Pride

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.

Page 89 of 174 · 20 per page

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Even if someone calls you a bigamist, or a childbeater, and you know you’re not, you don’t crumple into bits. You say it’s not true and keep on printing the posters. But let anyone, particularly a Black man, accuse a straight Black woman of being a Black Lesbian , and right away that sister becomes immobilized, as if that is the most horrible thing she could be, and must at all costs be proven false. That is homophobia. It is a waste of woman energy, and it puts a terrible weapon into the hands of your enemies to be used against you to silence you, to keep you docile and in line. It also serves to keep us isolated and apart. I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are not political, that we have not been and are not involved in the struggles of Black people. But when I taught Black and Puerto Rican students writing at City College in the SEEK program in the sixties I was a Black Lesbian. I was a Black Lesbian when I helped organize and fight for the Black Studies Department of John Jay College. And because I was fifteen years younger then and less sure of myself, at one crucial moment I yielded to pressures that said I should step back for a Black man even though I knew him to be a serious error of choice, and I did, and he was. But I was a Black Lesbian then. When my girlfriends and I went out in the car one July 4 night after fireworks with cans of white spray paint and our kids asleep in the back seat, one of us staying behind to keep the motor running and watch the kids while the other two worked our way down the suburban New Jersey street, spraying white paint over the black jockey statues, and their little red jackets, too, we were Black Lesbians. When I drove through the Mississippi delta to Jackson in 1968 with a group of Black students from Tougaloo, another car full of redneck kids trying to bump us off the road all the way back into town, I was a Black Lesbian. When I weaned my daughter in 1963 to go to Washington in August to work in the coffee tents along with Lena Horne, making coffee for the marshals because that was what most Black women did in the 1963 March on Washington, I was a Black Lesbian. When I taught a poetry workshop at Tougaloo, a small Black college in Mississippi, where white rowdies shot up the edge of campus every night, and I felt the joy of seeing young Black poets find their voices and power through words in our mutual growth, I was a Black Lesbian. And there are strong Black poets today who date their growth and awareness from those workshops.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Hence a vow is, in one sense, a matter partly of counsel, and, in another sense, a matter of precept. But, from whichever point of view we consider it, we shall see plainly that good works performed under vow, are more meritorious than those executed without a vow. For, it is clear, that, in all that is necessary for salvation, all men are bound by the precept of God; neither would it be Tight to think that God would give a command without a purpose. For, as St. Paul says (1 Tim. i. 5), “Now the end of the Commandment is charity.” In vain, then, would God have given a commandment concerning the performance of anything, if the execution of such a thing had not tended more towards the increase of charity than its omission would have done. Now we are not only bidden by precept to believe, and forbidden to steal, but, further, we are commanded to make a vow to believe and to abstain from theft. Therefore, believing on account of our vow, and abstention from theft on the same account, tend more to augment charity than would be the case if we had no vow. Again, the more anything increases charity, the more it is praiseworthy and meritorious. Hence it is more praiseworthy and meritorious to perform any work under vow, than without such an obligation. Once more, the counsel is given to us not only to preserve virginity or chastity, but (as the Gloss points out) to make a vow to do so. But since, as we have said, a counsel is only given concerning that which is the greater good, it must be better to observe chastity under a vow than without one. The same argument holds good concerning the other counsels, Now, amongst other good works virginity meets with special commendation. our Lord speaking of it says, “He who can take it, let him take it” (Matt. xix. 12). It is, however, the vow of virginity which renders that state so praiseworthy. St. Augustine says, in his book, Do virginitate, “Virginity is honourable, not because it is virginity, but because it is consecrated to God, and because it vows to Him, and preserves for Him, the continence of piety.” And, again, he says, “We do not praise virgins because they are virgins, but because they are consecrated to God by the holy continence of virginity.” Hence we see, that the fact of their being performed under a vow, renders good works the more meritorious.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I train myself for triumph by knowing it is mine, no matter what. In fact, I am surrounded within my external living by ample examples of the struggle for life going on inside me. Visualizing the disease process inside my body in political images is not a quixotic dream. When I speak out against the cynical U.S. intervention in Central America, I am working to save my life in every sense. Government research grants to the National Cancer Institute were cut in 1986 by the exact amount illegally turned over to the contras in Nicaragua. One hundred and five million dollars. It gives yet another meaning to the personal as the political. Cancer itself has an anonymous face. When we are visibly dying of cancer, it is sometimes easier to turn away from the particular experience into the sadness of loss, and when we are surviving, it is sometimes easier to deny that experience. But those of us who live our battles in the flesh must know ourselves as our strongest weapon in the most gallant struggle of our lives. Living with cancer has forced me to consciously jettison the myth of omnipotence, of believing—or loosely asserting—that I can do anything, along with any dangerous illusion of immortality. Neither of these unscrutinized defenses is a solid base for either political activism or personal struggle. But in their place, another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. An open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to be. To stretch as far as I can go and relish what is satisfying rather than what is sad. Building a strong and elegant pathway toward transition. I work, I love, I rest, I see and learn. And I report. These are my givens. Not sureties, but a firm belief that whether or not living them with joy prolongs my life, it certainly enables me to pursue the objectives of that life with a deeper and more effective clarity. August 1987 Carriacou, Grenada Anguilla, British West Indies St. Croix, Virgin Islands * Ex-slave who led a workers’ revolt in St. Croix in 1848.† Alexis De Veaux, poet and biographer.‡ Clare Cross, playwright, psychotherapist, and partner of Blanche Cook.§ Blanche Cook, classmate of Lorde at Hunter College, historian, and partner of Clare Cross.Is Your Hair Still Political? My first trip to Virgin Gorda earlier this year had been an enjoyable, relaxing time. After coping with the devastations of Hurricane Hugo, three friends and I decided to meet somewhere in the Caribbean for a Christmas vacation. From my personal and professional travels, Virgin Gorda seemed the ideal spot. And less than an hour’s flight time from my home.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  No one in the hall seemed to understand this “obvious reform”; but the speech called forth a hurricane of cheers and I concluded that there were a great many students from the State University in the audience. I don’t know what possessed me but when Smith returned to his seat behind me between the two girls and they praised him to the skies, I got up and walked to the platform. I was greeted with a tempest of laughter and must have cut a ludicrous figure. I was in cowpuncher’s dress as modified by Reece and Dell: I wore loose Bedford cord breeches, knee-high brown boots and a sort of buckskin shirt and jacket combined that tucked into my breeches. But rains and sun had worked their will on the buckskin which had shrunk down my neck and up my arms. Spurred on by the laughter I went up the four steps to the platform and walked over to the Mayor who was Chairman: “May I speak?” I asked: “Sure”, he replied “your name?” “My name is Harris,” I answered and the Mayor manifestly regarding me as a great joke announced that a Mr. Harris wished to address the meeting and he hoped the audience would give him a fair hearing even if his doctrines happened to be peculiar. As I faced them, the spectators shrieked with laughter: the house fairly rocked. I waited a full minute and then began: “How like Americans and Democrats”, I said, “to judge a man by the clothes he wears and the amount of hair he has on his face or the dollars in his jeans.” There was instantaneous silence, the silence of surprise at least, and I went on to show what I had learned from Mill that open competition was the law of life, another name for the struggle for existence; that each country should concentrate its energies on producing the things it was best fitted to produce and trade these off against the products of other nations; this was the great economic law, the law of the territorial division of labor. “Americans should produce corn and wheat and meat for the world”, I said, and exchange these products for the cheapest English woolen goods and French silks and Irish linen. This would enrich the American farmer, develop all the waste American land and be a thousand times better for the whole country than taxing all consumers with high import duties to enrich a few Eastern manufacturers who were too inefficient to face the open competition of Europe. “The American farmers,” I went on, “should organize with the laborers, for their interests are identical and fight the Eastern manufacturer who is nothing but a parasite living on the brains and work of better men.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  It takes the cultural identity of a widespread but definite group and makes it a generic identity for many culturally diverse peoples, all on the basis of a shared oppression. This runs the risk of providing a convenient blanket of apparent similarity under which our actual and unaccepted differences can be distorted or misused. This blanket would diminish our chances of forming genuine working coalitions built upon the recognition and creative use of acknowledged difference, rather than upon the shaky foundations of a false sense of similarity. When a Javanese Dutch woman says she is Black, she also knows she goes home to another cultural reality that is particular to her people and precious to her—it is Asian, and Javanese. When an African-American woman says she is Black, she is speaking of her cultural reality, no matter how modified it may be by time, place, or circumstances of removal. Yet even the Maori women of New Zealand and the Aboriginal women of Australia call themselves Black. There must be a way for us to deal with this, if only on the level of language. For example, those of us for whom Black is our cultural reality relinquishing the word in favor of some other designation of the African diaspora, perhaps simply African . [The first half of 1985 spins past: a trip to Cuba with a group of Black women writers, a reading tour through the Midwest, the great workspace I created from my son’s old room, the beginning of a new collection of poems, my daughter’s graduation from college. My general health seemed stable, if somewhat delicate. I removed the question of cancer from my consciousness beyond my regular Iscador treatments, my meager diet, and my lessened energies. In August and September I spent six weeks traveling and giving poetry readings in Australia and New Zealand, a guest of women’s groups at various community organizations and universities. It was an exciting and exhausting time, one where thoughts about cancer were constant but never central.] May 28, 1985 Cambridge, Massachusetts My daughter Beth’s graduation from Harvard this weekend was a rite of passage for both of us. This institution takes itself very seriously, and there was enormous pomp and circumstance for three days. I couldn’t help but think of all the racist, sexist ways they’ve tried through the last four years to diminish and destroy the essence of all the young Black women enrolled here. But it was a very important moment for Beth, a triumph that she’d survived Harvard, that she’d made it out, intact, and in a self she can continue living with. Of course, the point of so much of what goes on at places like Harvard—supposed to be about learning—is actually geared to either destroying these young people, or altering their substance into effigies that will be pliant, acceptable, and nonproblematic to the system.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  When Yoli [Yolanda Rios] and I cooked curried chicken and beans and rice and took our extra blankets and pillows up the hill to the striking students occupying buildings at City College in 1969, demanding open admissions and the right to an education, I was a Black Lesbian. When I walked through the midnight hallways of Lehman College that same year, carrying Midol and Kotex pads for the young Black radical women taking part in the action, and we tried to persuade them that their place in the revolution was not ten paces behind Black men, that spreading their legs to the guys on the tables in the cafeteria was not a revolutionary act no matter what the brothers said, I was a Black Lesbian. When I picketed for welfare mothers’ rights, and against the enforced sterilization of young Black girls, when I fought institutionalized racism in the New York City schools, I was a Black Lesbian. But you did not know it because we did not identify ourselves, so now you can say that Black Lesbians and Gay men have nothing to do with the struggles of the Black Nation. And I am not alone. When you read the words of Langston Hughes you are reading the words of a Black Gay man. When you read the words of Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Angelina Weld Grimké, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, you are reading the words of Black Lesbians. When you listen to the life-affirming voices of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, you are hearing Black Lesbian women. When you see the plays and read the words of Lorraine Hansberry, you are reading the words of a woman who loved women deeply. Today, Lesbians and Gay men are some of the most active and engaged members of Art Against Apartheid, a group which is making visible and immediate our cultural responsibilities against the tragedy of South Africa. We have organizations such as the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, Dykes Against Racism Everywhere, and Men of All Colors Together, all of which are committed to and engaged in antiracist activity.

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

  Scholars have identified the genre as “Rough South,” of which Allison has figured prominently, but the regional name is inaccurate given that Chute’s subjects are rural families in Maine. For a discussion of the genre and how these novelists write from “within” their class, see Erik Bledsoe, “The Rise of Southern Redneck and White Trash Writers,” Southern Cultures 6, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 68–90, esp. 68. 6. Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985), 10–11, 21, 23–25, 92, 100, 114–16, 122–24, 134–35, 156, 174, 189. 7. Ibid., 135–36, 165, 175, 177–79, 181, 192. 8. Ibid., 3, 46–47, 122, 116. 9. Ibid., 3. 10. See Peter S. Prescott, “A Gathering of Social Misfits: Six New Novels Take a Walk on Life’s Weirder Shores,” Newsweek (February 25, 1985): 86; and David Gates, “Where the Self Is a Luxury Item,” Newsweek (June 13, 1988): 77. Chute emphasized that she was “so close to these people—they were my people”; see Ellen Lesser and Carolyn Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 8, no. 2 (Winter 1985): 158–77, esp. 161, 174. For other interviews highlighting her experiences with poverty, see Donald M. Kreis, “Life Better for ‘Beans of Egypt’ Author Carolyn Chute,” Lewiston [ME] Daily Sun, March 6, 1985; and Katherine Adams, “Chute Dialogics: A Sidelong Glance from Egypt, Maine,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 1–22. 11. Lesser and Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” 158, 160, 164–67, 177. For her husband as “coauthor,” see Dudley Clendinin, “Carolyn Chute Found Her Love and Her Calling in Maine,” Gainesville [FL] Sun, February 3, 1985. On the influence of her husband, see “Illiterate Mate Inspires Maine’s Carolyn Chute,” [Lewiston, ME] Sun Journal, September 16, 1991. For a realistic portrait of Maine poverty, see Leigh McCarthy, “Carolyn Chute Took a Bum Rap on Poverty,” Bangor [ME] Daily News, September 24, 1985. 12. In 1985, Chute distinguished herself from rednecks. Doing public readings, she wrote, “gives me a chance to see some people that aren’t [slaps her neck with her hand to indicate ‘redneck.’] I wouldn’t mind if rednecks showed up, that would be all right. I just don’t like to see them brushing their teeth out my window.” See Lesser and Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” 163. But in 2000, she wrote, “But being a redneck, working class—or, more accurately, the ‘tribal class,’—I am proud of that.” See “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” New Democracy Newsletter (March–April 2000), in Newdemocracyworld.org; Charles McGrath, “A Writer in a Living Novel,” New York Times, November 3, 2008; Carolyn Chute, The Beans of Egypt, Maine: The Finished Version (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1995), 273, 275; Gregory Leon Miller, “The American Protest Novel in a Time of Terror: Carolyn Chute’s Merry Men,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 52, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 102–28, esp. 103; Dwight Gardner, “Carolyn Chute’s Wicked Good Militia,” Salon.com, February 24, 1996. 13.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  These constant evening discussions, this perpetual arguing, had an unimaginable effect on me. I had no books with me and I was often called on to deal with two or three different theories in a night: I had to think out the problems for myself and usually I thought them out when hunting by myself in the daytime. It was as a cowpuncher that I taught myself how to think:—a rare art among men and seldom practised. Whatever originality I possess comes from the fact that in youth, while my mind was in process of growth, I was confronted with important modern problems and forced to think them out for myself and find some reasonable answer to the questionings of half a dozen different minds. For example, Bent asked one night what the proper wage should be of the ordinary workman? I could only answer that the workman’s wage should increase at least in measure as the productivity of labor increased; but I could not then see how to approach this ideal settlement. When I read Herbert Spencer ten years later in Germany, I was delighted to find that I had divined the best of his sociology and added to it materially. His idea that the amount of individual liberty in a country depends on “the pressure from the outside”, I knew to be only half-true. Pressure from the outside is one factor but not even the most important: the centripetal force in the society itself is often much more powerful: how else can one explain the fact that during the world-war, liberty almost disappeared in these States in spite of the First Amendment to the Constitution. At all times indeed there is much less regard for liberty here than in England or even in Germany or in France: one has only to think of prohibition to admit this. The pull towards the centre in every country is in direct proportion to the mass and accordingly the herd-feeling in America is unreasonably strong. If we were not arguing or telling smutty stories, Bent would be sure to get out cards and the gambling instinct would keep the boys busy till the stars paled in the eastern sky. One incident I must relate here, for it broke the monotony of the routine in a curious way. Our fire at night was made up of buffalo “chips”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I have heard it said that Black Lesbians are not political, that we have not been and are not involved in the struggles of Black people. But when I taught Black and Puerto Rican students writing at City College in the SEEK program in the sixties I was a Black Lesbian. I was a Black Lesbian when I helped organize and fight for the Black Studies Department of John Jay College. And because I was fifteen years younger then and less sure of myself, at one crucial moment I yielded to pressures that said I should step back for a Black man even though I knew him to be a serious error of choice, and I did, and he was. But I was a Black Lesbian then. When my girlfriends and I went out in the car one July 4 night after fireworks with cans of white spray paint and our kids asleep in the back seat, one of us staying behind to keep the motor running and watch the kids while the other two worked our way down the suburban New Jersey street, spraying white paint over the black jockey statues, and their little red jackets, too, we were Black Lesbians. When I drove through the Mississippi delta to Jackson in 1968 with a group of Black students from Tougaloo, another car full of redneck kids trying to bump us off the road all the way back into town, I was a Black Lesbian. When I weaned my daughter in 1963 to go to Washington in August to work in the coffee tents along with Lena Horne, making coffee for the marshals because that was what most Black women did in the 1963 March on Washington, I was a Black Lesbian. When I taught a poetry workshop at Tougaloo, a small Black college in Mississippi, where white rowdies shot up the edge of campus every night, and I felt the joy of seeing young Black poets find their voices and power through words in our mutual growth, I was a Black Lesbian. And there are strong Black poets today who date their growth and awareness from those workshops.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  Dingwall took the next train west, leaving me to put up hoardings in a month, after getting first of all the permission from the lot-owners. To cut a long story short, I got the permission from a hundred lot-owners in a week through my brother Willie, who as an estate agent knew them all. Then I made a contract with a little English carpenter and put the hoardings up and got the bills all posted three days before the date agreed upon. Hatherly’s Minstrels had a great fortnight and everyone was content. From that time on, I drew about fifty dollars a week as my profit from letting the hoardings, in spite of the slump. Suddenly Smith got a bad cold: Lawrence is nearly a thousand feet above sea-level and in winter can be as icy as the Pole. He began to cough, a nasty, little, dry hacking cough: I persuaded him to see a doctor and then to have a consultation, the result being that the specialists all diagnosed tuberculosis and recommended immediate change to the milder east. For some reason or other, I believe because an editorial post on the “Press” in Philadelphia was offered to him, he left Lawrence hastily and took up his residence in the Quaker City. His departure had notable results for me. First of all, the spiritual effect astonished me. As soon as he went, I began going over all he had taught me, especially in economics and metaphysics: bit by bit I came to the conclusion that his Marxian communism was only half the truth and probably the least important half: his Hegelianism, too, which I have hardly mentioned, was pure moonshine in my opinion: extremely beautiful at moments, as the moon is when silvering purple clouds: “history is the development of the Spirit in time: Nature is the projection of the idea in space”, sounds wonderful; but it’s moon-shiney, and not very enlightening. In the first three months of Smith’s absence, my own individuality sprang upright, like a sapling that has long been bent almost to breaking, so to speak, by a superincumbent weight and I began to grow with a sort of renewed youth. Now for the first time, when about nineteen years of age, I came to self-consciousness as Frank Harris and began to deal with life in my own way and under this name, Frank.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  His death changed my whole life, though I didn’t dream at the time it could have any effect upon me. One day I was in court arguing a case before Judge Bassett. Though I liked the man, he exasperated me that day by taking what I thought was a wrong view. I put my point in every light I could; but he wouldn’t come round and finally gave the case against me. When I had collected my papers and looked up, he was smiling: “I shall take this case to the Supreme Court at my own expense”, I explained bitterly, “and have your decision reversed.” “If you want to waste your time and money,” he remarked pleasantly, “I can’t hinder you.” I went out of the court and suddenly found Sommerfeld beside me: “You fought that case very well”, he said, “and you’ll win it in the Supreme Court, but you shouldn’t have told Bassett so, in his own—‘domain’”, I suggested, and he nodded. When we got to our floor and I turned towards my office, he said, “Won’t you come in and smoke a cigar, I’d like a talk—” Sommerfeld’s cigars were uniformly excellent and I followed him very willingly into his big, quiet office at the back that looked over some empty lots. I was not a bit curious; for a talk with Sommerfeld usually meant a rather silent smoke. This time, however, he had something to say and said it very abruptly: “Barker’s gone,” he remarked in the air, and then: “Why shouldn’t you come in here and take his place?” “As your partner?” I exclaimed. “Sure”, he replied, “I’ll make out the briefs in the cases as I did for Barker and you’ll argue them in court. For instance”, he added in his slow way, “there is a decision of the Supreme Court of the State of Ohio that decides your case today almost in your words, and if you had cited it, you’d have convinced Bassett”, and he turned and read out the report. “The State of Ohio,” he went on, “is one of the four States, as you know, (I didn’t know it) that have adopted the New York Code—New York, Ohio, Kansas and California”—he proceeded, “the four States in a line across the continent; no one of these high courts will contradict the other. So you can be sure of your verdict—well, what do you say?” he concluded. “I shall be delighted,” I replied at once, “indeed I am proud to work with you: I could have wished no better fortune.” He held out his hand silently and the thing was settled. Sommerfeld smoked a while in silence and then remarked casually, “I used to give Barker a hundred dollars a week for his household expenses: will that suit you?” “Perfectly, perfectly”, I cried, “I only hope I shall earn it and justify your good opinion—” “You are a better advocate than Barker even now,” he said, “but you have one—drawback”—he hesitated.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  I made a visit to my breast surgeon, a doctor with whom I have always been able to talk frankly, and it was from him that I got my first trustworthy and objective sense of timing. It was from him that I learned that the conventional forms of treatment for liver metastases made little more than one year’s difference in the survival rate. I heard my old friend Clem’s voice coming back to me through the dimness of thirty years: “I see you coming here trying to make sense where there is no sense. Try just living in it. Respond, alter, see what happens.” I thought of the African way of perceiving life, as experience to be lived rather than as problem to be solved. Homeopathic medicine calls cancer the cold disease. I understand that down to my bones that quake sometimes in their need for heat, for the sun, even for just a hot bath. Part of the way in which I am saving my own life is to refuse to submit my body to cold whenever possible. In general, I fight hard to keep my treatment scene together in some coherent and serviceable way, integrated into my daily living and absolute. Forgetting is no excuse. It’s as simple as one missed shot could make the difference between a quiescent malignancy and one that is growing again. This not only keeps me in an intimate, positive relationship to my own health, but it also underlines the fact that I have the responsibility for attending my own health. I cannot simply hand over that responsibility to anybody else. Which does not mean I give in to the belief, arrogant or naive, that I know everything I need to know in order to make informed decisions about my body. But attending my own health, gaining enough information to help me understand and participate in the decisions made about my body by people who know more medicine than I do, are all crucial strategies in my battle for living. They also provide me with important prototypes for doing battle in all other arenas of my life. Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. None of these struggles are ever easy, and even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable.

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

  55 Walker had tapped into a dominant class motif of cracker democracy, dating back at least to 1790, when the cracker-versus-beau plotline began to take shape. In its earliest literary form, the cracker buck is lured into town, plied with liquor, and swindled, after which he learns the painful lesson that his dreary cabin in the woods is “where contentment and plenty ever dwell.” A similar story in 1812 told of a backwoodsman curtly dismissing a supercilious lawyer and a capering dancing master who had stood at the door of his cabin. In 1821, clergyman and backcountry historian Joseph Doddridge of western Virginia embellished these stock characters in his play Dialogue of the Backwoodsman and the Dandy. He summed up the peculiar virtues of rough-hewn men: A Backwoodsman is a queer sort of fellow. . . . If he’s not a man of larnin, he had plain good sense. If his dress is not fine, his inside works are good and his heart is sound. If he is not rich or great, he knows that he is the father of his country. . . . You little dandies, and other big folk may freely enjoy the fruits of our hardships; you may feast, where we had to starve; and frolic, where we had to fight; but at peril of all of you, give the Backwoodsman none of your slack-jaw. 56 All of this explains Congressman Walker’s point-counterpoint in distinguishing General Jackson from the congressional investigators. The beau was an effete snob, and his ridicule an uncalled-for taunt. The real men of America were Jacksonian, the hearty native sons of Tennessee and Kentucky. They fought the wars. They opened up the frontier through their sacrifice and hardship. They fathered the next generation of courageous settlers. Defensive westerners thus attached to Jackson their dreams and made him a viable presidential candidate. 57 Another way to promote their cracker president was through humorous exaggeration. As the different coffin handbills made the rounds in 1828, Jackson’s men used Crockett-like humor to defend him, claiming that the general was really guilty of having eaten the six militiamen, “swallowing them all, coffins and all.” When John Quincy Adams supporters circulated a note written by Jackson filled with misspellings and bad grammar, Jacksonians praised him as “self-taught.” If his lack of diplomatic experience made him “homebred,” this meant that he was less contaminated than the former diplomat Adams by foreign ideas or courtly pomp. The class comparison could not be ignored: Adams had been a professor of rhetoric at Harvard, while his Tennessee challenger was “sprung from a common family,” and had written nothing to brag about. Instinctive action was privileged over unproductive thought. 58 Given that his initial support in the 1824 campaign came from Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee, Jackson was derided for having cornered the cracker vote. A humorous piece in a southern newspaper described a Georgia cracker in Crockett prose, “half alligator, half man,” giving a hurrah for Jackson.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  wrong to fear those who are subject to his judgment. Wherefore should I weep, madam, since honour and con- science do not upbraid me ? As to repentance, madam, I am so far from repenting of what I have done that were it to be done again, I would do it. It is you, madam, who have great reason to weep, both for the wrong you have done me in the past, and for that which you now do me in censuring me publicly for a fault of which you are more guilty than I. If I had offended God, the king, you, my kindred, and my conscience, I ought to testify my re- pentance by my tears ; but I ought not to weep for having done an act that is good, just, and holy, which would never have been spoken of but with honour, if you, madam, had not prematurely divulged it, and given it an air of culpability: thereby plainly showing that you are more bent on dishonouring me than on preserving the honour of your house and your kindred., But since it is your pleasure, madam, to act thus, it is not for me to gainsay you. Innocent as I am, I shall feel no less pleasure in submitting to the punishment you may choose to inflict upon me than }'ou in imposing it. You and my father, madam, have but to say what you desire that I should suffer, and you shall be promptly obeyed. I reckon upon it, madam, that he will not be backward in this ; and I shall be very glad if he will share your sentiments, and if, after having agreed with you in the negligence he has shown in providing for my welfare, he imitates your activity now that the question is how to do me harm. But I have another Father in Heaven, who, I hope, will give me patience to endure the evils I see you are pre- paring for me ; and it is in Him alone I put my whole trust." The queen, bursting with rage, gave orders that Ro- landine should be taken out of her sight, and shut up 2o8 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE \Nmel zi. alone in a chamber where she should not be allowed to speak to anyone. Nevertheless, her gouvernante was left with her, and through her it was that Rolandine made known her present condition to the bastard, asking his advice at the same time as to what she should do. The bastard, believing that the services he had rendered to the king would be counted for something, repaired at once to the court. He found the king at the chase, told him the truth of the matter, reminded him of his poverty, and besought his majesty to appease the queen and per- mit the consummation of the marriage. The king made no other reply than to say " Do you assure me that you have married her .''"

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  My daughter Beth’s graduation from Harvard this weekend was a rite of passage for both of us. This institution takes itself very seriously, and there was enormous pomp and circumstance for three days. I couldn’t help but think of all the racist, sexist ways they’ve tried through the last four years to diminish and destroy the essence of all the young Black women enrolled here. But it was a very important moment for Beth, a triumph that she’d survived Harvard, that she’d made it out, intact, and in a self she can continue living with. Of course, the point of so much of what goes on at places like Harvard—supposed to be about learning—is actually geared to either destroying these young people, or altering their substance into effigies that will be pliant, acceptable, and nonproblematic to the system. So I was proud of Beth standing there in the manicured garden of Adams House, wearing her broad white Disinvestment banner across her black commencement gown, but I was also very scared for her. Out there can be even more difficult, although now she knows at least that she can and did survive Harvard. And with her own style unimpaired. I embarrassed myself because I kept trying to find secret places to cry in, but it was still a very emotionally fulfilling occasion. I feel she’s on her way now in a specific sense that must leave me behind, and that is both sad and very reassuring to me. I am convinced that Beth has the stuff—the emotional and psychic wherewithal to do whatever she needs to do for her living, and I have given her the best I have to offer. I remember writing “What My Child Learns of the Sea” when she was three months old, and it’s both terrifying and wonderful to see it all coming true. I bless the goddess that I am still here to see it. I tremble for her, for them all, because of the world we are giving them and all the work still to be done, and the gnawing question of will there be enough time? But I celebrate her, too, another one of those fine, strong, young Black women moving out to war, outrageous and resilient, plucky and beautiful. I’m proud of her, and I’m proud of having seen her this far. It’s a relief for me to know that whatever happens with my health now, and no matter how short my life may be, she is essentially on her way in the world, and next year Jonathan will be stepping out with his fine self, too. I look at them and they make my heart sing. Frances and I have done good work. August 10, 1985 Melbourne, Australia

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

  Louis newspaperman John Robb’s Streaks of Squatter Life. In one of the stories in the collection, Robb introduced a poor white Missouri squatter named Sugar. Though he was dressed in rags, his personal influence over local elections was hypnotic. At the polling place, “Sug” came with a keg of whiskey, which he sweetened with brown sugar. As members of the crowd lined up for his special concoction, he told them, based on his honest opinion of the speeches he had heard, whom they should vote for. Sug had lost his girl and his farm, and yet as a landless squatter he somehow gained respect. He represented the new common man, a simple fellow who couldn’t be misled by fancy rhetoric. 71 Sug was not simply a leveling character. He actually represented a reformed, even middle-class solution to the larger debate over class and respectability. His qualities suggested a reasonable man who handed out a little whiskey and dispensed meaningful advice. He wasn’t running for office. He wasn’t brawling or bartering whiskey for votes. He wasn’t threatening the life of a rival bidder over a tract of land. Sug knew his place as the neighborhood purveyor of common sense. 72 “Old Sug” in Streaks of Squatter Life (1847) is a comic character whose poverty is rendered harmless. He represented a softened image of actual squatters known for brawling, drinking, and swearing at political events in the backcountry. John Robb’s Streaks of Squatter Life (1847), American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts The squatter may have been tamed, at least in the minds of some, but political equality did not come to America in the so-called Age of Jackson. Virginia retained property qualifications for voting until 1851; Louisiana and Connecticut until 1845; North Carolina until 1857. Tennessee did not drop its freehold restriction until 1834—after Jackson had already been elected to a second term. Eight states passed laws that disenfranchised paupers, the urban poor. Meanwhile many towns and cities adopted stricter suffrage guidelines for voting than their state legislatures did. This was true for Chicago, and for towns in Crockett’s Tennessee and pro-Jackson Alabama. He could vote for a member of Congress, but in John Robb’s St. Louis, his fictional pal Sug would have been denied the right to vote in municipal elections. 73 The heralded democrat Andrew Jackson (as it was pointed out in the 1828 campaign) had actually helped draft suffrage restrictions for the Tennessee constitution in 1796. He made no effort to expand the electorate in his state— ever. As the territorial governor of Florida in 1822, he was perfectly comfortable with the new state’s imposing property requirements for voting. Jackson’s appeal as a presidential candidate was not about real democracy, then, but instead the attraction to a certain class of land-grabbing whites and the embrace of the “rude instinct of masculine liberty.”

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  Even if you do believe any of these stereotypes about Black Lesbians, begin to practice acting like you don’t believe them. Just as racist stereotypes are the problem of the white people who believe them, so also are homophobic stereotypes the problem of the heterosexuals who believe them. In other words, those stereotypes are yours to solve, not mine, and they are a terrible and wasteful barrier to our working together. I am not your enemy. We do not have to become each other’s unique experiences and insights in order to share what we have learned through our particular battles for survival as Black women. . . . There was a poster in the 1960s that was very popular: HE’S NOT BLACK, HE’S MY BROTHER! It used to infuriate me because it implied that the two were mutually exclusive—he couldn’t be both brother and Black. Well, I do not want to be tolerated, nor misnamed. I want to be recognized. I am a Black Lesbian, and I am your sister. A Burst of Light Living with Cancer though we may land here there is no other landing to choose our meaning we must make it new. —MURIEL RUKEYSER INTRODUCTION The year I became fifty felt like a great coming together for me. I was very proud of having made it for half a century, and in my own style. “Time for a change,” I thought, “I wonder how I’m going to live the next half.” On February 1, two weeks before my fiftieth birthday, I was told by my doctor that I had liver cancer, metastasized from the breast cancer for which I had had a mastectomy six years before. At first I did not believe it. I continued with my previously planned teaching trip to europe. As I grew steadily sicker in Berlin, I received medical information about homeopathic alternatives to surgery, which strengthened my decision to maintain some control over my life for as long as possible. I believe that decision has prolonged my life, together with the loving energies of women who supported me in that decision and in the work which gives that life shape. The struggle with cancer now informs all my days, but it is only another face of that continuing battle for self-determination and survival that Black women fight daily, often in triumph. The following excerpts are from journals kept during my first three years of living with cancer. January 15, 1984 New York City I’ve just returned from three days in Washington, D.C. It was an extraordinary reading. The second evening spent with the Sapphire Sapphos was like 2001 Space Odyssey time—the past dreaming the future blooming real and tasty into the present, now. During our evening together, I felt the love and admiration of other Black women in a way I had not before—a web woven between us of the uses to which my work has been put.

• From Barclay's Guide to the New Testament (2008)

  In fact, for all their so-called wisdom, they are really in a state of immaturity. They think that they are wise, but really they are no better than babies. 9 Galatians Law and Grace Paul under Attack The letter to the Galatians has been likened to a sword flashing in a great warrior's hand. Both Paul and his gospel were under attack. If that attack had succeeded, Christianity might have become just another Jewish sect, dependent upon circumcision and on keeping the law, instead of being a thing of grace. It is strange to think that, if Paul's opponents had had their way, the gospel might have been kept for Jews and we might never have had the chance to know the love of Christ. Paul's Apostleship Attacked It is impossible to possess a vivid personality and a strong character as Paul did and not to encounter opposition; and it is equally impossible to lead such a revolution in religious thought as Paul did and not to be attacked. The first attack was on his apostleship. There were many who said that he was not an apostle at all. From their own point of view, they were right. In Acts 1:21-2, we have the basic definition of an apostle. Judas the traitor had committed suicide; it was necessary to fill the gap made in the apostolic band. The one to be chosen is described as someone who must be `one of the men who have accompanied us throughout the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us' and `a witness with us to his resurrection'. To be an apostle, it was necessary to have kept company with Jesus during his earthly life and to have witnessed his resurrection. That qualification Paul obviously did not fulfil. Further, not so very long ago, he had been the chief persecutor of the Christian Church. In the very first verse of the letter, Paul answers that challenge. Proudly, he insists that his apostleship is from no human source and that no human hand ordained him to that office, but that he received his call direct from God. Others might have the qualifications demanded when the first vacancy in the apostolic band was filled; but he had a unique qualification - he had met Christ face to face on the Damascus road. Independence and Agreement Further, Paul insists that for his message he was dependent on no one.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  The reader will find in the present work scattered references to my novels, but on the whole I felt that the trouble of writing them had been enough and that they should remain in the first stomach. My recent introductions to the English translations of Zashchita Luzhina, 1930 (The Defense, Putnam, 1964), Otchayanie, 1936 (Despair, Putnam, 1966), Priglashenie na kazn’, 1938 (Invitation to a Beheading, Putnam, 1959), Dar, 1952, serialized 1937–38 (The Gift, Putnam, 1963) and Soglyadatay, 1938 (The Eye, Phaedra, 1965) give a sufficiently detailed, and racy, account of the creative part of my European past. For those who would like a fuller list of my publications, there is the detailed bibliography, worked out by Dieter E. Zimmer (Vladimir Nabokov Bibliographie des Gesamtwerks, Rowohlt, 1st ed. December, 1963; 2nd revised ed. May, 1964). The two-mover described in the last chapter has been republished in Chess Problems by Lipton, Matthews & Rice (Faber, London 1963, p. 252). My most amusing invention, however, is a “White-retracts-move” problem which I dedicated to E. A. Znosko-Borovski, who published it, in the nineteen-thirties (1934?), in the émigré daily Poslednie Novosti, Paris. I do not recall the position lucidly enough to notate it here, but perhaps some lover of “fairy chess” (to which type of problem it belongs) will look it up some day in one of those blessed libraries where old newspapers are microfilmed, as all our memories should be. Reviewers read the first version more carelessly than they will this new edition: only one of them noticed my “vicious snap” at Freud in the first paragraph of Chapter Eight, section 2, and none discovered the name of a great cartoonist and a tribute to him in the last sentence of section 2, Chapter Eleven. It is most embarrassing for a writer to have to point out such things himself. To avoid hurting the living or distressing the dead, certain proper names have been changed. These are set off by quotation marks in the index. Its main purpose is to list for my convenience some of the people and themes connected with my past years. Its presence will annoy the vulgar but may please the discerning, if only because Through the window of that index Climbs a rose And sometimes a gentle wind ex Ponto blows. VLADIMIR NABOKOV January 5, 1966 Montreux

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  I had at my disposal a number of such truths that I liked to air, but that Nesbit, firmly entrenched in his ignorance, regarded as mere fancies. The history of Russia (I might, for example, declare) could be considered from two points of views (both of which, for some reason, equally annoyed Nesbit): first, as the evolution of the police (a curiously impersonal and detached force, sometimes working in a kind of void, sometimes helpless, and at other times outdoing the government in brutal persecution); and second, as the development of a marvelous culture. Under the Tsars (I might go on), despite the fundamentally inept and ferocious character of their rule, a freedom-loving Russian had had incomparably more means of expressing himself, and used to run incomparably less risk in doing so, than under Lenin. Since the reforms of the eighteen-sixties, the country had possessed (though not always adhered to) a legislation of which any Western democracy might have been proud, a vigorous public opinion that held despots at bay, widely read periodicals of all shades of liberal political thought, and what was especially striking, fearless and independent judges (“Oh come …” Nesbit would interpose). When revolutionaries did get caught, banishment to Tomsk or Omsk (now Bombsk) was a restful vacation in comparison to the concentration camps that Lenin introduced. Political exiles escaped from Siberia with farcical ease, witness the famous flight of Trotsky—Santa Leo, Santa Claws Trotsky—merrily riding back in a Yuletide sleigh drawn by reindeer: On, Rocket, on, Stupid, on, Butcher and Blitzen! I soon became aware that if my views, the not unusual views of Russian democrats abroad, were received with pained surprise or polite sneers by English democrats in situ, another group, the English ultraconservatives, rallied eagerly to my side but did so from such crude reactionary motivation that I was only embarrassed by their despicable support. Indeed, I pride myself with having discerned even then the symptoms of what is so clear today, when a kind of family circle has gradually been formed, linking representatives of all nations, jolly empire-builders in their jungle clearings, French policemen, the unmentionable German product, the good old churchgoing Russian or Polish pogromshchik, the lean American lyncher, the man with the bad teeth who squirts antiminority stories in the bar or the lavatory, and, at another point of the same subhuman circle, those ruthless, paste-faced automatons in opulent John Held trousers and high-shouldered jackets, those Sitzriesen looming at all our conference tables, whom—or shall I say which?—the Soviet State began to export around 1945 after more than two decades of selective breeding and tailoring, during which men’s fashions abroad had had time to change, so that the symbol of infinitely available cloth could only provoke cruel derision (as occurred in postwar England when a famous Soviet team of professional soccer players happened to parade in mufti).