Humiliation

Passages

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

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• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One evening, as it was getting dark, Kalla and I were busy, without being unduly hurried, putting the four chairs with which we had been playing at trains back where they belonged. We were tired of traveling around the world, with my sister as the only tourist while I alone drove the engine. Besides, the tiled floor of the yard was cold and our legs were frozen. So we then played at being bakers: we were kneading our painless legs, laughing at their being so strangely numb and threatening to put them in the oven to bake. My mother came out of the dark room and, as the light outside still allowed her to see a bit, set about checking the wick of her lamp. The twilight comes late in our country, but night then falls suddenly, and Mother, as always, was in a hurry. Two discreet knocks were heard, barely touching the wood of the street door. So as to avoid giving me any excuse to go out, I was forbidden ever to open the door. Kalla was more obedient than I and was therefore allowed to open it, which humiliated me, but gave her no particular pleasure. Her large dark eyes and her shoulders apologized to me as she went to open the door. It was Fraji, the son of Choulam: puny, with his scared, wide-open eyes like those of a bat, his sickly hair that grew in greasy tufts on a scalp like a barren moor. “Is your mother at home,” he asked Kalla. Dancing shadows suddenly appeared on the walls that seemed to stare as Fraji’s dark double arose at his feet, crawled from the ground up to the door, and then spread huge across the ceiling. My mother was on her way, holding the lamp at arm’s length before her. She saw the visitor: “Oh, yes, I know what you want. Wait a moment.”

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘That’s right. Well, my child, you must never play with cold steel. That’s to say, you must never be wounding about a man’s ... a man’s favours, if I may so express it. You were wounding about the gifts, about the favours, I bestow on you.* ‘You ... you talk like a cocotte,’ she gasped. She blushed, and her strength and self-control deserted her. She hated him for remaining cool and collected, for keeping his superiority: its whole secret lay in the carriage of his head, the sureness of his stance, the poise of his arms and shoulders. The hard forefinger once more pressed into Edmee’s shoulder. ‘Excuse me, excuse me ... It’ll probably come as a great surprise when I state that, on the contrary, it’s you who have the mentality of a tart. When it comes to judging such matters, there’s no greater audiority than young Peloux. I’m a connoisseur of “cocottes”, as you call them. I know them inside out. A “cocotte” is a lady who generally manages to receive more than she gives. Do you hear what I say? ’ What she heard above all was that he was now addressing her like a stray acquaintance. ‘Nineteen years old, white skin, hair that smells of vanilla; and then, in bed, closed eyes and limp arms. That’s all very pretty, but is there anything unusual about it? Do you really think it so very unusual? ’ She had started at each word, and each sting had goaded her towards the duel of female versus male. ‘It may be very unusual,’ she said in a steady voice, ‘how could you know? ’ He did not answer, and she hastened to take advantage of a hit. ‘Personally, I saw much handsomer men than you when we were in Italy. The streets were full of them. My nineteen years are worth those of any other girl of my age, just as one good-looking man is as good as the next. Don’t worry, everything can be arranged. Nowadays, marriage is not an important undertaking. Instead of allowing silly scenes to make us bitter He put a stop to what she had to say by an almost pitying shake' of the head. ‘My poor kid, it’s not so simple as that.’ ‘Why not? There’s such a thing as quick divorce, if one’s ready to pay.’ She spoke in the peremptory manner of a runaway schoolgirl,, and it was pathetic. She had pushed back the hair off her forehead, and her anxious, intelligent eyes were made to look all the darker by the soft contours of her cheeks now fringed with hair: the eyes off an unhappy woman, eyes mature and definitive in a still undeveloped face. ‘That wouldn’t help at all,’ Cheri said. ‘Because?’ ‘Because ...’ He leaned forward with his eyelashes tapered into pointed wings, shut his eyes and opened them again as if he had just swallowed a bitter pill. ‘ Because you love me.’

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem. “Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying. Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes. I countered. I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem. She countered. “Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.” I had no answer for that. I tried to pretend I was home. I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting. Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter. Will someone please take the catheter out . That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening . “How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?” D emoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy .

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night: it was I who said Lenox Hill. I got into a taxi in front of my apartment, which happens to be equidistant from two hospitals, Lenox Hill and New York Cornell, and I said Lenox Hill. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell did not demonstrate a developed instinct for self-preservation. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell demonstrated only that I was at that moment incapable of taking care of myself. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell proved the point humiliatingly made by every nurse and aide and doctor to whom I spoke in the two nights I would eventually spend at Lenox Hill, the first night in the emergency room and the second in a cardiac unit, where a bed happened to be available and where it was erroneously assumed that because I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem: I was old. I was too old to live alone. I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem. “Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying. Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes. I countered. I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem. She countered. “Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.” I had no answer for that. I tried to pretend I was home. I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting. Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter. Will someone please take the catheter out. That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening. “How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?”

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

  More precisely, her failure, indeed her refusal, to inhabit the category of respectable racial womanhood in socially accepted terms exposed her to a mode of institutionalized gender disciplining and discrimination that she came to name “Jane Crow.” Within the context of the intellectual geography and genealogy of the book, I turn to Murray’s time in the early 1940s as a student at Howard University Law School. I consider Howard Law and the stultifying gender politics that Murray encountered there as a significant site in her intellectual formation as a race leader and feminist. It was at Howard, as she encountered the sexism of the all-male Howard Law faculty and student body, that she created the term Jane Crow. I want to suggest that in addition to being an early formulation of intersectional theory, Jane Crow also sought to name a powerful system of gender disciplining within Black intellectual communities. This system, propped up by deep investments in the heteronorms of respectability politics, demanded proper sexual and gender performances from Black women if they desired to be race leaders, and attempted to silence, humiliate, and isolate them when they chose not to comply. Commensurate with the cultural and gender disciplining that she experienced at Howard, it was there, I argue, that Pauli Murray became a race woman. Armed by the end of her tenure at Howard with both medical confirmation of her biological femaleness and intricate knowledge of rampant sexism among race men, Murray turned her attention to seeking legal remedies for segregation and sexism. Her fervent advocacy for women’s equality within the law redirected some of Murray’s internal conflicts over her gender identity to a righteous cause—the cause of women. However, Murray was still sexually attracted to women, and she found little support for openly pursuing her sexual desires within the confines of her work as a race leader. Thus, I argue that at the height of her legal career, unable to resolve her identity conflicts fully through science, she used her legal training and broad historical knowledge to craft a fluid racial identification scheme that supported her liberal vision of a racially integrated society and resolved through sublimation her continued conflicts over what it meant to be a queer Black female race leader. My examination of Pauli Murray’s archival materials, coupled with a close reading of her 1956 autobiography, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, and her posthumously published second autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat, reveal an emerging framework of resistance to both institutional and cultural definitions of race, gender, and sexuality. 4 Like many of her race women forebears, she enacted this resistance by using her two autobiographies as sites for racial theorization, while also employing embodied discourse as a textual strategy that allowed her, both publicly and privately, to contest received discourses within science, history, and the law about the nature of Black female identity and Black female sexuality.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  At which point he came over. At which point, since I was still bleeding, we took a taxi to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital. It was I who said Lenox Hill. Let me repeat: it was I who said Lenox Hill. Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night: it was I who said Lenox Hill. I got into a taxi in front of my apartment, which happens to be equidistant from two hospitals, Lenox Hill and New York Cornell, and I said Lenox Hill. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell did not demonstrate a developed instinct for self-preservation. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell demonstrated only that I was at that moment incapable of taking care of myself. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell proved the point humiliatingly made by every nurse and aide and doctor to whom I spoke in the two nights I would eventually spend at Lenox Hill, the first night in the emergency room and the second in a cardiac unit, where a bed happened to be available and where it was erroneously assumed that because I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem: I was old. I was too old to live alone. I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem. “Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying. Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes. I countered. I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem. She countered. “Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.” I had no answer for that. I tried to pretend I was home. I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting. Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Will someone please take the catheter out. That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening. “How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?” Demoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy. With effort, I managed to convey this point. I got released from Lenox Hill. My own doctor got back from St. Petersburg. After further days of unproductive cardiac monitoring the cardiac hypothesis was abandoned. An appointment was made with yet another new neurologist, this one at NewYork Cornell. Many tests were scheduled and done. A new MRI, to establish whether or not there had been significant changes. There had not been. A new MRA, to see whether or not there had been any enlargement of the aneurysm visualized on the previous MRAs. There had not been. A new ultrasound, to establish whether or not there had been increased calcification of the carotid artery. There had not been. And, finally, a full-body PET scan, meant to show any abnormalities in the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the bones, the brain: in fact anywhere in the body. I repeatedly slid in and out of the PET scanner. Forty minutes passed, then a change of position and another fifteen. I lay motionless on the scanner. It seemed impossible to imagine this coming up clean.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Demoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy. With effort, I managed to convey this point. I got released from Lenox Hill. My own doctor got back from St. Petersburg. After further days of unproductive cardiac monitoring the cardiac hypothesis was abandoned. An appointment was made with yet another new neurologist, this one at NewYork Cornell. Many tests were scheduled and done. A new MRI, to establish whether or not there had been significant changes. There had not been. A new MRA, to see whether or not there had been any enlargement of the aneurysm visualized on the previous MRAs. There had not been. A new ultrasound, to establish whether or not there had been increased calcification of the carotid artery. There had not been. And, finally, a full-body PET scan, meant to show any abnormalities in the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the bones, the brain: in fact anywhere in the body. I repeatedly slid in and out of the PET scanner. Forty minutes passed, then a change of position and another fifteen. I lay motionless on the scanner. It seemed impossible to imagine this coming up clean. It would be one more version of the bed in the cardiac unit: a full-body PET scan had been ordered, ergo, as night follows day, there would need to be abnormalities for the full-body PET scan to show. A day later I was given the results. There were, surprisingly, no abnormalities seen in the scan. Everyone agreed on this point. Everyone used the word “surprisingly.” Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to explain why I felt as frail as I did.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The thread ran over my ribs and along my spine, tingling and singing, into a basin that was poised between my hips, now pressed against the low kitchen counter before which I stood, pounding spice. And within that basin was a tiding ocean of blood beginning to be made real and available to me for strength and information. The jarring shocks of the velvet-lined pestle, striking the bed of spice, traveled up an invisible pathway along the thread into the center of me, and the harshness of the repeated impacts became increasingly more unbearable. The tidal basin suspended between my hips shuddered at each repetition of the strokes which now felt like assaults. Without my volition my downward thrusts of the pestle grew gentler and gentler until its velvety surface seemed almost to caress the liquefying mash at the bottom of the mortar. The whole rhythm of my movements softened and elongated until, dreamlike, I stood, one hand tightly curved around the carved mortar, steadying it against the middle of my body; while my other hand, around the pestle, rubbed and pressed the moistening spice into readiness with a sweeping circular movement. I hummed tunelessly to myself as I worked in the warm kitchen, thinking with relief about how simple my life had become now that I was a woman. The catalog of dire menstruation warnings from my mother passed out of my head. My body felt strong and full and open, yet captivated by the gentle motions of the pestle, and the rich smells filling the kitchen, and the fullness of the young summer heat. I heard my mother’s key in the lock. She swept into the kitchen briskly, like a ship under full sail. There were tiny beads of sweat over her upper lip, and vertical creases between her brows. “You mean to tell me no meat is ready?” My mother dropped her parcel of tea onto the table, and looking over my shoulder, sucked her teeth loudly in weary disgust. “What do you call yourself doing, now? You have all night to stand up there playing with the food? I go all the way to the store and back already and still you can’t mash up a few pieces of garlic to season some meat? But you know how to do the thing better than this! Why you vex me so?” She took the mortar and pestle out of my hands and started to grind vigorously. And there were still bits of garlic left at the bottom of the bowl. “Now you do, so!” She brought the pestle down inside the bowl of the mortar with dispatch, crushing the last of the garlic. I heard the thump of wood brought down heavily upon wood, and I felt the harsh impact throughout my body, as if something had broken inside of me. Thump, thump, went the pestle, purposefully, up and down in the old familiar way.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  From my personal and professional travels, Virgin Gorda seemed the ideal spot. And less than an hour’s flight time from my home. My friend, another Black woman from St. Croix, and I deplaned in Tortola to clear BVI [British Virgin Islands] immigration at the Beef Island Airport. I was happy to be a tourist for a change, looking forward to a wonderful holiday, post-hurricane problems left behind for a few days. The morning was brilliant and sunny, and in our bags was a frozen turkey, along with decorations for the rented house. The Black woman in a smartly pressed uniform behind the Immigration Control desk was younger than I, with heavily processed hair flawlessly styled. I handed her my completed entry card. She looked up at me, took it with a smile, and said, “Who does your hair?” My friend and I were the only passengers going on to Virgin Gorda. As a Black woman writer who travels widely, I have recently been asked that question many times. Thinking we were about to embark on one of those conversations about hairstyle Black women so often have in passing, on supermarket lines, buses, in laundromats, I told her I had done it myself. Upon her further questioning, I described how. I was not at all prepared when, still smiling, she suddenly said, “Well, you can’t come in here with your hair like that you know.” And reaching over she stamped “no admittance” across my visitor’s card. “Oh, I didn’t know,” I said, “then I’ll cover it,” and I pulled out my headkerchief. “That won’t make any difference,” she said. “The next plane back to St. Croix is 5:00 p.m. this evening.” By this time my friend, who wears her hair in braided extensions, tried to come to my aid. “What’s wrong with her hair,” she asked, “and what about mine?” “Yours is all right,” she was told. “That’s just a hairstyle.” “But mine is just a hairstyle too,” I protested, still not believing this was happening to me. I had traveled freely all over the world; now, in a Caribbean country, a Black woman was telling me I could not enter her land because of how I wore my hair? “There is a law on our books,” she said. “You can’t come in here looking LIKE THAT.” I touched my natural locks, of which I was so proud. A year ago I had decided to stop cutting my hair and to grow locks as a personal style statement, much the same as I had worn a natural afro for most of my adult life.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The long journey southward started tolerably well, with the heat still humming and the lamps still intact in the Petrograd-Simferopol first-class sleeper, and a passably famous singer in dramatic makeup, with a bouquet of chrysanthemums in brown paper pressed to her breast, stood in the corridor, tapping upon the pane, along which somebody walked and waved as the train started to glide, without one jolt to indicate we were leaving that gray city forever. But soon after Moscow, all comfort came to an end. At several points of our slow dreary progression, the train, including our sleeping car, was invaded by more or less Bolshevized soldiers who were returning to their homes from the front (one called them either “deserters” or “Red Heroes,” depending upon one’s political views). My brother and I thought it rather fun to lock ourselves up in our compartment and thwart every attempt to disturb us. Several soldiers traveling on the roof of the car added to the sport by trying to use, not unsuccessfully, the ventilator of our room as a toilet. My brother, who was a first-rate actor, managed to simulate all the symptoms of a bad case of typhus, and this helped us out when the door finally gave way. Early on the third morning, at a vague stop, I took advantage of a lull in those merry proceedings to get a breath of fresh air. I moved gingerly along the crowded corridor, stepping over the bodies of snoring men, and got off. A milky mist hung over the platform of an anonymous station—we were somewhere not far from Kharkov. I wore spats and a derby. The cane I carried, a collector’s item that had belonged to my uncle Ruka, was of a light-colored, beautifully freckled wood, and the knob was a smooth pink globe of coral cupped in a gold coronet. Had I been one of the tragic bums who lurked in the mist of that station platform where a brittle young fop was pacing back and forth, I would not have withstood the temptation to destroy him. As I was about to board the train, it gave a jerk and started to move; my foot slipped and my cane was sent flying under the wheels. I had no special affection for the thing (in fact, I carelessly lost it a few years later), but I was being watched, and the fire of adolescent amour propre prompted me to do what I cannot imagine my present self ever doing. I waited for one, two, three, four cars to pass (Russian trains were notoriously slow in gaining momentum) and when, at last, the rails were revealed, I picked up my cane from between them and raced after the nightmarishly receding bumpers. A sturdy proletarian arm conformed to the rules of sentimental fiction (rather than to those of Marxism) by helping me to swarm up. Had I been left behind, those rules might still have held good, since I would have been brought near Tamara, who by that time had also moved south and was living in a Ukrainian hamlet less than a hundred miles from the scene of that ridiculous occurrence.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNI'S ROOM 193 walked to the arrSt. There was a policeman standing there, his blue hood, weighted, hang- ing down behind, his white club gleaming. He looked at me and smiled and cried, 'Qa vaT *Ouiy merct And you?' Toujours. It's a nice day, no?' Tes/ But my voice trembled. Theautumn is beginning.' Vest ga: And he turned away, backto his contemplation of the boulevard. I smoothed my hair withmy hand, feeling foolish for feeling shaken. I watcheda woman pass, coming from the market,her stringbag full; atthe top, precariously, a literofred wine. She was not young but she was clear-faced andbold,she had a strong,thick body andstrong, thick hands. The policemanshoutedsomething to herand she shomted back — something bawdy andgood-natured. Thepolicemanlaughed; but refused tolook at meagain. I watched the women continue down thestreet— home, I thought, toher husband, dressed in blue work- ing clothes, dirty, andto her children. She passed the corner where the patch of sunlight fell and crossed the street. The bus came and the policeman and I, the only people waiting, got on — he stood on the platform, far from me. The policeman was not young, either, but he had a gusto which I admired. I looked out of the window and the streets rolled by. Ages ago, in another city, on another bus, I sat so at the windows, looking outward, inventing for 194 James Baldwin eachflying face which trappedmy brief atten- tionsome life, some destiny,inwhich I played a part.Iwas lookingforsome whisper, or promise, of mypossible salvation. But it seemed tomethat morning that myancient self had beendreaming themost dangerous dream of aU. The daysthat followed seemed to fly.It seemedtoturn cold overnight. The tourists in theirthousandsdisappeared, conjured away by timetables. Whenonewalked through the gardens, leaves fellabout one's head and sighed and crashedbeneath one's feet.The stone of the city,which hadbeen luminous and chang- ing, faded slowly, but with no hesitation, into simple grey stoneagain. It was apparent that the stone was hard. Daily, fishermen disap- peared from theriveruntil, one day, the river banks were clear.The bodies of young boys and girls began tobe compromised by heavy under- wear,by sweaters andmufflers, hoods and capes.Old men seemed older, old women slower. The colors ontheriver faded,the rain began, andthe riverbegan torise. Itwasappar- ent that the sun would soongive up thetre- mendous struggle it costher toget toParis for a few hours everyday. *But itwill be warminthesouth,' I said. The money had come.Hellaand I were busy every day, onthe trackof a houseinEze, in Cagnes-sur-Mer, in Vence,in Monte Carlo,in Antibes,inGrasse. We were scarcely ever seen

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  My friend, another Black woman from St. Croix, and I deplaned in Tortola to clear BVI [British Virgin Islands] immigration at the Beef Island Airport. I was happy to be a tourist for a change, looking forward to a wonderful holiday, post-hurricane problems left behind for a few days. The morning was brilliant and sunny, and in our bags was a frozen turkey, along with decorations for the rented house. The Black woman in a smartly pressed uniform behind the Immigration Control desk was younger than I, with heavily processed hair flawlessly styled. I handed her my completed entry card. She looked up at me, took it with a smile, and said, “Who does your hair?” My friend and I were the only passengers going on to Virgin Gorda. As a Black woman writer who travels widely, I have recently been asked that question many times. Thinking we were about to embark on one of those conversations about hairstyle Black women so often have in passing, on supermarket lines, buses, in laundromats, I told her I had done it myself. Upon her further questioning, I described how. I was not at all prepared when, still smiling, she suddenly said, “Well, you can’t come in here with your hair like that you know.” And reaching over she stamped “no admittance” across my visitor’s card. “Oh, I didn’t know,” I said, “then I’ll cover it,” and I pulled out my headkerchief. “That won’t make any difference,” she said. “The next plane back to St. Croix is 5:00 p.m. this evening.” By this time my friend, who wears her hair in braided extensions, tried to come to my aid. “What’s wrong with her hair,” she asked, “and what about mine?” “Yours is all right,” she was told. “That’s just a hairstyle.” “But mine is just a hairstyle too,” I protested, still not believing this was happening to me. I had traveled freely all over the world; now, in a Caribbean country, a Black woman was telling me I could not enter her land because of how I wore my hair? “There is a law on our books,” she said. “You can’t come in here looking LIKE THAT.” I touched my natural locks, of which I was so proud. A year ago I had decided to stop cutting my hair and to grow locks as a personal style statement, much the same as I had worn a natural afro for most of my adult life. I remembered an Essence magazine cover story in the early 80s that had inspired one of my most popular poems—Is Your Hair Still Political? “You can’t be serious,” I said. “Then why didn’t I know about this before? Where is it written in any of your tourist information that Black women are only allowed to wear our hair in certain styles in your country? And why do we have to?” Her smile was gone by now.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  So this is a call for each of you to remember herself and himself, to reach for new definitions of that self, and to live intensely. To not settle for the safety of pretended sameness and the false security that sameness seems to offer. To feel the consequences of who you wish to be, lest you bring nothing of lasting worth because you have withheld some piece of the essential, which is you. And make no mistake; you will be paid well not to feel, not to scrutinize the function of your differences and their meaning, until it will be too late to feel at all. You will be paid in insularity, in poisonous creature comforts, false securities, in the spurious belief that the midnight knock will always be upon somebody else’s door. But there is no separate survival . Is Your Hair Still Political? M y first trip to Virgin Gorda earlier this year had been an enjoyable, relaxing time. After coping with the devastations of Hurricane Hugo, three friends and I decided to meet somewhere in the Caribbean for a Christmas vacation. From my personal and professional travels, Virgin Gorda seemed the ideal spot. And less than an hour’s flight time from my home. My friend, another Black woman from St. Croix, and I deplaned in Tortola to clear BVI [British Virgin Islands] immigration at the Beef Island Airport. I was happy to be a tourist for a change, looking forward to a wonderful holiday, post-hurricane problems left behind for a few days. The morning was brilliant and sunny, and in our bags was a frozen turkey, along with decorations for the rented house. The Black woman in a smartly pressed uniform behind the Immigration Control desk was younger than I, with heavily processed hair flawlessly styled. I handed her my completed entry card. She looked up at me, took it with a smile, and said, “Who does your hair?” My friend and I were the only passengers going on to Virgin Gorda. As a Black woman writer who travels widely, I have recently been asked that question many times. Thinking we were about to embark on one of those conversations about hairstyle Black women so often have in passing, on supermarket lines, buses, in laundromats, I told her I had done it myself. Upon her further questioning, I described how. I was not at all prepared when, still smiling, she suddenly said, “Well, you can’t come in here with your hair like that you know.” And reaching over she stamped “no admittance” across my visitor’s card. “Oh, I didn’t know,” I said, “then I’ll cover it,” and I pulled out my headkerchief. “That won’t make any difference,” she said. “The next plane back to St.

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

  We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof. If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke, or minded what we did, but if every person we met 'cut us dead,' and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all. Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind. To wound any one of these his images is to wound him. [257] But as the individuals who carry the images fall naturally into classes, we may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself to each of these different groups. Many a youth who is demure enough before his parents and teachers, swears and swaggers like a pirate among his 'tough' young friends. We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command. The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with. The good or bad fortunes of this self cause the most intense elation and dejection—unreasonable enough as measured by every other standard than that of the organic feeling of the individual. To his own consciousness he is not, so long as this particular social self fails to get recognition, and when it is recognized his contentment passes all bounds.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Sally appeals, silently, to Walter. Speak, you moron. Walter simply nods, blinking, basking, alert to the possibility of danger and, at the same time, all but hypnotized by the heat that emanates from Oliver St. Ives, who is trim and rumpled, fortyfive-ish, keen-eyed behind his modest gold-rimmed glasses; whose image on celluloid has survived countless attempts by other men to murder him, swindle him, blacken his name, ruin his family; who has made love to goddesses, always with the same abashed ardor, as if he can’t believe his luck. “Yes,” Oliver says, with an audible rise of impatience in his voice. “It sounds really, well, interesting,” Sally says, and can’t help laughing. “Walter could do it,” Oliver says. “Walter could pull it off. Definitely.” At the sound of his name Walter rouses, blinks more rapidly, shifts forward in his chair, all but changes color. “I’d love to take a crack at it,” he says. Oliver smiles his famous smile. Sally is still surprised, sometimes, at how much Oliver resembles himself. Aren’t movie stars supposed to be short, ordinary, and ill-tempered? Don’t they owe us that? Oliver St. Ives must have been identifiable as a movie star since childhood. He is incandescent; he is Bunyanesque. He can’t be much under six foot four, and his perfectly formed, blond-tufted hands could easily palm most other men’s heads. He is large-featured, flat-faced, and if in person he is not quite so handsome as he is on screen he carries every bit as much of that mysterious and undeniable singularity, a singularity not just of spirit but of the flesh as well, as if all other brawny, exuberant, unflinching American men were somehow copies of him, either well or indifferently made. “Do,” Oliver says to Walter. “I have great faith in your powers. Hey, you wrecked my career with one little story.” Walter tries a knowing grin but it comes out hideously debased, and full of hatred. Sally imagines him, suddenly and with perfect clarity, at the age of ten. He would have been overweight, desperately friendly, able to calibrate the social standing of other ten-year-olds to the millimeter. He would have been capable of treachery in almost any form. “Don’t give me that,” Walter says, grinning. “Didn’t I try to talk you out of it? How many times did I call?” “Oh, don’t worry, little friend, I’m pulling your leg,” Oliver says. “I don’t regret anything, not one thing. What do you think about the screenplay?” “I’ve never tried a thriller before,” Walter says. “It’s easy. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Rent a half dozen of the ones that made money, you’ll know all you need to know.” “This one would be a little different, though,” Sally says.

• From The Hours (1998)

  They drop by and are received; it doesn’t matter about your hair or your robe. It doesn’t matter about the cake. “Hi, Kitty,” she says. “Am I interrupting anything?” Kitty asks. “Of course not. Come on in.” Kitty enters, and brings with her an aura of cleanliness and a domestic philosophy; a whole vocabulary of avid, nervy movements. She is an attractive, robust, fleshy, large-headed woman several years younger than Laura (it seems that everyone, suddenly, is at least slightly younger than she). Kitty’s features, her small eyes and delicate nose, are crowded into the center of her round face. In school she was one of several authoritative, aggressive, not quite beautiful girls so potent in their money and their athletic confidence they simply stood where they stood and insisted that the local notion of desirability be reconfigured to include them. Kitty and her friends— steady, stolid, firm-featured, large-spirited, capable of deep loyalties and terrible cruelties—were the queens of the various festivals, the cheerleaders, the stars of the plays. “I need a favor,” Kitty says. “Sure,” Laura says. “Can you sit a minute?” “Mm-hm.” Kitty sits at the kitchen table. She says a friendly, slightly dismissive hello to the little boy as he watches suspiciously, even angrily (why has she come?) from a place of relative safety near the stove. Kitty, with no children of her own yet (people are starting to wonder), does not attempt to seduce the children of others. They can come to her, if they like; she will not go to them. “I’ve got coffee on,” Laura says. “Would you like a cup?” “Sure.” She pours a cup of coffee for Kitty, and one for herself. She glances nervously at the cake, wishing she could hide it. There are crumbs caught in the icing. The “n” in “Dan” is squashed against a rose. Following Laura’s eyes, Kitty says, “Oh, look, you made a cake.” “It’s Dan’s birthday.” Kitty gets up, comes and stands beside Laura. Kitty wears a white short-sleeved blouse, green plaid shorts, and straw sandals that make a small, crisp sound when she walks. “Aw, look,” she says. “One of my maiden attempts,” Laura says. “It’s harder than you’d think, writing in frosting.” She hopes she is careless, debonair, charmingly unconcerned. Why did she put the roses on first, when any idiot would have known to begin with the message? She finds a cigarette. She is someone who smokes and drinks coffee in the mornings, who is raising a family, who has Kitty as a friend, who doesn’t mind if her cakes are less than perfect. She lights her cigarette. “It’s cute,” Kitty says, and punctures Laura’s brash, cigarette self at its inception. The cake is cute, Kitty tells her, the way a child’s painting might be cute. It is sweet and touching in its heartfelt, agonizingly sincere discrepancy between ambition and facility. Laura understands: There are two choices only.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Third day:\ Q UEEN OF NA VARRE. 223 Sister Marie, witliout suffering herself to be dismayed, replied that He who knew the hearts of his servants would be her stay. " And since you carry your malev- olence so far," she said, " I would rather be the victim of your cruelty than the accomplice of your criminal desires ; because I know that God is a just judge." In a rage that may be more easily imagined than de- scribed, the prior hurried off to assemble the chapter. Summoning Sister Marie before him, he made her kneel, and thus addressed her : " It is with extreme grief. Sister Marie, that I see how the wholesome remonstrances which I have addressed to you on so capital a fault have been of no avail, and I am compelled with regret to im- pose a penance upon you contrary to my custom. I have examined your confessor touching certain crimes of which he was accused, and he has confessed to me that he has abused you, and that in a place where two witnesses de- pose to having seen you. Instead, then, of the honourable post of mistress of the novices in which I had placed you, I ordain that you be the lowest of all, and also that you eat your diet of bread and water on the ground in the presence of all the sisters, until you shall have merited pardon by your repentance." Sister Marie, having been warned beforehand, by one of her companions who knew her whole affair, that if she made any reply which was displeasing to the prior he would put her in pace, that is, immure her for ever in a cell, heard her sentence without saying a word, raising her eyes to heaven, and praying that He who had given her the grace to resist sin, would give her the patience necessary to endure her sufferings. This was not all. The venerable prior further prohibited her speaking for three years to her mother or her relations, or writing any letter excepting in community. 224 ^-^^ HEPTAMERON OF THE iNovel 22.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Since his return he lived in a room in the corridor on the first floor of his mother's house, as before, but stayed more in the "club" than on Mengstrasse, for life there was not made very pleasant for him. Riekchen Severin, Ida Jungmann's successor, who now ruled the consul's servants and ran the household, a squat, 27-year-old country creature with red, cracked cheeks and pursed lips, had recognized with a peasant sense of facts that this unemployed storyteller , who was alternately silly and miserable, and whom the respected person, the senator, looked at with a raised eyebrow, saying there was not much to consider, and she quite simply neglected his needs. "Yeah, Herr Buddenbrook!" she said. "I don't have time for you now! as if to say: Aren't you ashamed?... and went on his way stiff-jointed. "You think I always have a candle?" he said to Tony... "Rarely! Most of the time I have to go to bed with a match...' Or he would also explain - because the pocket money his mother was still able to give him was small -: 'Bad times!... Yes, things used to be different! What do you think? I often have to borrow five shillings for toothpowder now!' "Christian!" exclaimed Frau Permaneder. 'How unworthy! With a match! Five shillings! At least don't talk about it!' She was indignant, indignant, offended in her most sacred feelings; that alone didn't change anything... Christian borrowed the five shillings for toothpowder from his old friend Andreas Gieseke, a doctor of both laws. He was lucky in this friendship, and it honored him; for the lawyer Gieseke, that suitier who knew how to preserve dignity, had been elected senator last winter, when old Kaspar Oeverdieck had gently drifted off to sleep and Doctor Langhals had taken his place. But that didn't affect his lifestyle. It was known that he, who had owned a spacious house in the middle of the city since his marriage to Fraulein Huneus, also owned the small, green, comfortably furnished villa in the suburb of St. Gertrude, which belonged to a still young and extraordinarily pretty lady of uncertain origin was inhabited all alone. Above the front door was the word »Quisisana ', and throughout the city the peaceful little house was known by that name, which, by the way, was spoken with very soft S's and very murky A's. Christian Buddenbrook, however, as Senator Gieseke's best friend, had gained access to Quisisana, and he had been successful there in the same way as in Hamburg with Aline Puvogel and on similar occasions in London, in Valparaiso and in so many other places around the world . He had "told a little," he had been "a little nice," and now he was hanging out with the same woman in the little green house regularity like Senator Gieseke himself.

• From The Hours (1998)

  Mrs. Dalloway Clarissa carries her armload of flowers out into Spring Street. She imagines Barbara still in the cool dimness on the far side of the door, continuing to live in what Clarissa can’t help thinking of now as the past (it has to do, somehow, with Barbara’s sorrow, and the racks of ribbons on the back wall) while she herself walks into the present, all this: the Chinese boy careening by on a bicycle; the number 281 written in gold on dark glass; the scattering of pigeons with feet the color of pencil erasers (a bird had flown in through the open window of her fourth-grade classroom, violent, dreadful); Spring Street; and here she is with a huge bouquet of flowers. She will stop by Richard’s apartment to see how he’s doing (it’s useless to call, he never answers), but first she goes and stands shyly, expectantly, not too close to the trailer from which the famous head emerged. A small crowd is gathered there, mostly tourists, and Clarissa positions herself beside two young girls, one with hair dyed canary yellow and the other with hair dyed platinum. Clarissa wonders if they intended to so strongly suggest the sun and the moon. Sun says to Moon, “It was Meryl Streep, definitely Meryl Streep.” Clarissa is excited, despite herself. She was right. There is a surprisingly potent satisfaction in knowing that her vision was shared by another. “No way,” says Moon. “It was Susan Sarandon.” It was not, Clarissa thinks, Susan Sarandon. It may have been Vanessa Redgrave but it was certainly not Susan Sarandon. “No,” says Sun, “it was Streep. Trust me.” “It was not Meryl Streep.” “It was. It fucking was.” Clarissa stands guiltily, holding her flowers, hoping the star will show herself again, embarrassed by her own interest. She is not given to fawning over celebrities, no more than most people, but can’t help being drawn to the aura of fame—and more than fame, actual immortality—implied by the presence of a movie star in a trailer on the corner of MacDougal and Spring Streets. These two girls standing beside Clarissa, twenty if not younger, defiantly hefty, slouching into each other, laden with brightly colored bags from discount stores; these two girls will grow to middle and then old age, either wither or bloat; the cemeteries in which they’re buried will fall eventually into ruin, the grass grown wild, browsed at night by dogs; and when all that remains of these girls is a few silver fillings lost under ground the woman in the trailer, be she Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave or even Susan Sarandon, will still be known. She will exist in archives, in books; her recorded voice will be stored away among other precious and venerated objects. Clarissa allows herself to continue standing, foolish as any fan, for another few minutes, in hope of seeing the star emerge. Yes, just another few minutes, before the humiliation is simply too much to bear.