Nostalgia

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 H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Despite the eccentricity of a hawk on his fist, what White was doing was very much of his time. Long walks in the English countryside, often at night, were astonishingly popular in the 1930s. Rambling clubs published calendars of full moons, train companies laid on mystery trains to rural destinations, and when in 1932 the Southern Railway offered an excursion to a moonlit walk along the South Downs, expecting to sell forty or so tickets, one and a half thousand people turned up. The people setting out on these walks weren’t seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour: to Merrie England, or to pre-historic England, pre-industrial visions that offered solace and safety to sorely troubled minds. For though railways and roads and a burgeoning market in countryside books had contributed to this movement, at heart it had grown out of the trauma of the Great War, and was flourishing in fear of the next. The critic Jed Esty has described this pastoral craze as one element in a wider movement of national cultural salvage in these years; it was a response to economic disaster , a contracting Empire and totalitarian threats from abroad. It was a movement that celebrated ancient sites and folk traditions . It delighted in Shakespeare and Chaucer , in Druids , in Arthurian legend. It believed that something essential about the nation had been lost and could be returned, if only in the imagination. White, caught up in this conservative, antiquarian mood, walked with his hawk and wrote of ghosts, of starry Orion naked and resplendent in the English sky, of all the imaginary lines men and time had drawn upon the landscape. By the fire, his hawk by his side, he brooded on the fate of nations. The cloud-base is low today. It does not matter. He is not flying today. He is walking. He is walking with his hawk, and he and Gos have traversed five fields to get here. Now he stands by the ruins of the chapel of St Thomas the Martyr. Once it was a chapel, then it was a house, and now it is a ruin, a great, collapsing carcass of stained ironstone. The roof is a broken ribcage heaped with rotting thatch. Lintels sag over windows and doors blocked with laths and limestone rubble. Great banks of nettles grow here, rich and green. Ash trees rise in lacy fists and the fields fall away each side. It is very quiet. He hears the ticking of a robin somewhere, like falling water. This place is soundly cursed against man, he thinks. The stink of the dead sheep he found dumped in a drain is still caught in his nose, a sorry, sodden wreck of fleece pullulating with maggots. He does not mind the smell.

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

  The two of them began to talk at the same time, asking how my trip had been, telling me all the plans they had made, listing all the people I had to see. Wide plains stretched out on either side of the road, savannah grass mostly, an occasional thorn tree against the horizon, a landscape that seemed at once ancient and raw. Gradually the traffic thickened, and crowds began to pour out of the countryside on their way to work, the men still buttoning their flimsy shirts; the women straight-backed, their heads wrapped in bright-colored scarves. Cars meandered across lanes and roundabouts, dodging potholes, bicycles, and pedestrians, while rickety jitneys—called matatus, I was told—stopped without any warning to cram on more passengers. It all seemed strangely familiar, as if I had been down the same road before. And then I remembered other mornings in Indonesia, with my mother and Lolo talking in the front seat, the same smell of burning wood and diesel, the same stillness that lingered at the center of the morning rush, the same look on people’s faces as they made their way into a new day, with few expectations other than making it through, and perhaps a mild hope that their luck would change, or at least hold out. We went to drop off Zeituni at Kenya Breweries, a large, drab complex where she worked as a computer programmer. Stepping out of the car, she leaned over again to kiss me on the cheek, then wagged her finger at Auma. “You take good care of Barry now,” she said. “Make sure he doesn’t get lost again.” Once we were back on the highway, I asked Auma what Zeituni had meant about my getting lost. Auma shrugged. “It’s a common expression here,” she said. “Usually, it means the person hasn’t seen you in a while. ‘You’ve been lost,’ they’ll say. Or ‘Don’t get lost.’ Sometimes it has a more serious meaning. Let’s say a son or husband moves to the city, or to the West, like our Uncle Omar, in Boston. They promise to return after completing school. They say they’ll send for the family once they get settled. At first they write once a week. Then it’s just once a month. Then they stop writing completely. No one sees them again. They’ve been lost, you see. Even if people know where they are.”

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Although I didn’t long believe the story told to me by Mother - that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch - for eighteen years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies, never looked far beyond my father’s kitchen for occupation, or for love.It was a curious kind of life, mine, even by Whitstable standards ; but it was not a disagreeable or even a terribly hard one. Our working day began at seven, and ended twelve hours later; and through all those hours my duties were the same. While Mother cooked, and Alice and my father served, I sat upon a high stool at the side of a vat of natives, and scrubbed, and rinsed, and plied the oyster-knife. Some people like their oysters raw; and for them your job is easiest, for you have merely to pick out a dozen natives from the barrel, swill the brine from them, and place them, with a piece of parsley or cress, upon a plate. But for those who took their oysters stewed, or fried - or baked, or scalloped, or put in a pie - my labours were more delicate. Then I must open each oyster, and beard it, and transfer it to Mother’s cooking-pot with all of its savoury flesh intact, and none of its liquor spilled or tainted. Since a supper-plate will hold a dozen fish; since oyster-teas are cheap; and since our Parlour was a busy one, with room for fifty customers at once - well, you may calculate for yourself the vast numbers of oysters which passed, each day, beneath my prising knife; and you might imagine, too, the redness and the soreness and the sheer salty soddenness of my fingers at the close of every afternoon. Even now, two decades and more since I put aside my oyster-knife and quit my father’s kitchen for ever, I feel a ghostly, sympathetic twinge in my wrist and finger-joints at the sight of a fishmonger’s barrel, or the sound of an oyster-man’s cry; and still, sometimes, I believe I can catch the scent of liquor and brine beneath my thumb-nail, and in the creases of my palm.I have said that there was nothing in my life, when I was young, but oysters; but that is not quite true.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For Tootsie was also leaving - leaving for France, for a part in a Parisian revue; and her room was being taken by a comedian who whistled. The Professor had developed the beginnings of a palsy - there was talk that he might end up in a home for old artistes. Sims and Percy were doing well, and planned to take our rooms when we had left them; but Percy had found a sweetheart, too, and the girl made quarrels between them - I learned later that they split the act, and found spots as minstrels in rival troupes. It’s the way of theatrical houses, I suppose, to break up and re-fashion themselves; but I was almost sadder, on my last day at Ginevra Road, than I had been on leaving Whitstable. I sat in the parlour - my portrait was upon the wall, now, along with all the others - and thought how much had changed since I had sat there first, a little less than thirteen months before; and for a moment I wondered if all the changes had been good ones, and wished that I could be plain Nancy Astley again, whom Kitty Butler loved with an ordinary love she was not afraid to show to all the world. The street to which we moved was very new, and very quiet. Our neighbours, I think, were city men; their wives stayed at home all day, and their children had nurses, who wheeled them, puffing, up and down the garden steps in great iron perambulators. We had the top two floors of a house close to the station; our landlady and her husband lived beneath us, but they were not connected to the business, and we rarely saw them. Our rooms were smart, we were the first to rent them: the furniture was all of polished wood, and velvet and brocade, and was far finer than anything either of us was used to - so that we sat upon the chairs and sofas rather gingerly. There were three bedrooms, and one of them was mine - which meant only, of course, that I kept my dresses in its closet, my brushes and combs upon its wash-hand stand, and my nightgown beneath the pillow of its bed: this was for the sake of the girl who came to clean for us, three days a week. My nights were really spent in Kitty’s chamber, the great front bedroom with its great high bed that the house-builders had meant for a husband and wife. It made me smile to lie in it. ‘We are married,’ I would say to Kitty. ‘Why, we don’t have to lie here at all, if we don’t wish to!

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  You think this is an accident?” Yale: “They had these glitter cannons, and they’d—one time, the cannons shot foam stars. I don’t even know how they did that.” Nico: “I’m still hung over from the closing party, and it was four days ago.” His voice. It traveled down her neck and arms. The building, small and undefended. A voice off camera: “It’s mob bosses tearing this place down.” Another: “Well. I don’t know.” Charlie: “They’re making a bloody parking lot.” Yale: “Watch.” But nothing happened. A shot of the building, just standing there. Static. Nico: “Now. Look.” The wrecking ball swinging, colliding. Not the topple you’d expect, not a skyscraper’s collapse. Just a cloud of obscuring dust and, when that cleared, a hole. Then another. Someone shouting “Whooh!” as if out of obligation. A slow, awkward minute of wrecking ball, and faces reacting. Yale’s face. Charlie’s face. Fiona felt Julian take her hand. She’d forgotten where she was, forgotten the gallery and the museum and all of Paris. The film cut forward; time had passed. The building, destroyed. The entire place downed, the dust clearing. People leaving. The sound of wind. Charlie’s voice: “Better be a hell of a parking lot.” Yale: “Oh my God, look.” Yale on his knees, digging in the gutter. Yale surrounded by the remaining people, showing them something in his hands. Yale showing the camera: a handful of dust. “There’s glitter in it!” he said. A man Fiona didn’t know peered over Yale’s shoulder. “That’s not glitter. Where?” It just looked like dust. Yale turned and smeared it down Charlie’s shirt. Yale and Charlie and Nico laughing hysterically. Charlie rubbing the dust between his fingers, sprinkling it on the sidewalk. Nico rubbing it into Charlie’s jacket sleeve. A man smearing it on his cheeks, a woman saying, “That’s asbestos, I’m sure.” Charlie, laughing still, giddy: “We’re gonna take it home with us!” A shot of the gutter filled with dust. True, there were glints of light there, but they could have been tiny shards of fiberglass. Surely they were. Fiona tried hard to believe it was more than that. Nico’s voice one more time, disembodied: “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Campo!” The gutter, and a long silence. She expected the film to end right there, but instead, as the laughter died down, the camera lingered uncomfortably on a man collecting his long black hair into a ponytail. On a mother walking by through the last gawkers, pulling her young son by the hand. On Yale and Charlie walking off down the sidewalk, so clearly a couple—inches from each other, but not touching. Around them, a silence as big as the city. Then the whole film looped again. There they all stood, the Bistro whole. Boys with hands in pockets, waiting for everything to begin.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had friends and cousins, as any girl must have who grows up in a small town in a large, old family. I had my sister Alice - my dearest friend of all - with whom I shared a bedroom and a bed, and who heard all my secrets, and told me all of hers. I even had a kind of beau: a boy named Freddy, who worked a dredging smack beside my brother Davy and my Uncle Joe on Whitstable Bay.And last of all I had a fondness - you might say, a kind of passion - for the music hall; and more particularly for music-hall songs and the singing of them. If you have visited Whitstable you will know that this was a rather inconvenient passion, for the town has neither music hall nor theatre - only a solitary lamp-post before the Duke of Cumberland Hotel, where minstrel troupes occasionally sing, and the Punch-and-Judy man, in August, sets his booth. But Whitstable is only fifteen minutes away by train from Canterbury; and here there was a music hall - the Canterbury Palace of Varieties - where the shows were three hours long, and the tickets cost sixpence, and the acts were the best to be seen, they said, in all of Kent.The Palace was a small and, I suspect, a rather shabby theatre ; but when I see it in my memories I see it still with my oyster-girl’s eyes - I see the mirror-glass which lined the walls, the crimson plush upon the seats, the plaster cupids, painted gold, which swooped above the curtain. Like our oyster-house, it had its own particular scent - the scent, I know now, of music halls everywhere - the scent of wood and grease-paint and spilling beer, of gas and of tobacco and of hair-oil, all combined. It was a scent which as a girl I loved uncritically; later I heard it described, by theatre managers and artistes, as the smell of laughter, the very odour of applause. Later still I came to know it as the essence not of pleasure, but of grief.That, however, is to get ahead of my story.I was more intimate than most girls with the colours and scents of the Canterbury Palace - in the period, at least, of which I am thinking, that final summer in my father’s house, when I became eighteen - because Alice had a beau who worked there, a boy named Tony Reeves, who got us seats at knock-down prices or for free.

• From Cultish (2021)

  As sociologist Ron Enroth wrote in his 1979 book The Lure of the Cults, “The unprecedented media exposure given Jonestown . . . alerted Americans to the fact that seemingly beneficent religious groups can mask a hellish rot.” Then, as these things tend to go, as soon as cults became frightening, they also became cool. Seventies pop culture didn’t wait long to birth terms like “cult film” and “cult classic,” which described the up-and-coming genre of underground indie movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Bands like Phish and the Grateful Dead came to be known for their peripatetic “cult followings.” A generation or two after the Fourth Great Awakening, the era began to take on a nostalgic cool factor among cult-curious youth. Fringe groups from the ’70s now boast a sort of perversely stylish vintage cachet. At this point, being obsessed with the Manson Family is akin to having an extensive collection of hippie-era vinyl and band tees. At an LA salon the other week, I eavesdropped on a woman telling her stylist that she was going for a “Manson girl” hair look: overgrown, brunette, middle-parted. A twentysomething acquaintance of mine recently hosted a cult-themed birthday party in New York’s Hudson Valley—the site of numerous historical “cults” (including The Family, * NXIVM, and countless witches), as well as the Woodstock music festival. The dress code? All white. Filtered photographs of guests sporting ivory slips and glassy-eyed “oops, I didn’t know I was haunted” expressions flooded my Instagram feed. Over the decades, the word “cult” has become so sensationalized, so romanticized, that most experts I spoke to don’t even use it anymore. Their stance is that the meaning of “cult” is too broad and subjective to be useful, at least in academic literature. As recently as the 1990s, scholars had no problem tossing around the term to describe any group “considered by many to be deviant.” But it doesn’t take a social scientist to see the bias built into that categorization. A few scholars have tried to get more precise and identify specific “cult” criteria: charismatic leaders, mind-altering behaviors, sexual and financial exploitation, an us-versus-them mentality toward nonmembers, and an ends- justify-the-means philosophy. Stephen Kent, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta, adds that “cult” has typically been applied to groups that have some degree of supernatural beliefs, though that isn’t always the case. (Angels and demons don’t usually make their way into, say, cosmetics pyramid schemes. Except when they do . . . more on that in part 4.) But Kent says the result of all these institutions is the same: a power imbalance built on members’ devotion, hero worship, and absolute trust, which frequently facilitates abuse on the part of unaccountable leaders.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I gotta say, though, that life with my family wasn’t always doom and gloom. I remember coming home after school and walking into our rundown Hollywood apartment that was filled with the rich scent of weed being rolled into fat spliffs. Our home was often filled with laughter, with Black fathers and white mothers kekein’ it up for hours.74 My sister and I used to love to watch them dance and sing along to Stevie, The O’Jays, and Earth, Wind, and Fire. It was magical sometimes. My parents and their friends dabbled in a bit of everything, but what began for them as recreational drug use gave way to harder times. Poverty and untreated mental health issues fueled by chaotic substance use took their toll on our little family, and life grew grim. As I reflect on my own family’s story, I realize it isn’t much different than the generations of families caught in the web of chaos created by extreme poverty; generational, societal, and institutional trauma; cycling in and out of prisons; exposure to stigmatizing and potentially deadly diseases like HIV and hepatitis C; untreated mental health; homelessness—the list goes on and on. Every single one of these issues touched my family. Every. Single. One. It is no mystery to me why many people turn to drugs to cope. British author Johann Hari once said that eventually people can “no longer bear to be present in their lives.” I get it. I had my son Christian when I was twenty and raised him while working at a retail pharmacy. Ten years later, in 1995, I left LA and moved to Massachusetts, where I studied art and philosophy at community college. I wrote queer erotica and read at a few shows with people like Tristan Taormino. I found work in a nonprofit organization serving people living with HIV and people who used drugs at a needle exchange program, and it was there that I learned about harm reduction, and it changed my life for good. I met my partner of twenty years there too. I’m clear that my views on drug user health and drug user rights are informed by my own experience, my own biases, my own perspectives. I’m not an academic, an organizer, or a politician. I am a product of an imperfect world filled with people struggling to survive. When I was a child in the middle of my family’s chaos, I didn’t have words to describe what we were experiencing. But thanks to harm reduction I do now. amb. What is your long-term vision for harm reduction’s impact in the world?

• From The Great Believers (2018)

  For a while. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but I am.” “Well I’m proud of you. Hey, have you seen it yet?” “Seen what?” “Well, two things, really. Three things! Did you see me? Do I look okay?” “You looked smashing, Julian.” “Okay, two other things. This one.” He took her shoulders and angled her toward a glowing light box mounted on the wall and covered, every inch of it, with black and white contact sheets. As big as a picture window. Some strips of photos hung vertically, some horizontally. Occasionally they crossed each other. The piece was titled 1983. Magnifying glasses, strong ones, hung at each side— great, because Fiona didn’t want to dig her readers out of her purse. She started arbitrarily on the top left. A strip of some kind of party, too many men in each frame to make anyone out. A strip of a face she thought was Katsu Tatami’s. Four in a row of what looked like that year’s Pride parade, men waving flags. There was the really tall guy who used to sell loose cigarettes on Halsted. There was Teddy Naples. They kissed and danced and lounged on couches and wore ridiculous clothes and flipped pancakes and sunbathed on the rocks. She was hoping to see Nico there, but she didn’t. Julian said, “Look.” There she was herself, an arm around Terrence. In a restaurant, it looked like. She never remembered being that pretty, that happy. Claire was just an egg in an ovary, one more thing Fiona hadn’t ruined yet. At the left of the shot was Yale, mouth open, talking to someone out of frame. A mirror behind them all, in which you could see a room of tables, diners, and Richard himself, camera flash for a head. She wanted to climb into the photo, to say, “Stop where you are.” Wasn’t that what the camera had done, at least? It had frozen them forever. Stay there, she thought. Stay there. Julian gave her a minute and then he said, “I was thinking about Hamlet. You know I was in it three different times, and I never got to be Hamlet? Actually it’s Horatio I was thinking about. I never got to be him either.” Fiona was filled with ridiculous, irrational love for Julian just then, for whatever he was about to say, because she could feel Nico beside her, and Yale and Terrence and all of them, rolling their eyes at Julian’s making this about himself, about his acting, which was such a Julian thing to do, and they all loved him anyway, and she still did too. He said, “The whole play is about Hamlet trying to avenge his father’s death, trying to tell the truth, right? And then when he dies, he hands it all to Horatio. In this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story. See, I’d have made a great Hamlet! But what a burden. To be Horatio.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  31 Archaeologists have found mass graves from this period that suggest some kind of massacre, 32 yet there is little evidence that early humans regularly fought one another. 33 But human life changed forever in about 9000 BCE, when pioneering farmers in the Levant learned to grow and store wild grain. They produced harvests that were able to support larger populations than ever before and eventually they grew more food than they needed. 34 As a result, the human population increased so dramatically that in some regions a return to hunter-gatherer life became impossible. Between about 8500 BCE and the first century of the Common Era—a remarkably short period given the four million years of our history—all around the world, quite independently, the great majority of humans made the transition to agrarian life. And with agriculture came civilization; and with civilization, warfare. In our industrialized societies, we often look back to the agrarian age with nostalgia, imagining that people lived more wholesomely then, close to the land and in harmony with nature. Initially, however, agriculture was experienced as traumatic. These early settlements were vulnerable to wild swings in productivity that could wipe out the entire population, and their mythology describes the first farmers fighting a desperate battle against sterility, drought, and famine. 35 For the first time, backbreaking drudgery became a fact of human life. Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders. 36 The earth was revered as the Mother Goddess and her fecundity experienced as an epiphany; she was called Ishtar in Mesopotamia, Demeter in Greece, Isis in Egypt, and Anat in Syria. Yet she was not a comforting presence but extremely violent. The Earth Mother regularly dismembered consorts and enemies alike—just as corn was ground to powder and grapes crushed to unrecognizable pulp. Farming implements were depicted as weapons that wounded the earth, so farming plots became fields of blood. When Anat slew Mot, god of sterility, she cut him in two with a ritual sickle, winnowed him in a sieve, ground him in a mill, and scattered his scraps of bleeding flesh over the fields. After she slaughtered the enemies of Baal, god of life-giving rain, she adorned herself with rouge and henna, made a necklace of the hands and heads of her victims, and waded knee-deep in blood to attend the triumphal banquet. 37 These violent myths reflected the political realities of agrarian life. By the beginning of the ninth millennium BCE, the settlement in the oasis of Jericho in the Jordan valley had a population of three thousand people, which would have been impossible before the advent of agriculture. Jericho was a fortified stronghold protected by a massive wall that must have consumed tens of thousands of hours of manpower to construct.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I gotta say, though, that life with my family wasn’t always doom and gloom. I remember coming home after school and walking into our rundown Hollywood apartment that was filled with the rich scent of weed being rolled into fat spliffs. Our home was often filled with laughter, with Black fathers and white mothers kekein’ it up for hours.74 My sister and I used to love to watch them dance and sing along to Stevie, The O’Jays, and Earth, Wind, and Fire. It was magical sometimes. My parents and their friends dabbled in a bit of everything, but what began for them as recreational drug use gave way to harder times. Poverty and untreated mental health issues fueled by chaotic substance use took their toll on our little family, and life grew grim. As I reflect on my own family’s story, I realize it isn’t much different than the generations of families caught in the web of chaos created by extreme poverty; generational, societal, and institutional trauma; cycling in and out of prisons; exposure to stigmatizing and potentially deadly diseases like HIV and hepatitis C; untreated mental health; homelessness—the list goes on and on. Every single one of these issues touched my family. Every. Single. One. It is no mystery to me why many people turn to drugs to cope. British author Johann Hari once said that eventually people can “no longer bear to be present in their lives.” I get it. I had my son Christian when I was twenty and raised him while working at a retail pharmacy. Ten years later, in 1995, I left LA and moved to Massachusetts, where I studied art and philosophy at community college. I wrote queer erotica and read at a few shows with people like Tristan Taormino. I found work in a nonprofit organization serving people living with HIV and people who used drugs at a needle exchange program, and it was there that I learned about harm reduction, and it changed my life for good. I met my partner of twenty years there too. I’m clear that my views on drug user health and drug user rights are informed by my own experience, my own biases, my own perspectives. I’m not an academic, an organizer, or a politician. I am a product of an imperfect world filled with people struggling to survive. When I was a child in the middle of my family’s chaos, I didn’t have words to describe what we were experiencing. But thanks to harm reduction I do now. amb. What is your long-term vision for harm reduction’s impact in the world?

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Tell him it was sure a pretty place. I’ll talk to him about it when I get home.” The trunk held sepia photos wrapped in cheesecloth from his childhood during the early part of this century. My favorite shows Aunt Iris with the four boys—Uncle A.D., Daddy (who also received no name, only initials—J.P.), Uncle Pug, and Uncle Tim. The boys range from just under six feet (Pug) to six four (A.D.). They are shirtless under their bib overalls; their matching close-cropped haircuts, which Daddy claimed you could rub the river water out of with three strokes of a flat palm, are dark and sleek as seals. With odd solemnity, they hold a single boat oar like a totem. And strung from the giant pecan tree behind them are half a dozen dead alligators, which they hunted for the hides. I remember Daddy’s description of swamp gas circling their flat-bottomed boat. Baby Tim usually sat at the prow with a bull’s-eye lantern that turned a gator’s eyes an eerie reflecting red. In another picture, his mother—her face partly obscured by the huge bonnet—holds the halter of a mule my grandfather allegedly beat to death one day for its stubbornness in the field. My grandfather’s picture resembles a younger, stouter version of what I had watched him calcify into before he finally died at eighty-six—a hard brown man in a Stetson, planted in a cane-bottomed rocker on a porch with three equally taciturn-looking bird dogs. We found a clipping from Life on Normandy. Daddy had taken a pen to the spread, writing names underneath many of the men walking away from boats in the surf and holding their rifles up out of the spray. Others posed on tanks. Daddy had scribbled names under certain faces—Rogers, Kinney, Brown, Gustitus, and some faces he had inked out with a simple X. The trunk also held just about every receipt from every bill he ever paid. He didn’t trust banks and believed checking accounts and credit cards were big-company traps to make a man spend money he didn’t have without even knowing it. If a Southwestern Gas representative ever had the gall to knock on our door to claim that Daddy owed three dollars for a 1947 gas bill, he would have met with one of the elastic-bound bundles of receipts from that year, then a rectangular piece of faded onionskin stamped PAID . It was a feat Daddy never got to perform, but on nights when he spread the receipts out chronologically, he made it clear to my sister and me that every day some suit-wearing, Republican sonofabitch (his term) weaseled a working man out of an extra three dollars for lack of a receipt. He would not be caught short. These notorious Republicans were the bogeymen of my childhood.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At once, a woman sat down before it, cracked her knuckles, and played a staggering scale.‘Really,’ I said, ‘I can’t!’ I looked wildly at Florence - she was studying me as if she had never seen my face before. Jenny cried carelessly: ‘Oh, go on, Nan, be a sport, for the gals at the Boy. What was that one you used to sing - about winking at the pretty ladies, with your hand hanging on to your sovereign ... ?’One voice, and then another and another, picked it up. Annie had taken a swig of her beer, and now almost choked on it. ‘Lord!’ she said, wiping her mouth. ‘Did you sing that? I saw you once at the Holborn Empire! You threw a chocolate coin at me - it was half-melted from the heat of your pocket - I ate it, and thought I should die! Oh, Nancy!’I gazed at her and bit my lip. The billiard players had all set down their cues and moved to stand about the piano; the pianist was picking out the chords of the song, and about twenty women were singing it. It was a silly song, but I remembered Kitty’s voice lilting upwards at the chorus, and giving the tune a kind of sweet liquidity, as if the foolish phrases turned to honey on her tongue. It sounded very different here, in this rough cellar - and yet, it had a certain trueness, too, and a new sweetness all of its own. I listened to the boisterous girls, and found myself beginning to hum... In a moment I had knelt upon my seat and joined my voice with theirs; and afterwards they cheered and clapped me, and I found I had to put my head upon my arm, and bite my lip, to stop the tears from coming.They started on another song, then - not one of mine and Kitty‘s, but a new one that I didn’t know, and so could not join in with. I sat down, and let my head fall back against the panels of the stall. A girl arrived at the end of our table with a pork pie on a plate, sent over from Mrs Swindles and ‘on the house’. I picked at the pastry of this for a while, and grew a little calmer. Ruth and Nora now had their elbows on the table, their heads on their chins, and were gazing at me, their story forgotten. Annie, I could hear in the pauses of the new song, was explaining to an incredulous Miss Raymond: ‘No, I swear, we had no idea. Arrived on Florrie’s doorstep with a black eye and a bunch of cresses, and has never left it. Quite a dark horse...’Florence herself had her face turned my way, and her eyes in shadow.‘You were really famous?’ she asked me, as I found a cigarette and lit it. ‘And you really sang?’‘Sang, and danced.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  For a year and a half I had eaten nothing but cutlets and salmis, pates and crystallised fruits; but there was a dish that Mrs Milne had used to make, consisting of mashed potato, mashed cabbage, corned beef and onions - Gracie and I had used to smack our lips at the sight of it placed before us on the table. I thought it couldn’t be very hard to make; and I set about cooking it now, for Ralph and Florence.I had set the potatoes and the cabbage on to boil, and got as far as browning the onions, when I heard a knock at the door. This made me jump, then grow a little flustered. I had made myself so comfortable that I felt, instinctively, that I should answer it; but should I, really? Was there not a point at which helpfulness, if persevered with, became impertinence? I looked down at the pan of onions, my rolled-up sleeves. Had I perhaps crossed over that point, already?’While I wondered, the knock came again; and this time I didn’t hesitate, but went straight to the door and opened it. Beyond it was a girl - a rather handsome girl, with dark hair showing beneath a velvet tam-o‘-shanter. When she saw me she said, ‘Oh! Is Florrie not at home, then?’ and looked quickly at my arms, my dress, my eye, and then my hair.I said, ‘Miss Banner isn’t here, no. I’m on my own.’ I sniffed, and thought I caught the smell of burning onions. ‘Look here,’ I went on, ‘I’m doing a bit of frying. Do you mind... ?’ I ran back to the kitchen to rescue my dish. To my surprise I heard the thud of the front door, and found that the girl had followed me. When I looked round she was unbuttoning her coat, and gazing about her in wonder.‘My God,’ she said - her voice had a bit of breeding to it, but she was not at all proud. ‘I called because I saw the step, and thought Florrie must have had some sort of fit. Now I see she’s either lost her head entirely, or had the fairies in.’I said, ‘I was me that did it all ...’She laughed, showing her teeth. ‘Then you, I suppose, must be the fairy king himself. Or is it, the fairy queen? I cannot tell if your hair is at odds with your costume, or the other way around. If that’ - she laughed again - ‘means anything.’I didn’t know what it might mean.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Did you, perhaps, push at that door, and step into the dim, low-ceilinged, fragrant room beyond it? Can you recall the tables with their chequered cloths - the bill of fare chalked on a board - the spirit-lamps, the sweating slabs of butter? Were you served by a girl with a rosy cheek, and a saucy manner, and curls? That was my sister, Alice. Or was it a man, rather tall and stooping, with a snowy apron falling from the knot in his neck-tie to the bow in his boots? That was my father. Did you see, as the kitchen door swung to and fro, a lady stand frowning into the clouds of steam that rose from a pan of bubbling oyster soup, or a sizzling gridiron? That was my mother. And was there at her side a slender, white-faced, unremarkable-looking girl, with the sleeves of her dress rolled up to her elbows, and a lock of lank and colourless hair forever falling into her eye, and her lips continually moving to the words of some street-singer’s or music-hall song? That was me. Like Molly Malone in the old ballad, I was a fishmonger, because my parents were. They kept the restaurant, and the rooms above it: I was raised an oyster-girl, and steeped in all the flavours of the trade. My first few childish steps I took around vats of sleeping natives and barrels of ice; before I was ever given a piece of chalk and a slate, I was handed an oyster-knife and instructed in its use; while I was still lisping out my alphabet at the schoolmaster’s knee, I could name you the contents of an oyster-cook’s kitchen - could sample fish with a blindfold on, and tell you their variety. Whitstable was all the world to me, Astley’s Parlour my own particular country, oyster-juice my medium. Although I didn’t long believe the story told to me by Mother - that they had found me as a baby in an oyster-shell, and a greedy customer had almost eaten me for lunch - for eighteen years I never doubted my own oysterish sympathies, never looked far beyond my father’s kitchen for occupation, or for love. It was a curious kind of life, mine, even by Whitstable standards ; but it was not a disagreeable or even a terribly hard one.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I saw you once at the Holborn Empire! You threw a chocolate coin at me - it was half-melted from the heat of your pocket - I ate it, and thought I should die! Oh, Nancy!’ I gazed at her and bit my lip. The billiard players had all set down their cues and moved to stand about the piano; the pianist was picking out the chords of the song, and about twenty women were singing it. It was a silly song, but I remembered Kitty’s voice lilting upwards at the chorus, and giving the tune a kind of sweet liquidity, as if the foolish phrases turned to honey on her tongue. It sounded very different here, in this rough cellar - and yet, it had a certain trueness, too, and a new sweetness all of its own. I listened to the boisterous girls, and found myself beginning to hum... In a moment I had knelt upon my seat and joined my voice with theirs; and afterwards they cheered and clapped me, and I found I had to put my head upon my arm, and bite my lip, to stop the tears from coming. They started on another song, then - not one of mine and Kitty‘s, but a new one that I didn’t know, and so could not join in with. I sat down, and let my head fall back against the panels of the stall. A girl arrived at the end of our table with a pork pie on a plate, sent over from Mrs Swindles and ‘on the house’. I picked at the pastry of this for a while, and grew a little calmer. Ruth and Nora now had their elbows on the table, their heads on their chins, and were gazing at me, their story forgotten. Annie, I could hear in the pauses of the new song, was explaining to an incredulous Miss Raymond: ‘No, I swear, we had no idea. Arrived on Florrie’s doorstep with a black eye and a bunch of cresses, and has never left it. Quite a dark horse...’ Florence herself had her face turned my way, and her eyes in shadow. ‘You were really famous?’ she asked me, as I found a cigarette and lit it. ‘And you really sang?’ ‘Sang, and danced. And acted, once, in a pantomime at the Britannia.’ I slapped my thigh. “‘My lords, where is the Prince, our master.”’ She laughed, though I did not. ‘How I wish I’d seen you! When was all this?’ I thought for a moment; then, ‘Eighteen eighty-nine,’ I said. She stuck her lip out. ‘Ah. Strikes all that year: no time for the music hall.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Some quirk of the Kentish coastline makes Whitstable natives - as they are properly called - the largest and the juiciest, the savouriest yet the subtlest, oysters in the whole of England. Whitstable oysters are, quite rightly, famous. The French, who are known for their sensitive palates, regularly cross the Channel for them; they are shipped, in barrels of ice, to the dining-tables of Hamburg and Berlin. Why, the King himself, I heard, makes special trips to Whitstable with Mrs Keppel, to eat oyster suppers in a private hotel; and as for the old Queen - she dined on a native a day (or so they say) till the day she died.Did you ever go to Whitstable, and see the oyster-parlours there? My father kept one; I was born in it - do you recall a narrow, weather-boarded house, painted a flaking blue, half-way between the High Street and the harbour? Do you remember the bulging sign that hung above the door, that said that Astley’s Oysters, the Best in Kent were to be had within? Did you, perhaps, push at that door, and step into the dim, low-ceilinged, fragrant room beyond it? Can you recall the tables with their chequered cloths - the bill of fare chalked on a board - the spirit-lamps, the sweating slabs of butter?Were you served by a girl with a rosy cheek, and a saucy manner, and curls? That was my sister, Alice. Or was it a man, rather tall and stooping, with a snowy apron falling from the knot in his neck-tie to the bow in his boots? That was my father. Did you see, as the kitchen door swung to and fro, a lady stand frowning into the clouds of steam that rose from a pan of bubbling oyster soup, or a sizzling gridiron? That was my mother.And was there at her side a slender, white-faced, unremarkable-looking girl, with the sleeves of her dress rolled up to her elbows, and a lock of lank and colourless hair forever falling into her eye, and her lips continually moving to the words of some street-singer’s or music-hall song?That was me.Like Molly Malone in the old ballad, I was a fishmonger, because my parents were. They kept the restaurant, and the rooms above it: I was raised an oyster-girl, and steeped in all the flavours of the trade. My first few childish steps I took around vats of sleeping natives and barrels of ice; before I was ever given a piece of chalk and a slate, I was handed an oyster-knife and instructed in its use; while I was still lisping out my alphabet at the schoolmaster’s knee, I could name you the contents of an oyster-cook’s kitchen - could sample fish with a blindfold on, and tell you their variety. Whitstable was all the world to me, Astley’s Parlour my own particular country, oyster-juice my medium.

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

  The New Testament is equally ignorant of both. The expression a{gioi, sancti, saints, is used by the apostles not of a particular class, a spiritual aristocracy of the church, but of all baptized and converted Christians without distinction; because they are separated from the world, consecrated to the service of God, washed from the guilt of sin by the blood of Christ, and, notwithstanding all their remaining imperfections and sins, called to perfect holiness. The apostles address their epistles to "the saints" i.e., the Christian believers, "at Rome, Corinth, Ephesus," &c.813 After the entrance of the heathen masses into the church the title came to be restricted to bishops and councils and to departed heroes of the Christian faith, especially the martyrs of the first three centuries. When, on the cessation of persecution, the martyr’s crown, at least within the limits of the Roman empire, was no longer attainable, extraordinary ascetic piety, great service to the church, and subsequently also the power of miracles, were required as indispensable conditions of reception into the Catholic calendar of saints. The anchorets especially, who, though not persecuted from without, voluntarily crucified their flesh and overcame evil spirits, seemed to stand equal to the martyrs in holiness and in claims to veneration. A tribunal of canonization did not yet exist. The popular voice commonly decided the matter, and passed for the voice of God. Some saints were venerated only in the regions where they lived and died; others enjoyed a national homage; others, a universal. The veneration of the saints increased with the decrease of martyrdom, and with the remoteness of the objects of reverence. "Distance lends enchantment to the view;" but "familiarity" is apt "to breed contempt." The sins and faults of the heroes of faith were lost in the bright haze of the past, while their virtues shone the more, and furnished to a pious and superstitious fancy the richest material for legendary poesy.

• From My People (2022)

  And now, as we drove through green and winding Central Park, I could hear above the anxious conversation of my elders the strange staccato rhythm of “A Hundred-Fifteenth-between-Lenox-and-Fifth.” Central Park, a mass of tiny green patterns, reminded me of the country. About twenty miles below the little Georgia town where I lived lay acres of pine trees and apple, peach, plum, and pear orchards. In the summer, when my family went riding, we drove along red country roads, unpaved and dusty, where there were only distantly separated houses, and we would come upon clusters of plum bushes filled with tiny ripe yellow or red plums. We’d stop and fill bags with them and go on until we’d happen upon another such find. And we had to be careful of the little green snakes that lay in the road, happy until disturbed. But in New York, once the green park gave way to the city, I saw nothing that reminded me of anything I’d ever seen before. All around me were tall buildings with expressionless faces and cold stone stoops. As far as I could see, there were no hills or sand or clay or grass. Nor were there blossoming dogwood trees—no trees at all to identify the season. It was June, and in Georgia the crops were flourishing in summer sun and rain. But when the wind blew cold on my face, I realized that summer came late to this place. It was definitely not a Georgia June day, on which I would begin the summer without shoes. Later on, my impressions of 115th Street changed with the scene. My spirits lifted on the days when children my age played hopscotch, jumping in and out of chalk-drawn boxes on the sidewalk, or when they shot marbles that weren’t really marbles but bottle tops weighted with candle wax. These children spoke a fast and musical foreign language that I did not understand, and even when they spoke English I often had to beg their pardon and ask them to repeat. Their names, instead of being Betty Jo and Mary Ruth and Sarah Ann—my friends back home—were Ana and Maria and Alaina. The boys were called Tonio and Mario and Felipe, instead of Jimmy and Eddie and Pete. In the summer, when it was hot, the neighborhood young cooled off in the water from fire hydrants opened by boys who appeared from around the corner and disappeared like wisps. The children also cooled off with the grape- and orange- and lemon-ice cones that had little effect and cost a nickel. At home, we had no such havens from the heat. Instead, my friends and I crawled under houses, some of which were raised high off the ground by brick pillars, and looked for dust-covered bugs making their way in and out of the soft brown earth.

• From My People (2022)

  Burroughs, and Margaret Walker, the festival organizer, whose volume of poetry, For My People , published in 1942, broke with tradition and presaged the development of black writing that was unabashedly for and about blacks. They read from their works and discussed their thoughts not only with each other, but also with the students who flocked to see them on this ninety-six-year-old, predominantly black campus. Carolyn Rodgers, a Chicago-based poet, said she was glad to be in Mississippi because she felt “as if I’ve touched home.” As a child I grew up terrified and afraid of Mississippi because it was a place where the Klan ran wild and you were brutalized and afraid, and if you were from Mississippi, people snickered and sneered. So you didn’t tell people. But I really feel as if I have touched home. Some root. Because I expected to come to a place where if you go home you see blood flowing in the streets. June Jordan from New York said, however, that she did not want anyone to forget the sight of bullet holes still on a dormitory from “that twenty-eight-second fusillade of unfettered murder” dating back to the disorder in May 1970, which left two students—Phillip L. Gibbs and James E. Green—dead. Mississippi Highway patrolmen, brought that night to the campus to quell a disorder, were absolved of blame for the shooting. Mari Evans read from her book of poems, I Am a Black Woman , and later talked in the lounge about controls on black writers. “Since the name of oppression is control,” she said, “I cannot bring myself to feel that Phillis’s life, even as the prize exhibit, was free of controls. I am sure that [Miss Wheatley’s] exercise of control in maintaining a careful image is the reason we have no work from the poet that deals with the controversial issues of her time.” Later, Dr. Margaret Walker, who heads the college’s Institute for the Study of Life and Culture of Black People, told the poets that “all the terrible stuff wasn’t just a myth. America is like this—the horror is here, the corruption is here, the evil is here. But there is also some love and some beauty, as we see in this festival atmosphere.” Then Nikki Giovanni read to a packed audience in the auditorium a poem about hands “. . . in fact / two brown butterflies fluttering / across the pleasure / they give my body.” Though the students sat as if enthralled as she jubilantly read to the background music of the Tougal Gospel Choir they never tapped their feet or clapped their hands. And while they gave Miss Giovanni three standing ovations there was silence in between. Later, poets and some of the students and townspeople talked about the atmosphere. “It’s because we ain’t about too much these days,” volunteered George Willingham, a junior at the college in the bookstore during an autographing session.