Love

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 Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Muriel was herself, and I had only aided that process, as she had mine. I had released her anger in much the same way as she had released my love, and we were precious to each other because of that. It was only the Muriel in my head I had to give up, or keep forever; the Muriel peering up from the couch belonged to herself, whoever she wished to be. Alone, I began to drop by the bars during the week—the Bag, the Page Three, the Pony Stable, the Seven Steps… A few times that winter, after Joan had run away from her, I found Muriel sitting in a corner of some bar, crying. I had never seen her crying in public before. Her voice had lost its sweetness. Sometimes, she yelled or made a scene and got thrown out of a club. I had never seen her drunk before, either. I remembered the night in Cuernavaca when I listened to Eudora roaring in the compound gardens, sodden with tequila. Drunk, with her dark hair disheveled and falling about her face, her crooked pinkie at half-mast, Muriel looked like a buttery angel, fallen from grace, become all too human. Nicky said she was finally recovering from the effects of electro-shock. Sometimes I took Muriel back to her apartment and put her to bed; sometimes I took her to my house. One night, as she slept at Seventh Street, I lay awake in the next room, listening to her crying out in her sleep for Joan to come play in the snow. Finally, one night I started downstairs into the Seven Steps and spotted Muriel, slumped over the far corner of the bar, her back towards me. I swung around, walking quickly out before she could turn around and see me. I was tired of playing keeper. The stolen, bastardized yet familiar rhythms of Presley drape like garlands over that winter. Now that my baby’s left me I’ve found a new place to dwell It’s down at the end of Lonely Street in Heartbreak Hotel Muriel went home to Stamford for Christmas. She did not come back, in any real sense. The following spring she signed herself into a state hospital insulin unit, where Toni was working in an experimental program for schizophrenics.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  Not even to-night, in the heart’s nearly impenetrable secret place, where the truth is hidden and where only the truth can live, could she wish that she had not known him; nor deny that, so long as he was there, the rejoicing of Heaven could have meant nothing to her—that, being forced to choose between Richard and God, she could only, even with weeping, have turned away from God. And this was why God had taken him from her. It was for all of this that she was paying now, and it was this pride, hatred, bitterness, lust—this folly, this corruption—of which her son was heir. Richard had not been born in Maryland, but he was working there, the summer that she met him, as a grocery clerk. It was 1919, and she was one year younger than the century. He was twenty-two, which seemed a great age to her in those days. She noticed him at once because he was so sullen and only barely polite. He waited on folks, her aunt said, furiously, as though he hoped the food they bought would poison them. Elizabeth liked to watch him move; his body was very thin, and beautiful, and nervous— high strung, thought Elizabeth, wisely. He moved exactly like a cat, perpetually on the balls of his feet, and with a cat’s impressive, indifferent aloofness, his face closed, in his eyes no light at all. He smoked all the time, a cigarette between his lips as he added up the figures, and sometimes left burning on the counter while he went to look for stock. When, as someone entered, he said good morning, or good day, he said it barely looking up, and with an indifference that fell just short of insolence. When, having bought what he wanted and counted his change, the customer turned to leave and Richard said: ‘Thank you,’ it sounded so much like a curse that people sometimes turned in surprise to stare. ‘He sure don’t like working in that store,’ Elizabeth once observed to her aunt. ‘He don’t like working,’ said her aunt, scornfully. ‘He just like you.’ On a bright, summer day, bright in her memory for ever, she came into the store alone, wearing her best white summer dress and with her hair, newly straightened and curled at the ends, tied with a scarlet ribbon. She was going to a great church picnic with her aunt, and had come in to buy some lemons. She passed the owner of the store, who was a very fat man, sitting out on the pavement, fanning himself; he asked her, as she passed, if it was hot enough for her, and she said something and walked into the dark, heavy-smelling store, where flies buzzed, and where Richard sat on the counter reading a book.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  But I knew I meant more than cuddling under the covers and kissing in Marie’s bed. Marie, like me, had been on the fringes of The Branded in high school. She was short and round, with immense Mediterranean eyes shining out of a heart-shaped face. We shared a passionate weakness for memorizing the same romantic ballads, and for reciting Millay. Marie did not want to go to college, and got a job after high school which gave her nominal independence, even though she still lived with her very strict Italian family. I went to dinner a few times at their house, the fall after I left home. The food was plentiful and filling, served by Marie’s silently generous mother who did not approve of me at all, mostly because I was Black, but also because I now lived alone. No nice girl left her mother’s house before she was married, unless she had become a whore, which in Mrs. Madrona’s eyes was synonymous with being Black anyway. Sometimes I would sleep over, and get to share Marie’s Castro Convertible in the living room, because her brother had the second bedroom. We lay awake far into the night, snuggling under the covers by the light of the votive candle on Our Lady’s altar in the corner, kissing and hugging and giggling in low tones so her mother wouldn’t hear us. When the other members of The Branded came back from their various ivy-league colleges in the late spring, we all had the grand reunion/clean-up party at my apartment. All except Marie. She had run away from home and moved into the YWCA, and then married someone who sat down at her table in the Waldorf Cafeteria. The same night. They drove into Maryland and found a justice of the peace. I opened my house to The Branded and they saw it as a second home. Since it was summer, none of us minded too much that there was no heat or hot water in the apartment, although not having a shower was a problem. Sometimes my next-door neighbor and I would go to his friend’s apartment around the corner and have a hot shower. There was a constant stream of young women in and out of my apartment, most of them in varying periods and conditions of distress. I particularly remember Bobbi, who lived around the corner and had been a year behind us in high school. She was now in her senior year, and was always being beaten by her mother. Bobbi decided to run away to California even though she had not yet finished school. In those days, that was an unusually bizarre and courageous thing to do, and she hid out at my apartment until her plane left.

• From The City of God

  484 Books That Matter: The City of God 484 „This effort to receive healing must be taken up assiduously. No sloth is permitted in the city of God. ›Christians are called upon to perform positive acts of charity sponsored by the compassion they are required to cultivate toward those vulnerable in their communities and to all humans. ›They are required to exercise forbearance and patience, even to the most outrageous provocations and the most painful persecutions. ›They are also called upon to see these practices as helping them to cultivate an understanding of themselves as stretched out over time and to see themselves as ever more deeply in need of God’s help. Vision of the World „Augustine’s fourth great theme is the transfigured vision of the world as creation and his efforts to cultivate in his audience not only a typological but a sacramental imagination of the world. ›Augustine was accused not just of despising politics, but also of despising the world. From his perspective, this accusation makes sense only if your own attachment to the world is so desperate as to prevent your seeing that he loves it in God, as a gift of God and as composed of signs of God. ›Augustine’s affection for the world is real, but it is rooted in his perception of the world as the primordial unprompted expression of God’s love for what is outside of God. He sees it as the context of redemption, for humanity’s movement ever more fully into God at the end of time. If your heart is rightly directed, Augustine argued your actions cannot be other than good.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  Her favorite expression was, “Be cool, girl,” and I congratulated myself on how cool I was . It didn’t bother me, I maintained, that Ginger went out on dates which Cora arranged. With her typical aplomb, Cora welcomed my increased presence around the house with the rough familiarity and browbeating humor due another one of her daughters. If she recognized the sounds emanating from the sunporch on the nights I slept over, or our haggard eyes the next day, she ignored them. But she made it very clear that she expected Ginger to get married again. “Friends are nice, but marriage is marriage,” she said to me one night as she helped me make a skirt on her machine, and I wondered why Ginger had asked me over and then gone to the movies with a friend of Cora’s from American Cyanimid. “And when she gets home don’t be thumping that bed all night, neither, because it’s late already and you girls have work tomorrow.” But I thought of little else at work now other than the night pleasures of Ginger’s body, and how I could arrange to get her over to Mill River Road for an hour or so after work. It was a little more private than Walker Road, except that my old bed creaked so badly that we always had to put the mattress on the floor. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography 19 The week before Christmas I fell off my stool at work, hitting my head against the brick half-wall that separated us from the cutters, and getting a mild concussion. I was in the hospital when Ginger brought me a telegram from my sister saying that my father had had another severe stroke. It was Christmas Eve. I signed myself out of the hospital and caught a train for New York City. I had not seen any member of my family for a year and a half. The next few weeks were a haze of headache, and other people’s emotions swirling around me. I went back to work after Christmas, commuting to and from New York City to visit my father in the hospital. Sometimes Ginger came with me after work. The fog was heavy and chilling over the streets of Stamford the night my father died. No cars moved. I walked two miles to the station to catch the 9:30 train to New York. Ginger walked with me as far as Crispus Attucks. I was terrified I was going to trip on a curbstone, the fog was so thick.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I remember thinking for a while that I was the only Black lesbian living in the Village, until I met Felicia. Felicia, with the face of a spoiled nun, skinny and sharp-brown, sat on my sofa on Seventh Street, with her enormous eyelashes that curled back upon themselves twice. She was bringing me a pair of Siamese cats that had terrorized her junkie friends who were straight and lived on a houseboat with the two cats until they brought their new baby home from the hospital and both cats went bananas back and forth all over the boat, jumping over everything including the box that the baby screamed in, because Siamese cats are very jealous. So, instead of drowning the cats, they gave them to Felicia whom I ran into having a beer at the Bagatelle that night and when Muriel mentioned I liked cats, Flee insisted on bringing them over to my house right then and there. She sat on my sofa with her box of cats and her curly eyelashes and I thought to myself, “if she must wear false eyelashes you’d think she’d make them less obviously false.” We soon decided that we were really sisters, which was much more than friends or buddies, particularly when we discovered while reminiscing about the bad days that we had gone to the same catholic school for six months in the first grade. I remembered her as the tough little kid in 1939 who came into class in the middle of winter, disturbing our neat tight boredom and fear, bringing her own. Sister Mary of Perpetual Help seated her beside me because I had a seat to myself in the front row, being both bad-behaved and nearsighted. I remembered this skinny little kid who made my life hell. She pinched me all day long, all the time, until she vanished sometime around St. Swithin’s Day, a godsent reward I thought, for what, I couldn’t imagine, but it almost turned me back to god and prayer again. Felicia and I came to love each other very much, even though our physical relationship was confined to cuddling. We were both part of the “freaky” bunch of lesbians who weren’t into role-playing, and who the butches and femmes, Black and white, disparaged with the term Ky-Ky, or AC/DC. Ky-Ky was the same name that was used for gay-girls who slept with johns for money. Prostitutes. Flee loved to snuggle in bed, but sometimes she hurt my feelings by saying I had shaggy breasts.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  He told her that she was the apple of his eye, that she was wound around his heartstrings, that she was surely the finest little lady in the land. When she was with her father she pranced and postured like a very queen: and she was not afraid of anything, save the moment when he would say that it was her bedtime, or that he had to be ‘getting along.’ He was always buying her things, things to wear and things to play with, and taking her on Sundays for long walks through the country, or to the circus, when the circus was in town, or to Punch and Judy shows. And he was dark, like Elizabeth, and gentle, and proud; he had never been angry with her, but she had seen him angry a few times with other people—her mother, for example, and later, of course, her aunt. Her mother was always angry and Elizabeth paid no attention; and, later, her aunt was perpetually angry and Elizabeth learned to bear it: but if her father had ever been angry with her—in those days—she would have wanted to die. Neither had he ever learned of her disgrace; when it happened, she could not think how to tell him, how to bring such pain to him who had had such pain already. Later, when she would have told him, he was long past caring, in the silent ground. She thought of him now, while the singing and weeping went on around her—and she thought how he would have loved his grandson, who was like him in so many ways. Perhaps she dreamed it, but she did not believe she dreamed when at moments she thought she heard in John echoes, curiously distant and distorted, of her father’s gentleness, and the trick of his laugh—how he threw his head back and the years that marked his face fled away, and the soft eyes softened and the mouth turned upward at the corners like a little boy’s mouth—and that deadly pride of her father’s behind which he retired when confronted by the nastiness of other people. It was he who had told her to weep, when she wept, alone; never to let the world see, never to ask for mercy; if one had to die, to go ahead and die, but never to let oneself be beaten. He had said this to her on one of the last times she had seen him, when she was being carried miles away, to Maryland, to live with her aunt. She had reason, in the years that followed, to remember his saying this; and time, at last, to discover in herself the depths of bitterness in her father from which these words had come.

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other. Now she understood in this nervous, hollow, ringing city, that nervousness of Richard’s which had so attracted her—a tension so total, and so without the hope, or possibility of release, or resolution, that she felt it in his muscles, and heard it in his breathing, even as on her breast he fell asleep. And this was perhaps why she had never thought to leave him, frightened though she was during all that time, and in a world in which, had it not been for Richard, she could have found no place to put her feet. She did not leave him, because she was afraid of what might happen to him without her. She did not resist him, because he needed her. And she did not press about marriage because, upset as he was about everything, she was afraid of having him upset about her, too. She thought of herself as his strength; in a world of shadows, the indisputable reality to which he could always repair. And, again, for all that had come, she could not regret this. She had tried, but she had never been and was not now, even to-night, truly sorry. Where, then, was her repentance? And how could God hear her cry? They had been very happy together, in the beginning; and until the very end he had been very good to her, had not ceased to love her, and tried always to make her know it. No more than she had been able to accuse her father had she ever been able to accuse him. His weakness she understood, and his terror, and even his bloody end. What life had made him bear, her lover, this wild, unhappy boy, many another stronger and more virtuous man might not have borne so well. Saturday was their best day, for they only worked until one o’clock. They had all the afternoon to be together, and nearly all of the night, since Madame Williams had her séances on Saturday night and preferred that Elizabeth, before whose silent scepticism departed spirits might find themselves reluctant to speak, should not be in the house. They met at the service entrance. Richard was always there before her, looking, oddly, much younger and less anonymous without the ugly, tight-fitting, black uniform that he had to wear when working. He would be talking, or laughing with some of the other boys, or shooting dice, and when he heard her step down the long, stone hall he would look up, laughing; and wickedly nudging one of the other boys, he would half shout, half sing: ‘He-y!

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  “I understand,” said Shandee. They were quiet for a moment. “I hope you’ve had some fun times here,” said Dave. “Oh, definitely. You?” “I snuck off the reservation, did some crazy stuff. Spent more time in the old Porndecahedron than I care to admit.” He breathed. “And now here we are.” “Here we are.” Shandee smiled at him, loving his rueful in-telligent eyes. Her vagina—or maybe it was her heart?—felt as if it weighed about eight pounds. Dave’s arm snapped its fingers impatiently. “So,” said Dave, “how do we do this?” “Lila told me how,” said Shandee. “I’ve been sleeping every night with the cloth of Ka-Chiang tucked in my pussyhole, so my juices have special healing powers.” “Oh, nice.” “Now all you have to do is, ah”—she lay back on her bed and pulled up her little denim skirt—“press your stump right here on my cunny.” She pulled her panties to one side and pointed. “I can do that,” said Dave. “But could we maybe kiss a little bit first?” Shandee nodded, and Dave knelt by the bed. She felt the full-on murflement of his enveloping kiss. Their tongues made friends; they’d known each other forever, it seemed. Shandee let her hand fall as if casually till it found the cocky thickness under his pants. She smoothed it over, feeling it swell, and he made a happy sound. Then he pushed his sleeve up higher and aimed his stump so it touched her gently between her legs—too gently. “You can go ahead and grind it in,” she said. He ground it in. “Like that?” “No, harder. You have to get it all wet. In other words, fuck me with your stump.” He pushed harder. “How about that?” “Oh, god, aaah, whoa, fuck, that’s far enough. Now tighten your biceps muscle so I can feel it jerk. Aaah! Good.” She sat up and straightened her hair. “That should do it, yes, you’re all moistened up now.” “Feels strange, a little like burning,” said Dave. “Now, quickly,” said Shandee. Dave held out his glistening stump, and Shandee peeled off the cap on Dave’s arm. She pushed the two ends together, and they joined, making a juicy sloomping sound. Dave was whole again. He fell on the bed, clutching his elbow. “Eee, eee, eee!” he said. “Pins and needles, and thorns and burrs and shrapnel—ow! I can feel the bone knitting back together.” Then, after the pain passed, he smiled, flexing his hand. “My arm is sending me up some vivid memories of touching your face,” he said. “May I touch your face?”

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  By the beginning of summer the walls of Afrekete’s apartment were always warm to the touch from the heat beating down on the roof, and chance breezes through her windows rustled her plants in the window and brushed over our sweat-smooth bodies, at rest after loving. We talked sometimes about what it meant to love women, and what a relief it was in the eye of the storm, no matter how often we had to bite our tongues and stay silent. Afrekete had a seven-year-old daughter whom she had left with her mama down in Georgia, and we shared a lot of our dreams. “She’s going to be able to love anybody she wants to love,” Afrekete said, fiercely, lighting a Lucky Strike. “Same way she’s going to be able to work any place she damn well pleases. Her mama’s going to see to that.” Once we talked about how Black women had been committed without choice to waging our campaigns in the enemies’ strongholds, too much and too often, and how our psychic landscapes had been plundered and wearied by those repeated battles and campaigns. “And don’t I have the scars to prove it,” she sighed. “Makes you tough though, babe, if you don’t go under. And that’s what I like about you; you’re like me. We’re both going to make it because we’re both too tough and crazy not to!” And we held each other and laughed and cried about what we had paid for that toughness, and how hard it was to explain to anyone who didn’t already know it that soft and tough had to be one and the same for either to work at all, like our joy and the tears mingling on the one pillow beneath our heads. And the sun filtered down upon us through the dusty windows, through the mass of green plants that Afrekete tended religiously. I took a ripe avocado and rolled it between my hands until the skin became a green case for the soft mashed fruit inside, hard pit at the core. I rose from a kiss in your mouth to nibble a hole in the fruit skin near the navel stalk, squeezed the pale yellow-green fruit juice in thin ritual lines back and forth over and around your coconut-brown belly . The oil and sweat from our bodies kept the fruit liquid, and I massaged it over your thighs and between your breasts until your brownness shone like a light through a veil of the palest green avocado, a mantle of goddess pear that I slowly licked from your skin .

• From Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

  She preferred to look, in the other museum, at the paintings; but still she did not understand anything he said about them. She did not know why he so adored things that were so long dead; what sustenance they gave him, what secrets he hoped to wrest from them. But she understood, at least, that they did give him a kind of bitter nourishment, and that the secrets they held for him were a matter of his life and death. It frightened her because she felt that he was reaching for the moon and that he would, therefore, be dashed down against the rocks; but she did not say any of this. She only listened, and in her heart she prayed for him. But on other Saturdays they went to see a movie; they went to see a play; they visited his friends; they walked through Central Park. She liked the park because, however spuriously, it re-created something of the landscape she had known. How many afternoons had they walked there! She had always, since, avoided it. They bought peanuts and for hours fed the animals at the zoo; they bought soda pop and drank it on the grass; they walked along the reservoir and Richard explained how a city like New York found water to drink. Mixed with her fear for him was a total admiration: that he had learned so young, so much. People stared at them but she did not mind; he noticed, but he did not seem to notice. But sometimes he would ask, in the middle of a sentence—concerned, possibly, with ancient Rome: ‘Little-bit—d’you love me?’ And she wondered how he could doubt it. She thought how infirm she must be not to have been able to make him know it; and she raised her eyes to his, and she said the only thing she could say: ‘I wish to God I may die if I don’t love you. There ain’t no sky above us if I don’t love you.’ Then he would look ironically up at the sky, and take her arm with a firmer pressure, and they would walk on. Once, she asked him: ‘Richard, did you go to school much when you was little?’ And he looked at her a long moment. Then: ‘Baby, I done told you, my mama died when I was born. And my daddy, he weren’t nowhere to be found. Ain’t nobody never took care of me. I just moved from one place to another. When one set of folks got tired of me they sent me down the line.

• From The City of God

  493 nor its consequences, but the character of the intention behind the act. This is the logic of Augustine’s famous dispositionalism—what allowed him to say, famously, “Love and do what you will.” If your heart is rightly directed, he argued, there is no way that your actions will be other than good. And so, instead of worrying about principles or maximizing utility, we ought to work on our hearts as the primary object of our ethical labors. More profoundly, I think, in ways that we still miss, this focus on love really does alter our vision of the kind of agents we are and invite us to recognize and reconceive our acting, moving us from understanding ourselves as paralleling God’s totally spontaneous ex nihilo Creation of the world. Indeed, our ambition to rival God by seeking to be that kind of an actor is itself, for Augustine, one good description of the demonic temptation we face—the Promethean temptation to rival God. Instead, we should see ourselves as actors not as primarily acting, but as responding to our situation—always already placed in a context, and with passions and affections; and participating in those passions, and affections, and our situation more or less well. We are creatures who come to knowledge of our agential powers only within a horizon of preset attachments and affections. Now this means that our action is never properly unprompted, but is always action in the context of, and in response to, a world lit up by our loves. Action is thus, for Augustine, perhaps more importantly conceived within a larger enframing context of responding—or even more extremely, even more rhetorically, perhaps powerfully of suffering—than we usually understand. I can’t say much more about this here, except to say that this is a very large theme in The City, but one that often goes unnoticed in our age. So committed are we generally to the idea that we do possess such demonic, Promethean powers of action. A third great theme is the picture of the right kind of human community, the truest politics we can find in this world now, the right context in which to live our lives as adoring beings after the Fall—namely, the city of God on pilgrimage in this life, found in the Lecture 23 Transcript—The City of God as a Single Book

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  With her towel around her neck, Eudora made huevos , scrambled eggs Mexican-style, and real café con leche for our breakfast. We ate at the gaily painted orange table between the tiny kitchen and her bedroom, smiling and talking and feeding each other from our common plate. There was room for only one of us at the square shallow sink in the kitchen. As I washed dishes to insure an ant-free afternoon, Eudora leaned on the doorpost, smoking lazily. Her hipbones flared like wings over her long legs. I could feel her quick breath on the side of my neck as she watched me. She dried the dishes, and hung the towel over a tin mask on the kitchen cabinet. “Now let’s go back to bed,” she muttered, reaching for me through the Mexican shirt I had borrowed to throw over myself. “There’s more.” By this time the sun was passing overhead. The room was full of reflected light and the heat from the flat adobe over us, but the wide windows and the lazy ceiling fan above kept the sweet air moving. We sat in bed sipping iced coffee from a pewter mug. When I told Eudora I didn’t like to be made love to, she raised her eyebrows. “How do you know?” she said, and smiled as she reached out and put down our coffee cup. “That’s probably because no one has ever really made love to you before,” she said softly, her eyes wrinkling at the corners, intense, desiring. Eudora knew many things about loving women that I had not yet learned. Day into dusk. A brief shower. Freshness. The comfort and delight of her body against mine. The ways my body came to life in the curve of her arms, her tender mouth, her sure body—gentle, persistent, complete. We run up the steep outside steps to her roof, and the almost full moon flickers in the dark center wells of her eyes. Kneeling, I pass my hands over her body, along the now-familiar place below her left shoulder, down along her ribs. A part of her. The mark of the Amazon. For a woman who seems spare, almost lean, in her clothing, her body is ripe and smooth to the touch. Beloved. Warm to my coolness, cool to my heat. I bend, moving my lips over her flat gentle stomach to the firm rising mound beneath. On Monday, I went back to school. In the next month, Eudora and I spent many afternoons together, but her life held complications about which she would say little. Eudora had been all over Mexico.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I would turn the corner into 113th Street towards the park, my steps quickening and my fingertips tingling to play in her earth. And I remember Afrekete, who came out of a dream to me always being hard and real as the fire hairs along the under-edge of my navel. She brought me live things from the bush, and from her farm set out in cocoyams and cassava— those magical fruit which Kitty bought in the West Indian markets along Lenox Avenue in the 140s or in the Puerto Rican bodegas within the bustling market over on Park Avenue and 116th Street under the Central Railroad structures. “I got this under the bridge” was a saying from time immemorial, giving an adequate explanation that whatever it was had come from as far back and as close to home—that is to say, was as authentic—as was possible. We bought red delicious pippins, the size of french cashew apples. There were green plantains, which we half-peeled and then planted, fruit-deep, in each other’s bodies until the petals of skin lay like tendrils of broad green fire upon the curly darkness between our upspread thighs. There were ripe red finger bananas, stubby and sweet, with which I parted your lips gently, to insert the peeled fruit into your grape-purple flower . I held you, lay between your brown legs, slowly playing my tongue through your familiar forests, slowly licking and swallowing as the deep undulations and tidal motions of your strong body slowly mashed ripe banana into a beige cream that mixed with the juices of your electric flesh. Our bodies met again, each surface touched with each other’s flame, from the tips of our curled toes to our tongues, and locked into our own wild rhythms, we rode each other across the thundering space, dripped like light from the peak of each other’s tongue . We were each of us both together. Then we were apart, and sweat sheened our bodies like sweet oil. Sometimes Afrekete sang in a small club further uptown on Sugar Hill. Sometimes she clerked in the Gristede’s Market on 97th Street and Amsterdam, and sometimes with no warning at all she appeared at the Pony Stable or Page Three on Saturday night. Once, I came home to Seventh Street late one night to find her sitting on my stoop at 3:00 A.M., with a bottle of beer in her hand and a piece of bright African cloth wrapped around her head, and we sped uptown through the dawn-empty city with a summer thunder squall crackling above us, and the wet city streets singing beneath the wheels of her little Nash Rambler. There are certain verities which are always with us, which we come to depend upon. That the sun moves north in summer, that melted ice contracts, that the curved banana is sweeter. Afrekete taught me roots, new definitions of our women’s bodies—definitions for which I had only been in training to learn before.

• From The City of God

  Chapter 7. --That the Words Love and Regard (Amor and Dilectio) are in Scripture Used Indifferently of Good and Evil Affection. He who resolves to love God, and to love his neighbor as himself, not according to man but according to God, is on account of this love said to be of a good will; and this is in Scripture more commonly called charity, but it is also, even in the same books, called love. For the apostle says that the man to be elected as a ruler of the people must be a lover of good. [662]And when the Lord Himself had asked Peter, "Hast thou a regard for me (diligis) more than these? " Peter replied, "Lord, Thou knowest that I love (amo) Thee. "And again a second time the Lord asked not whether Peter loved (amaret) Him, but whether he had a regard (diligeret)for Him, and, he again answered, "Lord, Thou knowest that I love (amo) Thee. "But on the third interrogation the Lord Himself no longer says, "Hast thou a regard (diligis) for me,"but "Lovest thou (amas) me? "And then the evangelist adds, "Peter was grieved because He said unto him the third time, "Lovest thou (amas) me? " though the Lord had not said three times but only once, "Lovest thou (amas) me? " and twice "Diligis me ? " from which we gather that, even when the Lord said "diligis," He used an equivalent for "amas. " Peter, too, throughout used one word for the one thing, and the third time also replied, "Lord, Thou knowest all things, Thou knowest that I love (amo) Thee. " [663]

• From The City of God

  Chapter 28. --Whether We Ought to Love the Love Itself with Which We Love Our Existence and Our Knowledge of It, that So We May More Nearly Resemble the Image of the Divine Trinity. We have said as much as the scope of this work demands regarding these two things, to wit, our existence, and our knowledge of it, and how much they are loved by us, and how there is found even in the lower creatures a kind of likeness of these things, and yet with a difference. We have yet to speak of the love wherewith they are loved, to determine whether this love itself is loved. And doubtless it is; and this is the proof. Because in men who are justly loved, it is rather love itself that is loved; for he is not justly called a good man who knows what is good, but who loves it. Is it not then obvious that we love in ourselves the very love wherewith we love whatever good we love? For there is also a love wherewith we love that which we ought not to love; and this love is hated by him who loves that wherewith he loves what ought to be loved. For it is quite possible for both to exist in one man. And this co-existence is good for a man, to the end that this love which conduces to our living well may grow, and the other, which leads us to evil may decrease, until our whole life be perfectly healed and transmuted into good. For if we were beasts, we should love the fleshly and sensual life, and this would be our sufficient good; and when it was well with us in respect of it, we should seek nothing beyond. In like manner, if we were trees, we could not, indeed, in the strict sense of the word, love anything; nevertheless we should seem, as it were, to long for that by which we might become more abundantly and luxuriantly fruitful. If we were stones, or waves, or wind, or flame, or anything of that kind, we should want, indeed, both sensation and life, yet should possess a kind of attraction towards our own proper position and natural order. For the specific gravity of bodies is, as it were, their love, whether they are carried downwards by their weight, or upwards by their levity. For the body is borne by its gravity, as the spirit by love, whithersoever it is borne. [499]But we are men, created in the image of our Creator, whose eternity is true, and whose truth is eternal, whose love is eternal and true, and who Himself is the eternal, true, and adorable Trinity, without confusion, without separation; and, therefore, while, as we run over all the works which He has established, we may detect, as it were, His footprints, now more and now less distinct even in those things that are beneath us, since they could not so much as exist, or be bodied forth in any shape, or follow and observe any law, had they not been made by Him who supremely is, and is supremely good and supremely wise; yet in ourselves beholding His image, let us, like that younger son of the gospel, come to ourselves, and arise and return to Him from whom by our sin we had departed. There our being will have no death, our knowledge no error, our love no mishap. But now, though we are assured of our possession of these three things, not on the testimony of others, but by our own consciousness of their presence, and because we see them with our own most truthful interior vision, yet, as we cannot of our selves know how long they are to continue, and whether they shall never cease to be, and what issue their good or bad use will lead to, we seek for others who can acquaint us of these things, if we have not already found them. Of the trustworthiness of these witnesses, there will, not now, but subsequently, be an opportunity of speaking. But in this book let us go on as we have begun, with God's help, to speak of the city of God, not in its state of pilgrimage and mortality, but as it exists ever immortal in the heavens,--that is, let us speak of the holy angels who maintain their allegiance to God, who never were, nor ever shall be, apostate, between whom and those who forsook light eternal and became darkness, God, as we have already said, made at the first a separation.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  You love her. That’s a soul mate.” “Oh,” said Trix. “Will you take me to the groanrooms?” They went to a groanroom, and in the darkness of the entry foyer they put on the glowing wrist and ankle bracelets, which were in plastic packets in baskets just outside the door. “Just remember, we can’t talk in here at all, only groan,” said Trix, her hand on the door. “It’s like meditation except it’s more fun.” They went in together and closed the door very quietly. Reese Visits a Headless Bedroo m “I want something where the man’s not always judging me and criticizing me and disapproving of how I dress and all that,” said the ethereal flaxen-haired girl, Reese, to Lila, in Lila’s office. “I guess I want a good-looking man for a fun brainless time in the sack.” “Well,” said Lila, “we do offer the headless bedrooms.” “What are they?” “You choose a good-looking body whose head has been temporarily removed.” “That’s horrible!” said Reese. “Surprisingly it’s not, really. What you get is a nice friendly extremely handsome male body that is very responsive to any stimulation because it can’t hear or see or speak or think except with what it has, which is its spine and crotch.” “I see, I see.” “You and the handsome headless body are together in a furnished room for fifteen minutes, half an hour, or even a full hour.” “Where’s the head during all this?” “You never see the head. The head is safe in the headroom. Cora is the headmistress, she takes care of eight heads. We’ll put them all back on later.” “And the heads have agreed to this?” “Yep.” “And the body can move and all that?” “Yes, although some fine motor skills are not there. On the wall you’ll see some how-to posters that Kathy has made. They’ll help you handle these bodyboys, as we call them.” “Let’s do it.” Daggett led Reese into a room where there were eight headless men sitting on couches. They were wearing long Japanese-style bathrobes. Kathy smiled at Reese and offered her a seat in a comfortable chair. Then she touched each bodyboy, helping it stand and walk in front of Reese and then open its robe, showing off its chest and underpants. “I can have him pull down his underpants, if you’d like,” said Kathy. “He doesn’t mind.” “Well, I’d kind of like to see his butt, if you’d have him turn around.” Kathy guided him around and held his robe to one side. Reese nodded. “Very nice.” She was disappointed, though. He was an extreme body-builder type with a tanning-bed tan and pectoral muscles that looked sort of like breasts except hard. She said, in a low voice, “Um, do you have any men who are more, you know, guy-next-doorish?

• From The City of God

  Then let him look upon His Church, joined to her so great Husband in spiritual marriage and divine love, of which it is said in these words which follow, "The queen stood upon Thy right hand in gold-embroidered vestments, girded about with variety. Hearken, O daughter, and look, and incline thine ear; forget also thy people, and thy father's house. Because the King hath greatly desired thy beauty; for He is the Lord thy God. And the daughters of Tyre shall worship Him with gifts; the rich among the people shall entreat Thy face. The daughter of the King has all her glory within, in golden fringes, girded about with variety. The virgins shall be brought after her to the King:her neighbors shall be brought to Thee. They shall be brought with gladness and exultation:they shall be led into the temple of the King. Instead of thy fathers, sons shall be born to thee:thou shalt establish them as princes over all the earth. They shall be mindful of thy name in every generation and descent. Therefore shall the people acknowledge thee for evermore, even for ever and ever. " [1084]I do not think any one is so stupid as to believe that some poor woman is here praised and described, as the spouse, to wit, of Him to whom it is said, "Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever:a rod of direction is the rod of Thy kingdom. Thou hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity:therefore God, Thy God, hath anointed Thee with the oil of exultation above Thy fellows;" [1085] that is, plainly, Christ above Christians. For these are His fellows, out of the unity and concord of whom in all nations that queen is formed, as it is said of her in another psalm, "The city of the great King. " [1086]The same is Sion spiritually, which name in Latin is interpreted speculatio (discovery); for she descries the great good of the world to come, because her attention is directed thither. In the same way she is also Jerusalem spiritually, of which we have already said many things. Her enemy is the city of the devil, Babylon, which is interpreted "confusion. "Yet out of this Babylon this queen is in all nations set free by regeneration, and passes from the worst to the best King,--that is, from the devil to Christ. Wherefore it is said to her, "Forget thy people and thy father's house. "Of this impious city those also are a portion who are Israelites only in the flesh and not by faith, enemies also of this great King Himself, and of His queen. For Christ, having come to them, and been slain by them, has the more become the King of others, whom He did not see in the flesh. Whence our King Himself says through the prophecy of a certain psalm, "Thou wilt deliver me from the contradictions of the people; Thou wilt make me head of the nations. A people whom I have not known hath served me:in the hearing of the ear it hath obeyed me. " [1087]Therefore this people of the nations, which Christ did not know in His bodily presence, yet has believed in that Christ as announced to it; so that it might be said of it with good reason, "In the hearing of the ear it hath obeyed me," for "faith is by hearing. " [1088]This people, I say, added to those who are the true Israelites both by the flesh and by faith, is the city of God, which has brought forth Christ Himself according to the flesh, since He was in these Israelites only. For thence came the Virgin Mary, in whom Christ assumed flesh that He might be man. Of which city another psalm says, "Mother Sion, shall a man say, and the man is made in her, and the Highest Himself hath founded her. " [1089]Who is this Highest, save God? And thus Christ, who is God, before He became man through Mary in that city, Himself founded it by the patriarchs and prophets. As therefore was said by prophecy so long before to this queen, the city of God, what we already can see fulfilled, "Instead of thy fathers, sons are born to thee; thou shall make them princes over all the earth;" [1090] so out of her sons truly are set up even her fathers [princes] through all the earth, when the people, coming together to her, confess to her with the confession of eternal praise for ever and ever. Beyond doubt, whatever interpretation is put on what is here expressed somewhat darkly in figurative language, ought to be in agreement with these most manifest things.

• From Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982)

  I never saw Afrekete again, but her print remains upon my life with the resonance and power of an emotional tattoo. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography Epilogue Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from meso different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. Another meeting. A year later, I finished library school. The first summer of a new decade was waning as I walked away from Seventh Street for the last time, leaving that door unlocked for whatever person came after me who needed shelter. There were four half-finished poems scribbled on the bathroom wall between the toilet and the bathtub, others in the window jambs and the floorboards under the flowered linoleum, mixed up with the ghosts of rich food smells. The casing of this place had been my home for seven years, the amount of time it takes for the human body to completely renew itself, cell by living cell. And in those years my life had become increasingly a bridge and field of women. Zami . Zami. A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers . We carry our traditions with us. Buying boxes of Red Cross Salt and a fresh corn straw broom for my new apartment in Westchester: new job, new house, new living the old in a new way. Recreating in words the women who helped give me substance. Ma-Liz, DeLois, Louise Briscoe, Aunt Anni, Linda, and Genevieve; MawuLisa, thunder, sky, sun, the great mother of us all; and Afrekete, her youngest daughter, the mischievous linguist, trickster, best-beloved, whom we must all become . Their names, selves, faces feed me like corn before labor. I live each of them as a piece of me, and I choose these words with the same grave concern with which I choose to push speech into poetry, the mattering core, the forward visions of all our lives. Once home was a long way off, a place I had never been to but knew out of my mother’s mouth. I only discovered its latitudes when Carriacou was no longer my home. There it is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother’s blood.

• From House of Holes: A Book of Raunch (2011)

  Shandee handed Lila the arm, and Lila pressed Dave’s hand against her face. “Mmmm, gentle touch he has.” “I think I’m a bit in love,” said Shandee, “and the weird thing is I don’t know what Dave looks like, or what his voice is like, or what his personality is like, or anything.” “Ain’t that the way it is sometimes,” Lila said. “You don’t know a damn thing about them and yet you love them to pieces.” Lila gave Dave’s arm a pat, sighing, and handed it back. “There are times when I just don’t know why I’m doing all this,” she confided. “It’s not easy for you, I would imagine,” said Shandee. “No, it isn’t. The sex happiness of so many people—it weighs on you. We have our fun, sure, but we have our problems, too. The Pearloiner has been on a spree lately, stealing clits. She is one sick bitch. Zilka got her clit stolen clean away.” “That’s terrible,” said Shandee. Lila leaned forward. “That’s why she’s so vague sometimes. She’s lost her focus. And yet life does go on. You see that light?” Lila pointed to a small red light that blinked above the words PLEASURE FIRST. “Every time somebody has an orgasm somewhere in the House of Holes that light lights up. Whenever that light lights up I feel happy. I was working in hospital administration—I was seeing my friends get old, my life go by. Now I’m living. Don’t you wish you were having an orgasm right this second?” “I guess so,” said Shandee. “Well I do. After I have an orgasm I get so darn much work done. However.” She thought briefly, tapping her pen lightly on her nose. “Do you know how to fly an airplane?” “I’m sorry, I don’t.” Shandee waited. “That’s too bad.” She clicked a button. “Zilka. Could you bring those three arrivals in from the waiting room?” Shandee thought she should bring the conversation around. “So how do you think I should best go about searching for my Dave?” she asked. “Let me muse on that further,” said Lila, taking off her bifocals. “I’ll need to hold the dear one again.” She sniffed Dave’s arm’s knuckles and pressed his hand lightly on her breast. “Hmmm. Let me just consider awhile. Mmm.” Zilka opened the door for Hax, Ruzty, and Dune. Lila quickly lowered Dave’s arm and looked over the crowd. “My goodness,” she said, “this is a pleasant afternoon. Dune, hello again, you rogue. Can any of you three fly a plane?” “I can sail a boat,” said Hax. “I drive a stunt motorcycle,” said Dune. “I can bend my thumbs backward, like this,” said Ruzty, demonstrating. “That settles it. Hax and Dune, you’ll fly the pornsucker ship to Baltimore with one of the pussypilots. Daggett will give you pointers.