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 Mud Vein (2014)

  Until it comes. Clarity, bleeding through my denial, warm against my numb brain. Warm—it’s a word I’m becoming less and less familiar with. Isaac has become increasingly worried about the generator lately. He calculates how long we’ve been here. “It’s going to run out of gas. I don’t know why it hasn’t already…” We turned off the heat and used the wood from the closet downstairs. But now we are running out of wood. Isaac has rationed us down to four logs a day. Any day now the generator could run out of fuel. It is Isaac’s fear that we will no longer be able to get water through the faucet without the power. “We can burn things in the house for heat,” he tells me. “But once we run out of water we’re dead.” My feet are cold, my hands are cold, my nose is cold; but right now, my brain is cooking something. I press my face into the pillow and will it away. My brain is sometimes like a rogue Rubik’s cube. It twists until it finds a pattern. I can figure out any movie, any book within five minutes of starting it. It’s almost painful. I wait for it to pass, the twisting. My mind can see the picture that Isaac has been looking for. While he, no doubt, paces the kitchen, I get up and sit on the floor in front of my dwindling fire. The wood is hard against my legs, but wood absorbs heat and I’d rather be warm and uncomfortable than cold and cushioned. I’m trying to distract my thoughts, but they are persistent. Senna! Senna! Senna! My thoughts sound like Yul Brynner. Not girl voice, not my voice, Yul Brynner’s voice. Specifically in The Ten Commandments. “Shut up, Yul,” I whisper. But, he doesn’t shut up. And no wonder I didn’t see it before. The truth is more twisted than I am. If I am right, we will be home soon; Isaac with his family, me with mine. I giggle. If I am right, the door will open and we can walk to a place where there is help. All of this will be over. And it’s a good thing, too, we are down to a dozen logs. When my toes are thawed, I stand and head downstairs so that I can tell him.

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

  Beza was deeply grieved at this apostasy. But when he learned that the king favored his old co-religionists in many ways, and especially, when in 1598, he published the Edict of Nantes, which put the Protestants on a nearly common footing with the Roman Catholics in France, Beza took a more hopeful view of the king’s condition. In 1599 the king, in the course of a war with Charles Emmanuel, approached near Geneva. The city saw in this a chance to obtain from the king the promise of his protection, especially against the Duke of Savoy, who had built a fort called St. Catherine, quite near Geneva. To effect this the city sent a delegation headed by Beza, and the interview between the monarch and the reformer was honorable to both. The king gladly gave his promise, and the next year the fort was destroyed. He also came to Geneva and received its hospitality. § 175. Beza’s Last Days. Beza’s life was now drawing to its close. The weight of years had become a grievous burden. His bodily powers gradually deserted him. He partially lost his hearing. His memory became so enfeebled that the past only remained to him, while recent events made no lasting impression. It was the breaking up of an extraordinarily vigorous constitution, which had so supported him for sixty-five years that he had scarcely known what it was to be sick. Then he took the prudent course of giving up one by one the duties which he had so long discharged. In 1586 he was excused from preaching daily, and henceforth till 1600 preached only on Sunday. In 1598 he retired from active duty in the Academy, and sold his library, giving part of the proceeds, which were considerable, to his wife, and part to the poor. In 1600 he rendered his last public services in the Academy, and preached his last sermon—the only one preached in the seventeenth, by a reformer of the sixteenth, century.1306 Occasionally something of the old wit flashed forth. As when he made his reply to the silly rumor that he had yielded to the argumentation of François de Sales and had gone over to Rome. The facts are these: François came to Geneva in 1597 with the express purpose of converting Beza. He was then thirty years old, very zealous, very skilful, and in many other cases had been successful. But he met his match in the old Reformer, who however listened to him courteously. What argument failed to accomplish, the priest thought money might do, and so he offered Beza in the name of the pope a yearly pension of four thousand gold crowns and a sum equal to twice as much as the value of all his personal effects! This brought matters to a climax, and Beza dismissed him with the polite but sarcastic and decisive rebuke, "Go, sir; I am too old and too deaf to be able to hear such words."1307

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

  This recital only inflamed my zeal the more, I became unable to resist the violent desire I felt to pay a visit to this hallowed church and there, by a few acts of piety, to make restitution for the neglect whereof I was guilty. However great was my own need of charities, I gave the girl a crown, and set off down the road leading to Saint Mary-in-the-Wood, as was called the monastery toward which I directed my steps. When I had descended upon the plain I could see the spire no more; for guide I had nothing but the forest ahead of me, and before long I began to fear that the distance, of which I had forgotten to inform myself, was far greater than I had estimated at first; but was in nowise discouraged. I arrived at the edge of the forest and, some amount of daylight still remaining, I decided to forge on, considering I should be able to reach the monastery before nightfall. However, not a hint of human life presented itself to my gaze, not a house, and all I had for road was a beaten path I followed virtually at random; I had already walked at least five leagues without seeing a thing when, the Star having completely ceased to light the universe, it seemed I heard the tolling of a bell... I harken, I move toward the sound, I hasten, the path widens ever so little, at last I perceive several hedges and soon afterward the monastery; than this isolation nothing could be wilder, more rustic, there is no neighboring habitation, the nearest is six leagues removed, and dense tracts of forest surround the house on all sides; it was situated in a depression, I had a goodly distance to descend in order to get to it, and this was the reason I had lost sight of the tower; a gardener's cabin nestled against the monastery's walls; it was there one applied before entering. I demanded of this gate-keeper whether it were permitted to speak to the superior; he asked to be informed of my errand; I advised him that a religious duty had drawn me to this holy refuge and that I would be well repaid for all the trouble I had experienced to get to it were I able to kneel an instant before the feet of the miraculous Virgin and the saintly ecclesiastics in whose house the divine image was preserved. The gardener rings and I penetrate into the monastery; but as the hour is advanced and the fathers are at supper, he is some time in returning.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  He moved in for the kill. “We’ll walk to the car,” he said. “I’ll open the door for you, because that’s what I do. We will drive to a great Greek place. Best gyros you’ve ever tasted-open twenty-four hours. You get to choose the music in the car. I’ll open your door, we’ll go inside, get a table by the window. We want the table by the window because the restaurant is across the street from a gym, and the gym is next door to a doughnut shop. And we’ll want to count how many gym goers stop for doughnuts after they work out. We’ll talk or we can just watch the doughnut shop. Whatever you want. But you have to leave the house, Senna. And I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Please.” I was shaking by the time he finished. So violently I had to sit down on the bottom stair, my fingernails bending against the wood. That meant I was considering what he was saying. Actually thinking about leaving the house, wanting to taste the gyros … see the doughnut shop. But not just that, there was something in his voice. He needed to do this. When I looked up, Isaac Asterholder was still where he was. Waiting. “Okay,” I said. It wasn’t like me, but everything had changed. And if he kept showing up for me, I could show up for him. Just this once. It was raining. I liked the cover that rain provided. It protected you from the hard brutality of the sun. It brought things to life, made them flourish. I was born in the desert where the sun and my father almost killed me. I lived in Washington because of the rain, because of how it made my life feel washed of my past. I stared out the window until Isaac handed me his iPod. It was beat-up looking. Well loved. He had the Finding Neverland soundtrack. I pressed play, and we drove without words, from our lips or from our music. The restaurant was called Olive and smelled like onions and lamb. We sat by the window, just as Isaac promised, and ordered gyros. Neither of us spoke. It was enough to be out among the living. We watched people amble on the sidewalk across the street. Gym goers and doughnut shop goers, and just as he promised, sometimes they were one and the same. The shop was called The Doughnut Hole. It had a large picture of a pink frosted doughnut on the storefront with an arrow pointing to the hole in the center. There was a large flashing blue sign that said, Open 24/7. People in the city didn’t sleep. I should live there.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima — collective work and responsibility — the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together. Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation. For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth. And it is never without fear — of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now that if I were to have been born mute, or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective. And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, “I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing — their experience is so different from mine.” Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, “She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other. We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  The official reason why and the actual reason why may be very different, but it is a fact. I was struck by the sight of many people, even children, walking through the parks after sundown. Earlier, when I had first come to Moscow from the airport, I had noticed quite heavy steady traffic, but there did not appear to be a traffic jam or great delay although this was the time when most people were coming home from work. It seemed quite an achievement in a city of eight million people, and I thought Moscow must be handling her problems of urban transportation in a new and creative way. Of course, when I saw the Metro, I realized why. Not only are the stations spotlessly clean, but the trains are quick and comfortable, and I’d never really thought that it could be an actual joy to ride on the subways. VII It will take a while and a lot of dreams to metabolize all I’ve seen and felt in these hectic two weeks. I haven’t even discussed the close bonding I felt with some of the African writers and how difficult it was to get to know others. I have no reason to believe Russia is a free society. I have no reason to believe Russia is a classless society. Russia does not even appear to be a strictly egalitarian society. But bread does cost a few kopecs a loaf and everybody I saw seemed to have enough of it. Of course, I did not see Siberia, nor a prison camp, nor a mental hospital. But that fact, in a world where most people — certainly most Black people — are on a breadconcern level, seems to me to be quite a lot. If you conquer the bread problem, that gives you at least a chance to look around at the others. So, for all of the double messages I received (and there were many — because of the places in which I stayed, because of a kind of both deference and unpleasantness that I received as an American, and because no matter how much is said and done, America still appears to have some kind of magic over many countries), no matter what the shortcomings were, there is enthusiasm about the people that I met in Russia, particularly the people I met in Uzbekhistan. And I recognize some of the contradictions and problems that they have. I am deeply suspicious of the double messages that kept coming and of the fact that when they are finished with you (and by they, I mean the government), when they are finished with you, they drop you and you can fall very far. So what’s new? I also am intrigued by the idea that there are writers who are paid to be writers and that they survive and they wield considerable power.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  And we have learned to deal across those differences with the urgency of all oppressed subordinates. All of us have had to learn to live or work or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the masters’ difference in order to survive. But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles. The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, * the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival. We have chosen each other and the edge of each others battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting. ** * Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980. * From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, An African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya Salaam in Black Books Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 4 (1980). * Seabury Press, New York, 1970. ** From “Outlines,” unpublished poem. The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism * Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, and had maintained an oath of silence my whole life for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective. 13 Lorde’s commitment to confront the worst so that she is freed to experience the best is unshakeable. Although Sister Outsider spans almost a decade of her work, nine of the fifteen pieces in this book were written in the two years following Lorde’s discovery that she might have/did have cancer. In the process of her growth, her coming to terms and using what she has learned, she shows us things we can take with us in our struggles for survival, no matter what our particular “worst” may be. What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again? 14 Audre Lorde asks no more of us than she does of herself: that we pay attention to those voices we have been taught to distrust, that we articulate what they teach us, that we act upon what we know. Just as she develops themes, reworking and building on them over time to create theory, so, too, can we integrate the material of our lives. Black woman, lesbian, feminist, mother of two children, daughter of Grenadian immigrants, educator, cancer survivor, activist. The essays and speeches in Sister Outsider give new resonance to that fundamental but much abused feminist revelation that the personal is political. We are all amplified by Audre Lorde’s work. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself. 15 —NANCY K. BEREANO December 1983 Notes 1. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” p. 55. 2. “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” p. 151. 3. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” p. 112. 4. “Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response,” p. 73. 5. Ibid., p. 74. 6. “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” p. 119. 7. Ibid., p. 114. 8. From an interview in The Feminist Renaissance. 9. “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,” p. 100, and “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” p. 68. 10. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” p. 38. 11. “An Interview,” p. 109. 12. Ibid., pp. 108–109. 13. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” p. 43. 14. The Cancer Journals (Aunt Lute Books, 1980), p. 25. 15. “Eye to Eye,” p.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. Possibility is neither forever nor instant. It is not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live, only to have that beachhead assaulted or threatened by those canards we have been socialized to fear, or by the withdrawal of those approvals that we have been warned to seek for safety. Women see ourselves diminished or softened by the falsely benign accusations of childishness, of nonuniversality, of changeability, of sensuality. And who asks the question: Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action? And even though the latter is no mean task, it is one that must be seen within the context of a need for true alteration of the very foundations of our lives. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours? “If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!” shouts the child.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Jonathan is fourteen now. In talking over this paper with him and asking his permission to share some pieces of his life, I asked Jonathan what he felt were the strongest negative and the strongest positive aspects for him in having grown up with lesbian parents. He said the strongest benefit he felt he had gained was that he knew a lot more about people than most other kids his age that he knew, and that he did not have a lot of the hang-ups that some other boys did about men and women. And the most negative aspect he felt, Jonathan said, was the ridicule he got from some kids with straight parents. “You mean, from your peers?” I said. “Oh no,” he answered promptly. “My peers know better. I mean other kids.” * First published in Conditions: Four (1979). * From “School Note” in The Black Unicom (W.W. Norton and Company, New York, 1978), p. 55.An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich*Adrienne: What do you mean when you say that two essays, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic” are really progressions? Andre: They’re part of something that’s not finished yet. I don’t know what the rest of it is, but they’re clear progressions in feeling out something connected with the first piece of prose I ever wrote. One thread in my life is the battle to preserve my perceptions — pleasant or unpleasant, painful or whatever … Adrienne: And however much they were denied. Audre: And however painful some of them were. When I think of the way in which I courted punishment, just swam into it: “If this is the only way you’re going to deal with me, you’re gonna have to deal with me this way.” Adrienne: You’re talking about as a young child? Audre: I’m talking about throughout my life. I kept myself through feeling. I lived through it. And at such a subterranean level that I didn’t know how to talk. I was busy feeling out other ways of getting and giving information and whatever else I could because talking wasn’t where it was at. People were talking all around me all the time — and not either getting or giving much that was useful to them or to me. Adrienne: And not listening to what you tried to say, if you did speak. Audre: When you asked how I began writing, I told you how poetry functioned specifically for me from the time I was very young. When someone said to me, “How do you feel?” or “What do you think?” or asked another direct question, I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was my response. Adrienne; Like a translation into this poem that already existed of something you knew in a preverbal way. So the poem became your language?

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Audre: What I was defending was something that needed defense. And this moved it out of “I’m defending Ed because I want to live with him.” It was, “I’m defending this relationship because we have a right to examine it and try it.” So there’s the northern Black poet making contact with these young southern Black people who are not saying, “This is what we need you for,” but were telling me by who they were what they needed from me. In the poem “Black Studies”* a lot of that starts coming through. Tougaloo laid the foundation for that poem, that knowledge born five years later. My students needed my perception, yet my perception of their need was different from what they were saying. What they were saying aloud was, “We need strong Black people,” but what they were also saying was that their ideas of what strong was had come from our oppressors and didn’t jibe with their feelings at all. It was through poetry that we began to deal with these things — formally. I knew nothing. Adrienne, I had never read a book about poetry! I picked up one day a book by Karl Shapiro, a little thin white book. I opened it and something he said made sense. “Poetry doesn’t sell Cadillacs.” It was the first time I’d ever talked about writing; always before I’d listened — part of my being inarticulate, inscrutable; I didn’t understand in terms of verbalization, and if I did I was too terrified to speak anyway. But at Tougaloo we talked about poetry. And I got the first copies of my book there at Tougaloo. I had never been in this relationship with Black people before. Never. There had been a very uneasy dialogue between me and the Harlem Writers’ Guild where I felt I was tolerated but never really accepted — that I was both crazy and queer but would grow out of it all. Johnny Clarke adopted me because he really loved me, and he’s a kind man. And he taught me wonderful things about Africa. And he said to me, “You are a poet. You are a poet. I don’t understand your poetry but you are a poet, you are.” So I would get this underlining of me. “You’re not doing what you’re supposed to do, but, yes, you can do it and we totally expect you to. You are a bright and shining light. You’re off on a lot of wrong turns — women, the Village, white people, all of this, but you’re young yet. You’ll find your way.” So I would get these double messages, this kind of underlining and rejection at the same time. It reduplicated my family, you see. In my family it was: “You’re a Lorde, so that makes you special and particular above anybody else in the world. But you’re not our kind of Lorde, so when are you going to straighten out and act right?”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  All of us have had to learn to live or work or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the masters’ difference in order to survive. But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles. The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed , * the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival. We have chosen each other and the edge of each others battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting . ** * Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980. * From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, An African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya Salaam in Black Books Bulletin , vol. 6, no. 4 (1980). * Seabury Press, New York, 1970. ** From “Outlines,” unpublished poem. The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism * Racism . The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied. Women respond to racism .

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Most likely there will always be women who move with women, women who live with men, men who choose men. I work for a time when women with women, women with men, men with men, all share the work of a world that does not barter bread or self for obedience, nor beauty, nor love. And in that world we will raise our children free to choose how best to fulfill themselves. For we are jointly responsible for the care and raising of the young, since that they be raised is a function, ultimately, of the species. Within that tripartite pattern of relating/existence, the raising of the young will be the joint responsibility of all adults who choose to be associated with children. Obviously, the children raised within each of these three relationships will be different, lending a special savor to that eternal inquiry into how best can we live our lives. Jonathan was three-and-a-half when Frances and I met. He is now fourteen years old. I feel the living perspective that having lesbian parents has brought to Jonathan is a valuable addition to his human sensitivity. Jonathan has had the advantage of growing up within a nonsexist relationship, one in which this society’s pseudo-natural assumptions of ruler/ruled are being challenged. And this is not only because Frances and I are lesbians, for unfortunately there are some lesbians who are still locked into patriarchal patterns of unequal power relationships. These assumptions of power relationships are being questioned because Frances and I, often painfully and with varying degrees of success, attempt to evaluate and measure over and over again our feelings concerning power, our own and others’. And we explore with care those areas concerning how it is used and expressed between us and between us and the children, openly and otherwise. A good part of our biweekly family meetings are devoted to this exploration. As parents, Frances and I have given Jonathan our love, our openness, and our dreams to help form his visions. Most importantly, as the son of lesbians, he has had an invaluable model — not only of a relationship — but of relating. Jonathan is fourteen now. In talking over this paper with him and asking his permission to share some pieces of his life, I asked Jonathan what he felt were the strongest negative and the strongest positive aspects for him in having grown up with lesbian parents. He said the strongest benefit he felt he had gained was that he knew a lot more about people than most other kids his age that he knew, and that he did not have a lot of the hang-ups that some other boys did about men and women. And the most negative aspect he felt, Jonathan said, was the ridicule he got from some kids with straight parents. “You mean, from your peers?”

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  Mothering ourselves means learning to love what we have given birth to by giving definition to, learning how to be both kind and demanding in the teeth of failure as well as in the face of success, and not misnaming either. When you come to respect the character of the time you will not have to cover emptyness with pretense . * We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created. As we fear each other less and value each other more, we will come to value recognition within each other’s eyes as well as within our own, and seek a balance between these visions. Mothering. Claiming some power over who we choose to be, and knowing that such power is relative within the realities of our lives. Yet knowing that only through the use of that power can we effectively change those realities. Mothering means the laying to rest of what is weak, timid, and damaged — without despisal — the protection and support of what is useful for survival and change, and our joint explorations of the difference. I recall a beautiful and intricate sculpture from the court of the Queen Mother of Benin, entitled “The Power Of The Hand.” It depicts the Queen Mother, her court women, and her warriors in a circular celebration of the human power to achieve success in practical and material ventures, the ability to make something out of anything. In Dahomey, that power is female. VIII Theorizing about self-worth is ineffective. So is pretending. Women can die in agony who have lived with blank and beautiful faces. I can afford to look at myself directly, risk the pain of experiencing who I am not, and learn to savor the sweetness of who I am. I can make friends with all the different pieces of me, liked and disliked. Admit that I am kinder to my neighbor’s silly husband most days than I am to myself. I can look into the mirror and learn to love the stormy little Black girl who once longed to be white or anything other than who she was, since all she was ever allowed to be was the sum of the color of her skin and the textures of her hair, the shade of her knees and elbows, and those things were clearly not acceptable as human. Learning to love ourselves as Black women goes beyond a simplistic insistence that “Black is beautiful.” It goes beyond and deeper than a surface appreciation of Black beauty, although that is certainly a good beginning. But if the quest to reclaim ourselves and each other remains there, then we risk another superficial measurement of self, one superimposed upon the old one and almost as damaging, since it pauses at the superficial.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "If we survey the held of history and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that each and all of them have said to the human being, 'The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers which you possess.' In what did the emancipating message of primitive Christianity consist, but in the announcement that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely overlooked. Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can at least repent of his failures. But for paganism this faculty of repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair. Christianity took it and made it the one power within us which appealed straight to the heart of God. And after the night of the Middle Ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses of the flesh, and defined the Reality to be such that only slavish natures could commune with it, in what did the Sursum corda! of the Renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole æsthetic being? What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them, faith and self-despair, but which were personal, requiring no priestly intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God? What caused the wild-fire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between? How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with cheer, except by saying, 'Use all your powers; that is the only obedience which the universe exacts'? And Carlyle with his gospel of Work, of Fact, of Veracity, how does he move us except by saying that the universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can perform? Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is here in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself—' He who will rest in what he is, is a part of Destiny'—is in like manner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency of one's natural faculties."

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Isaac is not in his bed when I wake. He’s not in the house. I check every corner, dragging my half useless leg behind me. My guess is that I’ve been unconscious for at least twenty-four hours, perhaps more. I step outside in Isaac’s oversized clunky boots, sinking into the fresh snow. The blizzard has all but covered the lower half of the house. Snow piles in graceful sweeps of white. White, white, white. All I see is white. It looks like the house is wearing a wedding dress. If there were tire marks, they are gone now. I walk as far as I can before reaching the fence. I am tempted to touch it. To let the volts shake my body and send my heart to a screeching stop. I reach my gloves toward the chain link. My light wool gloves that do nothing to stave off the frigid air. I might as well be wearing lace on my hands, I think for the thousandth time. Isaac is out. My hands pause midair. I have no idea if Elgin will take him to a hospital. My hands move an inch toward the fence. But if she does, he will live. And I might see him again. I drop my hands to my sides. She’s crazy. For all I know she’s locked him up somewhere else where she can play more of her sick games. No. Dr. Elgin always did what she said she was going to do. Even if it meant locking me up like an animal to fix me. The last time I had seen Saphira Elgin was a year past the date I filed a restraining order against Isaac. I’d been seeing her once a week for over a year. Our visits, that had started with her extracting one sliver at a time from the lockdown that is my mind, eventually became more relaxed. More pleasant. I got to speak to someone who didn’t really care about me. She wasn’t trying to save me, or love me to better health; she was paid (a hundred dollars an hour) to take an unbiased look into my soul and help me find the crickets. That’s what she called them: crickets. The little chirping noises that were either alarms, or echoes, or the unspoken words that needed to be spoken. Or that’s what I thought anyway. Turns out Saphira cared above and beyond her pay grade. She entered God’s pay grade. Toying with fate and lives and sanity. But that last time, the last time I saw her, she’d said something that in hindsight should have been my clue in to her insanity.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Carlos eventually began dating, cultivated the necessary social skills, and learned to avoid interpreting each man’s reaction to him as a referendum on his worth. Eventually, he moved in with a guy who was handsome and affectionate but not as irresistible as the fantasy guys he continued to stalk in his imagination. This man wanted to love him, and Carlos’s greatest achievement was the decision to receive that affection. If you’re pursuing any kind of erotic transition, large or small, I have a prediction. One day you’ll look back on how far you’ve come and wonder how you did it. I doubt that you’ll recall one pivotal turning point, except perhaps the decision to begin. Like Carlos, most likely you’ll recall a series of unfamiliar and awkward experiments, opportunities seized in spite of—or because of—the risks. Through these experiments you turn the promise of change into a reality. STEP 7:INTEGRATE YOUR DISCOVERIESIf alternative erotic styles are to be more than passing experiments, they must become woven into the fabric of your everyday life. For a lucky few, this integration occurs with relative ease. Especially when modifications are readily satisfying and don’t seriously conflict with older patterns, merely repeating pleasurable new behaviors may be sufficient to establish them. For most people, however, it’s not that easy. I’ve observed dozens of men and women attempt new forms of erotic expression, only to revert to less fulfilling but more predictable ways of being. They found that the most daunting aspect of an erotic transition wasn’t trying new behaviors but making these changes stick. Unless you learn how to do this, your discoveries from the previous steps may, in the end, prove to be futile. Few if any of us follow an uninterrupted path toward our goals. More commonly, we make headway until we come up against some internal or external blockage that tests our motivation. At such moments we may feel as if we’re going backward. These setbacks are among the most common impediments to our development. But it’s not the setbacks themselves that hinder growth. Far more important is how we respond to them. Some people quickly become demoralized, interpret their setbacks as signs of weakness, or perhaps even abandon their goals. When you encounter a setback, I encourage you to view it not as a failure but as an opportunity to integrate change at a deeper level where it’s more likely to take root and flourish. Sometimes this is simply a matter of recognizing reversals as thoroughly human and inevitable, and deciding to persist in spite of them—with as little self-criticism as possible. But I’ve learned from my clients that persistent setbacks serious enough to undermine positive change are, more often than not, signs that a person must wrestle with one or both of two crucial questions: (1) What is the relationship between the changes I seek and how I perceive myself? and (2) How do I deal with my old turn-ons as I practice new ones?

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  You have to get to a clearing. Somewhere they can see you. But all around me there are trees. I’ve walked so far. I am in the thickest of thickets. I can reach out and touch the nearest tree trunk with my pinkie. Did I stop here because I thought it would be warmer? Did I just collapse? I can’t remember. But I hear a helicopter whipping the air, and I have to make them see me. I utilize the nearest tree trunk and pull myself to my feet. I stumble forward, heading in the direction I came from. I can see my prints in the snow. I think I remember a thicket just ahead. One where I could see the sky. It’s farther than I thought, and by the time I reach it and tilt my head back, I can’t hear the Whump-Whump quite as clearly as before. Not enough time to build a fire. I picture myself crouched in the snow whittling away at a pile of wood, and laugh. Too late to go back to the house, how long have I been out her? I’ve lost all concept of time. Two days? Three? Then I think it. Isaac is alive! He sent them. There is nothing to do but to stand in the clearing, head tilted up, and wait. I am airlifted to the nearest hospital in Anchorage. There are already news trucks outside. I see flashes and hear slamming doors and voices before I am wheeled on the gurney through the back door and into a private room. Nurses and doctors in salmon-colored scrubs come rushing toward me. I am compelled to roll off the gurney and hide. There are too many people. I want to tell them that I’m fine. I’m a death escapist. There is no need for this many medical professionals or this many tests. Their faces are serious; they are concentrating on saving me. There’s nothing really left for them to save. Nevertheless, needles slide into my arms over and over until I can’t even feel them anymore. They make me comfortable in a private room, with only an IV to keep me company. The nurses ask how I feel, but I don’t know what to tell them. I know that my heart is beating and that I am not cold anymore. They tell me that I’m dehydrated, undernourished. I want to say, “No shit” but I can’t form words yet. After a few hours they feed me. Or they try to. Simple food that my hollow stomach can handle: bread and something that is white and mushy. I push the food aside and ask for coffee. They say, “No.” When I try to stand up and tell them that I’m getting my own, they bring me coffee.

• From Sister Outsider (1984)

  But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles. The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion. For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed,* the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships. Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival. We have chosen each other and the edge of each others battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling we seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting.** * Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amherst College, April 1980. * From “Rape: A Radical Analysis, An African-American Perspective” by Kalamu ya Salaam in Black Books Bulletin, vol. 6, no. 4 (1980).* Seabury Press, New York, 1970.** From “Outlines,” unpublished poem. The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism*Racism. The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance, manifest and implied. Women respond to racism. My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste, for most of my life. Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight. My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  -So I have, watching someone masturbate, fingering, finger popping, oral sex on a vulva, touching one's own genitals for pleasure, naked massage, kissing, teabagging, digital pleasure to a vulva or anus, a harmonica job, and then the last one we have on there is penis anus sex without a condom. [Alex] You heard him say "harmonica job," right? They aren't kidding when they said this would be comprehensive. The purpose of this exercise is to list any sex acts that come to mind and think through the risk for infection or pregnancy. Next, youth leader Sofia went over ways to reduce that risk. -Rolling over the head of the penis. I don't know how many of you have seen a female condom. ...into the vagina and making sure that it goes back to the cervical wall. Right here is a dental dam. A lot of people think that if you use lube you're not doing your job right. That is incorrect. We need to know this information. Whether you're choosing to have sex, to not have sex, you need that information so that you can make good, informed choices. And your decision can be to not have sex. That is still something that we teach. Abstinence is still a good option for a lot of people. [Alex] How is your relationship with your parents? Do your parents know what you're doing? -My dad comes and picks me up and drives me home. And we have conversations about the things that we go over in teen council, and I think that that's been so beneficial because I didn't have those conversations before with my dad. I think it's hard for parents sometimes to realize that, you know, your kids are thinking about sex. Your kids are getting on birth control, all those sorts of things. I think that that's something that's hard for parents and teen council has really helped my relationship with my parents. Yeah, any questions? -It's heartwarming to hear how sex education is strengthening Sofia's relationship with her parents. Because at her age, my inability to talk to my parents damn near killed me. [Alex] And I kept hearing that silence is the problem. -The silence is as loud as the words that we speak. -Universally, we want what's best for our children. We want to keep them safe. And in our urge to keep them safe, we keep information from them as though that will somehow keep them safer. -Kids pick up on, there are things we talk about, there are things that we don't. -Like vulva is the proper term for it, but hardly anybody ever uses that. I don't know why, but it's a body part. -You have to be a pretty open-minded, sexually confident parent not to instill a sense of shame around sex. And many parents struggle with that. And it's through no fault of their own. That's probably how they were raised as well.