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 Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But his eyes had kept their hard fire, the gleam of precious stones. His first words to me were to remind me that he had come back only at my command; that his administration had incurred no reproach; that he had obeyed me in everything. He spoke like a schoolboy who justifies the way that he has spent his day. I established him in that villa of Cicero where he had formerly passed a season with me when he was eighteen. He had the elegance never to speak of those times. The first few days seemed like a victory over the disease; this return to Italy was already a remedy in itself; at that time of year the countryside there was wine-red in hue. But the rains began; a damp wind blew from the strong sea; the old house built in the time of the Republic lacked the more modern comforts of the villa in Tibur; I watched Lucius dispiritedly warming his slender fingers, laden with rings, over the brazier. Hermogenes had returned but a short time before from the Orient, where I had sent him to refurnish and augment his provision of medicaments; he tried on Lucius the effects of a mud impregnated with powerful minerals salts; these applications were reputed to cure everything. But they were of no more help to his lungs than to my arteries. Illness exposed the worst aspects of that hard and frivolous nature: his wife paid him a visit; as always, their interview ended in bitter words; she did not come back again. His son was brought to see him, a beautiful child of seven, laughing and gay, and just at the toothless age; Lucius beheld him without interest. He asked eagerly for political news from Rome, but more as a gambler would than a statesman. Such levity, however, was a form of courage on his part; he would awaken from long afternoons of pain or torpor to throw his whole being into one of those sparkling conversations of his former days; that face wet with sweat still knew how to smile; the emaciated body rose with grace to receive the physician. He would be to the end the prince formed of ivory and gold. At night, unable to sleep, I would take up my station in the invalid's room; Celer, who disliked Lucius, but who is too loyal not to serve with care those dear to me, consented to share my vigil; from the covers came the sound of rattled breathing. A feeling of bitterness swept over me, deep as the sea: he had never loved me; our relations had quickly become those of the spendthrift son and the indulgent father; that life had run out without ever having known great hopes or serious thoughts and ardent passions; he had squandered his years as a prodigal scatters gold coin.

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

  Negotiating the separation is a heroic task for the daughter when the mother is lonely. Lisa sobs as she contemplates her mother’s plight and wonders what she should do. Another young woman told me that when she closes her eyes, she sees the figure of her mother “for the sad, repressed woman that she is and I cry and cry and feel that I’ll never stop crying.” Another said, “It used to be that I wasn’t sure where she left off and where I began. I feel more separate now but I pity her and I worry about her.” Another said, “My mother is a fettered person. She has the right tools but she can’t make the shift since the divorce. She’s wandered around in chains.” Most said that they don’t want to be like their mothers because that would be courting failure. They think of their mothers as women who have not been able to keep their dad’s love or to capture the love of another man. And they are terrified of growing up to be like them. The mother evokes an extraordinary mix of love, compassion, and frightened rejection. Moreover, the girl is deeply afraid that she will succeed where her mother failed. Everywhere she walks, the ice is thin. If she follows in her mother’s footsteps, she fears that she’ll end up alone and miserable. If she leaves her mother to pursue her own career, she repeats her father’s rejection and leaves her mother alone and grieving. If she stays at her mother’s side, she’ll give up a life of independence, her career, and the man she wants. If she’s happy in a relationship with a desirable man, then she commits the ultimate betrayal. She has taken what her mother never had and never will have. This dilemma is widespread. In one form or another, it’s the central drama of many sensitive, devoted daughters who grow up in the loving care of an unhappy, lonely mother who has been left by her husband or who may have sought the divorce but failed to fill the void that was left. For example, from age twenty to thirty-two, Denise lived with a man who criticized and humiliated her. “I believed him when he said that I was bad person,” she told me. When I saw her in her early thirties she had finally left him and was dating an eligible, attractive man. “I’ve been on a long detour,” she explained. “It’s long overdue but I’m finally finding my way. I’ve been preoccupied with what happened to my mom when I was ten years old. I think I’m free of her now. My mind and her mind are not enmeshed anymore. I feel separate now, though I still feel guilty.” Denise married her boyfriend of three years when she was thirty-seven.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It had a certain power, the lonely sea and the sky, though I felt it took enigma to the verge of emptiness. Underneath, though, was another sheet—an earlier state, Paul said, that showed what the black margins hid, like worn old details boarded up against the salt air: the white balustrade of a balcony below, tall windows at either side folded steeply back, in the left one the letters DROME reversed, running downwards and very faint. The sky was lighter and crossed with high striations of cloud and in its depths I thought I saw (what may only have been a hesitation of the penal) a pale speck of the folding star—well, you didn't fold at sea, but it gave me a disconsolate shiver. "Presumably Hippo and not Aero," I said, envisaging the white cliff of sea-front hotels; it might be Eastbourne, and then seeing of course where it was, the whole thing shifting into a deeper perspective, a hotel at Ostend—"Cold as the wind without an end." "Eh? Oh, you're very clever." Paul smiled. "But not quite clever enough!" I frowned and he stooped beside me; I was in his breath as he looked very closely at the picture. "You have to think what hotel our friend would be likely to choose for a romantic escape with his lover. And right next to the Kursaal, too, for Jane, who loved to gamble." "I've never been to Ostend, where I assume it is, except getting off the ferry to come here." I was trying to think what other sorts of drome there were. A velodrome? The Belgians were keen cyclists. Or perhaps it was the beginning of the word. "The Dromedary Hotel?" was my unconfident attempt. Paul stood back. "No matter. It was the Hotel Andromeda. It really doesn't matter, though it was a favourite legend of his." "Did he see himself as rescuing Jane from something? I suppose her jealous husband . . ." "It's possible. Actually, I don't think it was the rescue side that interested him, he was much keener on the idea of the chained-up woman. He had a bronze Andromeda at the Villa—school of de Vries, a beautiful thing, but with a very long and heavy chain that hung down the pedestal in a loop." "Anyway", I said after a moment, "he certainly didn't rescue her on the most important occasion." "He couldn't swim," said Paul abstractedly, still pondering the images he must have seen so many times, as if there were more of these secrets in them if you only knew how to look. "He stood at the window in the late afternoon and watched her go out till he lost sight of her. She swam right out, as she often did—she was a strong swimmer. He never saw her come back. He sat in the room and sketched the window and the view, almost as a kind of reflex: he liked to be busy with his work all the time.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse. Mamaw could spew venom like a Marine Corps drill instructor, but what she saw in our community didn’t just piss her off. It broke her heart. Behind the drugs, and the fighting matches, and the financial struggles, these were people with serious problems, and they were hurting. Our neighbors had a kind of desperate sadness in their lives. You’d see it in how the mother would grin but never really smile, or in the jokes that the teenage girl told about her mother “smacking the shit out of her.” I knew what awkward humor like this was meant to conceal because I’d used it in the past. Grin and bear it, says the adage. If anyone appreciated this, Mamaw did. The problems of our community hit close to home. Mom’s struggles weren’t some isolated incident. They were replicated, replayed, and relived by many of the people who, like us, had moved hundreds of miles in search of a better life. There was no end in sight. Mamaw had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty—emotional, if not financial—had followed her. Something had made her later years eerily similar to her earliest ones. What was happening? What were our neighbor’s teenage daughter’s prospects? Certainly the odds were against her, with a home life like that. This raised the question: What would happen to me? I was unable to answer these questions in a way that didn’t implicate something deep within the place I called home. What I knew is that other people didn’t live like we did. When I visited Uncle Jimmy, I did not wake to the screams of neighbors. In Aunt Wee and Dan’s neighborhood, homes were beautiful and lawns well manicured, and police came around to smile and wave but never to load someone’s mom or dad in the back of their cruiser. So I wondered what was different about us—not just me and my family but our neighborhood and our town and everyone from Jackson to Middletown and beyond. When Mom was arrested a couple of years earlier, the neighborhood’s porches and front yards filled with spectators; there’s no embarrassment like waving to the neighbors right after the cops have carted your mother off. Mom’s exploits were undoubtedly extreme, but all of us had seen the show before with different neighbors. These sorts of things had their own rhythm. A mild screaming match might invite a few cracked shutters or peeking eyes behind the shades. If things escalated a bit, bedrooms would illuminate as people awoke to investigate the commotion.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  It is unquestionably beautiful, but its beauty is obscured by the environmental waste and loose trash that scatters the countryside. Its people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work. Jackson, like the Blanton men, is full of contradictions. Things have gotten so bad that last summer, after my cousin Mike buried his mother, his thoughts turned immediately to selling her house. “I can’t live here, and I can’t leave it untended,” he said. “The drug addicts will ransack it.” Jackson has always been poor, but it was never a place where a man feared leaving his mother’s home alone. The place I call home has taken a worrisome turn. If there is any temptation to judge these problems as the narrow concern of backwoods hollers, a glimpse at my own life reveals that Jackson’s plight has gone mainstream. Thanks to the massive migration from the poorer regions of Appalachia to places like Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, hillbilly values spread widely along with hillbilly people. Indeed, Kentucky transplants and their children are so prominent in Middletown, Ohio (where I grew up), that as kids we derisively called it “Middletucky.” My grandparents uprooted themselves from the real Kentucky and relocated to Middletucky in search of a better life, and in some ways they found it. In other ways, they never really escaped. The drug addiction that plagues Jackson has afflicted their older daughter for her entire adult life. Mountain Dew mouth may be especially bad in Jackson, but my grandparents fought it in Middletown, too: I was nine months old the first time Mamaw saw my mother put Pepsi in my bottle. Virtuous fathers are in short supply in Jackson, but they are equally scarce in the lives of my grandparents’ grandchildren. People have struggled to get out of Jackson for decades; now they struggle to escape Middletown. If the problems start in Jackson, it is not entirely clear where they end. What I realized many years ago, watching that funeral procession with Mamaw, is that I am a hill person. So is much of America’s white working class. And we hill people aren’t doing very well. Chapter 2Hillbillies like to add their own twist to many words. We call minnows “minners” and crayfish “crawdads.” “Hollow” is defined as a “valley or basin,” but I’ve never said the word “hollow” unless I’ve had to explain to a friend what I mean when I say “holler.” Other people have all kinds of names for their grandparents: grandpa, nanna, pop-pop, grannie, and so on. Yet I’ve never heard anyone say “Mamaw”—pronounced ma’am-aw—or “Papaw” outside of our community. These names belong only to hillbilly grandparents. My grandparents—Mamaw and Papaw—were, without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me. They spent the last two decades of their lives showing me the value of love and stability and teaching me the life lessons that most people learn from their parents.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Then she too stood up and reached for our plates and asked us about coffee. Paul watched her go out with the kind of exasperated tenderness I remembered noticing sometimes between my mother and father. "I wish I'd seen the Villa Hermes," I said, unsure if he was going to tell me about it or not. "I'd like to have seen it in its early days," Paul agreed promptly. "Yes." "Do you mean it had fallen into disrepair when you knew it?" He fiddled with some breadcrumbs on the tablecloth. "The thing is, I never did know it. Orst had moved out years before that brief period when I used to go and see him. It was let to an English artist up until the war, and then stood empty. I knew it as a landmark, of course, if I went to visit schoolfriends on that side of town." I had been hurriedly revising the scenario I had been loosely carrying, of young Paul's visits there and the aesthete blind in his own treasure-house. "No, the only time I entered the villa was in the period before its demolition in the early sixties, when several of us tried to save it and there was a petition signed by, well, by almost nobody really. The Symbolists were still seen as a bit of a sick joke then. Even the children of Symbolist painters were teased about it, as if they had convicts or madmen for fathers. Things which would fetch a fortune today were being sold for their frames." For a moment I found myself regretting those missed chances; I wasn't someone who would ever own anything. "But he was still a well-known figure when you met him?" "Honestly, no," Paul admitted. "He was remembered in the town, but rather as someone from long ago. His great London days were forty or fifty years before—when he was your age, more or less. He was a blind, half-paralysed, half-mad old man, who might as well have been dead for all anyone cared. I was quite frightened of him, and of course determined to prove I wasn't. If I say so myself, I was very tolerant of him, and came to be fond of him. I used to do a few chores in the house, read to him, listen to him muttering and raving about the past, and the beautiful woman who'd ruined his life and brought him to this state—I didn't understand it all, but I gained a sense of his own mythology, you might say. I knew my way around a place I'd never been. And he could still be quite lucid about the world: 'You be my eyes,' he used to say. 'Tell me what you saw in the street, what was the sky like, what colour were the clouds?'

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

  After college she went on to earn an M.B.A at Georgetown University and now held a middle management job at a Fortune 500 firm in Columbus, Ohio. At age thirty-one, Lisa owned her own home, had a new car, and was swiftly climbing the corporate ladder. She had been sent west by her company on a business trip and took time out for our meeting. She spoke directly, just like her attorney mother. It wasn’t long before we were talking about her mom and Lisa’s expression turned serious. “I’d have to admit that my main worry right now is my mother.” “Why? Is she having health problems?” “Oh no, nothing like that,” Lisa said. “It’s just, well, I know this sounds strange, but I’d rather she got married than me. She’s going to retire in five years from her law firm and then what’ll she do? She’s sad and very lonely. I’m probably the only person who realizes it because she’s so attractive and she looks so capable. To take care of her, I’d need to live in Los Angeles, but I want to lead my own life in Columbus where I have a great job.” Lisa’s tone then changed from sadness to anguish. “You see, I have to protect her. Ultimately she has no one else in the world to take care of her but me. Ever since I was four years old, when my dad asked for the divorce, I’ve felt it was my job to make her happy.” Mother and Daughter Traps MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS can become stuck in the relationships they have at the breakup. We see this most often when the mother cannot absorb the shock of the divorce and go on to rebuild her life in a different direction. Fully identified with their mothers’ pain, the daughters cannot break away emotionally to establish truly separate lives even if they live three thousand miles away. Problems begin when the adolescent girl, who for years may have been her mother’s most stalwart supporter, begins to move away from her mother’s orbit. She needs to try her own wings, to be proud of her femininity, to be independent and strong. For all children, the adolescent years involve moving out and away. Here the daughter’s dilemma becomes increasingly acute as she approaches young adulthood. Her problem is this: How can I leave my mother who has no one but me? Who will take care of her in her loneliness? Who will comfort her? The Old Testament tells the story of Ruth, a young woman who loses her spouse and devotes herself to her mother-in-law. The mother, Naomi, is griefstricken. Ruth captures the passionate relationship between the two women when she says, “Whither thou goest I will go.” This ancient story translates easily into the love and compassion that daughters of divorce feel for their mothers who are grieving and alone. They are bound by the golden strands of love and compassion.

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

  Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest—children who have become more vulnerable and at-risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home. In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of “untouchables” in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children. Marsha wandered through her first days at Tutwiler in a state of disbelief. She met other women like herself who had been imprisoned after having given birth to stillborn babies. Efernia McClendon, a young black teenager from Opelika, Alabama, got pregnant in high school and didn’t tell her parents. She delivered at just over five months and left the stillborn baby’s remains in a drainage ditch. When they were discovered, she was interrogated by police until she acknowledged that she couldn’t be 100 percent sure the infant hadn’t moved before death, even though the premature delivery made viability extremely unlikely. Threatened with the death penalty, she joined a growing community of women imprisoned for having unplanned pregnancies and bad judgment. The lives and the suffering of the women got tangled together at Tutwiler. For Marsha, it was impossible not to notice that some women never got visits. She tried at first but couldn’t remain indifferent to the people around her who seemed in acute distress—those who cried more than usual or who suffered the greatest anxiety about the children or parents they’d left behind or who seemed especially down or depressed. Knitted together as they were, a horrible day for one woman would inevitably become a horrible day for everyone. The only consolation in such an arrangement was that joyous moments were shared as well. A grant of parole, the arrival of a hoped-for letter, a visit from a long-absent family member would lift everyone’s spirits. If the struggles of the other women had been Marsha’s biggest challenge at Tutwiler, her years there would have been difficult but manageable. But there were bigger problems, coming from the correctional staff itself. Women at Tutwiler were being raped by prison guards. Women were being sexually harassed, exploited, abused, and assaulted by male officers in countless ways. The male warden allowed the male guards entry into the showers during prison counts. Officers leered at the naked women and made crude comments and suggestive threats.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Paul came in with a large old box-file and set it in front of me—I felt I'd rather jumped the gun, he still had this stage of my education to lead me through. The file contained all that survived of the painter's photographs of Jane Byron. They were creased and curled and compressed and when I lifted the restraining spring they rose with a ghostly tremor to the brim of the box. I was looking at a large-faced woman wrapped and scarfed like a desert-dweller in a length of dark material, her pale, heavy features set off in half-profile by the silky cowl. Her skin was rough and pollchy, there was a pitiless quality to the photo, heightened by its metallic register, which rose out of black through obscure leaden greys to glaring blurred highlights. In the next picture her hair was down, she was gazing up from within it, in pained adoration, her long, powerful hands twisting a lily. In the next she lay on a kind of day-bed, her hair dragged backwards, eyes staring at nothing. It was the first one I recognised as the basis of a painting—the Ophella that hung upstairs—and it gave me, across nearly a century, a quick shudder to see her acting out that particular death. Paul stayed in the room, abruptly taking down books and putting them back, not hovering exactly, but there to watch my progress, commenting occasionally, as I picked another photo from the box, on the picture it had become. "That of course is 'Le Collier de Médailles'," he said when I paused on a staring full face, chin pushed up by an elaborate heavy collar of what?, Roman medals, the impressive white slope of the bosom wrapped in a sheet—it was sexy and monumental at once. And then, at a very shadowy little study, a reverie, the eyes averted, a pale gloved arm gleaming against darkness—"Ah, that's a lost picture, it disappeared in the war, it was called. 'La Musique' or 'Palestrina'—oddly enough, I only know the painting itself from a photograph." Many of them were torn at the edges, or showed the little tooth-marks of pegs or rusty pin-holes. On several a white crayon had added its own emphases or drawn a detail out of darkness, like a picture touched up and sharpened in an old magazine. On one or two there were smears of paint, lemon or violet thumbprints that were disconcerting evidence of the man himself, who took care never to be seen at work. Sometimes there were splashes of that intense blue he used, which Paul said was the costly blue of a Bellini Madonna but given a further resonance—the Symbolists' infinite azure.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Some days after we reached Thebes I learned that the empress and her suite had gone twice to the base of the colossal statue of Memnon, hoping to hear the mysterious sound emitted from the stone at dawn, a well-known phenomenon which all travelers wish to witness. The prodigy had not occurred, but with superstitious awe they imagined that it would take place if I were present, so I agreed to accompany the women the next day; any means would do to shorten those interminable nights of autumn. Early that morning, at about the eleventh hour, Euphorion came to my cabin to relight the lamp and help me put on my clothes. I stepped on deck; the sky, still wholly dark, was truly the iron sky of Homer's poems, indifferent to man's woes and joys alike. More than twenty days had passed since this thing had happened. I descended to the small boat for the short trip, which was not without tremorous cries from the women. They landed us near the Colossus. A strip of dull rose extended along the East; still another day was beginning. The mysterious sound occurred three times, resembling the snap of a breaking bowstring. The inexhaustible Julia Balbilla produced on the spot a whole series of poems. The women undertook to visit the temples, but I accompanied them only part way, along walls monotonously covered with hieroglyphs. I had had enough of those colossal figures of kings all alike, sitting side by side, their long flattened feet planted straight before them; in such inert blocks of stone there is nothing which signifies life for us, neither grief nor sensuous delight, nor movement which gives limbs their freedom, nor that capacity which composes a world round a pensive head. The priests who guided me seemed almost as ill-informed as myself about those extinguished lives, though from time to time some discussion arose over a name. They knew vaguely that each of these monarchs had inherited a kingdom, governed over his peoples, and begotten a successor; nothing besides remained. Those obscure dynasties extended farther back than Rome, farther than Athens, back beyond the day when Achilles died before the walls of Troy, earlier than the astronomic cycle of five thousand years calculated by Meno for Julius Caesar. Feeling tired, I dismissed the priests and rested for a while in the shade of the Colossus before returning to the boat.

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

  “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. Minnie sat close to me, almost leaning on me as she continued speaking softly. “Work people tell you to be there, and so you got to go. I’m trying to get her through school and it ain’t easy.” She nodded to her daughter, Jackie, who looked back at her mother sympathetically. Jackie walked across the room and sat near us. Walter and Minnie had mentioned their children—Jackie, Johnny, and “Boot”—to me several times. Jackie’s name was always followed by “She’s in college.” I had begun to think of her as Jackie “She’s in College” McMillian. All of the kids were in their twenties but still very close and protective of their mother. I told them about my visit with Walter. Minnie hadn’t been to the prison in several months and seemed grateful that I had spent some time there. I went over the appeals process with them and talked about the next steps in the case. They confirmed Walter’s alibi and updated me on all the rumors in town currently circulating about the case. “I believe it was that old man Miles Jackson who done it,” Minnie said emphatically. “I think it’s the new owner, Rick Blair,” Jackie said. “Everybody knows they found a white man’s skin under that girl’s fingernails where she had fought whoever killed her.” “Well, we’re going to get to the truth,” I said. I tried to sound confident, but given what I’d read in the trial transcript, I thought it very unlikely that the police would turn over their evidence to me or let me see the files and the materials collected from the crime scene. Even in the transcript, the law enforcement officers who had investigated Walter seemed lawless. These police put Walter on death row while he was a pretrial detainee; I feared that they would not scrupulously follow the legal requirement to turn over all exculpatory evidence that could help him prove his innocence. We talked for well over an hour—or they talked while I listened. You could tell how traumatizing the last eighteen months since Walter’s arrest had been. “The trial was the worst,” Minnie said. “They just ignored what we told them about Johnny D being home. Nobody has explained to me why they did that. Why did they do that?” She looked at me as if she honestly hoped I could provide an answer.

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

  We filed two cases in Alabama. Ashley Jones was a fourteen-year-old girl who had been convicted of killing two family members when her older boyfriend tried to help her escape her family. Ashley suffered from a horrific history of abuse and neglect. When she was still a teenager serving her sentence at the Tutwiler Prison for Women, she started writing to me to ask about various legal decisions she’d read about in the newspaper. She never asked for legal assistance; she simply asked about what she’d read and expressed interest in the law and our work. She started sending notes congratulating me and EJI whenever we won a death penalty appeal. When we decided to challenge death-in-prison sentences imposed on children, I told her we might be able to finally challenge her sentence. She was thrilled. Evan Miller was another fourteen-year-old condemned to die in prison in Alabama. Evan is from a poor white family in North Alabama. His difficult life was punctuated by suicide attempts that started at age seven when he was in elementary school. His parents were abusive and had drug addiction problems, so he was in and out of foster care, but he was living with his mother at the time of the crime. A middle-aged neighbor, Cole Cannon, had come over one night seeking to buy drugs from Evan’s mother. The fourteen-year-old Evan and his sixteen-year-old friend went to the man’s house with him to play cards. Cannon gave the teens drugs and played drinking games with them. At one point, he sent the boys out to buy more drugs. The boys returned and stayed over as it got later and later. Eventually the boys thought Cannon had passed out and tried to steal his wallet. Cannon was startled awake and jumped on Evan. The older boy responded by hitting the man in the head with a bat. Both boys started beating him and then set his trailer on fire. Cole Cannon died, and Evan and his friend were charged with capital murder. The older boy made a deal with prosecutors and got a parole-eligible life sentence, while Evan was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. I got involved in Evan’s case right after his trial and filed a motion to reduce his sentence, even though it was the mandatory punishment for someone convicted of capital murder who was too young to be executed. At a hearing, I asked the judge to reconsider Evan’s sentence in light of his age. The prosecutor argued, “I think he should be executed. He deserves the death penalty.” He then lamented that the law no longer authorized the execution of children because he just couldn’t wait to put this fourteen-year-old boy in the electric chair and kill him. The judge denied our motion.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Given the centrality of sexual exploitation in the Roman Empire, what is notable is that the early church maintained a deaf- ening silence on the problem of sexual coercion in the centuries after the Pauline mission. Clement of Alexandria was the fi rst to notice the “miserable creatures” sold into the fl esh trade, and Lactantius evinced an empty sym- pathy for women forced into the brothel. Th e truth is that vulnerable men and women, boys and girls, probably had shown up at the doorsteps of Christian house- churches long before the problem enters our fi eld of vi- sion. It has been provocatively asked, given the presumptive sexual abuse of slaves, what their status was in a religious community with a deeply ritual sense of purity and pollution; had not Paul unambiguously coun- seled that the fornicator be cast from the body of the church? What about those who were fornicators by force? Ingenious answers have been devised, but the glaring fact is precisely that we do not know. As a persecuted, minor- ity sect struggling to survive in a hostile environment, the church managed to avoid defi nitive answers to these questions for over three centuries. Over the fourth century, though, against the backdrop of Christian triumph, amid the Christianization of society, the problem of systemic sexual exploi- tation became increasingly diffi cult to avoid. Th e missionary success of the church imperiled the fragile silence. Th e pastoral wing of the church was forced to confront the social mechanics of sexuality in the Mediterranean. In the golden age of Christian free will, bishops came to realize that their CHURCH, SOCIETY, AND SEX IN THE AGE OF TRIUMPH  gospel of freedom rang hollow in the face of the complex social realities of sexuality.  Th e earliest stirrings of a new consciousness are preserved in the sermons of Basil of Caesarea. Th is origin is fi tting, both because the homiletic con- text demonstrates the practical role of pastoral Christianity, and because Basil’s canons demonstrate an eff ort toward systematic thought.

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

  Tell me what to say, Lord—” I didn’t want to interrupt her prayer, so I waited until she finished. “Ma’am, I can’t take the case, but I will drive down to the jail and see your grandson tomorrow. I’ll see what I can do. We likely won’t be able to represent him, but let me find out what’s going on, and perhaps we can help you find a lawyer who can assist you.” “Mr. Stevenson, I’m so grateful.” I was tired and already feeling overwhelmed with the cases I had. And cases with juveniles took an especially severe emotional toll on everyone who touched them. But I needed to go to a courthouse near the county where this boy was being held, so it wouldn’t be that big a deal to stop by and see the child. The next morning I drove for over an hour to the county. When I got to the courthouse, I checked the clerk’s file on the case and found a lengthy incident report. Because I was an attorney investigating the case on behalf of the family, the clerk let me read the file, although she wouldn’t make a copy or let me take it out of the office because it involved a minor. The clerk’s office was small, but it wasn’t especially busy, so I sat down on an uncomfortable metal chair in a cramped corner of the room to read the statement, which mostly confirmed everything the grandmother had told me. Charlie was fourteen years old. He weighed less than 100 pounds and was just five feet tall. He didn’t have any juvenile criminal history—no prior arrests, no misconduct in school, no delinquencies or prior court appearances. He was a good student who had earned several certificates for perfect attendance at his school. His mother described him as a “great kid” who always did what she asked. But Charlie had, by his own account, shot and killed a man named George. — George was Charlie’s mother’s boyfriend. She referred to their relationship as a “mistake.” George would often come home drunk and begin acting violently. There were three occasions in the year and a half leading up to the night of the shooting when George beat Charlie’s mother so mercilessly that she required medical treatment. She never left George or made him leave, even though she told several people that she knew she should. On the night of the shooting, George had come home very drunk. Charlie and his mother were playing cards when he arrived. He entered the house shouting, “Hey, where are you?”

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

  I answer that, As was said above (A[5], ad 3), by Divine dispensation the joy of contemplation remained in Christ’s mind so as not to overflow into the sensitive powers, and thereby shut out sensible pain. Now even as sensible pain is in the sensitive appetite, so also is sorrow. But there is a difference of motive or object; for the object and motive of pain is hurt perceived by the sense of touch, as when anyone is wounded; but the object and motive of sorrow is anything hurtful or evil interiorly, apprehended by the reason or the imagination, as was said in the [4035]FS, Q[35], AA[2],7, as when anyone grieves over the loss of grace or money. Now Christ’s soul could apprehend things as hurtful either to Himself, as His passion and death—or to others, as the sin of His disciples, or of the Jews that killed Him. And hence, as there could be true pain in Christ, so too could there be true sorrow; otherwise, indeed, than in us, in the three ways above stated [4036](A[4]), when we were speaking of the passions of Christ’s soul in general. Reply to Objection 1: Sorrow was not in Christ, as a perfect passion; yet it was inchoatively in Him as a “propassion.” Hence it is written (Mat. 26:37): “He began to grow sorrowful and to be sad.” For “it is one thing to be sorrowful and another to grow sorrowful,” as Jerome says, on this text. Reply to Objection 2: As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiv, 8), “for the three passions”—desire, joy, and fear—the Stoics held three {eupatheias} i.e. good passions, in the soul of the wise man, viz. for desire, will—for joy, delight—for fear, caution. But as regards sorrow, they denied it could be in the soul of the wise man, for sorrow regards evil already present, and they thought that no evil could befall a wise man; and for this reason, because they believed that only the virtuous is good, since it makes men good, and that nothing is evil, except what is sinful, whereby men become wicked. Now although what is virtuous is man’s chief good, and what is sinful is man’s chief evil, since these pertain to reason which is supreme in man, yet there are certain secondary goods of man, which pertain to the body, or to the exterior things that minister to the body. And hence in the soul of the wise man there may be sorrow in the sensitive appetite by his apprehending these evils; without this sorrow disturbing the reason. And in this way are we to understand that “whatsoever shall befall the just man, it shall not make him sad,” because his reason is troubled by no misfortune. And thus Christ’s sorrow was a propassion, and not a passion.

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

  He remained kind and charming until the very end, despite his increasing confusion from the advancing dementia. He lived with his sister Katie, but in the last two years of his life he couldn’t enjoy the outdoors or get around much without help. One morning he fell and fractured his hip. Doctors felt it was inadvisable to operate, so he was sent home with little hope of recovery. The hospital social worker told me that they would arrange home health and hospice care, which was sad but dramatically better than what he feared when he was on Alabama’s death row. He lost a lot of weight and became less and less responsive to visitors after returning home from the hospital. He passed away quietly in the night a short time later. We held Walter’s funeral at Limestone Faulk A.M.E. Zion Church near Monroeville on a rainy Saturday morning. It was the same pulpit where over twenty years earlier I had spoken to the congregation about casting and catching stones. It felt strange to be back there. Scores of people packed the church, and dozens more stood outside. I looked at the mostly poor, rural black people huddled together with their ungrieved suffering filling the sad space of yet another funeral, made all the more tragic by the unjustified pain and unnecessary torment that had preceded it. I often had this feeling when I worked on Walter’s case, that if the anguish of all the stressed lives, the pain of all of the oppressed people in all of the menaced spaces of Monroe County could be gathered in some carefully constructed receptacle, it could power something extraordinary, operate as some astonishing alternative fuel capable of igniting previously impossible action. And who knew what might come of it—righteous disruption or transformational redemption? Maybe both. The family had a large TV monitor near the casket that flashed dozens of pictures of Walter before the service. Almost all of the photos were taken on the day he was released from prison. Walter and I stood next to each other in several of the photos, and I was struck by how happy we both seemed. I sat in the church and watched the pictures with some disbelief about the time that had passed. When Walter was on death row, he once told me how ill he had become during the execution of one of the men on his tier. “When they turned on the electric chair you could smell the flesh burning! We all were banging on the bars to protest, to make ourselves feel better, but really it just made me sick. The harder I banged, the more I couldn’t stand any of it. “Do you ever think about dying?” he asked me. It was an unusual question for someone like Walter to pose. “I never did before, but now I think about it all the time,” he continued.

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

  Reply to Objection 1: Jerome (Super Matth. xix, 20) says: “The young man lies when he says: ‘All these have I kept from my youth.’ For if he had fulfilled this commandment, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ why did he go away sad when he heard: Go, sell all thou hast and give to the poor?” But this means that he lied as to the perfect observance of this commandment. Hence Origen says (Tract. viii super Matth.) that “it is written in the Gospel according to the Hebrews that when our Lord had said to him: ‘Go, sell all thou hast,’ the rich man began to scratch his head; and that our Lord said to him: How sayest thou: I have fulfilled the law and the prophets, seeing that it is written in the law: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself? Behold many of thy brethren, children of Abraham, are clothed in filth, and die of hunger, whilst thy house is full of all manner of good things, and nothing whatever hath passed thence to them. And thus our Lord reproves him saying: If thou wilt be perfect, go, etc. For it is impossible to fulfil the commandment which says, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, and to be rich, especially to have such great wealth.” This also refers to the perfect fulfilment of this precept. on the other hand, it is true that he kept the commandments imperfectly and in a general way. For perfection consists chiefly in the observance of the precepts of charity, as stated above ([3835]Q[184], A[3]). Wherefore in order to show that the perfection of the counsels is useful both to the innocent and to sinners, our Lord called not only the innocent youth but also the sinner Matthew. Yet Matthew obeyed His call, and the youth obeyed not, because sinners are converted to the religious life more easily than those who presume on their innocency. It is to the former that our Lord says (Mat. 21:31): “The publicans and the harlots shall go into the kingdom of God before you.”

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

  Objection 2: Further, Tully (De Tusc. Quaes. iii) says that the soul’s passions are ailments [*Cf. [4027]FS, Q[24], A[2]]. But Christ’s soul had no ailment; for the soul’s ailment results from sin, as is plain from Ps. 40:5: “Heal my soul, for I have sinned against Thee.” Therefore in Christ’s soul there were no passions. Objection 3: Further, the soul’s passions would seem to be the same as the “fomes” of sin, hence the Apostle (Rom. 7:5) calls them the “passions of sins.” Now the “fomes” of sin was not in Christ, as was said A[2]. Therefore it seems that there were no passions in His soul; and hence His soul was not passible. On the contrary, It is written (Ps. 87:4) in the person of Christ: “My soul is filled with evils”—not sins, indeed, but human evils, i.e. “pains,” as a gloss expounds it. Hence the soul of Christ was passible. I answer that, A soul placed in a body may suffer in two ways: first with a bodily passion; secondly, with an animal passion. It suffers with a bodily passion through bodily hurt; for since the soul is the form of the body, soul and body have but one being; and hence, when the body is disturbed by any bodily passion, the soul, too, must be disturbed, i.e. in the being which it has in the body. Therefore, since Christ’s body was passible and mortal, as was said above (Q[14], A[2]), His soul also was of necessity passible in like manner. But the soul suffers with an animal passion, in its operations—either in such as are proper to the soul, or in such as are of the soul more than of the body. And although the soul is said to suffer in this way through sensation and intelligence, as was said in the [4028]FS, Q[22], A[3]; [4029]FS, Q[41], A[1]; nevertheless the affections of the sensitive appetite are most properly called passions of the soul. Now these were in Christ, even as all else pertaining to man’s nature. Hence Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiv, 9): “Our Lord having deigned to live in the form of a servant, took these upon Himself whenever He judged they ought to be assumed; for there was no false human affection in Him Who had a true body and a true human soul.”

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

  Most incarcerated women—nearly two-thirds—are in prison for nonviolent, low-level drug crimes or property crimes. Drug laws in particular have had a huge impact on the number of women sent to prison. “Three strikes” laws have also played a considerable role. I started challenging conditions of confinement at Tutwiler in the mid-1980s as a young attorney with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. At the time, I was shocked to find women in prison for such minor offenses. One of the first incarcerated women I ever met was a young mother who was serving a long prison sentence for writing checks to buy her three young children Christmas gifts without sufficient funds in her account. Like a character in a Victor Hugo novel, she tearfully explained her heartbreaking tale to me. I couldn’t accept the truth of what she was saying until I checked her file and discovered that she had, in fact, been convicted and sentenced to over ten years in prison for writing five checks, including three to Toys“R”Us. None of the checks was for more than $150. She was not unique. Thousands of women have been sentenced to lengthy terms in prison for writing bad checks or for minor property crimes that trigger mandatory minimum sentences. The collateral consequences of incarcerating women are significant. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest—children who have become more vulnerable and at-risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home. In 1996, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of “untouchables” in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children. Marsha wandered through her first days at Tutwiler in a state of disbelief. She met other women like herself who had been imprisoned after having given birth to stillborn babies. Efernia McClendon, a young black teenager from Opelika, Alabama, got pregnant in high school and didn’t tell her parents. She delivered at just over five months and left the stillborn baby’s remains in a drainage ditch. When they were discovered, she was interrogated by police until she acknowledged that she couldn’t be 100 percent sure the infant hadn’t moved before death, even though the premature delivery made viability extremely unlikely. Threatened with the death penalty, she joined a growing community of women imprisoned for having unplanned pregnancies and bad judgment.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Many slaves were owned in small numbers and surreptitiously sought com- panionship outside the home. In larger house holds, the slave staff may have off ered its own opportunities. Rural slaves might have had the greatest chance of stability and privacy, but our ignorance of their lives is profound. When Leucippe was made a fi eld slave, she was viciously threatened by the sexual advances of her overseer. Although slave marriages were aff orded virtually no legal protections, slaves married nonetheless. We hear casually of “slave weddings.” Plutarch knew that a slave girl who was married would suddenly become more resistant to her master’s advances, but slave marriages were not protected under the adultery laws. Slaves were entirely cut off from their male relatives, and the surviving documents of sale are a chilling re- minder that the slave family existed only at the master’s will.  As blurry as our perception of the slave’s life is, the realities of prostitu- tion are possibly even more obscure. Slaves haphazardly appear in our upper- class sources because they inhabited the same walls, because they inevitably intruded upon the daily aff airs of their masters. Prostitutes, by contrast, represented “the most impure part of humankind,” and hence real consideration of their existence has been exiled from all literature with pre- tension to gentility. When prostitutes do appear in the sources, it is thus usually as a cipher for pure sexual indecency. Like the miserable creature whose unfortunate destiny is lost in the brilliant glare of Leucippe’s invin- cible sexual modesty, the prostitutes we know are mostly nameless, faceless distortions of an inconceivably brutal existence. But like slaves, prostitutes were in reality ubiquitous, and the sexual economy of the Roman Empire directly depended on the exploitation of their available bodies.  Roman policy toward prostitution has been aptly described as a volatile mixture of “toleration and degradation.” Prostitution was legal. It was taxed by the state and broadly supervised by the public offi cials in charge of keep- ing urban peace. Far from an institution that festered implacably in shadowy corners, prostitution in the Roman Empire was purposefully conspicuous. It played a well- established role in the sexual order. Th e idea that prostitu- tion prevented adultery, that the prostitute’s body acted as a safety valve for THE MORALITIES OF SEX IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE  male lust, was already, by the high empire, very ancient, and it remained a vital notion across Roman history. Th e very model of ancestral Roman man- liness, Cato the Censor, was reputed to have congratulated a young man exiting a brothel for avoiding other men’s wives. Male sexual energy was a defi nite quantity that had to be expended, somewhere; a nickname for the penis was “the necessity.”