Loneliness

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 Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  When you’re about to launch into space, you are strapped into a capsule that is attached to rocket boosters that will blast to 17,500 miles per hour in a jiffy and get you to outer space in eight and a half minutes. You get to space and look back and see planet Earth in all her glory—the whole big round ball. You then proceed to work twelve-hour days for ten days straight, collecting samples, conducting experiments, taking walks—you know, in space. At the end of your day, you retire to soundproof sleeping quarters that are the size of a telephone booth, and you strap yourself to your bed, lest you float around all night. You peek out your window and see the oceans, the continents, the moon, the stars, before drifting off to sleep. Now, not only is it hard on an astronaut’s body to be in space (on average, astronauts lose about 1 percent of their bone mass per month spent in space), but it’s also hard on their minds. They are separated from friends and family and normal earthly routines for days—sometimes months—on end. Despite the wonderful aspects of their job, they know that life is going on without them back home. They can feel isolated. Emotions can run dark. Shane told me about an extended mission he was on last year, when he really had to mind his mind. “We launched in September and were scheduled to be home mid-February. In late January, our crew received some troubling news from mission control. For a whole host of reasons, we wouldn’t be landing until April now.” This wasn’t like being an hour later for dinner; Shane would be two months late. Shane was ready to be home. Shane’s wife and kids were ready for him to be home. The entire crew ached to get home. Yet they would not be going home. “How in the world did you cope?” I asked him, and in response he said four words I’ll never, ever forget. “I trusted my training.” Shane so believed in his work, in his mission to serve humanity, in the fact that mission control had his best interests at heart, in God’s faithful provision, come what may, that he was able to arrest the thoughts that would have otherwise derailed him and think on more useful things. “I spent years and years learning how to be a successful astronaut,” he said. “I believed the best, I called my wife, and I got busy finishing my task.” “I trusted my training,” Shane told me, words that lingered with me for days. It’s not easy to stop believing lies. We can’t simply sit back and wait for our minds to heal, for our thoughts to change. We train. That’s how truth gains the victory in the battle for our minds.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  My replies, in consequence, grew shorter and rarer than ever. As for Alice: after that one brief, bitter epistle, she never wrote to me at all. Chapter 9 I t might seem a curious kind of leap to make, from music-hall masher to renter. In fact, the world of actors and artistes, and the gay world in which I now found myself working, are not so very different. Both have London as their proper country, the West End as their capital. Both are a curious mix of magic and necessity, glamour and sweat. Both have their types - their ingénues and grandes dames, their rising stars, their falling stars, their bill-toppers, their hacks ... All this I learned, slowly but steadily, in the first few weeks of my apprenticeship, just as I had learned my music-hall trade at Kitty’s side. Luckily for me, I found a friend and adviser - a boy with whom I fell into conversation late one night, as we sheltered together from a sudden shower in the doorway of a building on the edge of Soho Square. He was a very girlish type - what they call a true mary-anne - and, like many of them, he gave himself a girl’s name: Alice. ‘That’s my sister’s name!’ I said, when he told me, and he smiled: it was his sister’s name, too - only his sister, he said, was dead. I said I didn’t know if mine was dead or not, and didn’t care; and this did not surprise him. This Alice was, I guessed, about my age. He was as pretty as a girl - prettier, indeed, than most girls (including me), for he had glossy black hair and a heart-shaped face, and eye-lashes impossibly long and dark and thick. He had rented, he said, since he was twelve; renting, now, was the only life he knew, but he liked it well enough. ‘It’s better, anyway,’ he said, ‘than working in an office or a shop. I believe that, if I had to work in the same little room all day, perched on the same little stool and staring at the same dull faces, I would go mad, just mad!’

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I have spent my evenings playing with Mabel. I’ve made her toys out of paper and tissue and card. She turns her head upside down, puffs out her chin- feathers, squeaks, picks up the toys in her beak, drops them, and preens. When I throw her balls of scrunched-up paper she catches them in her beak and tosses them back to me with a flick of her head. Then she crouches, waiting for me to throw them to her again. It is as good as it gets. When I told Stuart I played catch with her for a while he didn’t believe me. You don’t play with goshawks. It’s not what people do. But I have had to, to somehow leaven the chill. Because other people with goshawks have people too. For them their goshawks are their little splinter of wildness, their balance to domesticity; out in the woods with the hawk, other falconers get in touch with their solitudinous, bloody souls. But then they come home and have dinner, watch TV, play with their kids, sleep with their partner, wake, make tea, go to work. You need both sides, as they say. I don’t have both sides. I only have wildness. And I don’t need wildness any more. I’m not stifled by domesticity. I have none. There is no need, right now, to feel close to a fetch of dark northern woods, a creature with baleful eyes and death in her foot. Human hands are for holding other hands. Human arms are for holding other humans close. They’re not for breaking the necks of rabbits, pulling loops of viscera out onto leaf-litter while the hawk dips her head to drink blood from her quarry’s chest cavity. I watch all these things going on and my heart is salt. Everything is stuck in an eternal present. The rabbit stops breathing; the hawk eats; leaves fall; clouds pass overhead. A car drives past the field, and there are people in it, held securely on their way somewhere, wrapped in life like a warm coat. Tyre sounds recede. A heron bows overhead. I watch the goshawk snip, tear and wrench flesh from the rabbit’s foreleg. I feel sorry for the rabbit. Rabbit was born, grew up in the field, ate dandelions and grass, scratched his jaw with his feet, hopped about. Had baby rabbits of his own. Rabbit didn’t know what lonely was; he lived in a warren. And rabbit is now just a carefully packed assemblage of different kinds of food for a hawk who spends her evenings watching television on the living-room floor. Everything is so damn mysterious. Another car passes. Faces turn to watch me crouched with rabbit and hawk. I feel like a tableau at a roadside shrine. But I’m not sure what the shrine is for. I’m a roadside phenomenon. I am death to community. I am missing the point. There is a point?

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  father’s family). 2. 1°32 forezgn woman, as term. techn., in Pr, for harlot (perh. because harlots were orig. chiefly foreigners): Pr 2" (Ft AWS), 7° (||), 52 (ITY, 6 (| IVY, 237 (|| 712%)—On 20" 27% y. infr. 3. fig. unknown, unfamiliar : בְּעִיבִיהֶם‎ NNT 733 Jb 19” an alien am I become in their eyes; "28 בי לבני‎ ו‎ 69° (|| ‘R20 איש כ' ;ור‎ He 6% of “s judgment, iNJay 1°32 Is 28% strange is his task / )|| נַּפֶן כֶכְרִיּה ;)7 מעשהו‎ Je 27 an alien vine (opp. MDS ,(זֶרע‎ fig. of degenerate Israel ; as subst., נָכְרִים‎ Pr 20" Kt ( > Qr %753), aliens, persons unknown to him (||), so read also (for MT 1°73) || 27™. 1 [נכר]‎ vb.denom. act or treat as foreign, or strange; disguise, misconstrue ;—-Niph. Impf. 123" Pr 26% with his lips a hater dis- guiseth himself (dissembles, speaks what is Foreign to his thought). Pi. Pf.122 1823’, but v. infr.; Jmpf. 132%) Je 19* and they have treated this place as foreign (profane); 132° IMS _Dt 32” lest their adversaries should mis- construe (it). 1!2 אתל א'‎ 132 1S 237 God hath alienated him into my hand, but improbable; G12 (cf. Ju 4°) hath sold him, so Th Klo HPS (ef. We); > סְכַּר‎ (as 18 19*( Krochm Dr; Kit either of these; >73D Bu; Lohr either 73D or "2D, Hithp. Jmpf, DDN 7B Gn 427 he acted as a stranger toward them; 16.1, מִתִנכָּרָה‎ 1K 14°° feign to be a stranger-woman. n.[f.] treasure (so context‏ [:כת]1 demands) (GL 2 K 20% rips imdpfeas, 01. 6 5 ;‏ der. uncertain; Dl?’™™ cp. As. bit nakamti‏ (nakanti), house of treasure, / nakdmu, heap‏ perh. borrowed ;‏ ב' )’ up [Dl#¥**), whence‏ Hpt™ ii, 266‏ 731 ,)1886( [א this favoured by No ZMG‏ (reading nakavdti=nakamdati,and Heb.Vi3)/3‏ A= his treasure-‏ נְכתה 3)).—Only sf,‏ / נְכוְתָו or‏ house 2 K 20%=Is 39”.‏ doubtful / (Ar. Jos, JU is obtain,‏ נלה attain, 5 what one obtains by another’s‏ bounty, Lane*™°);—for supposed Hiph. 707: sf.‏ WOM. (Ki Ges”? Ks),‏ = ב 19 PO‏ so RaCapp Ges™‏ ; כלה read W923 (Pi. Inf. of‏ Ew Kn Che Brd Di Du), ef. || Jn.‏ n.[m.]? gain, acquisition !—‏ [מנלה]+ Jb 15” (si vera 1.)‏ לא Only sf. D530 YIN? no.‏ their acquisition, but very dub.; Di (formerly)‏ ears, cf. Bu; other conj. v.‏ מְלְלִים Hi‏ שְבָּלִים 649 נמרים in Di; Du thinks hopelessly 60---.)גוינינס6‎ cndy [i.e. Dy], S their word [ond]. Niph.‏ בזה v.‏ 15° 5 1 נמבוה n.pr.m. (cf. Gray?-N-907) > 1,‏ נְמוּאֶל1 2 יָמוּאֶל ==) *4 son of Simeon Nu 26” 1 Ch‏ Gn 46" Ex 6”), G Napounr. 2. a Reubenite‏ (brother of Dathan and Abiram) Nu 26°, 69 0.‏

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  She shook her head. “Let me tell you what I start thinking then. I think of who will take care of the house if I’m not here? I think, who can I count on to make sure that a leak gets fixed or that the fence gets mended? It’s terrible, selfish, I know. All I can do when I think this way is to get mad at the Old Man because he didn’t build this house for us. We are the children, Barack. Why do we have to take care of everyone? Everything is upside down, crazy. I had to take care of myself, just like Bernard. Now I’m used to living my own life, just like a German. Everything is organized. If something is broken, I fix it. If something goes wrong, it’s my own fault. If I have it, I send money to the family, and they can do with it what they want, and I won’t depend on them, and they won’t depend on me.” “It sounds lonely.” “Oh, I know, Barack. That’s why I keep coming home. That’s why I’m still dreaming.” After two days, I still hadn’t recovered my bag. The airline office downtown told us to call the airport, but whenever we tried the lines were always busy. Auma finally suggested that we drive out there ourselves. At the British Airways desk we found two young women discussing a nightclub that had just opened. I interrupted their conversation to ask about my bag, and one of them thumbed listlessly through a stack of papers. “We have no record of you here,” she said. “Please check again.” The woman shrugged. “If you wish, you can come back tonight at midnight. A flight from Johannesburg comes in at that time.” “I was told my bag would be delivered to me.” “I’m sorry, but I have no record of your bag here. If you like, you can fill out another form.” “Is Miss Omoro here? She—” “Omoro is on vacation.” Auma bumped me aside. “Who else can we talk to here, since you don’t seem to know anything.” “Go downtown if you want to talk to someone else,” the woman said curtly before returning to her conversation. Auma was still muttering under her breath when we stepped into the British Airways downtown office. It was in a high-rise building whose elevators announced each floor electronically in crisp Victorian tones; a receptionist sat beneath photographs of lion cubs and dancing children. She repeated that we should check the airport. “Let me talk to the manager,” I said, trying not to shout. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Maduri is in a meeting.”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It’s our last morning. Erin, Mum and I are walking along Parsons Beach, bracing ourselves against the wind. It is a bitter, salt cold day; we tread on frozen sand. Strings of seaducks fly far offshore, ragged lines over soaked slate baize. The waters under them are full of lobsters; Maine is famous for them; signs for lobster rolls hang everywhere across town. Erin’s dad had been a lobsterman once, and I’d gone out fishing with them years ago. Which is to say, I sat on the deck of their boat and watched as they hauled traps, measured, sorted and banded lobsters, rebaited the traps and set them overboard. They worked for hours while I sat there, unable to help, unable to do anything except watch. They were delighted I’d come out with them, and it was a wonderful day, but I felt guilty all the same: I was an English tourist out of her depth. Walking on the beach I remembered that boat-trip and felt uncomfortable as hell. I’d spent months out with Mabel on the hill. I’d seen the harvest come in, tractors harrowing slopes, stockmen turning sheep out to winter in the fields. And I’d not spoken to anyone. No one at all. I thought of the summer tourists here standing in packs to photograph the lobster boats coming in, or angling their cameras to catch the twisted light and shade on stacks of lobster traps on Cape Porpoise quay. Was I like that? I hadn’t meant to be a tourist with my hawk. It didn’t feel like tourism. But I sure as hell had avoided being part of the working world. We turn back, walking into the wind now, crunching over ice-crusted rockweed and sending sanderling flocks swirling along the tideline. The off-season streets are deserted, the hotels closed, shutters down, wooden signboards swinging in the wind. A Cooper’s hawk sits on the overhead stop-light on the intersection of Main Street and Western Avenue, flat-headed and fluffed as Mabel, looking down on the empty town. Back at the inn, feeling cold and horribly sober, I grab a coffee and pace about by the fire. My face is burning. I suppose it is from the wind. Mum is packing upstairs. Erin and his dad are in the kitchen. I can hear them laughing. I don’t want to go back, I think. I had fled from community. At my father’s memorial I’d remembered it existed. Now I am back in it, in the middle of a community, in the middle of a family home, and I do not want to leave. This place is fixing my broken heart. I can feel it mending, and I’m fearful of what will happen when I’m gone. I’m not sure how I will cope back in England, back in my jobless, hopeless, lonely old town.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I spent the rest of the day in a daze. A redheaded girl asked to touch my hair and seemed hurt when I refused. A ruddy-faced boy asked me if my father ate people. When I got home, Gramps was in the middle of preparing dinner. “So how was it? Isn’t it terrific that Miss Hefty used to live in Kenya? Makes the first day a little easier, I’ll bet.” I went into my room and closed the door. The novelty of having me in the class quickly wore off for the other kids, although my sense that I didn’t belong continued to grow. The clothes that Gramps and I had chosen for me were too old-fashioned; the Indonesian sandals that had served me so well in Djakarta were dowdy. Most of my classmates had been together since kindergarten; they lived in the same neighborhoods, in split-level homes with swimming pools; their fathers coached the same Little League teams; their mothers sponsored the bake sales. Nobody played soccer or badminton or chess, and I had no idea how to throw a football in a spiral or balance on a skateboard. A ten-year-old’s nightmare. Still, in my discomfort that first month, I was no worse off than the other children who were relegated to the category of misfits—the girls who were too tall or too shy, the boy who was mildly hyperactive, the kids whose asthma excused them from PE. There was one other child in my class, though, who reminded me of a different sort of pain. Her name was Coretta, and before my arrival she had been the only black person in our grade. She was plump and dark and didn’t seem to have many friends. From the first day, we avoided each other but watched from a distance, as if direct contact would only remind us more keenly of our isolation. Finally, during recess one hot, cloudless day, we found ourselves occupying the same corner of the playground. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but I remember that suddenly she was chasing me around the jungle gyms and swings. She was laughing brightly, and I teased her and dodged this way and that, until she finally caught me and we fell to the ground breathless. When I looked up, I saw a group of children, faceless before the glare of the sun, pointing down at us. “Coretta has a boyfriend! Coretta has a boyfriend!” The chants grew louder as a few more kids circled us. “She’s not my g-girlfriend,” I stammered. I looked to Coretta for some assistance, but she just stood there looking down at the ground. “Coretta’s got a boyfriend! Why don’t you kiss her, mister boyfriend?”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I would gaze about me at the dim and dreary place in which my gentleman and I leaned panting, and wish the cobbles were a stage, the bricks a curtain, the scuttling rats a set of blazing footlights. I would long for just one eye - just one! - to be fixed upon our couplings: a bold and knowing eye that saw how well I played my part, how gulled and humbled was my foolish, trustful partner.But that - considering the circumstances - seemed quite impossible. All continued smoothly for, perhaps, six months or so: my colourless life at Mrs Best’s went on, and so did my trips to the West End, and my renting. My little stash of money dwindled, and finally disappeared; and now, since renting was all I knew and cared for, I began to live entirely from what I earned upon the streets.I still had had no word of Kitty — not a word! I concluded at last that she must have gone abroad, to try her luck with Walter — to America, perhaps, where we had planned to go. My months upon the music-hall stage seemed very distant to me now, and quite unreal. Once or twice on my trips around the city I saw someone I knew, from the old days - a fellow with whom we’d shared a bill at the Paragon, a wardrobe-mistress from the Bedford, Camden Town. One night I leaned against a pillar in Great Windmill Street and watched as Dolly Arnold - who had played Cinderella to Kitty’s Prince, at the Britannia - made her exit from the door of the Pavilion and was helped into a carriage. She looked at me, and blinked - then looked away again. Perhaps she thought she knew my face; perhaps she thought I was a boy that she had worked with; perhaps she only thought I was a miserable ningle, haunting the shadows in search of a gent. Anyway, she did not see Nan King in me, I know it; and if I had an urge to cross to her and reveal myself and ask for news of Kitty, it lasted for only a moment; and in that moment the driver shook his horses into life, and the carriage rumbled off.No, my only contact with the theatre now was as a renter. I discovered that the music halls of Leicester Square - the very same halls which Kitty and I had gazed at, all hopefully, two years before — were rather famous in the renter world as posing-grounds and pick-up spots.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  I don’t even open my mail! We had mutual friends who suggested our families join a small group together. I tell her this now, but she was the kind of new friend who is so awesome, you feel intimidated around her (though she would never want you to). The first time we met, I remember playing it safe. I thought I’d hold back and feel her out. But the second time, I decided to go for it. I was all of me—opinionated, loud, honest, and passionate. She laughed and started calling more often. She wasn’t wanting to be friends with someone just like her. She liked me in all my chaotic glory. Now, plenty of other relational risks I’ve taken have not turned out that way, but that’s how we find our people. Gather Your Team As we make this choice to stop trying to do life on our own and instead risk in the context of other real live human beings, we must have two resources at our disposal: both the awareness to know what we need and the courageous gumption to go out and get it. Here are a few encouragements that may push you out of your comfort zone and help you find your people. Seek Out Healthy People Here is Paul’s advice on the subject: “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.”15 Follow me, as I follow Christ. If you want to know whom to connect with in community, look for someone whose life shouts those words. Find someone who is following hard after Jesus, and then ask that person to coffee. In the past year, I have found that by seeking out healthy people in Dallas, I’ve been made healthier too. Even the process of looking for whole friendships has ushered in more wholeness for me. Now, notice I didn’t say to seek out perfect people. Whole people. Healthy people. Does this potential friend of yours seem to be in touch with her strengths and weaknesses? Is she clear on the values that guide her life? When she feels all the feels, is she then able to kind of rein it in? Is she thriving in other relationships, or does she seem closed off from the world? Do you feel seen and valued when you interact with her? Does she listen well, or is she always turning the conversation back to herself? Is she motivated to grow? Does she seem happy? Is she at peace? Again, nobody is going to get this stuff right 100 percent of the time. What I’m asking you to look for is a pattern of progress here. When you’re looking for intimate friendships, you’ve got to start with emotionally intelligent friends. And guess what? We have to become those emotionally healthy friends too! If no one ever wants to be friends with you, there might be reasons.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I enjoyed such moments—but only in brief. If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself. I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew. I remember there was an old man living next door who seemed to share my disposition. He lived alone, a gaunt, stooped figure who wore a heavy black overcoat and a misshapen fedora on those rare occasions when he left his apartment. Once in a while I’d run into him on his way back from the store, and I would offer to carry his groceries up the long flight of stairs. He would look at me and shrug, and we would begin our ascent, stopping at each landing so that he could catch his breath. When we finally arrived at his apartment, I’d carefully set the bags down on the floor and he would offer a courtly nod of acknowledgment before shuffling inside and closing the latch. Not a single word would pass between us, and not once did he ever thank me for my efforts. The old man’s silence impressed me; I thought him a kindred spirit. Later, my roommate would find him crumpled up on the third-floor landing, his eyes wide open, his limbs stiff and curled up like a baby’s. A crowd gathered; a few of the women crossed themselves, and the smaller children whispered with excitement. Eventually the paramedics arrived to take away the body and the police let themselves into the old man’s apartment. It was neat, almost empty—a chair, a desk, the faded portrait of a woman with heavy eyebrows and a gentle smile set atop the mantelpiece. Somebody opened the refrigerator and found close to a thousand dollars in small bills rolled up inside wads of old newspaper and carefully arranged behind mayonnaise and pickle jars. The loneliness of the scene affected me, and for the briefest moment I wished that I had learned the old man’s name. Then, almost immediately, I regretted my desire, along with its companion grief. I felt as if an understanding had been broken between us—as if, in that barren room, the old man was whispering an untold history, telling me things I preferred not to hear. It must have been a month or so later, on a cold, dreary November morning, the sun faint behind a gauze of clouds, that the other call came. I was in the middle of making myself breakfast, with coffee on the stove and two eggs in the skillet, when my roommate handed me the phone. The line was thick with static. “Barry? Barry, is this you?” “Yes …. Who’s this?” “Yes, Barry … this is your Aunt Jane. In Nairobi. Can you hear me?” “I’m sorry—who did you say you were?”

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I hadn’t meant to be a tourist with my hawk. It didn’t feel like tourism. But I sure as hell had avoided being part of the working world. We turn back, walking into the wind now, crunching over ice-crusted rockweed and sending sanderling flocks swirling along the tideline. The off-season streets are deserted, the hotels closed, shutters down, wooden signboards swinging in the wind. A Cooper’s hawk sits on the overhead stop-light on the intersection of Main Street and Western Avenue, flat-headed and fluffed as Mabel, looking down on the empty town. Back at the inn, feeling cold and horribly sober, I grab a coffee and pace about by the fire. My face is burning. I suppose it is from the wind. Mum is packing upstairs. Erin and his dad are in the kitchen. I can hear them laughing. I don’t want to go back, I think. I had fled from community. At my father’s memorial I’d remembered it existed. Now I am back in it, in the middle of a community, in the middle of a family home, and I do not want to leave. This place is fixing my broken heart. I can feel it mending, and I’m fearful of what will happen when I’m gone. I’m not sure how I will cope back in England, back in my jobless, hopeless, lonely old town. The back door slams. Jim is heading off in the truck to his workshop. I don’t want to leave. I sulk. I fret. I scowl at the fire, hot with self-pity. Then I hear the door open and Erin’s tousled head appears round the frame. It wears a vastly conspiratorial expression. I sense a plan is brewing. And a minute later I’m helping him drag their huge Christmas tree out of the room and onto the snowy lawn, tip snaking through the rough trail it makes, branches skittering over and cutting through the crust that glitters in the sparse light. We prop it up in the deep snow as if it had grown there. I have no idea what is going on. ‘OK, Macca, let’s burn this!’ he says. Puzzlement. ‘It’s traditional. It’s what we do here. In America.’ I don’t believe him for a second. ‘In England we dump them on the street, traditionally,’ I say. ‘Absolutely let’s burn it.’ ‘I’ll get the firelighter!” he yells. I can feel the madness to this, its contagious pagan glee. He runs back from the house with a squeezy plastic bottle of firelighting gel and in the snowy hush, fog collecting around us as the thaw turns ice to water that hangs in the warming air, he decorates the tree with gloopy green strings that drip and stick like glutinous tinsel. ‘Stand back!’ he commands. He strikes a match. A branch catches with a tearing scratch of flame. For a few moments this is pretty: a soft yellow light in the monochromatic gloom.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I took a seat and watched Mary finish arranging the cups. She was a hard person to know, Mary was; she didn’t like to talk much, about herself or her past. I knew that she was the only white person from the city who worked with us, one of maybe five white people left in West Pullman. I knew that she had two daughters, one ten and one twelve; the younger one had a disability that made walking difficult and required regular therapy. And I knew that the father was absent, although Mary never mentioned him. Only in bits and pieces, over the course of many months, would I learn that she had grown up in a small Indiana town, part of a big, working-class Irish family. Somehow she had met a black man there; they had dated secretly, were married; her family refused to speak to her again, and the newlyweds moved to West Pullman, where they bought a small house. Then the man left, and Mary found herself beached in a world she knew little of, without anything but the house and two manila-hued daughters, unable to return to the world she had known. Sometimes I would stop by Mary’s house just to say hello, drawn perhaps by the loneliness I sensed there, and the easy parallels between my own mother and Mary; and between myself and Mary’s daughters, such sweet and pretty girls whose lives were so much more difficult than mine had ever been, with grandparents who shunned them, black classmates who teased them, all the poison in the air. Not that the family had no support; after Mary’s husband left, the neighbors had shown her and her children solicitude, helping them fix a leaky roof, inviting them to barbecues and birthday parties, commending Mary on all her good works. Still, there were limits to how far the neighbors could accept the family, unspoken boundaries to the friendships that Mary could make with the women—specially the married ones—that she met. Her only real friends were her daughters—and now Will, whose own fall, and idiosyncratic faith, gave them something private to share. With nothing left to do for the meeting, Mary sat down and watched me scribble some last-minute notes to myself. “Do you mind if I ask you something, Barack?” “No, go ahead.” “Why are you here? Doing this work, I mean.” “For the glamour.” “No, I’m serious. You said yourself you don’t need this job. And you’re not very religious, are you?” “Well …” “So why do you do it? That’s why Will and I do this, you know. Because it’s part of our faith. But with you, I don’t—” At that moment, the door opened and Mr. Green walked in. He was an older man in a hunting jacket and a cap whose earflaps hung stiffly against his chin. “How you doing, Mr. Green.” “Fine, just fine. Getting chilly, though ….”

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check. “Who knows?” he said. “What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress. Life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage.” We stood up to leave, and I insisted on paying the bill. Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache. When I got home, I told Auma how the meeting had gone. She looked away for a moment, then broke out with a short, bitter laugh. “What’s so funny?” “I was just thinking about how life is so strange. You know, as soon as the Old Man died, the lawyers contacted all those who might have a claim to the inheritance. Unlike my mum, Ruth has all the documents needed to prove who Mark’s father was. So of all of the Old Man’s kids, Mark’s claim is the only one that’s uncontested.” Again Auma laughed, and I looked up at the picture hanging on her wall, the same picture pasted inside Ruth’s album, of three brothers and a sister, smiling sweetly for the camera. CHAPTER SEVENTEEN [image file=image_rsrc2W2.jpg] TOWARD THE END OF my second week in Kenya, Auma and I went on a safari. Auma wasn’t thrilled with the idea. When I first showed her the brochure, she grimaced and shook her head. Like most Kenyans, she could draw a straight line between the game parks and colonialism. “How many Kenyans do you think can afford to go on a safari?” she asked me. “Why should all that land be set aside for tourists when it could be used for farming? These wazungu care more about one dead elephant than they do for a hundred black children.” For several days we parried. I told her she was letting other people’s attitudes prevent her from seeing her own country. She said she didn’t want to waste the money. Eventually she relented, not because of my persuasive powers but because she took pity on me. “If some animal ate you out there,” she said, “I’d never forgive myself.” And so, at seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, we watched a sturdily built Kikuyu driver named Francis load our bags onto the roof of a white minivan. With us were a spindly cook named Rafael, a dark-haired Italian named Mauro, and a British couple in their early forties, the Wilkersons. We drove out of Nairobi at a modest pace, passing soon into countryside, green hills and red dirt paths and small shambas surrounded by plots of wilting, widely spaced corn. Nobody spoke, a discomfiting silence that reminded me of similar moments back in the States, the pause that would sometimes accompany my personal integration of a bar or hotel. It made me think about Auma and Mark, my grandparents back in Hawaii, my mother still in Indonesia, and the things Zeituni had told me.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Ruth lived in Westlands, an enclave of expensive homes set off by wide lawns and well-tended hedges, each one with a sentry post manned by brown-uniformed guards. It was raining as we drove toward her house, sending a soft, gentle spray through the big, leafy trees. The coolness reminded me of the streets around Punahou, Manoa, Tantalus, the streets where some of my wealthier classmates had lived back in Hawaii. Staring out Auma’s car window, I thought back to the envy I’d felt toward those classmates whenever they invited me over to play in their big backyards or swim in their swimming pools. And along with that envy, a different impression—the sense of quiet desperation those big, pretty houses seemed to contain. The sound of someone’s sister crying softly behind the door. The sight of a mother sneaking a tumbler of gin in midafternoon. The expression on a father’s face as he sat alone in his den, his features clenched as he flicked between college football games on TV. An impression of loneliness that perhaps wasn’t true, perhaps was just a projection of my own heart, but that, either way, had made me want to run, just as, an ocean away, David had run, back into the marketplace and noisy streets, back into disorder and the laughter disorder produced, back into the sort of pain a boy could understand. We came to one of the more modest houses on the block and parked along the curve of a looping driveway. A white woman with a long jaw and graying hair came out of the house to meet us. Behind her was a black man of my height and complexion with a bushy Afro and horn-rimmed glasses. “Come in, come in,” Ruth said. The four of us shook hands stiffly and entered a large living room, where a balding, older black man in a safari jacket was bouncing a young boy on his lap. “This is my husband,” Ruth said, “and this is Mark’s little brother, Joey.” “Hey, Joey,” I said, bending down to shake his hand. He was a beautiful boy, with honey-colored skin and two front teeth missing. Ruth tousled the boy’s big curls, then looked at her husband and said, “Weren’t you two on your way to the club?” “Yes, yes,” the man said, standing up. “Come on, Joey … it was nice to meet you both.” The boy stood fast, staring up at Auma and me with a bright, curious smile until his father finally picked him up and carried him out the door. “Well, here we are,” Ruth said, leading us to the couch and pouring lemonade. “I must say it was quite a surprise to find out you were here, Barry. I told Mark that we just had to see how this other son of Obama’s turned out. Your name is Obama, isn’t it? But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name?”

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  It was understood. Despite my frequent—and sometimes sullen—claims of independence, the two of us remained close, and I did my best to help her out where I could, shopping for groceries, doing the laundry, looking after the knowing, dark-eyed child that my sister had become. But when my mother was ready to return to Indonesia to do her field work, and suggested that I go back with her and Maya to attend the international school there, I immediately said no. I doubted what Indonesia now had to offer and wearied of being new all over again. More than that, I’d arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents: I could live with them and they’d leave me alone so long as I kept my trouble out of sight. The arrangement suited my purpose, a purpose that I could barely articulate to myself, much less to them. Away from my mother, away from my grandparents, I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant. My father’s letters provided few clues. They would arrive sporadically, on a single blue page with gummed-down flaps that obscured any writing at the margins. He would report that everyone was fine, commend me on my progress in school, and insist that my mother, Maya, and I were all welcome to take our rightful place beside him whenever we so desired. From time to time he would include advice, usually in the form of aphorisms I didn’t quite understand (“Like water finding its level, you will arrive at a career that suits you”). I would respond promptly on a wide-ruled page, and his letters would find their way into the closet, next to my mother’s pictures of him. Gramps had a number of black male friends, mostly poker and bridge partners, and before I got old enough not to care about hurting his feelings, I would let him drag me along to some of their games. They were old, neatly dressed men with hoarse voices and clothes that smelled of cigars, the kind of men for whom everything has its place and who figure they’ve seen enough not to have to waste a lot of time talking about it. Whenever they saw me they would give me a jovial slap on the back and ask how my mother was doing; but once it was time to play, they wouldn’t say another word except to complain to their partner about a bid.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The night we came back without our father, the tail twined itself around my thigh, clasping like a garter. I pet it to sleep before me. My tail and I were on a honeymoon: We were married now, vowing to defend each other. In his sleep, my brother tucked himself away from me, blowing silver spit-bubbles in the dark. He said my name like the name of a hurricane. Molding a moat of pillows around his body, he told me to keep my tail leashed. It’s already leashed to me, I said. It’s grown to me. But he said I didn’t know who held the other end of it. Who lived on the other end of it. A tail is two-way, he said. Like a telephone cord. Like something that plugs two things together. You don’t know what you’re being connected to. I told him he should be more grateful: Without it, without me, we wouldn’t have been able to walk away on our own. Instead of answering, he turned to the wall and wrote something on it with his spit-wet finger, a warning no one could read. A week later, the phone rang itself red. When I picked up, silence was on the other end. Heat radiated from the receiver, blistering my cheeks, and I had to hold it away from my face. It must have been a fire calling. But then the silence changed, became familiar, and I could imagine the mouth making it: silver-capped teeth uneven as a mountain range, a fog of cigarette smoke twined through the peaks. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t know if he knew it was me, but I hung up after counting to a hundred, let him learn my silence too: Mine was a weapon. Mine was a mercy, too. I gave him a hundred silences to translate into anything: sorry, goodbye, come back, leave, don’t, go, stay. DAUGHTER Back to Ben Ben’s father bought a lot in another town. He wanted to build his own house, with a porch and a yard and a painted-white doghouse—even though, according to Ben, he was allergic to dogs and once sneezed at a beagle so hard his brains fled out of his nose as a flock of moths. The resulting hollowness of his head caused him to sell their car and furniture and buy an empty lot. No one in class believed Ben until the week she came to school with her father’s toolbox, full of nails and screws and other little silver things that looked like ear-bones. We told her that houses weren’t built. They existed like trees, grown in from the street. Ben walked me to the land her father had bought. It was damp and tufted with grass like an old man’s scalp.

• From The Art of Memoir

  age six, the man he called “daddy” was a violent drunk uncle who terrorized the family. Before Crews was even conceived, the father he mourns lost one testicle to the clap, while working on a dredging crew in the Florida swamps. He caught it from “a flat-faced Seminole girl whose name he never knew and who grunted like a sow and smelled like something shot in the woods.” This unflattering portrait of the unflattering act helps describe the hard place we’re in—a universe full of loud pigs and shot things you have to take whiffs of while walking around. It’s a world told in muscular language and jam-packed with action of the grittiest sort. But that lost world is also one where people hang tough together, and Crews sounds—above all else—so lonely and disconnected. That sense of unassailable community would seem to him like food to a starving man. Crews never seems to have had a pal like his daddy’s on the dredging crew, a guy who took the old man to have one testicle lopped off. Before that, the friend engages the old man in a grim banter that binds them. The rhythmic stroke of the dredge’s engine came counterpoint to my daddy’s shaky voice as he told Cecil what was wrong. When Cecil finally did speak, he said, “I hope it was good boy. I sho do.” “What was good?” “That Indian. You got the clap.” But daddy had already known. He had thought of little else since it had become almost impossible for him to give water because of the fire that started in his stomach and felt like it burned through raw flesh every time he had to water off. He had thought of the chickee where he had lain under the palm roof being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Because such stories are Crews’s patrimony, the sole bonds that tether him to the planet, the carnal reality of the place and his daddy’s suffering body have an immediacy we have to buy into. For the sake of his own manhood, we sense, Papa Crews embodies the butch, hypertrophied male, and all of Crews’s tough acts—from joining the marines and brawling and working as a carny to getting massive skull tattoos—seem to grow from the author’s longing to live up to the mythic, über-mensch patriarch only met in photos and stories. “His is the gun that is always drawn; his is the

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  It is traditional in its theology, but it is an extreme form of sacrifice not entertained by a human dancer. What makes the third vision quest of Jesus so extraordinary is that he understands his sacrifice to be in the context of messiahship. He is the Sun Dancer for all people, for all of creation, for all time. Through his Dance, all life will be blessed forever. His sacrifice will not be about a death for sin, but about a life for love. From the Native American perspective, a crucial part of the meaning of the third vision quest is revealed in the strange interaction between Jesus and his friends. He has told them that he thinks this is the most important vision quest he will make. He has asked them personally to please stay with him in spirit because he is full of sorrow. He has asked them to be part of this quest with him. And what do they do? They fall asleep. As human beings, even though they are as close to Jesus as any friends can ever be, they cannot enter the vision. He is on his own. When Jesus receives his vision of the cup, when he begins to understand that his Sun Dance may cost him his life, he instinctively does what any Native person would do: he seeks to return to the community, to the people, to the tribe of the human beings. But the pathos of his third vision quest is the recognition that this is not going to be possible. If he truly wants to call down the ultimate blessing on all of life, then he is going to have to go to the tree alone. Nothing could be more frightening for a Native person. The anguish of the Garden vision is not about death. It is about being alone. As the Native Messiah, what Jesus must struggle with is isolation. His friends are literally not there. They are asleep, gone during his most critical hour. They cannot do what he must do: make a sacrifice so profound that it will turn even the grave into a garden. Essentially, in Gethsemane during his third vision quest, Jesus understands that for him it has become a good day to die. In traditional Native American culture, people did not fear death. In fact, they often prepared songs to sing while facing death, welcoming it as a part of life. A speech attributed to the Shawnee prophet, Tecumseh, may say it most clearly: So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  It’s not night yet, but Ma prefers the kitchen dark, says her eyes have never been native to light. When she wakes, her mouth opens before her eyes. She says, Jie, and I don’t correct her. She gets up from the stool and finishes the dishes. I do the drying. Ba’s not home yet, but he’s already on the bus, counting the stops with his shirt buttons. At every stop, he unbuttons one. When the shirt’s all the way open, the sweat of his chest beaconing through, he knows it’s time to get off. When Ma plunges her hand into the sink, groping for the bowl, she grabs the blade-end of a knife instead, releasing her blood into the water. Taking her hands out of the sink, I dry them on my shirt. I don’t know why I’m rescuing her hands from the water when they once tried to d____ me in the r___. In a year I’ll leave. I’ll marry your father, any man I can ride away from here. The irony: We’re the same as Ma. That’s what Ma did, marry out of her country, marry out of her body. _ You only know her as disappeared, but your fourth aunt was the first one to hold me when I was born: I practiced latching on her thumb, crying when I couldn’t suck anything out but blood. Her absence now is the size of the sky. The only thing that fills it is night. At night, I watch your yard-holes gaping for the moon to descend into their mouths like a nipple, fill them with milklight. Two nights after her wedding, she came back to pack the last of her things. Jie said they were driving to Reno for the honeymoon soon, and I told her not to gamble anything she wasn’t willing to lose. Folding the denim skirts she’d sewn on Ma’s Singer, Jie kept her eyes down on the seams and said she never intended to lose anything.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  By middle school, you spend all your time watching TV, talking on the phone, playing board games with your friends, fighting with your sister, going to the library and Girl Scout meetings and orchestra practice and oratory club practice, and reading, and even going to church with your friends’ families. You are never really alone, because even when you’re alone, you’re escaping into a book or a song or a show or a conversation. You don’t know how to be still. When you’re still, the flashbacks come. It’s true, some of these moments include fun, and even sensuality, in the company of your friends. You love your friends. You get in trouble in seventh grade for giving half-heart best-friend necklaces to three different girls. You were always emotionally polyamorous. (One best friend would never have been enough to get you through the magnitude of your childhood.) You lay your head in one of your best friend’s laps, and she massages your temples, rubs each of your eyebrows in the direction that follows the hair. Your friends play with your long, silky hair, a lot (before that eighth-grade body wave ruins it). You hug each other frequently. You play truth-or-dare, and as you hit eighth grade, the dares more frequently involve Ouija boards, trying to contact “the spirits,” prank calling 1-800-MATTRES, and public nudity stunts like mooning passing cars. Gaggles of tightly wound white, Arab, South Asian, East Asian, African American, and Afro-Caribbean middle school girls surviving together and getting their kicks where they can. Your backyard is dominated by an in-ground pool, and in the summer you cannonball off the diving board, enjoying the sharp feel as you hit the water, the feeling of being held by the water before you surface again. Your friends teach you about fashion, and you try to stay on-trend. You try to keep up. Blend in. Fit in. Be normal. You wear things like ripped jeans with lace patches, and black sweaters with giant random neon words—“HOT” in highlighter pink, blue, yellow, and green. You wear slouchy socks and slap bracelets, delighting in the knowledge that they are banned, and you get away with them in school anyway. You, after all, are a hall monitor. You love Halloween and dress up every year: homemade costumes of Raggedy Ann, Peter Pan, a scarecrow, and, one year, a present (yes, a gift-wrapped cardboard box over your shoulders and a bow on your head). Your family cannot afford the frivolity of store-bought throwaway costumes. You love pretending. But does “escape” really count as “pleasure”? Is it possible to experience pleasure when you can’t even experience yourself? Where is the room in which to experience yourself, to know yourself, to be an authentic human being, when everything about your public sphere life is a lie (or at least includes a giant and critical omission), and everything about your private sphere life is about surviving torture?