Sadness

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

  “I’m so very sorry you haven’t received the help you’ve been promised. But I actually represent Herbert Richardson in this case,” I said as gently as I could. “We know that. I know you might not be able to do anything right now, but when this is over, can you help us? They said we’d get some money for medical help and help for my daughter’s hearing.” A young woman had quietly approached the woman as she spoke to me and embraced her. While she was probably in her early twenties, she acted in every other respect like a very small child. She leaned her head into her mother’s side like a much younger child would and looked at me sadly. Another woman approached and spoke somewhat defiantly. “I’m her auntie,” she said. “We don’t believe in killin’ people.” I wasn’t exactly sure what she was trying to say, but I looked at her and replied, “Yes, I don’t believe in killing people, either.” The aunt seemed to relax a little. “All this grievin’ is hard. We can’t cheer for that man you trying to help but don’t want to have to grieve for him, too. There shouldn’t be no more killing behind this.” “I don’t know what I can do to help you all but I do want to help. Please contact me after August 18, and I’ll see what I can find out.” The aunt then asked me if she could have her son write to me because he was in prison and needed a lawyer. She sighed with relief when I gave her my card. As we all left the courthouse, we offered each other solemn goodbyes. “We’ll pray for you,” the aunt said as they departed. On the way to my car, I considered asking them to say something to the prosecutor and state lawyers about not wanting Mr. Richardson to be executed, although it was clear that the State wasn’t acting on behalf of these victims. The courtroom had been filled with state lawyers and other officials watching the hearing, but they had long since fled the courthouse without so much as a word to any of the battered souls standing in the back of the room. I was haunted by the tragic irony that they felt I was their best hope for help.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We obviously cdn’t remain where we were, but I knew his sticking-power & so I buttoned up & slipped off, tipping my hat with a polite ‘Good evening’ & best wishes to his wife. I went along Old Compton Street, wishing Sandy were still there, & rather wanting a pal to get drunk with. The Leicester Square lavs seemed a possibility, so I popped in, but there were all the usual faces turning expectantly, Major Sprague & that butler from Kensington Palace & a few anxious youngsters on the make. Andrews tells me you can have a wonderful whirl at Victoria these days with all the tommies & tars; he picked up a couple of the latter there some time last week & had the night of his life, if he is to be believed. I wandered down towards Trafalgar Square, thinking I might get a bus, but the sunset came on & I was suddenly flooded with misery again & just gave it all up & went back to the Club for a chop & a glass of beer & was wretchedly rude to anybody who approached me. ——— It was with a mind worried by the gloom and misfortune of my friends and with my appearance newly toughened, Marine-style, by Mr Bandini that I went that evening to the view of Ronald Staines’s little exhibition. Normally I would have kept away, but James’s news made me realise I must put in an appearance. I had had to go through the rubbish bin to find the invitation again, a purple card with, scrawled on the back in white ink, the note ‘Sorry to lose you so soon the other evening—Ronnie’. I could quite happily have remained lost, but I needed to keep in with him and to secure from him those moody but surely incriminating photographs of Colin. The exhibition was called Martyrs , and was hung at the Sigma Gallery in Lamb’s Conduit Street, a home, or at least a stopping place, for many ‘alternative’ figures. Founded in the Thirties by Rycote Prideaux, it had catered in its earlier days for left-wing artists, and Prideaux’s Sigma Pamphlets had been launched there with readings and exhibitions. In my lifetime, though, it had been run by Prideaux’s much younger friend Simon Sims, who had diluted his late mentor’s style, showed a lot of banal mystical art interspersed with often embarrassing gay and ethnic shows, and opened an austere vegan café, with harpsichord music and wooden plates, in the basement. The whole establishment was tinged with a mood of high-principled disappointment.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I was not struck by their wickedness, for that wickedness was but the spirit and the history of America. What struck me was the unbelievable dimension of their sor row. I felt as though I had wandered into hell. But, it must TAKE ME TO THE WATER also be said that, if they were in hell, some among them were beginning to recognize what fuel, in themseh·es, fed the flames. Their sorrow placed them far be�·ond, exactly, as at that hour, it seemed to ha,·e placed them far beneath, their compatriots-\\·ho did not yet know that sorrow existed, and who imagined that hell was a condition to which others " · ere sentenced. For this reason, and I am not the only black man who "ill say this, I ha,·e more faith in Southerners than I "ill e\"er ha,·e in �ortherners: the mighty and pious ::\orth could ne,·er, after all, ha,·e acquired its wealth "ithout utilizing, bru tally, and consciously, those "folk" ways, and locking the South within them. And when this country's absolutely in escapable disaster Je,·els it, it is in the South and not in the �orth that the rebirth "ill begin. I went, first, if memory sen·es, to Charlotte, �orth Caro lina, where I met, among others, Tl1e Carolina Ismelite. I "·ent to Little Rock, where I met, among others, ;\lr. and ;\irs. Bates. I went to Atlanta, where I met, among others, Re,·er end Martin Luther King, Jr. I went to Birmingham. I went to Montgomery. I \\ · ent to Tuskegee. I don't know how long I was on the road. The cam·as suitcase I had carried down was so full of contraband by the time I lugged it, on one shoulder, up, that it burst in the middle of Grand Central Station, scattering underground secrets all m·er the floor: no one, luckily, exhibited the remotest curiosity. I managed to get it all together, tied the suitcase together with the belt fr om my trousers, and got up the stairs, into the city. I collapsed in the home of a friend who lh·ed in what was not \"et known as the East Village-when I had been a tenant, it was known as the Lower East Side-and, re-li,ing my trip, surrendered to my nightmares, and, as far as the city was concerned, ,·anished. I could not take it on, I could not mm·e out of that cold water flat. I kept meaning to, I kept putting it off: for fi'"e days.

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

  But she looked troubled. Finally, she turned to me. “Bryan, I think you need to tell him that maybe he shouldn’t come back here. It’s just all been too much. The stress, the gossip, the lies, everything. He doesn’t deserve what they put him through, and it will hurt me to my heart the rest of my life what they did to him, and the rest of us. But I don’t think I can go back to the way things were.” “Well, you all should talk when he gets home.” “We want to have everybody over when he gets out. We want to cook some good food, and everybody will want to celebrate. But after that, maybe he should go to Montgomery with you.” I had already talked with Walter about not staying his first few nights in Monroeville, for security reasons. We had talked about him spending time with family members in Florida while we monitored the local reaction to his release. But I hadn’t discussed his future with Minnie. I kept urging Minnie to talk with Walter when he got home, but it was clear she didn’t have the heart for that. I drove back to Montgomery, sadly realizing that even as we stood on the brink of victory and what should have been a glorious release for Walter and his family, this nightmare would likely never be completely over for him. For the first time I fully reckoned with the truth that the conviction, the death sentence, and the heartbreak and devastation of this miscarriage of justice had created permanent injuries. State, local, and national media outlets were crowded outside the courthouse when I arrived the next morning. Dozens of Walter’s family members and friends from the community were there to greet him when he came out. They had made signs and banners, which surprised me. They were such simple gestures, but I found myself deeply moved. The signs gave a silent voice to the crowd: “Welcome Home, Johnny D,” “God Never Fails,” “Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We Are Free at Last.” I went down to the jail and brought Walter his suit. I told him that a celebration was planned at his house after the hearing. The prison had not allowed Walter to bring his possessions to the courthouse, refusing to acknowledge that he might be released, so we would have to go back to Holman Prison to get his things before the homecoming at his house. I also told him that I’d reserved a hotel room for him in Montgomery and that it would probably be safest to spend the next few nights there. I reluctantly talked to him about my conversation with Minnie.

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

  I should have returned to Montgomery directly from the prison, but Walter’s family wanted to meet, and since they were less than an hour from the prison I had promised to come to Monroeville. — Walter’s wife, Minnie Belle McMillian, and his daughter Jackie were waiting patiently when I pulled up to the McMillians’ dilapidated house in Repton, which was off the main road leading into Monroeville. Walter had told me I would know I was close when I passed a cluster of liquor stores on the county line between Conecuh and Monroe counties. Monroe County is a “dry county” where no alcoholic beverages can be sold; for the convenience of its thirsty citizens, several package stores marked the boundary with Conecuh County. Walter’s house was just a few miles from the county line. I pulled into the driveway and was surprised at the profound disrepair; this was a poor family’s home. The front porch was propped on three cinder blocks piled precariously beneath wood flooring that showed signs of rot. The blue window panes were in desperate need of paint, and a makeshift set of stairs that didn’t connect to the structure was the only access to the home. The yard was littered with abandoned car parts, tires, broken pieces of furniture, and other detritus. Before getting out of my car, I decided to put on my well-worn suit jacket, even though I had noticed earlier that it was missing buttons on both jacket sleeves. Minnie walked out the front door and apologized for the appearance of the yard as I carefully stepped onto the porch. She kindly invited me inside while a woman in her early twenties lingered behind her. “Let me fix something for you to eat. You been at the prison all day,” she said. Minnie looked tired but otherwise appeared as I had imagined—patient and strong—based on Walter’s descriptions and my own guesses from our phone conversations. Because the State had made Walter’s affair with Karen Kelly part of its case in court, the trial had been especially difficult for Minnie. But she looked like she was still standing strong. “Oh, no, thank you. I appreciate it, but it’s fine. Walter and I ate some things on the visitation yard.” “They don’t have nothing on that prison yard but chips and sodas. Let me cook you something good.” “That’s very kind, I appreciate it, but I’m really okay. I know you’ve been working all day, too.” “Well, yes, I’m on twelve-hour shifts at the plant. Them people don’t want to hear nothing about your business, your sickness, your nerves, your out-of-town guests, and definitely nothing about your family problems.” She didn’t sound angry or bitter, just sad. She walked over to me, gently looped her arm with mine, and slowly led me into the house. We sat down on a sofa in the crowded living room. Chairs that didn’t match were piled with papers and clothes; her grandchildren’s toys were scattered on the floor.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  As a young man he went to Brussels to study law, but in a first surprising show of independence gave it up after a year and managed to enrol, on the strength of some romantic designs for Hamlet, at the Academie des Beaux-Arts. A marked strain of Anglophilia brought him to lodge in the quartier Leopold, with the British colony—and much of the success of his earlier years was due to galleries and collectors in London and Liverpool and Glasgow. Burne-Jones was an influence, an admirer and, in his last years, when Orst would spend the two or three months of the exhibition season in England, a friend. Orst joined, in its own final years, the group of Belgian Symbolists who called themselves, like the first squad for some irregular ball-game, "Les XX". In 1898 he had made designs for The Merchant of Venice in Brussels and painted a life-size full-length of the Portia, Jane Byron, a Scottish actress with the abundant red hair and pale heavy-jawed beauty of the period. A scandalous love-affair followed (la Byron was suing for divorce in England, to the consternation of the Catholic Belgian press), and Orst produced a series of studies, portraits and outright fantasies over the heady six months before her death by drowning at Ostend in May 1899. The portraits and fantasies did not, it seems, finish with her death: furnished with passionate memories and several hundred photographs, Orst carried on painting her for another thirty or forty years—until he lost his sight in the mid-1930s. In 1900 he left Brussels and returned to the abandoned city of his birth; his career as a portrait-painter was over (though he was persuaded to take the occasional commission, for instance to draw the King's children) and henceforth he devoted himself to his melancholy obsession. I imagined him spending his days in this childhood house, in this room perhaps; but apparently he had built a house of his own on the other side of town, a tall white maison d ' artiste topped by a figure of Hermes who gazed out with a lofty challenge over the surrounding suburban gardens. (The house had been demolished after the war to make room for an important road.) There were three pictures of Orst himself in the booklet. The first was by a fellow-student at the Academy, a hasty charcoal drawing that emphasised potential brilliance and potential tragedy. In the second, a photograph, he was seen in his studio against a background of tapestry and objets de vertu, already the cold-eyed dandy I knew from the picture in Echevin's study, half emerging, half held back by shadow. A pebbly pince-nez hung at his lapel. The third, taken in his last years, looked none the less like an experiment from the early days of photography, or like something indoors seen through a breath-clouded window, a wash of white light into which the blind old man, shawled in a wheelchair, seemed almost to dematerialise.

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

  As the vulnerable child sees his parents’ struggle to contain their grief, he is likely to feel anxious, ashamed, or depressed. He is likely to be hyperalert to their moods and more likely than a healthy child to feel responsible for any troubles in the family. The vulnerable child needs a double dose of praise and encouragement for every step he takes toward realistic independence. He needs assurance that there is a great deal he can do by himself and that he can master important ways to care for himself. He especially needs praise for his courage in trying. When the parent of a vulnerable child remarries, he or she needs to proceed gradually. Billy’s mother, for example, could have set aside exclusive time with her son in the early months, which would have helped him make the transition. In planning remarriage, a parent needs to work out the complex feelings of love and resentment between caregiver and child. Just as weaning means gradually giving up a dependency for both mother and baby, the vulnerable child and his mother need to respect their relationship and give it time to adapt to new conditions. Boys who are ill and lack stamina usually cannot compete in the world of sports, which in our society is often a major link between fathers and sons. A sensitive father will help his son cope with this loss, finding other ways to bond and real achievements that he can take pride in. In a good intact family, parents spell each other in taking care of their children; when one person is exhausted, the other takes over. This sort of sharing is even more needed in homes with a vulnerable child, where physical and emotional exhaustion are constant undercurrents of daily life. Most important, people should not use divorce to solve their tremendous distress about bringing a defective child into the world and the overwhelming emotional and financial cost of raising the child. This is a very serious issue. Most people assume that divorce is caused by marital conflict. But we now know how readily stress from another sphere can ricochet into the marriage and lead to an impulsive divorce decision. Vulnerable children evoke strong passions and great suffering. The impulse to run away is potent. Trickle-Down Happiness WHEN I SAW Billy eighteen months after the divorce, he was a very sad and troubled child. He told me he no longer liked school. He refused to discuss Tom, his new stepfather. He wanted to see his biological father more often but he admitted that the visits had not been good. It was obvious from his story that his father continued to deny his son’s handicap or didn’t care. “Dad’s girlfriend is a runner and they invited me to run with them,” he said miserably. “I tried it once and I got halfway around the track and I had to sit down.

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

  Why don’t these young men hear their wives’ complaints? The men are intelligent and competent at work. They are decent people. But they are blind and deaf to their women and taken entirely by surprise when they leave. I think they don’t hear their wives because in large measure they don’t hear themselves. They’ve told me many times that their own feelings are muted or shut down in situations that evoke strong feelings. They learned long ago in childhood that feelings are painful and that it’s better and safer to shut down feelings and not respond to their own or to others. But sadly, people who are inhibited in acknowledging their own feelings also have trouble in recognizing the feelings of others. They’re especially clueless about how to gauge the quality of a woman’s feelings, needs, and wishes or how to assess the importance of her complaints. 4 It’s as if everything is experienced in the same monotone key. Such men are hardly able to read a woman’s facial expressions or her body language or to distinguish a minor upset from a serious grievance. They have no good models in their head for a good relationship between a man and a woman, and the subtleties of the interaction is a foreign language to them. Billy and the other young men in this group understood concrete requests. When Debbie wanted a house, he bought her a little house. Had she asked for shoes or a dress, he would have happily purchased these items for her. But she wanted her husband to talk to her in the evenings. She was lonely and wanted companionship. She was bored and wanted to go out dancing. These requests he found baffling and disconcerting. He failed utterly to observe the mounting distress or the rising anger that prompted these requests. Like others, he ignored all the signs of the coming storm. The woman became increasingly agitated and left in a towering rage. The men were shattered. Vulnerability and Resilience BY THE END of the interview I was keenly aware of how much Billy had suffered and how hard it had been for him to grow up with hardly any help from his family after the divorce. I was also impressed with his courage and perseverance. Despite his poor physical health, lack of education, and continuing sadness, he held a responsible, well-paying job that required skill, attention to detail, and an ability to make quick decisions. He had taken full responsibility for himself in recovering from a serious depression. And he had been able to live a life of extraordinary isolation and sadness without succumbing to alcoholism and drug abuse.

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

  In families like Gary’s, parents keep a close eye on what their children are doing “onstage” at every moment. If the play gets too rough or there is trouble in the classroom, they are front and center, ready to act. At home, they keep up the buzz of a “parenting dialogue,” a conversation that begins with the child’s birth and never ends: How is Gary doing? Does his teacher understand his aptitude for math? Should I talk with her? What should we do about his fighting in the schoolyard? What’s the best way to handle the teacher’s complaints? and so on. The litany is endless. Out of these ongoing dialogues, held after the children are asleep, or when they are thought to be out of earshot, parents evolve a domestic policy for the home and a foreign policy for outside the home. Later, at the dinner table, both adults present a united front to the children. This invisible structure of parenting that supports the growing child and runs interference for her is weakened or lost in the breakup. Karen and her siblings felt that they had been suddenly abandoned, almost orphaned. Their mother was present but so distracted that they could hardly get her attention. And their father was morose and cranky. In divorce, even parents who get along well after the breakup rarely share a strategy for raising their children, although they may come together around an emergency or scheduling. Like quality time, parallel parenting—a term coined by mediators to mean that two parents who raise a child separately are comparable to two parents who raise a child together—is a great slogan, but it can’t replicate the cooperative parenting that children and parents need. In a good intact family, a constant parental dialogue revolves around the day’s events and interactions within the family. Daily conversations and the pillow talk that follows literally shape the child’s environment to fit her needs as she grows up and changes. Such parental dialogue, if it existed, is abruptly shut off by divorce. As a result, the role of the parents as the child’s champion is weakened. This is a serious loss in our crowded, fast-moving society, especially for the child who has special needs or who may be a late or an early bloomer. Of course single parents can take on this role to the extent that their busy schedule permits, but as they often tell me, they feel weighed down by the responsibility for making all the decisions themselves and by the pressures of time. Remarried parents can and do reinstate the invisible parenting structure, but that may not happen for several years. Even then, it takes on a different cast, as we’ll see later in the book.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  I’m not so nosey that I ask them questions or anything, but these ladies tell me anyway about why they like to be waxed down there. These thin-thin ladies like Mrs. Nariman and Mrs. Dastur say that it makes them feel clean, because there’s no hair for anything to get stuck to down there. Then the gray hair ladies like Mrs. Patel and Mrs. Loelka say it makes them feel like innocent little girls again, and they even talk with gig gly, high voices. But worst of all are the lazy, fat ones like Mrs. Singh and Mrs. Vaswani, who tell me it’s so much better than getting a massage, giving so much more energy to the body, keeping the blood going all day and all night. Mostly I don’t listen to what they say, but one lady, Mrs. D’Souza, told me a very sad story. She said that she was mar ried so many years, and her husband never liked to do the man’s work in her and so they had no children. Finally she got angry and asked him what was wrong with him and he said that it was all her fault, that the hair on her thing was so rough that it poked like pins right into his skin so he couldn’t come near her. Poor man! Since then this lady makes me wax her thing every week, even when I can’t find one single hair. The whole time, she lies there saying prayers to Mother Mary. At least these days someone like Mrs. D’Souza can wax. In olden days what must have happened to these poor ladies? My mother in the village still lives like in olden times. I tried to explain to her that I do waxing to make money, but she just can’t understand. She stays in the house all day, covered from head to toe in her cotton sari, so how will she under stand? These city ladies are not like that. They understand

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "The girl, I can tell you, was a very different matter. She seemed utterly lost, a little dark-haired thing, sunk in herself; at night we used to hear her crying in her room and my mother going in to comfort her. I'm afraid I probably neglected her, I left her to do tasks in the kitchen, where she seemed happiest. She gave the impression of living in another world. Of course she was terribly homesick, and she had the curious habit of not answering to her name, until the second or third time you called her, which was unsettling to my new-found self-importance." "What was she called?" "She was called after St Augustine's mother: Monica. But as you will have guessed that was not her real name. I'm amazed now to think how long it took me to realise that we were sheltering two Jewish children, and how confidently the boy disguised the fact. Actually he was full of confidence; in some odd way he was able to block out what was going on by concentrating intensely on his school work and living so much in books. I think he'd read all the Waverley Novels except one, which had been stolen from the library. But. . . Monica somehow knew from the start that she had lost everything. She was so quiet because she was in constant fear of giving herself away. They had false papers, false ration-books, and school uniforms run up by my father—that was what the visitors were always taking away, of course, children's clothes with the forged papers hidden in their linings. It turned out that my parents were part of an underground network that helped thousands of Jewish children to disappear, or change identity, when their parents gave them up." "Or they'd have been deported . . ." "Exactly. It makes me shiver after fifty years. And they didn't all get away with it—children don't have that much discipline, they can't remain in the land of pretence for ever. The monks and the other masters of the various schools were playing with high explosives. They risked their lives to save the children, but the children actually had the masters' lives in their hands as well. If a hidden Jewish child was found in school by the Gestapo, neither the child nor the master who was deemed responsible was ever seen again. Personally I wouldn't want to place so much trust in a frightened or bereaved teenager—but what could they do when it was their only chance?" "I'm afraid you're going to say something about Monica and the boy."

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Yet, here we were, surrounded by quite beautiful and sensual peo ple, who did not, however, appear to find us beautiful or sen sual. They said so. By the time we had been abroad two years, each of us, in one way or another, had received this message. It was one of the things that was meant when we were referred to as children. We had been perfectly willing to refer to all the other Americans as children-in the beginning; we had not known what it meant; we had not known that we were included. By 1950 some of us had already left Paris for more promising ports of call, Tangiers for some, or Italy, or Spain; Sweden or Denmark or Germany for others. Some girls had got married and vanished; some had got married and vanished and reap peared-minus their husbands. Some people got jobs with the ECA and began a slow retreat back into the cocoon fr om which they had never quite succeeded in emerging. Some of us were going to pieces-spectacularly, as in my own case, quietly, in others. One boy, for example, had embarked on the career which I believe still engages him, that of laboriously writing extremely literary plays in English, translating them laboriously-into french and Spanish, reading the trilingual results to a coterie of friends who were, even then, beginning to diminish, and then locking them in his trunk. Maga zines were popping up like toadstools and vanishing like fog. Painters and poets of thin talent and no industry began to feel abused by the lack of attention their efforts elicited fr om the french, and made outrageously obvious-and successful bids for the attention of visiting literary figures from the States, of whose industry, in any case, there could be no doubt. And a certain real malice now began to make itself felt in our attitudes toward the French, as well as a certain defen siveness concerning whatever it was we had come to Paris to do, and clearly were not doing. We were edgy with each other, too. Going, going, going, gone-were the days when we walked through Lcs Hailes, singing, loving every inch of france, and loving each other; gone were the jam sessions in Pigalle, and our stories about the whores there; gone were the nights spent smoking hashish in Arab cafes; gone were the THE NEW LOST GENERATION 66 7 mornings which found us telling dirty stories, true stories, sad, and earnest stories, in grey, workingmen's cafes. It was all gone. We were secretive with each other. I no longer talked about my novel. We no longer talked about our love affairs, for either they had failed, were failing, or were serious. Above all, they were private-how can love be talked about?

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

  But finding common ground with an older child takes a lot more time because it depends on gradually building a genuine friendship, winning the cooperation of the child, and making it clear that the stepfather does not intend to displace the biological father in the child’s affection. Time, patience, and persistence are key components to becoming a successful stepparent and to creating a happy remarried family. Good intentions are important, but that’s only a bare beginning. Building a close bond with a child takes as much time as building a close relationship with an adult. It requires sustained effort and most of all genuine affection that can outlast the child’s resistance and anxiety about trusting a new adult whom they fear may disappear. Stepparenthood in the child’s heart is never a given. It is earned. Billy’s stepfather wanted to be a parent to Billy and made many overtures to the boy during the first year of the marriage. So why did he fail? He was not in direct competition with Billy’s father and he did not expect Billy to choose between them. I suspect one reason is that he did not need Billy in his life. He already had a son and very soon he and Billy’s mother had a new baby boy. Thus he had little incentive to pursue a relationship with a difficult, angry boy. Essentially, after a few attempts, he gave up trying to build a relationship. To make matters even harder, his son was good-looking and athletic—everything Billy was not. Billy would have loved to be like his stepbrother and it broke his heart when all the family members, including his own father, spoke glowingly of this rival. No one ever seemed to admire Billy. As a result, tragically but predictably, Billy forfeited his chance for a good relationship with a decent man who tried to befriend him. His stepfather essentially remained “the man my mom married, my mom’s husband but nothing for me.” For many children and stepfathers, this is a sad lost opportunity. However, given the difficulty of moving into a family midstream, it may represent the best compromise that the family can reach. Certainly it is a very common solution. This kind of relationship was the outcome in a full half of the remarriages in the study. Many stepfathers have little interest in the new wife’s children and heartily wish that the woman had come unencumbered. Others resent living with or caring for another man’s offspring. It is by no means a given that a man who wants to marry a woman can be expected to embrace her children as well. And in fact, some women recognizing this potential problem sent their children to live with their father when they remarried whether or not the father had indicated that he was eager or able to accept them. There are tensions in remarriage that we did not anticipate.

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

  We emphasized to the court throughout the day’s hearing that all of these statements were made by Myers before the initial trial. Not only did these statements make Myers’s recantation more credible but they had also been documented in medical records that had never been turned over to Walter’s trial lawyers, as the law required. The U.S. Supreme Court has long required that the prosecution disclose to the defendant anything that is exculpatory or that may be helpful to the defendant in impeaching a witness. The supporters whom the State had brought to court and the victim’s family seemed confused by the evidence we were presenting—it complicated the simple narrative they had fully embraced about Walter’s guilt and the need for swift and certain punishment. State supporters began to leave the courtroom as the day went on, and the number of black people who were let into the room grew. By the end of that second day, I felt very hopeful. We had maintained a good pace and the cross-examinations had been shorter than I had expected. I thought we could finish our case in one more day. — I was tired but feeling pleased as I walked to my car that evening. To my surprise, I noticed Mrs. Williams sitting outside the courthouse on a bench, alone. She stood when our eyes met. I walked over, remembering how unsettled I had been to see her leave the courtroom. “Mrs. Williams, I’m so sorry they did what they did this morning. They should not have done it, and I’m sorry if they upset you. But, so you know, things went well today. I feel like we had a good day—” “Attorney Stevenson, I feel so bad. I feel so bad,” she said and grabbed my hands. “I should have come into that courtroom this morning. I was supposed to be in that courtroom this morning,” she said and began to weep. “Mrs. Williams, it’s all right,” I said. “They shouldn’t have done what they did. Please don’t worry about it.” I put my arm around her and gave her a hug. “No, no, no, Attorney Stevenson. I was meant to be in that courtroom, I was supposed to be in that courtroom.” “It’s okay, Mrs. Williams, it’s okay.” “No, sir, I was supposed to be there and I wanted to be there. I tried, I tried, Lord knows I tried, Mr. Stevenson. But when I saw that dog—” She shook her head and stared away with a distant look. “When I saw that dog, I thought about 1965, when we gathered at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and tried to march for our voting rights. They beat us and put those dogs on us.” She looked back to me sadly. “I tried to move, Attorney Stevenson, I wanted to move, but I just couldn’t do it.”

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  When I was working on An othe r C o - untry, which was the hardest thing I had done until that time, I had several problems in trying to get across, in trying to convey, what I fe lt was happening to us in this country. Not that this is unusual: In a sense, every work of a _ rl,__if I may use that phrase, is_LkjncL_Qf__metaphor for what the artist takes to be our condition. My principal problem, at least by hindsigl��;as hmv-to -il:i'i1dle my heroine, Ida, who in ctlCct dictated a great deal of the book to me. And the first thing that I had to realize was that she, operating in New WORDS OF A NATIVE SON 7 09 York as she did, as Negro girls do, was an object of wonder and even some despair-and some distrust-to all the people around her, including people who were very fond of her Vivaldo, her lover, and their friends. I had somehow to make the reader see what was happening to this girl. I knew that a girl like Ida would not be able to say it for herself, but I also knew that no reader will believe you if you simply tell him what you want him to know. You must make him see it for himself. He must somehow be trapped into the reality you want him to submit to and you must achieve a kind of rig orous discipline in order to walk the reader to the guillotine without his knowing it. Now, in order to get what I wanted I had to invent Rufus, Ida's brother, who had not been present at the original con ception. Rufus was the only way that I could make the reader see what had happened to Ida and what was controlling her in all her relationships, why she was so difficult, why she was so uncertain, why she suffered so; and of course the reason she was suffering was because of what had happened to her brother, because her brother was dead. She was not about to forgive anybody for it. And this rage was about to destroy her.

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

  That Billy didn’t agree with this assessment of the state of things was all too clear. “She changed since he came,” he said sadly, referring to his mother and Tom. “She acts silly and laughs a lot and she even sits on his lap,” he said in disgust. “When I talk to her she’s always saying ‘Wait just a sec, hon’”—this said in a syrupy sweet falsetto voice—“and she’s on the phone with him again. He calls from work more than anyone I know. My dad never called from work. He does his work, not play kissy face over the phone!” Billy’s story shows us another way in which changed parent and child relationships can shape a child’s personality through the postdivorce years. Like Paula, Billy lost his mother’s devoted attention immediately after the divorce. But Paula’s mother disappeared because she had to go to work to support the family. Billy’s mother did not go back to work. Her devotion to her child in part reflected her dissatisfaction with her marriage. As she moved into a happier marriage, she expected her son to change with her—invoking the trickle-down theory of happiness that so many people believe in and which I questioned earlier. But Billy did not have the capacity to change. Caught between his inability to hope or to give up hope that his nurturing mother will come back, he comes increasingly to believe that he is unloved and unwanted. Like Paula, he’s angry but instead of lashing out at the world, he turns his frustrations inward. He withdraws into a sullen passivity. And as we’ll see in his later interviews, this passivity comes to dominate his adult life, including his attempts to build intimate relationships with young women—or to avoid them.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "There are hundreds more up in the old storage attic. Sometimes you see a very big one that's going to an exhibition being winched down outside on the hoist, in a great big box, of course." "What's special about the late ones?" "Paul doesn't like to show them. They're not really finished, at least not like the earlier ones which are so brilliantly painted, they're almost like photographs—well, of course, he based most of them on photographs as you know. Then at the end he tried to paint what things actually looked like as he was losing his sight. The landscapes became blurred and clouded over, and you have the sense he couldn't really see the canvas, either. I think they're very moving—in a way I like them more than the other ones, which slightly bore me after a while" (this said with a pretend-guilty wince). "But Paul for some reason can't decide about them." "So are they going in the catalogue?" She gave her touching, oddly sexy little chuckle. "I wonder." "Well, I must find out," I said stiffly. "Mm, do." We emerged through a gateway at the edge of a wide canal-basin, where half a dozen glass-roofed tourist-boats were tethered one beyond the other. There was a delicious sense of being left behind, the season over. We leant on a railing and looked down through dropped brown chestnut-fans into a shadowy saloon. "I think Orst's death must have left . . . a mark on Paul's mind. I think that may be something to do with it." I shook my head, aggrieved at my own ignorance. "I've no idea what happened." "I'm sorry, I don't know what you know. Yes, Paul, as he's probably told you, used to know Orst, he used to go and look after him when he was a boy, and read to him, I think. Orst apparently never saw Paul, or said he thought he could see him sometimes through a mist. He used to get him to describe things to him at great length, including his own pictures, which must have been like doing the catalogue already, and Orst could remember them all . . . Then he was murdered by the Germans, and it must have been a bit like losing a father, or an uncle perhaps, for Paul." "He was murdered by the Germans. It doesn't say anything about that in the booklet at the Museum." "I know." "But it does sound a quite major point of interest in the painter's story . . ." Helene raised her shoulders for a few moments. "Was he Jewish, I suppose?" "I'm sure he was partly. You'll have to ask Paul about it." "It doesn't sound as if he's very likely to tell me." We swung round and looked back over low roofs to the rival towers of St John's and the Cathedral, already silvery and shadowless in flood-lights against the dimming sky.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I think that I really was, though poverty is pov erty and we were, if I may say so, among the truly needy, in spite of the tins of corned beef we got fr om home relief every week, along with prunes. (Catsup had not yet become a veg etable; indeed, I don't think we had ever heard of it.) My mother fried corned beef, she boiled it, she baked it, she put potatoes in it, she put rice in it, she disguised it in corn bread, she boiled it in soup(!), she wrapped it in cloth, she beat it with a hammer, she banged it against the wall, she threw it onto the ceiling. Finally, she gave up, for nothing could make us eat it anymore, and the tins reproachfully piled up on the shelf above the bathtub--along with the prunes, which we also couldn't eat anymore. While I won't speak for my broth ers and sisters, I can't bear corned-beef hash or prunes even today. Poverty. I remember one afternoon when someone dropped a dime in fr ont of the subway station at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue and I and a man of about 40 both scram- 8J8 OTHER ESSAYS bled for it. The man won, giving me a cheerful goodbye as he sauntered down the subway steps. I was bitterly disap pointed, a dime being a dime, but I laughed, too. The truly needy. Once, my father gave me a dime-the last dime in the house, though I didn't know that-to go to the store fi:>r kerosene for the stove, and I fell on the icy streets and dropped the dime and lost it. My father beat me with an iron cord fr om the kitchen to the back room and back again, until I lay, half-conscious, on my belly on the floor. Yet-strange though it is to realize this, looking back-I never felt threatened in those years, when I was growing up in Harlem, my home town. I think this may be because it was familiar; the white people who lived there then were as poor as we, and there was no TV setting our teeth on edge with exhortations to buy what we could never hope to afford. On the other hand, I was certainly unbelievably unhappy and pathologically shy, but that, I felt, was nobody's fault but mine. My father kept me in short pants longer than he should have, and I had been told, and I believed, that I was ugly. This meant that the idea of myself as a sexual possibility, or target, as a creature capable of inciting desire or capable of desire, had never entered my mind.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But the obligatory, fade-out kiss, in the classic American film, did not really speak of love, and, still less, of sex: it spoke of reconciliation, of all things now becoming possible. It was a device desperately needed among a people for whom so much had to be made possible. And, 5 20 THE DEVIL FINDS WORK no matter how inept one must judge this film to be, in spite of its absolutely appalling distance fr om reality, in spite of my own helplessly sardonic tone when discussing it, and even in spite of the fact that the effect of such a film is to increase and not lessen white confusion and complacency, and black rage and despair, I still do not wish to be guilty of the gra tuitous injustice of seeming to impute base motives to the people responsible for its existence. Our situation would be far more coherent if it were possible to categorize, or dis miss, In the Heat of the Night so painlessly. No: the film help lessly conveys-without confronting-the anguish of people trapped in a legend. They cannot live within this legend; nei ther can they step out of it. The film gave me the impression, according to my notes the day I saw it, of "something stran gling, alive, struggling to get out." And I certainly felt this during the final scene, when the white Sheriff takes the black detective's bag as they walk to the train. It is not that the creators of the film were inspired by base motives, but that they could not understand their motives, nor be responsible tor the effect of their exceedingly complex motives, in action. (All motives arc complex, and it is just as well to remember this: including, or perhaps especially, one's own.) The history which produces such a film cannot, after all, be swiftly un derstood, nor can the effects of this history be easily resolved. Nor can this history be blamed on any single individual; but, at the same time, no one can be let off the hook. It is a terrible thing, simply, to be trapped in one's history, and attempt, in the same motion (and in this, our life!) to accept, deny, reject, and redeem it-and, also, on whatever level, to profit fr om it.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Severus was quick to grasp that such an elusive enemy could be exterminated, but not conquered; he resigned himself to a war of attrition. The peasants, fired by Simon's enthusiasm, or terrorized by him, made common cause with the Zealots from the start; each rock became a bastion, each vineyard a trench; each tiny farm had to be starved out, or taken by assault. Jerusalem was not recaptured until the third year, when last efforts to negotiate proved futile; what little of the Jewish city had been spared by the destruction under Titus was now wiped out. Severus closed his eyes for a long time, voluntarily, to the flagrant complicity of the other large cities now become the last fortresses of the enemy; they were later attacked and reconquered in their turn, street by street and ruin by ruin. In those times of trial my place was with the army, and in Judaea. I had utter confidence in my two lieutenants, but it was all the more fitting, therefore, that I should be present to share responsibility for decisions which, however carried out, promised atrocities to come. At the end of a second summer of campaign I made my preparations for travel, but with bitterness; once more Euphorion packed up my toilet kit, wrought long ago by an artisan of Smyrna and somewhat dented by wear, my case of books and maps, and the ivory statuette of the Imperial Genius with his lamp of silver; I landed at Sidon early in autumn. The army is the first of my callings; I have never gone back into it without feeling repaid for my constraints there by certain inner compensations; I do not regret having passed the last two active years of my existence in sharing with the legions the harshness and desolation of that Palestine campaign. I had become again the man clad in leather and iron, putting aside all that is not immediate, sustained by the routines of a hard life, though somewhat slower than of old to mount my horse, or to dismount, somewhat more taciturn, perhaps more somber, surrounded as ever (the gods alone know why) by a devotion from the troops which was both religious and fraternal. During this last stay in the army I made an encounter of inestimable value: I took a young tribune named Celer, to whom I was attached, as my aide-de-camp. You know him; he has not left me. I admired that handsome face of a casqued Minerva, but on the whole the senses played as small a part in this affection as they can so long as one is alive.