Realization

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 Collected Essays (1998)

  The shelves really looked as though a bomb had struck them. Cans of beans and soup and dog food, along with toilet paper, corn flakes, sardines, and milk tumbled every which way, and abandoned cash registers and cases of beer leaned crazily out of the splintered windows and were strewn along the avenues. Sheets, blankets, and clothing of every de scription formed a kind of path, as though people had dropped them while running. I truly had not realized that Harlem had so many stores until I saw them all smashed open; the first time the word wealth ever entered my mind in rela tion to Harlem was when I saw it scattered in the streets. But one's first, incongruous impression of plenty was countered immediately by an impression of waste. None of this was do ing anybody any good. It would have been better to have left the plate glass as it had been and the goods lying in the stores. It would have been better, but it would also have been intolerable, for Harlem had needed something to smash. To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work. That summer, for example, it was not enough to get into a fight on Lenox Avenue, or curse out one's cronies in the barber shops. If ever, indeed, the violence which fills Har lem's churches, pool halls, and bars erupts outward in a more direct tashion, Harlem and its citizens arc likely to vanish in an apocalyptic flood. That this is not likely to happen is due to a great many reasons, most hidden and powerful among them the Negro's real relation to the white American. This relation prohibits, simply, anything as uncomplicated and sat isf.<ctory as pure hatred. In order really to hate white people, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON one has to blot so much out of the mind-and the heart that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self destructi\·e pose. But this does not mean, on the other hand, that loYe comes easily: the white "·orld is too powerful, too complacent, too ready with gratuitous humiliation, and, abm·e all, too ignorant and too innocent for that. One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reac tions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has dri,·en so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of haYing to decide between amputation and gangrene.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But in my play there is another church. And I suddenly saw it. I don't know if I can make this clear to you. On a back road in Mississippi or Lou isiana or some place in the deep South, we were wandering around talking to various people, and there was a small church sitting by itself . I was very oppressed that day by things we'd seen and I was very aware that I was in the deep South and had been very close to my f.1ther's birthplace. It suddenly struck me that this church must have been very much like the church in which my father preached before he came North. I looked into the window and suddenly saw my set. It was a country church. I saw that if I could select the details which would be most meaningful for what I was trying to do, then in a sense, that part of my problem was solved. And I saw something else. I always have some idea of where I want to go. I even sometimes have my last chapter or my last line, a kind of very rough and untrustworthy map. But I don't know quite how I' m going to get there. In the working out of a novel , you work it out in terms of dialog and conflicts, and again, this is power of suggestion, this is hitting on the WORDS OF A NA TIVE SON 711 readers' nerves-nerves which we all have in common. In a play, you're doing the same thing. But you're doing it in such a different way that, for example, a white woman in my play, who is a somewhat older woman, married to a murderer, which is part of what the play is about, has to be revealed in very different ways. And I began to sec her by watching cer tain people, by watching for her, watching for my character, which is what you start doing, really, once this character has captured your attention. You look at everybody around you in another way. You suddenly arc looking for some revelatory and liberating detail. And if you're working on a play-1 don't know if I'm making this cle ar-you suddenly watch people in a very physical way. You watch the way they light their ciga rettes, you watch the way they cross a room, you observe, for the first time, whether or not this person is bowlegged and you begin to think that you can tell by the way a person combs his or her hair, by the beat of a pause, by the things they do or do not say, what is going on inside them. You're watching for the ways in which people reveal themselves in their day to-day lif e. What Freud callcd-1 think I'm right about th is the psychopathology of everyday li fe. So that as I began watching for my woman in the South, I began to sec her, too.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, under gone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world-which al lows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white-owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us-very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will-that this vision of the world is dan gerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our STRANGER IN THE VILLAGE I2 9 moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality sim ply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. �o road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer fo r any American aliYe. One of the things that distin guishes Americans from other people is that no other people has eyer been so deeply inYolved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fa ct fa ced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white ex perience which may proYe of indispensable value to us in the world we fa ce today. This world is white no lons;er, and it will neYer be white again. NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME More Notes of a Native Son fo r my brothers, George, Wilmer and David Contents Introduction . PART ONE Sitting in the House . 1. The Disco\'ery of What It Means To Be an 1 35 American . 1 37 2. Princes and Powers . 1 43 3 . Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem . 170 4 . East River, Downtown: Postscript to a Letter from Harlem 180 5 · A Fly in Buttermilk . 187 6. Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South 1 97 7 .

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  It is the day he realizes that there are no untroubled countries in this fe arfully troubled world; that if he has been preparing himself for anything in Europe, he has been preparing himself-for America. In short, the freedom that the American writer finds in Europe brings him, full circle, back to himself, with the responsibility fo r his development where it always was: in his own hands. Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born some where. He may leave the group that produced him-he may be forced to-but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter fo r rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this ac ceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends. The charge has often been made against American writers that they do not describe society, and have no interest in it. They only describe indi\,iduals in opposition to it, or isolated from it. Of course, what the American writer is describing is his own situation. But what is Anna Km·enina describing if not the tragic fa te of the isolated indi\'idual, at odds with her time and place? The real difference is that Tolstoy was describing an old and dense society in which e\'erything seemed-to the people in it, though not to Tolstoy-to be fixed forever. And the book NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME is a masterpiece because Tolstoy was able to fathom, and make us sec, the hidden laws which really governed this society and made Anna's doom inevitable. American writers do not have a fixed society to describe. The only society they know is one in which nothing is fixed and in which the individual must fight for his identity. This is a rich confusion, indeed, and it creates t<>r the American writer unprecedented opportunities. That the tensions of American lite, as well as the possibili ties, are tremendous is certainly not even a question. But these are dealt with in contemporary literature mainly compulsively; that is, the book is more likely to be a symptom of our tension than an exa mination of it. The time has come, God knows, t(>r us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here. Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspo ken but prot(>Und assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. It is up to the American writer to find out what these laws and assumptions are.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Martin immediately saw through Caretta's disguise, and in formed her on their first or second meeting that she had all the qualities he wanted in a wife. Coretta's understandable tendency was to laugh at this; but this tendency was checked by the rather frightening suspicion that he meant it; if he had not meant it, he would not have said it. But a great deal had been invested in Caretta's career as a singer, and she did not feel that she had the right to fail all the people who had done so much to help her. "And I'd certainly never intended to marry a minister. It was true that he didn't seem like any of the OTHER ESS AYS ministers I'd met, but-stili-I thought of how circumscribed my lite might become." By circumscribed, she meant dull; she could not possibly have been more mistaken. What had really happened, in Caretta's case, as in so many others, was that lite had simply refused to recognize her pri vate timetable. She had always intended to marry, but tidily, possibly meeting her husband at the end of a triumphant con cert tour. However, here he was now, exasperatingly early, and she had to rearrange herself around this fact. She and Martin were married on Ju ne 18, 1953. By now, naturally, it is she whom Martin sometimes accuses of thinking too much about clothes. "P eople who arc doing something don't have time to be worried about all that," he has informed her. Well, he certainly ought to know. Coretta King told me that from the time she reached Bos ton and all during Martin's courtship, and her own indecision, she yet could not rid herself of a feeling that all that was hap pening had been, somehow, preordained. And one does get an impression, until this point in the King story at least, that inexorable forces which none of us really know anything about were shaping and preparing him for that fateful day in Mont gomery. Everything that he will need has been delivered, so to speak, and is waiting to be used. Everything, including the principle of nonviolence. It was in 1950 that Dr. Mordecai W. Johnson of Howard University visited In dia. King heard one of the speeches Johnson made on his return, and it was from this moment that King became interested in Gandhi as a fig ure, and in nonviolence as a way of lif e. Later, in 1957, he would visit India himself. But, so far, of course, we are speaking after the fact. Plans and patterns arc always more easily discernible then.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  This is a serious distinction between people raised in divorced or intact families, and Gary had led me right to it. Arguably, the most important step in marriage is the first step, choosing the right person or someone who comes close to being right for you. Some people know intuitively what they want and need. My husband has told me throughout fifty years of marriage that he decided to marry me the day we met. He was twenty-one. I have no reason to doubt him or others who say the same. But most people follow Gary’s course of gradually finding out what they need, and then when they find it, going after it. People raised in good enough intact families who feel loved by their parents rarely doubt that they have choices and that they will be able to choose when the time is right. The reason for so many failed marriages among children of divorce may be in the forlorn, haphazard way that they begin. “Tell me what made Sara different. How did you know she was the one?” “That’s a good question,” Gary said. “I knew I wanted an independent woman. But I also wanted someone who was gentle and loving and not saccharine. I liked that she was emotionally even and constant, which was also what I wanted. No super histrionics. I had had it with that from my mom and other ladies. Sara offered me an alternative way to be with a woman. Also, it didn’t hurt that she was a very attractive lady.” His expression clouded. “But when it came time to setting the wedding date, I did get cold feet. Images of my parents fighting, my dad walking out, and my mom crying came flooding back. I hadn’t thought about those things in years and I felt panic. What if Sara and I were headed for the same? I really wanted my marriage to be different from my parents’ marriage. And then I had a kind of epiphany. I realized that there are no guarantees in life and that if I wanted a good marriage, I’d just have to work damned hard to make it happen.”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  The custodian of an inheritance, which is what blacks have had to be, in Western culture, must hand the inheritance down the line. So, you, the custodian, recognize, finally, that your life docs not belong to you: nothing belongs to you. This will not sound like fr eedom to Western cars, since the Western world pivots on the infantile, and, in action, criminal delusions of possession, and of property. But, just as love is the only money, as the song puts it, so this mighty responsibility is the CHAPTER THREE only fr eedom. Your child does not belong to you, and you must prepare your child to pick up the burden of his life long before the moment when you must lay your burden down. But the people of the West will not understand this until everything which they now think they have has been taken away from them. In passing, one may obser;e how remarkable it is that a people so quick and so proud to boast of what they have taken fr om others are unable to imagine that what they have taken from others can also be taken from them. In our church, the Devil had many faces, all of them one's own. He was not always evil, rarely was he frightening-he was, more oti:en, subtle, charming, cunning, and warm. So, one learned, for example, never to take the easy way out: whatever looked easy was almost certainly a trap. In short, the De\'il was that mirror which could never be smashed. One had to look into the mirror e\'ery day-good morning, blues/Blues, hoJV do you do?/Well, I'm doing al/1-ight/Good moming/How are you ?-check it all out, and take it all in, and traYel. The pleading of the blood was not, for us, a way of exorcising a Satan whom we knew could ne,·er sleep: it was to engage Satan in a battle which we knew could ne,·er end. I first saw Ihe Exorcist, in Hollywood, with a black friend of mine, who had his own, somewhat complex reasons for insisting that I see it: just so, one of my brothers had one day walked me into the film, Ihe Devils, which he had already seen, saying, cheerfully, as we walked out, Ain't that some shit? I just JVnnted you to see hoJV sick these people m-e! Both my friend and my brother had a point.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And it seemed quite unbelievable fo r a moment that the fi.\·e men standing with Wright (and Wright and myself) were defined, and had been brought together in this courtyard by our relation to the Af rican continent. The chief of the delegation, John Da,·is, was to be asked just JVby he considered himself a �egro--he was to be told that he certainly did not look like one. He is a �egro, of course, from the remarkable legal point of \'iew which obtains in the United States, but, more importantly, as he tried to make clear to his interlocutor, he was a �egro by choice and by depth of im·olvement-by experience, in fa ct. But the question of choice in such a context can scarcely be coherent fo r an Mr ican and the experience referred to, which produces a John Da,·is, remains a closed book fo r him. Mr. Davis might ha\·e been rather darker, as were the others Mercer Cook, \Villiam Fontaine, Horace Bond, and James hT-and it would not ha\·e helped matters very much. For what, at bottom, distinguished the Americans from the Negroes who surrounded us, men from Nigeria, Senegal, Bar bados, Martinique-so many names for so many disciplines was the banal and abruptly quite overwhelming fact that we had been born in a society, which, in a way quite inconcei\· able for Mricans, and no longer real for Europeans, was open, and, in a sense which has nothing to do with justice or injus tice, was free. It was a society, in short, in which nothing was fixed and we had therefore been born to a greater number of possibilities, wretched as these possibilities seemed at the in stant of our birth. Morem·er, the land of our fo refathers' exile had been made, by that tra\·ail, our home. It may have been the popular impulse to keep us at the bottom of the perpet ually shifting and bewildered populace; but we were, on the other hand, almost personally indispensable to each of them, simply because, without us, they could never ha\·e been cer tain, in such a confusion, where the bottom was; and nothing, in any case, could take away our title to the land which we, too, had purchased with our blood. This results in a psychol ogy very different-at its best and at its worst-from the psy chology which is produced by a sense of ha,·ing been im·aded and m·errun, the sense of having no recourse whate\·er against NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME oppression other than overthrowing the machinery of the op pressor. We had been dealing with, had been made and man gled by, another machinery altogether.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And, yet, we arc not quite where we began. We do not know what that voice out of the whirlwind will thunder next time-and we know that there will certainly CHAPTER TWO 5II be a next time. Job is not the same, nor are we: Job's story has changed Job forever, and illuminated us. By contrast, the elaborate anecdote of Joseph and his brothers turns on a plot, the key to which is that coat of many colors. That coat is meant to blind us to the fact that the anecdote of Joseph and his brothers, so far from being a record of brotherly love and forgiveness, is an absolutely deadly study of frustrated fratri cide and frustrated (although elaborately disguised) revenge. When Joseph feeds his brothers, it is not an act of love: he could just as easily have let them starve, which they, very log ically, expected him to do. They, just as logically, expected him to die when they threw him into the pit. Having done the unexpected once, Joseph can do it twice: here is the brother JVho was thrown into a pit by you, my brothers, and left alone there, to die!-help yourself, there's plenty. Neither Joseph, nor, more importantly, perhaps, his brothers, have got past that day. It is an act which cannot be forgotten, any more than the branding iron on the skin can be forgotten. And, if it cannot be forgotten, which is to say undone, then it will cer tainly, in one way or another, be repeated: therefore, it cannot be forgiven: a grave matter, if one accepts my central premise, which is that all men are brothers. Similarly, The Birth of a Nation is really an elab orate justi fication of mass murder. The film cannot possibly admit this, which is why we are immediately placed at the mercy of a plot labyrinthine and preposterous-as tallows: The gallant South, on the edge of the great betrayal by the Northern brethren: this is the pastoral and yet doom-laden weight of the early images. Two brothers, robust, two sisters, fair, a handsome house, a loving and united family, and happy, loyal slaves. Unhappily, however, for the South, and for us all, a certain eminent Southern politician has a mula tto sla ve mistress-a house nigger, whose cot he shares when the sun goes down: she does not share his bed, to which he returns shortly before the sun comes up: and the balef ul effect of this carnal creature on the eminent Southern politician helps bring about the ruin of the South. I cannot tell you exactly how she brings about so devastating a fate, and I defY anyone to tell me: but she does.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And it also became clear that, no matter where our fa thers had been born, or what they had endured, the fa ct of Europe had fo rmed us both was part of our identity and part of our inheritance. I had been in Paris a couple of years before any of this became clear to me. When it did, I, like many a writer before me upon the discovery that his props have all been knocked out fr om under him, suffered a species of breakdown and was carried off to the mountains of Switzerland. There, in that absolutely alabaster landscape, armed with two Bessie Smith records and a typewriter, I began to try to re - create the life that I had first known as a child ai1a fromwhich {hid spent so many years in flight. It was Bessie Smith, through her tone and her cadence, who helped me to dig back to the way I myself must have spoken when I was a pickaninny, and to remember the things I had heard and seen and fe lt. I had buried them very deep. I had never listened to Bessie Smith in America (in the same way that, fo r years, I would not touch watermelon), but in Europe she helped to reconcile me to being a "nigger." I do not think that I could have made this reconciliation here. Once I was able to accept my role-as distinguished, I must say, fr om my "place"-in the extraordinary drama which is America, I was released fr om the illusion that I hated America. The story of what can happen to an American Negro writer in Europe simply illustrates, in some relief, what can happen to any American writer there. It is not meant, of course, to imply that it happens to them all, fo r Europe can be very crippling, too; and, anyway, a writer, when he has made his first breakthrough, has simply won a crucial skirmish in a dan gerous, unending and unpredictable battle. Still, the break - WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AN AMERICAN 139 through is important, and the point is that an American writer, in order to achieve it, very often has to lea\'e this country. The American writer, in Europe, is released, first of all, from the necessity of apologizing tor himself. It is not until he is released from the habit of flexing his muscles and proving that he is just a "regular guy" that he realizes how crippling this habit has been. It is not necessary tor him, there, to pretend to be something he is not, fo r the artist does not encounter in Europe the same suspicion he encounters here. Whatever the Europeans may actually think of artists, they ha\'C killed enough of them otl" by now to know that they arc as real and as persistent-as rain, snow, taxes or businessmen.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Now, anyone who has ever been compelled to think about it-anyone, for example, who has ever been in love-knows that the one face which one can never see is one's own face. One's lover-or one's brother, or one's enemy-sees the f.1.ce you wear, and this face can elicit the most extraordinary re actions. We do the things we do, and feel what we feel, es sentially because we must-we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them. It goes without saying, I be lieve, that if we understood ourselves better, we would dam age ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one's knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know! We become social creatures be cause we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are a great many other things which we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of those forces within us which perpetually menace our precarious security. Yet, the forces are there, we cannot will them away. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot learn this unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is always at variance with what we wish to be. The human effort is to bring these two realities into a relationship resembling reconciliation. The human beings whom we re spect the most, after all-and sometimes fear the most-are those who are most deeply involved in this delicate and stren uous effort: for they have the unshakable authority which comes only from having looked on and endured and survived the worst. That nation is healthiest which has the least neces sity to distrust or ostracize or victimize these people-whom, as I say, we honor, once they are gone, because, somewhere in our hearts, we know that we cannot live without them. The dangers of being an American artist are not greater than those of being an artist anywhere else in the world, but they are very particular. These dangers are produced by our history. They rest on the fact that in order to conquer this continent, the particular aloneness of which I speak-the aloneness in which one discovers that life is tragic, and, thn-e fore, unutterably beautiful-could not be permitted. And that OTHER ESSAYS this prohibition is typical of all emergent nations will be proven, I have no doubt, in many ways during the next fifty years . This continent now is conquered, but our habits and our fears remain. And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one's interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified and sup pressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  230 Lecture 32: Petrarch Christian dispensation; perhaps the great tension of his life was not caused by his love for Laura as much as by his efforts to blend the classical and the Christian. He was a humanist by both temperament and scholarship. But in his “Letter to Posterity”—how many have written to posterity?—he said this, and we may give him the last word: As a young man I was deluded, as an adult I went astray; but old age corrected me and experience convinced me of the truth of what I had read a long time before—that youth and pleasure are vain; or to be more exact, I was taught that by Him who creates all times and ages, and who allows wretched mortals, swollen with unjusti fi ed pride, to go astray from time to time, so that eventually they may recognize their sinfulness and see themselves as they really are. ■ Mann, Petrarch. Petrarch, Canzoniere. ———, Secret Book, Letter to Posterity, The Ascent of Mount Ventoux. 1. In what ways is humanism a useful concept in re fl ecting on Petrarch’s work and achievement? 2. What themes or concerns seem to you to run through the corpus of Petrarch’s writings? Questions to Consider Essential Reading

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Then other sounds broke in, and I woke up, heart racing, in the pink penumbra of my own room. It had gone eleven, but I had not slept until four or five, turning over the uncomfortable revelations of the previous evening. If Charles had been orchestrating his campaign, as I sometimes believed he had, then he had brought it brilliantly and comprehensively to a head. The prison was the key. The one unspeakable thing that no one had been able to tell me threw light on everything else, and only left obscure the degrees of calculation and coincidence in Charles’s offering me his biography to write—a task he must have known I could never, in the end, accept. And as for my grandpa … As I shaved I looked at myself quizzically, yet his image was also in my mind, the groomed, sharp-eyed, authoritative face, ‘handsome suaveté’ … I remembered the rather frightening figure of my childhood, the trenchancy and reserve, and what I could now see as a slow softening of outline as he left politics and received his viscountcy. In retirement he had grown more accommodating, and with the arrival of Philippa’s children and the death of my grandmother had taken on something of the remote glamour of abdicated monarchy. His power was exercised with deference, calling on remembered allegiance. Yet his dynasty was not, in any strict sense, secure. Perhaps his fear that I would never have children explained the nervy familiarity of our relationship these days, the sense I had of being encouraged and yet kept at a hygienic distance. Perhaps it explained my own wariness of him, and the exaggerated obligation I felt under for the help he had given me. Oh, I wanted the flat and everything, but I was irked, graceless, I knew, and coltish about recognising its provenance. I loved my grandfather, too. Whether by the hoped-for sunbursts of our childhood holidays or the more watchful indulgence of his old age, he made one feel part of something superior and precious. All that could hardly change now that he turned out to be in part a tyrant and bigot—not just the elder statesman I had been so proud of at my tother, but (the first saddening strands of evidence suggested) a kind of bureaucratic sadist, a man who had built his career on oppression. Perhaps his precious and superior coterie was not so desirable after all. I was at a loss what to do. I wanted somehow to record my dissent but without callow scenes. I needed, without altogether wanting, to know more. I gave Gavin a ring, and was relieved when the long-suffering Spanish maid answered the phone: I didn’t want to bring it up with Philippa.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But in my play there is another church. And I suddenly saw it. I don't know if I can make this clear to you. On a back road in Mississippi or Lou isiana or some place in the deep South, we were wandering around talking to various people, and there was a small church sitting by itself. I was very oppressed that day by things we'd seen and I was very aware that I was in the deep South and had been very close to my f.1ther's birthplace. It suddenly struck me that this church must have been very much like the church in which my father preached before he came North. I looked into the window and suddenly saw my set. It was a country church. I saw that if I could select the details which would be most meaningful for what I was trying to do, then in a sense, that part of my problem was solved. And I saw something else. I always have some idea of where I want to go. I even sometimes have my last chapter or my last line, a kind ofvery rough and untrustworthy map. But I don't know quite how I'm going to get there. In the working out of a novel, you work it out in terms of dialog and conflicts, and again, this is power of suggestion, this is hitting on the WORDS OF A NATIVE SON 7 11 readers' nerves-nerves which we all have in common. In a play, you're doing the same thing . But you're doing it in such a different way that, for example, a white woman in my play, who is a somewhat older woman, married to a murderer, which is part of what the play is about, has to be revealed in very different ways. And I began to sec her by watching cer tain people, by watching for her, watching for my character, which is what you start doing, really, once this character has captured your attention. You look at everybody around you in another way. You suddenly arc looking for some revelatory and liberating detail. And if you're working on a play-1 don't know if I'm making this clear-you suddenly watch people in a very physical way. You watch the way they light their ciga rettes, you watch the way they cross a room, you observe, for the first time, whether or not this person is bowlegged and you begin to think that you can tell by the way a person combs his or her hair, by the beat of a pause, by the things they do or do not say, what is going on inside them. You're watching for the ways in which people reveal themselves in their day to-day life. What Freud callcd-1 think I'm right about this the psychopathology of everyday life. So that as I began watching for my woman in the South, I began to sec her, too.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But education can never be aimless, and it cannot occur in a vacuum. I went to school in Harlem, quite a long time ago, during 7 88 DARK DAYS a time of great public and private strain and misery. Yet I was somewhat luckier than the Harlem children are today. I was going to school in the Thirties, after the stock market crash. My family lived on Park Avenue, just above the uptown rail road tracks. The poverty of my childhood differed fr om pov erty today in that the TV set was not sitting in front of our faces, forcing us to make unbearable comparisons between the room we were sitting in and the rooms we were watching; neither were we endlessly being told what to wear and drink and buy. We knew that we were poor, but then, everybody around us was poor. The stock market crash had very little impact on our house. We had made no investments, and we wouldn't have known a stockbroker if one had patted us on the head. The market was part of the folly that always seemed to be overtaking white people, and it was always leading them to the same end. They wept briny tears, they put pistols to their heads or jumped out of windows. Ihat)s just like JVhite folks, was my father's con temptuous judgment, and we took our cue fr om him and felt no pity whatever. You reap JVhat you soJV, Daddy said, grimly, carrying himself and his lunch box off to the factory, while we carried our lunch boxes off to school and, soon, into the streets, where my brother and I shined shoes and sold shop ping bags. Mama went downtown or to the Bronx to clean white ladies' apartments. Yet there is a moment fr om that time that I remember today and will probably always remember-a photograph fr om the center section of the Daily NeJVs. We were starving, people all over the country were starving. Yet here were several photo graphs of farmers, somewhere in America, slaughtering hogs and pouring milk onto the ground in order to force prices up (or keep them up), in order to protect their profits. I was much too young to know what to make of this beyond the obvious. People were being forced to starve, and being driven to death, for the sake of money. One might say that my recollection of this photograph marks a crucial moment in my education; but one must also say that my education must have begun long before that moment, and dictated my reaction to the photograph.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Again, I was listening very hard to jazz and hop ing, one day, to translate it into language, and Shakespeare's bawdiness became very important to me since bawdiness was " THIS NETTLE, DANGER .. one of the elements of jazz and revealed a tremendous, loving and realistic respect for the body, and that ineffable force which the body contains, which Americans have mostly lost, which I had experienced only among �egroes, and of which I had then been taught to be ashamed. My relationship, then, to the language of Shakespeare re vealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past. Under this light, this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens at morning, but, more probably, the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw. The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through lo\·e-by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it-no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw; his public streets and his pri\·ate streets, which are always so mysteriously and in exorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and \\ill again) the lot of an American writer-to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who ha\"e eyes to see and see not!-1 am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them. That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to deteat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that -mighty, unname able, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people-all people!-who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there. ShoJV, February 196+ Nothing Personal I USED to distract myself, some mornings before I got out of bed, by pressing the television remote control gadget fr om one channel to another.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Next I set out to learn about my aunt who died in New York City around 1929. She became an organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers after her husband died. My father was always so proud that she merited an obituary in the New York Times. 1 remembered seeing it in the family scrapbook. I spent two weeks searching obituaries at the library, with no luck. I came close to giving up, but decided to try 1930. “There’s a half-hour limit today because we’re busy,” the woman behind the research counter said as she handed me the spool. I threaded the film and quickly fell into my routine of scanning headlines. I almost passed this one without registering its meaning: “Male Butler Discovered After Death To Be Woman.” My breathing slowed. I popped a quarter in the machine and printed out the article. I read each word carefully. The obituary reported the death of a servant Stone Butch Blues 263 in 1930. Her body was found in a rooming house. Her name was never mentioned. Nothing more: no diary, no clues. All I had were these few words on a page to know her by. I closed my eyes. I would never have the details of her life and yet I could feel its texture with my fingertips. Now I knew there was another woman in the world who had made the same complicated decision Rocco and I made. Time separated me from this anonymous servant. Space separated me from Rocco. The headline chilled me—het life reduced to eight flat words. I wondered if my life would be recorded in eight words or less. I stared at a spot high up on the wall, feeling empty and small. “Sit,” the librarian’s voice broke my thoughts, “your time is up.” The last task ’d set for myself was finding the Stonewall bar. I remembered the impact when we heard about the battle with the cops in 1969. I wanted to ask a passerby to take my picture in front of it. I thought someday, after I’d died, someone might find the photo and understand me a little better. “Do you know where the Stonewall bar is?” I 264 Leslie keinberg asked two gay men who were leaning up against a lamppost in Sheridan Square. “That used to be the bat.” One of the men pointed to a bagel shop. I sat down wearily on a park bench. A homeless man picked through the garbage can nearby. I’d seen him before. His bright African print fabric skirt brushed the sidewalk. Gauzy material wrapped his upper body, slung across one shoulder like an East Indian sari. He glided with grace and dignity. For a moment he looked up to argue with someone only he could see. The guttural words he spoke were strangely beautiful. No one else on this planet understood his language. His hands fluttered near his face as he talked, like dark birds winging on warm currents of air.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Long story short, I needed a new plan. By the time we sat down for dinner, I’d resolved to focus on the task at hand—getting a job—and leave the class tourism for later. My bearing lasted another two minutes. After we sat down, the waitress asked whether I’d like tap or sparkling water. I rolled my eyes at that one: As impressed as I was with the restaurant, calling the water “sparkling” was just too pretentious—like “sparkling” crystal or a “sparkling” diamond. But I ordered the sparkling water anyway. Probably better for me. Fewer contaminants. I took one sip and literally spit it out. It was the grossest thing I’d ever tasted. I remember once getting a Diet Coke at a Subway without realizing that the fountain machine didn’t have enough Diet Coke syrup. That’s exactly what this fancy place’s “sparkling” water tasted like. “Something’s wrong with that water,” I protested. The waitress apologized and told me she’d get me another Pellegrino. That was when I realized that “sparkling” water meant “carbonated” water. I was mortified, but luckily only one other person noticed what had happened, and she was a classmate. I was in the clear. No more mistakes. Immediately thereafter, I looked down at the place setting and observed an absurd number of instruments. Nine utensils? Why, I wondered, did I need three spoons? Why were there multiple butter knives? Then I recalled a scene from a movie and realized there was some social convention surrounding the placement and size of the cutlery. I excused myself to the restroom and called my spirit guide: “What do I do with all these damned forks? I don’t want to make a fool of myself.” Armed with Usha’s reply—“Go from outside to inside, and don’t use the same utensil for separate dishes; oh, and use the fat spoon for soup”—I returned to dinner, ready to dazzle my future employers. The rest of the evening was uneventful. I chatted politely and remembered Lindsay’s admonition to chew with my mouth closed. Those at our table talked about law and law school, firm culture, and even a little politics. The recruiters we ate with were very nice, and everyone at my table landed a job offer—even the guy who spit out his sparkling water. It was at this meal, on the first of five grueling days of interviews, that I began to understand that I was seeing the inner workings of a system that lay hidden to most of my kind. Our career office had emphasized the importance of sounding natural and being someone the interviewers wouldn’t mind sitting with on an airplane. It made perfect sense—after all, who wants to work with an asshole?—but it seemed an odd emphasis for what felt like the most important moment of a young career. Our interviews weren’t so much about grades or résumés, we were told; thanks to a Yale Law pedigree, one foot was already in the door.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  McMillian when he went into the cleaners. The mysterious third person, who is circumstantially presumed to be in charge, allegedly instructed McMillian to ‘get rid of Myers,’ which Mr. McMillian said he couldn’t do because he was out of bullets. The white man in charge has never been identified or arrested by the state. The State has not been looking for a third person, a ringleader for this crime, because I think they recognize that this person doesn’t exist.” I paused again to let the meaning of this sink in. “Based on the testimony of Ralph Myers, Walter McMillian was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. As you’re about to hear, the testimony of Ralph Myers was completely false. Again, Your Honor, the testimony of Ralph Myers at trial was completely false.” I took a moment before turning to the bailiff to call Myers to the stand. The courtroom was silent until the deputy opened the door to the holding area and Ralph Myers walked into the courtroom. There was an audible reaction to his presence. Ralph had aged visibly since the last time many of the people in the courtroom had seen him; I could hear murmurs about how his hair had grayed. Dressed in his prison whites, Myers once again appeared small and sad to me as he climbed up onto the witness stand. He looked around the courtroom nervously before raising his hand and swearing an oath to tell the truth. I waited until the courtroom became quiet. Judge Norton was looking at Myers attentively. I walked over to begin my examination. After asking him to state his name for the record and establishing that he had previously appeared in court and testified against Walter McMillian, it was time to get to the heart of things. I walked closer to the witness stand. “Mr. Myers, was the testimony that you gave at Mr. McMillian’s trial true?” I was hoping that the judge couldn’t see I was holding my breath waiting for Ralph to answer. Ralph looked at me coolly but then spoke very clearly and confidently. “Not at all.” There was more murmuring in the courtroom now, but the crowd quickly quieted to hear more. “Not at all,” I repeated before continuing. I wanted Ralph’s recantation to sink in, but I didn’t want to hesitate too long because we needed a lot more. “Did you see Mr. McMillian on the day that Ronda Morrison was murdered?” “Absolutely not.” Ralph looked steady as he spoke. “Did you drive his truck into Monroeville on that day?” “Absolutely not.” “Did you go into Jackson Cleaners when Ronda Morrison was murdered?” “No. Never did.”

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  The interviews were about passing a social test—a test of belonging, of holding your own in a corporate boardroom, of making connections with potential future clients. The most difficult test was the one I wasn’t even required to take: getting an audience in the first place. All week I marveled at the ease of access to the most esteemed lawyers in the country. All of my friends had at least a dozen interviews, and most led to job offers. I had sixteen when the week began, though by the end I was so spoiled (and exhausted) by the process that I turned down a couple of interviews. Two years earlier, I had applied to dozens of places in the hope of landing a well-paying job after college but was rebuffed every time. Now, after only a year at Yale Law, my classmates and I were being handed six-figure salaries by men who had argued before the United States Supreme Court. It was pretty clear that there was some mysterious force at work, and I had just tapped into it for the first time. I had always thought that when you need a job, you look online for job postings. And then you submit a dozen résumés. And then you hope that someone calls you back. If you’re lucky, maybe a friend puts your résumé at the top of the pile. If you’re qualified for a very high-demand profession, like accounting, maybe the job search comes a bit easier. But the rules are basically the same. The problem is, virtually everyone who plays by those rules fails. That week of interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game. They don’t flood the job market with résumés, hoping that some employer will grace them with an interview. They network. They email a friend of a friend to make sure their name gets the look it deserves. They have their uncles call old college buddies. They have their school’s career service office set up interviews months in advance on their behalf. They have parents tell them how to dress, what to say, and whom to schmooze. That doesn’t mean the strength of your résumé or interview performance is irrelevant. Those things certainly matter. But there is enormous value in what economists call social capital. It’s a professor’s term, but the concept is pretty simple: The networks of people and institutions around us have real economic value. They connect us to the right people, ensure that we have opportunities, and impart valuable information. Without them, we’re going it alone. I learned this the hard way during one of my final interviews of the marathon FIP week. At that point, the interviews were like a broken record. People asked about my interests, my favorite classes, my expected legal specialty. Then they asked if I had any questions. After a dozen tries, my answers were polished, and my questions made me sound like a seasoned consumer of law firm information.