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 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  His confidence that my uncle and every other Black man who heard of the Klan's coming ride would scurry under their houses to hide in chicken droppings was too humiliating to hear. Without waiting for Momma's thanks, he rode out of the yard, sure that things were as they should be and that he was a gentle squire, saving those deserving serfs from the laws of the land, which he condoned. Immediately, while his horse's hoofs were still loudly thudding the ground, Momma blew out the coal-oil lamps. She had a quiet, hard talk with Uncle Willie and called Bailey and me into the Store. We were told to take the potatoes and onions out of their bins and knock out the dividing walls that kept them apart. Then with a tedious and fearful slowness Uncle Willie gave me his rubber-tipped cane and bent down to get into the now-enlarged empty bin. It took forever before he lay down flat, and then we covered him with potatoes and onions, layer upon layer, like a casserole. Grandmother knelt praying in the darkened Store. It was fortunate that the “boys” didn't ride into our yard that evening and insist that Momma open the Store. They would have surely found Uncle Willie and just as surely lynched him. He moaned the whole night through as if he had, in fact, been guilty of some heinous crime. The heavy sounds pushed their way up out of the blanket of vegetables and I pictured his mouth pulling down on the right side and his saliva flowing into the eyes of new potatoes and waiting there like dew drops for the warmth of morning.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  Momma spoke to all the passersby but didn't stop to chat. She explained over her shoulder that we were going to the doctor and she'd “pass the time of day” on our way home. Until we reached the pond the pain was my world, an aura that haloed me for three feet around. Crossing the bridge into whitefolks' country, pieces of sanity pushed themselves forward. I had to stop moaning and start walking straight. The white towel, which was drawn under my chin and tied over my head, had to be arranged. If one was dying, it had to be done in style if the dying took place in whitefolks' part of town. On the other side of the bridge the ache seemed to lessen as if a whitebreeze blew off the whitefolks and cushioned everything in their neighborhood—including my jaw. The gravel road was smoother, the stones smaller and the tree branches hung down around the path and nearly covered us. If the pain didn't diminish then, the familiar yet strange sights hypnotized me into believing that it had. But my head continued to throb with the measured insistence of a bass drum, and how could a toothache pass the calaboose, hear the songs of the prisoners, their blues and laughter, and not be changed? How could one or two or even a mouthful of angry tooth roots meet a wagonload of powhitetrash children, endure their idiotic snobbery and not feel less important? Behind the building which housed the dentist's office ran a small path used by servants and those tradespeople who catered to the butcher and Stamps' one restaurant. Momma and I followed that lane to the backstairs of Dentist Lincoln's office. The sun was bright and gave the day a hard reality as we climbed up the steps to the second floor . Momma knocked on the back door and a young white girl opened it to show surprise at seeing us there. Momma said she wanted to see Dentist Lincoln and to tell him Annie was there. The girl closed the door firmly. Now the humiliation of hearing Momma describe herself as if she had no last name to the young white girl was equal to the physical pain. It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness. It was always possible that the teeth would quiet down and maybe drop out of their own accord. Momma said we would wait. We leaned in the harsh sunlight on the shaky railings of the dentist's back porch for over an hour. He opened the door and looked at Momma. “Well, Annie, what can I do for you?” He didn't see the towel around my jaw or notice my swollen face. Momma said, “Dentist Lincoln. It's my grandbaby here. She got two rotten teeth that's giving her a fit.” She waited for him to acknowledge the truth of her statement.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  “What you looking …” The minister's wife leaned toward me, her long yellow face full of sorry. She whispered, “I just come to tell you, it's Easter Day.” I repeated, jamming the words together, “Ijustcometotellyouit'sEasterDay” as low as possible. The giggles hung in the air like melting clouds that were waiting to rain on me. I held up two fingers, close to my chest, which meant that I had to go to the toilet, and tiptoed toward the rear of the church. Dimly, somewhere over my head, I heard ladies saying, “Lord bless the child,” and “Praise God.” My head was up and my eyes were open, but I didn't see anything. Halfway down the aisle, the church exploded with “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” and I tripped over a foot stuck out from the children's pew. I stumbled and started to say something, or maybe to scream, but a green persimmon, or it could have been a lemon, caught me between the legs and squeezed. I tasted the sour on my tongue and felt it in the back of my mouth. Then before I reached the door, the sting was burning down my legs and into my Sunday socks. I tried to hold, to squeeze it back, to keep it from speeding, but when I reached the church porch I knew I'd have to let it go, or it would probably run right back up to my head and my poor head would burst like a dropped watermelon, and all the brains and spit and tongue and eyes would roll all over the place. So I ran down into the yard and let it go. I ran, peeing and crying, not toward the toilet out back but to our house. I'd get a whipping for it, to be sure, and the nasty children would have something new to tease me about. I laughed anyway, partially for the sweet release; still, the greater joy came not only from being liberated from the silly church but from the knowledge that I wouldn't die from a busted head. If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult. 1When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed—“To Whom It May Concern”—that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson. Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home to his mother. A porter had been charged with our welfare—he got off the train the next day in Arizona-and our tickets were pinned to my brother's inside coat pocket.

• From The Letter to the Hebrews (The New Daily Study Bible) (2002)

  When the Greeks sacrificed, they were given back part of the meat. Often, they made a feast for themselves and their friends within the temple where the sacrifice had been made; and they believed that when they ate the meat of the sacrifice, the god to whom that meat had been sacrificed was in it and entered into them. It may well be that some Greeks had brought their own ideas with them into Christianity and talked about eating the body of Christ. The writer to the Hebrews believed with all the intensity of his being that no food can bring Christ into a person and that Christ can enter into us only by grace. It is quite likely that we have here a reaction against an overstressing of the sacraments. It is a notable fact that the writer to the Hebrews never mentions the sacraments; they do not seem to come into his scheme at all. It is likely that, even at this early stage, there were those who viewed the sacraments as working in an almost mechanical way, forgetting that no sacrament in the world achieves anything by itself and that its only use is that in it the grace of God meets the faith of men and women. It is not the meat but the faith and the grace which matter. This strange argument has set the writer to the Hebrews thinking. Christ was crucified outside the gate. He was exiled from society and numbered with criminals. In this, the writer to the Hebrews sees a picture. We, too, have to sever ourselves from the life of the world and be willing to bear the same reproach as Christ bore. The isolation and the humiliation may come to Christians as they came to their Saviour. The writer to the Hebrews goes further. If Christians cannot again offer the sacrifice of Christ, what can they offer? The writer says they can offer certain things. (1) They can offer their continual praise and thanks to God. The ancient peoples sometimes argued that a thank-offering was more acceptable to God than a sin offering; for, when people offered a sin offering, they were trying to get something for themselves, while a thank-offering was the unconditional offering of grateful hearts. The sacrifice of gratitude is one that all may and should bring. (2) They can offer their public and glad confession of faith in the name of Christ. That is the offering of loyalty. Christians can always offer to God lives that are never ashamed to show to whom they belong and whom they serve. (3) Christians can offer acts of kindness to their neighbours.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  When discussing transsexuals, it is often necessary to distinguish between those who transition from male to female—who are commonly referred to as trans women—and those who transition from female to male—who are called trans men. I prefer these terms over others because they acknowledge the lived and self-identified gender of the trans person (i.e., woman or man), while adding the adjective “trans” as a way to describe one particular aspect of that person’s life experience. In other words, “trans woman” and “trans man” function in a way similar to the phrases “Catholic woman” or “Asian man.” Because many trans people choose to relieve their gender dissonance in ways other than transitioning, I will often use the phrases male-to-female (MTF) spectrum and female-to-male (FTM) spectrum to describe all trans people (regardless of whether they are genderqueer, transsexual, crossdresser, etc.) who experience their gender as being different from or more complex than the gender they were assigned at birth. Sometimes people have a tendency to dismiss or delegitimize trans women’s and trans men’s gender identities and lived experiences by relegating us to our own unique categories that are separate from “woman” or “man.” This strategy is often adopted by nontrans folks who wish to discuss trans people without ever bringing into question their own assumptions and beliefs about maleness and femaleness. An obvious example of this phenomenon is the prevalence of the terms “she-males,” “he-shes,” and “chicks with dicks” in reference to trans women. Sometimes attempts to third-sex or third-gender trans people are more subtle or subconscious than that, such as when people merge the phrase “trans woman” to make one word, “transwoman,” or use the adjectives MTF and FTM as nouns (for example, “Julia Serano is an MTF.”). I do not identify as a “male-to-female”—I identify as a woman. These attempts to relegate trans people to “third sex” categories not only disregard the profoundly felt gender identity of the transsexual in question, but also ignore the very real experiences that trans person has had being treated as a member of the sex that they have transitioned to.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  But my head continued to throb with the measured insistence of a bass drum, and how could a toothache pass the calaboose, hear the songs of the prisoners, their blues and laughter, and not be changed? How could one or two or even a mouthful of angry tooth roots meet a wagonload of powhitetrash children, endure their idiotic snobbery and not feel less important? Behind the building which housed the dentist's office ran a small path used by servants and those tradespeople who catered to the butcher and Stamps' one restaurant. Momma and I followed that lane to the backstairs of Dentist Lincoln's office. The sun was bright and gave the day a hard reality as we climbed up the steps to the second floor. Momma knocked on the back door and a young white girl opened it to show surprise at seeing us there. Momma said she wanted to see Dentist Lincoln and to tell him Annie was there. The girl closed the door firmly. Now the humiliation of hearing Momma describe herself as if she had no last name to the young white girl was equal to the physical pain. It seemed terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness. It was always possible that the teeth would quiet down and maybe drop out of their own accord. Momma said we would wait. We leaned in the harsh sunlight on the shaky railings of the dentist's back porch for over an hour. He opened the door and looked at Momma. “Well, Annie, what can I do for you?” He didn't see the towel around my jaw or notice my swollen face. Momma said, “Dentist Lincoln. It's my grandbaby here. She got two rotten teeth that's giving her a fit.” She waited for him to acknowledge the truth of her statement. He made no comment, orally or facially. “She had this toothache purt' near four days now, and today I said, ‘Young Lady, you going to the dentist.’” “Annie?” “Yes, sir, Dentist Lincoln.” He was choosing words the way people hunt for shells. “Annie, you know I don't treat nigra, colored people.” “I know, Dentist Lincoln. But this here is just my little grandbaby and she ain't gone be no trouble to you …” “Annie, everybody has a policy. In this world you have to have a policy. Now, my policy is I don't treat colored people.” The sun had baked the oil out of Momma's skin and melted the Vaseline in her hair. She shone greasily as she leaned out of the dentist's shadow. “Seem like to me, Dentist Lincoln, you might look after her, she ain't nothing but a little mite. And seems like maybe you owe me a favor or two.”

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Lady Massey, Agnes and Colonel Fitzmaurice, a pleasant enough man, came and dined several times at the quiet old house in the Rue Jacob, and those evenings were always exceedingly friendly, Stephen talking of books with Colonel Fitzmaurice, while Lady Massey enlarged upon Branscombe and her plans for the coming Christmas party. Sometimes Stephen and Mary sent flowers to the Ritz, hothouse plants or a large box of special roses—Lady Massey liked to have her rooms full of flowers sent by friends, it increased her sense of importance. By return would come loving letters of thanks; she would write: ‘I do thank my two very dear children.’ In November she and Agnes returned to England, but the friendship was kept up by correspondence, for Lady Massey was prolific with her pen, indeed she was never more happy than when writing. And now Mary bought the new evening dresses, and she dragged Stephen off to choose some new ties. As the visit to Branscombe Court drew near it was seldom out of their thoughts for a moment—to Stephen it appeared like the first fruits of toil; to Mary like the gateway into an existence that must be very safe and reassuring. 4 Stephen never knew what enemy had prepared the blow that was struck by Lady Massey. Perhaps it had been Colonel Fitzmaurice who might all the time have been hiding his suspicions; he must certainly have known a good deal about Stephen—he had friends who lived in the vicinity of Morton. Perhaps it had merely been unkind gossip connected with Brockett or Valérie Seymour, with the people whom Mary and Stephen knew, although, as it happened, Lady Massey had not met them. But after all, it mattered so little; what did it matter how the thing had come about? By comparison with the insult itself, its origin seemed very unimportant. It was in December that the letter arrived, just a week before they were leaving for England. A long, rambling, pitifully tactless letter, full of awkward and deeply wounding excuses: ‘If I hadn’t grown so fond of you both,’ wrote Lady Massey, ‘this would be much less painful—as it is the whole thing has made me quite ill, but I must consider my position in the county. You see, the county looks to me for a lead—above all I must consider my daughter. The rumours that have reached me about you and Mary—certain things that I don’t want to enter into—have simply forced me to break off our friendship and to say that I must ask you not to come here for Christmas. Of course a woman of my position with all eyes upon her has to be extra careful.

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

  He was made bishop of Regensburg, an office he laid down in 1262.1475 His presence at the council of Lyons, 1274, is doubtful.1476 One of his last acts was to go to Paris and defend the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, after that theologian’s death. He died at the age of eighty-seven, in Cologne, where he is buried in the St. Andreas Church. Albert was small of stature and the story is told of his first appearance in the presence of the pope; that the pope, thinking he was kneeling, bade him stand on his feet. A few years before his death he became childish, and the story runs that the archbishop, Siegfried, knocking at the door of his cell, exclaimed, "Albert, are you here?" and the reply came, "Albert is not here. He used to be here. He is not here any more." In early life, Albert was called the dumb ox on account of his slowness in learning, and the change of his intellectual power was indicated by the bon mot. "Albert was turned from all ass to a philosopher and from a philosopher to an ass." In 1880, the six hundredth anniversary of his death, a statue was erected to his memory at his birthplace. Albertus Magnus was a philosopher, naturalist, and theologian; a student of God, nature, and man. He knew no Greek, but was widely read in the Latin classics as well as in the Fathers. He used the complete works of Aristotle, and was familiar with the Arabic philosophers whom at points he confuted.1477 He also used the works of the Hebrews, Isaac Israeli, Maimonides, and Gabirol.1478 His large indebtedness to Aristotle won for him the title, Aristotle’s ape,—simia Aristotelis — but unjustly, for he often disagreed with his teacher.1479

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

  During the two centuries and a half since Hildebrand had entered the city of Rome with Leo IX., popes had been imprisoned by emperors, been banished from Rome by its citizens, had fled for refuge and died in exile, but upon no one of them had a calamity fallen quite so humiliating and complete as the calamity which now befell Boniface. A plot, formed in France to checkmate the pope and to carry him off to a council at Lyons, burst Sept. 7 upon the peaceful population of Anagni, the pope’s country seat. William of Nogaret, professor of law at Montpellier and councillor of the king, was the manager of the plot and was probably its inventor. According to the chronicler, Villani,23 Nogaret’s parents were Cathari, and suffered for heresy in the flames in Southern France. He stood as a representative of a new class of men, laymen, who were able to compete in culture with the best-trained ecclesiastics, and advocated the independence of the state. With him was joined Sciarra Colonna, who, with other members of his family, had found refuge in France, and was thirsting for revenge for their proscription by the pope. With a small body of mercenaries, 300 of them on horse, they suddenly appeared in Anagni. The barons of the Latium, embittered by the rise of the Gaetani family upon their losses, joined with the conspirators, as also did the people of Anagni. The palaces of two of Boniface’s nephews and several of the cardinals were stormed and seized by Sciarra Colonna, who then offered the pope life on the three conditions that the Colonna be restored, Boniface resign, and that he place himself in the hands of the conspirators. The conditions were rejected, and after a delay of three hours, the work of assault and destruction was renewed. The palaces one after another yielded, and the papal residence itself was taken and entered. The supreme pontiff, according to the description of Villani,24 received the besiegers in high pontifical robes, seated on a throne, with a crown on his head and a crucifix and the keys in his hand. He proudly rebuked the intruders, and declared his readiness to die for Christ and his Church. To the demand that he resign the papal office, he replied, "Never; I am pope and as pope I will die." Sciarra was about to kill him, when he was intercepted by Nogaret’s arm. The palaces were looted and the cathedral burnt, and its relics, if not destroyed, went to swell the booty. One of the relics, a vase said to have contained milk from Mary’s breasts, was turned over and broken. The pope and his nephews were held in confinement for three days, the captors being undecided whether to carry Boniface away to Lyons, set him at liberty, or put him to death. Such was the humiliating counterpart to the proud display made at the pope’s coronation nine years before!

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

  The pontificate of Nicolas was marked by three important events: the controversy with Photius, the prohibition of the divorce of King Lothair, and the humiliation of archbishop Hincmar. In the first he failed, in the second and third he achieved a moral triumph. Nicolas and Photius. Ignatius, patriarch of Constantinople, of imperial descent and of austere ascetic virtue, was unjustly deposed and banished by the emperor Michael III. for rebuking the immorality of Caesar Bardas, but he refused to resign. Photius, the greatest scholar of his age, at home in almost every branch of knowledge and letters, was elected his successor, though merely a layman, and in six days passed through the inferior orders to the patriarchal dignity (858). The two parties engaged in an unrelenting warfare, and excommunicated each other. Photius was the first to appeal to the Roman pontiff. Nicolas, instead of acting as mediator, assumed the air of judge, and sent delegates to Constantinople to investigate the case on the spot. They were imprisoned and bribed to declare for Photius; but the pope annulled their action at a synod in Rome, and decided in favor of Ignatius (863). Photius in turn pronounced sentence of condemnation on the pope and, in his Encyclical Letter, gave classical expression to the objections of the Greek church against the Latin (867). The controversy resulted in the permanent alienation of the two churches. It was the last instance of an official interference of a pope in the affairs of the Eastern church. Nicolas and Lothair. Lothair II., king of Lorraine and the second son of the emperor Lothair, maltreated and at last divorced his wife, Teutberga of Burgundy, and married his mistress, Walrada, who appeared publicly in all the array and splendor of a queen. Nicolas, being appealed to by the injured lady, defended fearlessly the sacredness of matrimony; he annulled the decisions of synods, and deposed the archbishops of Cologne and Treves for conniving at the immorality of their sovereign. He threatened the king with immediate excommunication if he did not dismiss the concubine and receive the lawful wife. He even refused to yield when Teutberga, probably under compulsion, asked him to grant a divorce. Lothair, after many equivocations, yielded at last (865). It is unnecessary to enter into the complications and disgusting details of this controversy. Nicolas and Hincmar. In his controversy with Hincmar, Nicolas was a protector of the bishops and lower clergy against the tyranny of metropolitans. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, was the most powerful prelate of France, and a representative of the principle of Gallican independence. He was energetic, but ambitious and

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

  The development of organizations and bureaus in the 15th century was not carried as far as it is to-day, and for the good reason that the same demand for it did not exist. The cities were small and it was possible to carry out the practice of individual relief with little fear of deception. § 80. The Sale of Indulgences. Nowhere, except in the lives of the popes themselves, did the humiliation of the Western Church find more conspicuous exhibition than in the sale of

• From Notes of a Native Son (1955)

  But I remain as much a stranger today as I was the first day I arrived, and the children shout Neger! Neger! as I walk along the streets. It must be admitted that in the beginning I was far too shocked to have any real reaction. In so far as I reacted at all, I reacted by trying to be pleasant—it being a great part of the American Negro’s education (long before he goes to school) that he must make people “like” him. This smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine worked about as well in this situation as it had in the situation for which it was designed, which is to say that it did not work at all. No one, after all, can be liked whose human weight and complexity cannot be, or has not been, admitted. My smile was simply another unheard-of phenomenon which allowed them to see my teeth—they did not, really, see my smile and I began to think that, should I take to snarling, no one would notice any difference. All of the physical characteristics of the Negro which had caused me, in America, a very different and almost forgotten pain were nothing less than miraculous—or infernal—in the eyes of the village people. Some thought my hair was the color of tar, that it had the texture of wire, or the texture of cotton. It was jocularly suggested that I might let it all grow long and make myself a winter coat. If I sat in the sun for more than five minutes some daring creature was certain to come along and gingerly put his fingers on my hair, as though he were afraid of an electric shock, or put his hand on my hand, astonished that the color did not rub off. In all of this, in which it must be conceded there was the charm of genuine wonder and in which there was certainly no element of intentional unkindness, there was yet no suggestion that I was human: I was simply a living wonder. I knew that they did not mean to be unkind, and I know it now; it is necessary, nevertheless, for me to repeat this to myself each time that I walk out of the chalet. The children who shout Neger! have no way of knowing the echoes this sound raises in me. They are brimming with good humor and the more daring swell with pride when I stop to speak with them. Just the same, there are days when I cannot pause and smile, when I have no heart to play with them; when, indeed, I mutter sourly to myself, exactly as I muttered on the streets of a city these children have never seen, when I was no bigger than these children are now: Your mother was a nigger.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  44 The result was an inevitable slide toward patriarchy. Women were flatly prohibited from seeking divorce, and so long as their first husband was still living, they were forbidden to remarry, on pain of accusation of adultery. John Chrysostom, in the very same set of sermons that showed him sympathetic to the humble sufferings of women, could unleash a rhetoric against women that grates the modern ear. “They are like runaway slaves, who flee the master’s house but drag their chains along. Women who leave their husbands carry around the condemnation of the law like a chain, and are accused of adultery.… For she whose husband is alive becomes an adulteress.” In a society where a woman’s sexual honor was the measure of her worth, those were words calculated to bruise. John knew that Christian rules ran against common practice. “It may happen that slaves change their masters, even if the master is living, but the wife can never change husbands so long as he is living. It is adultery. Don’t read me the laws which have been laid down for those outside, which command that a notice of divorce be rendered and then set you free. You will not be judged by those laws on the day God has appointed, but by the law he has established.” Men, too, were deprived of access to divorce, with one all-important exception: female infidelity. In late antiquity the exception clauses uttered by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew were taken to mean that a husband could dismiss an unfaithful wife. Even John would accept it, with a little tergiversation. “An adulteress is not really even a wife.” The most he could find to say for such a rule was that it prevented bloodshed in the house. But what emerges so clearly from his sermons is the way that the church forcefully sought to alleviate the sexual double standard while importing a new double standard in the rules of divorce. 45 The homiletic corpus of the late fourth and early fifth centuries provides abundant and vivid testimony to the intense war on fornication that trailed the mainstreaming of Christianity. The sermons of Chrysostom were heard by rich and poor, powerful and powerless, free and slave, men and women.

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  So sexy in bed, so catastrophic out of bed. And thus I erected yet another Freudian triangle as I fantasized pulling her into bed with us so I could control what I couldn’t control. What I could never control: my dignity in the face of someone I adore. Losing it was the first thing I ever learned to fear; the cause of all my fear. My Waterloo in love . I am four years old. I am a very thin and little girl. So thin and little that my mother actually takes me to the doctor to make sure I’m healthy. After examining me, he allays my mother’s fears with one statement that quickly becomes family lore. “She is just ‘tin’ child!” he declares, in his thick German accent. He suggests I be given more exercise to stimulate my tiny appetite. So I am sent to my first ballet class. After school one day, a short while later, I ask my mother for a banana. (I now don’t remember particularly liking bananas—I liked fish sticks and macaroni with ketchup—but on this particular day I wanted a banana.) The request is refused on two counts. One: we don’t eat between meals in this house. Two: you won’t eat your dinner if you eat a banana now. But I am headstrong in my desire and beg so hard that I am finally handed a large, bright yellow banana. It is longer than my face. Victory. I go to the landing at the top of our staircase and look out the little picture window with my banana in hand. I peel down the top an inch or two and take a couple of bites. And stop. That’s all I want. My father, having witnessed the battle with my mother in the kitchen, comes up the stairs and tells me I had better finish that banana since I had asked for it. I know my father means what he says. Ten minutes later, he passes me and the banana again on the landing. The few inches of peel are now drooping around the few inches I have eaten, but the rest remains unpeeled, untouched. Again I am warned that I had better eat that damn banana, waste is not allowed in this household: you ask for it, you eat it. Daddy is very serious. But being such headstrong little girl, I just will not eat the rest of that banana. Now comes the lesson. As my mother looks on apprehensively—angry eruptions are frequent in our house—my father comes up to the landing, grabs the banana, pulls off the peel, and squashes it all over my face, rubbing the excess into my hair. As I stand there, frozen, I hear my mother cry out from the bottom of the stairs, “Don’t, don’t, I’ll have to wash her hair!”

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  As such, perhaps being sodomized could be viewed as my answer to the banana, the ultimate act of revenge. Out of the world of my bedroom, however, I fear that I will always be a little girl with banana dripping off her face, unable to forget that at any moment I am under the threat of humiliation from someone I love. The more I love, the greater the threat. When I am deprived by A-Man’s absence or the possibility of his loss, the threat of real humiliation, unchosen humiliation, lurks nearby like a predator awaiting its prey. The waiting is agony and the perceptions of humiliation multiply like a virus. They become so powerful that I experience them as real and endure the same annihilation of identity my father accomplished wielding a half-peeled piece of fruit. #291 As we approach year three, we approach three hundred ass-fucks. I love symmetry. After eight days without his cock in my ass, I’m ready to be certified. Insane from deprivation. We arrange a Power Hour and a Half. Unusually, I want to talk and I tell him of my pending insanity. I suggest to him that I am fully aware that he is not my answer (though my ass is convinced that he is). He concurs enthusiastically. “I am definitely not the answer,” he says. “I’m the question.” I immediately envisioned his cock entering my little asshole, his question firmly planted in the center of my being. I had it backwards, of course. My ass is the answer—for both of us. He strips, sits on the end of the bed, knees apart, and puts a pillow on the floor between his feet. I get on my knees, and as sucking begins, my heart is relieved. He takes my head between his hands, I put my own hands on either side of his hips, resting on the bed, and he slowly, smoothly guides my head, mouth rounded, open and wet, down the length of his cock. Very slowly, all the way until the tip of his cock meets the back of my throat. I give him total control, and become head and mouth for cock alone. It is so slow and his cock is so hard, the edge of cement. Beauty flowed back into my being and all my insanity flowed out like bilgewater. Then he fucked my ass, only my ass, and as his cock began entry he whispered, “If you ever forget, remember this, this is the point of connection, always.” SAVING FACE I was, however, now making other connections. When I confronted the mousy brunette that day, I asked her if she loved A-Man. I hadn’t planned on asking, but I guess I wanted to know. Well, no, I already knew.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  I am speaking to you as I always have—as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world. — One day, I was in Chicago, reporting a story about the history of segregation in the urban North and how it was engineered by government policy. I was trailing some officers of the county sheriff as they made their rounds. That day I saw a black man losing his home. I followed the sheriff’s officers inside the house, where a group of them were talking to the man’s wife, who was also trying to tend to her two children. She had clearly not been warned that the sheriff would be coming, though something in her husband’s demeanor told me he must have known. His wife’s eyes registered, all at once, shock at the circumstance, anger at the officers, and anger at her husband. The officers stood in the man’s living room, giving him orders as to what would now happen. Outside there were men who’d been hired to remove the family’s possessions. The man was humiliated, and I imagined that he had probably for some time carried, in his head, alone, all that was threatening his family but could not bring himself to admit it to himself or his wife. So he now changed all that energy into anger, directed at the officers. He cursed. He yelled. He pointed wildly. This particular sheriff’s department was more progressive than most. They were concerned about mass incarceration. They would often bring a social worker to an eviction. But this had nothing to do with the underlying and relentless logic of the world this man inhabited, a logic built on laws built on history built on contempt for this man and his family and their fate. The man ranted on. When the officers turned away, he ranted more to the group of black men assembled who’d been hired to sit his family out on the street. His manner was like all the powerless black people I’d ever known, exaggerating their bodies to conceal a fundamental plunder that they could not prevent.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  338 The History of Christianity II õ But getting rid of the missionaries was not sufficient to squelch Chinese Christianity. The communists saw that to consolidate their hold on this vast country, they needed to win the loyalty, or at least gain great influence over, native clergy. From the communist perspective, if they couldn’t extinguish Christianity, then the next best thing would be to herd as many believers as possible into a church controlled entirely by the government. õ In 1951, the party founded a new organization that was eventually called the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. They later set up a different organization to try to control the country’s Catholics, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION õ The ugliest period in modern Chinese history was the Cultural Revolution. Mao had become convinced that capitalists, counterrevolutionaries, intellectuals with Western ideas, and various other “enemies of the people” were lurking all around. õ In 1966, he called for loyal communists to purge these poisons from the country. Young people in particular raced to take up this call— they formed groups of vigilantes called Red Guards. They particularly preyed on professors and intellectuals, often dragging them out of their homes into the street for a “struggle session” that usually turned into torture and public humiliation. õ In 1968 Mao decided the Red Guards had too much power and dismantled the movement. He sent millions of bourgeois intellectuals to labor camps and farms, where the wholesome life of the revolutionary peasant was supposed to purify their minds. õ During the 10 years of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, the government banned all religion—even the Three-Self Movement. The journalist David Aikman tracked down a number of Christian survivors of these years and recorded their stories in a book called 339Lecture 34—Chinese Christianity: Missionaries to Mao Jesus in Beijing . He writes about one Christian in Henan province named Zhang Rongliang, who in 1974 was denounced by elders in his own church. õ Zhang actually got along with the local communist officials, and at first they tried to just talk him into renouncing Christianity so they could let him go free. But he wouldn’t do it. Officials put his trial, or struggle, on closed-circuit television and broadcast it into local schools as a warning to children. The police cuffed him, beat him with batons, charged him with “counterrevolution under the guise of religion,” and shipped him off to a labor camp.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Investigators from the Utah attorney general’s office have documented that between 1989 and 1999, Tom Green and his dependents received more than $647,000 in state and federal assistance, including $203,000 in food stamps and nearly $300,000 in medical and dental expenses. These same investigators estimate that had they been granted complete access to pertinent government files as far back as 1985, when Green began his polygamous lifestyle, they would have been able to show that Green received well over $1 million in welfare. Linda Kunz Green, now twenty-eight, was thirteen when she married Tom Green. She insists that he has done nothing wrong, that she is no victim. She says that she enjoys being a plural wife and points out that getting married to Green was her idea. Leavitt counters that Linda is simply a victim of what psychologists call the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages sympathize with, and later defend, their captors. “The ability to choose is an ability that Linda Green never had,” Leavitt argues. At the time Linda Kunz married Green, her mother, Beth Cooke, was also married to Green, although Cooke has since left him. (Seven of the ten women Green has married, and all of his current wives, were the children of his other wives when he married them; he has made a habit of marrying his stepdaughters, all of whom were sixteen or younger when he brought them into his matrimonial bed.) Cooke was raised in Short Creek, the product of a polygamous family. In 1953, when she was nine years old, she watched Mohave County sheriff’s deputies arrest her father and thirty other men in the Short Creek raid. Three years later, at the age of twelve, Cooke was married off to her stepfather, Warren “Elmer” Johnson, the brother of Prophet LeRoy Johnson. Cooke became one of seven women married to Elmer. In 1984, after Elmer Johnson had died and the husband who succeeded him had departed, Cooke and her two daughters were introduced to Green at a Sunday school meeting. “I paid particular attention to him,” Cooke told freelance journalist Carolyn Campbell, “because my friend said she had met Tom Green and he was the ugliest man she had ever met.” Cooke, who is four years older than Green, thought otherwise. She found him handsome, as well as highly intelligent. She was impressed with the way he took charge of the meeting. He asked her out on a date, during which he announced that he was going to marry her—a prophecy that was fulfilled in short order. The newlyweds honeymooned in Bountiful, Canada, a colony of UEP polygamists in southeastern British Columbia. By 1985 Cooke couldn’t help noticing that her thirteen-year-old daughter, Linda Kunz, was “showing feelings” toward Green. Linda liked to sit in her stepfather’s lap and would “hang on to him for the longest time.” She talked about him constantly, and eventually asked Cooke if she could marry Green.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  unable to prove that the supernatural bunny existed or quash a story that made him look like a country bumpkin. 33 In 1980, Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, a man who understood precious little about southern culture, but knew all he needed to about image making. His White House took on the trappings of a glamorous Hollywood set. Reagan could play the Irishman when he visited Ballyporeen, County Tipperary; he could wear a cowboy hat and ride a horse, as he did in one of his best-known films, Santa Fe Trail . The “acting president” had a skill few politicians possessed in that he was trained to deliver moving lines, look good for the camera, and project the desired tone and emotion. Since true eloquence had died with the advent of television, Reagan was less the “great communicator” his worshippers claimed than he was an actor with carefully honed “media reflexes.” He came to office rejecting everything Carter stood for: the rural South, the common man, the image of the down-home American in bare feet and jeans. Reagan looked fantastic in a tuxedo. A rumor made the rounds in 1980 that Nancy Reagan was telling her friends that the Carters had turned the White House into a “pigsty.” In her eyes, they were white trash, and every trace of them had to be erased. 34 In a 1980 newspaper piece, one prominent Reagan supporter with strong conservative credentials made a rather dubious argument about rednecks. Patrick Buchanan charged that urban blacks had been lured into the poverty trap by government, and that black men had been shorn of the pride that came from being family providers. His hope was that they might switch their support to Reagan and form a new “Black Silent Majority.” Casting the poor as pawns of the “professional povertarians,” Buchanan revived the old attack against Rexford Tugwell of the New Deal for being the poor man’s puppeteer. The most remarkable of Buchanan’s prescriptions was that urban blacks should see their way to imitating the rednecks whose pickups featured a Reagan bumper sticker and whose sleeves sported the American flag (he should have said Confederate). Putting poor blacks and rednecks in the same boat, Buchanan made bureaucracy the enemy of all. 35 • • • If Jimmy Carter’s election made one of Roy Blount’s friends cry out, “We ain’t trash no more,” that feeling was sadly deflated by 1987. That year’s biggest public scandal was the fall of Reverend Jim Bakker. Rising from obscurity, Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, had built a televangelist empire out of the

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  They’re all very suave, butter-tongued bastards with soft, doelike eyes; they sit around the table drinking the perfumed tea with a loud hissing noise while Nanantatee jumps up and down like a jack-in-the-box or points to a crumb on the floor and says in his smooth slippery voice—“Will you please to pick that up, Endree.” When the guests arrive he goes unctuously to the cupboard and gets out the dry crusts of bread which he toasted maybe a week ago and which taste strongly now of the moldy wood. Not a crumb is thrown away. If the bread gets too sour he takes it downstairs to the concierge who, so he says, has been very kind to him. According to him, the concierge is delighted to get the stale bread—she makes bread pudding with it. One day my friend Anatole came to see me. Nanantatee was delighted. Insisted that Anatole stay for tea. Insisted that he try little grease cakes and the stale bread. “You must come every day,” he says, “and teach me Russian. Fine language, Russian… I want to speak it. How do you say that again, Endree—borsht? You will write that down for me, please, Endree. …” And I must write it on the typewriter, no less, so that he can observe my technique. He bought the typewriter, after he had collected on the bad arm, because the doctor recommended it as a good exercise. But he got tired of the typewriter shortly—it was an English typewriter. When he learned that Anatole played the mandolin he said: “Very good! You must come every day and teach me the music. I will buy a mandolin as soon as business is better. It is good for my arm.” The next day he borrows a phonograph from the concierge. “You will please teach me to dance, Endree. My stomach is too big.” I am hoping that he will buy a porterhouse steak some day so that I can say to him: “You will please bite it for me, Mister Nonentity. My teeth are not strong!” As I said a moment ago, ever since my arrival he has become extraordinarily meticulous. “Yesterday,” he says, “you made three mistakes, Endree. First, you forgot to close the toilet door and so all night it makes boom-boom; second, you left the kitchen window open and so the window is cracked this morning. And you forgot to put out the milk bottle! Always you will put out the milk bottle please, before you go to bed, and in the morning you will please bring in the bread.” Every day his friend Kepi drops in to see if any visitors have arrived from India. He waits for Nanantatee to go out and then he scurries to the cupboard and devours the sticks of bread that are hidden away in a glass jar. The food is no good, he insists, but he puts it away like a rat.