move toward liberatory articulations of Black identity. Ironically, though Bambara’s clear commitment to Black national politics might have been off-putting to Murray, undoubtedly Murray would have reveled in Bambara’s calls to throw off the strictures of traditional gender roles. Indeed, both women attempt to retheorize and expand Black women’s gender possibilities by offering up new (though wholly different) conceptions of racial identity. Murray embraced the multiracial, whereas Bambara opted for an identity rooted in peak Blackness. Bambara’s notion of Blackhood constitutes a twentieth-century attempt at defining the very kind of racial sociality that Fannie Barrier Williams had been concerned with in the late 1890s. Antirespectable in its rejection of traditional gender roles, Blackhood as a form of revolutionary, queer, Black racial sociality, had the potential—and indeed even the intrinsic demand—to formulate new ideas about the performance of Black gender identities.