Shame

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 Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, Just as, considering the nature of the individual, a different quantity is due to different men, so also, considering the nature of the individual, a different sex is due to different men. Moreover, this same diversity is becoming to the perfection of the species, the different degrees whereof are filled by this very difference of sex and quantity. Wherefore just as men will rise again of various stature, so will they rise again of different sex. And though there be difference of sex there will be no shame in seeing one another, since there will no lust to invite them to shameful deeds which are the cause of shame. Reply to Objection 1: When it is said: We shall all meet “Christ unto a perfect man,” this refers not to the male sex but to the strength of soul which will be in all, both men and women. Reply to Objection 2: Woman is subject to man on account of the frailty of nature, as regards both vigor of soul and strength of body. After the resurrection, however, the difference in those points will be not on account of the difference of sex, but by reason of the difference of merits. Hence the conclusion does not follow. Reply to Objection 3: Although the begetting of a woman is beside the intention of a particular nature, it is in the intention of universal nature, which requires both sexes for the perfection of the human species. Nor will any defect result from sex as stated above (ad 2). Whether all will rise again to animal life so as to exercise the functions of nutrition and generation?Objection 1: It would seem that they will rise again to the animal life, or in other words that they will make use of the acts of the nutritive and generative powers. For our resurrection will be conformed to Christ’s. But Christ is said to have ate after His resurrection (Jn. 21; Lk. 24). Therefore, after the resurrection men will eat, and in like manner beget. Objection 2: Further, the distinction of sexes is directed to generation; and in like manner the instruments which serve the nutritive power are directed to eating. Now man will rise again with all these. Therefore he will exercise the acts of the generative and nutritive powers. Objection 3: Further, the whole man will be beatified both in soul and in body. Now beatitude or happiness, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. i, 7), consists in a perfect operation. Therefore it must needs be that all the powers of the soul and all the members should have their respective acts after the resurrection. And so the same conclusion follows as above.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Also notice—in notes that talk about aging in their first few pages, notes called Blue Nights for a reason, notes called Blue Nights because at the time I began them I could think of little other than the inevitable approach of darker days—how long it took me to tell you that one salient fact, how long it took me to address the subject as it were. Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than that a small child in the room, more often than not an adored niece or nephew, has just described them as “wrinkly,” or asked how old they are. When we are asked this question we are always undone by its innocence, somehow shamed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty. Right now when I answer this question I find myself doubting my own accuracy, rechecking the increasingly undoable arithmetic (born December 5 1934, subtract 1934 from 2009, do this in your head and watch yourself get muddled by the interruption of the entirely irrelevant millennium), insisting to myself (no one else particularly cares) that there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, my forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one. Quintana was born when I was thirty-one. Only yesterday Quintana was born. Only yesterday I was taking Quintana home from the nursery at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. Enveloped in a silk-lined cashmere wrapper. Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in. What if you hadn’t been home when Dr. Watson called? What would happen to me then? Only yesterday I was holding her in my arms on the 405. Only yesterday I was promising her that she would be safe with us. We then called the 405 the San Diego Freeway. It was only yesterday when we still called the 405 the San Diego, it was only yesterday when we still called the 10 the Santa Monica, it was only the day before yesterday when the Santa Monica did not yet exist. Only yesterday I could still do arithmetic, remember telephone numbers, rent a car at the airport and drive it out of the lot without freezing, stopping at the key moment, feet already on the pedals but immobilized by the question of which is the accelerator and which the brake. Only yesterday Quintana was alive. I disengage my feet from the pedals, first one, then the other. I invent a reason for the Hertz attendant to start the rental car. I am seventy-five years old: this is not the reason I give.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  If Mademoiselle found herself seated too far at the end of the huge table, and especially if she lost precedence to a certain poor relative who was almost as fat as she (“Je suis une sylphide à côté d’elle,” Mademoiselle would say with a shrug of contempt), then her sense of injury caused her lips to twitch in a would-be ironical smile—and when a naïve neighbor would smile back, she would rapidly shake her head, as if coming out of some very deep meditation, with the remark: “Excusez-moi, je souriais à mes tristes pensées.” And as though nature had not wished to spare her anything that makes one supersensitive, she was hard of hearing. Sometimes at table we boys would suddenly become aware of two big tears crawling down Mademoiselle’s ample cheeks. “Don’t mind me,” she would say in a small voice, and she kept on eating till the unwiped tears blinded her; then, with a heartbroken hiccough she would rise and blunder out of the dining room. Little by little the truth would come out. The general talk had turned, say, on the subject of the warship my uncle commanded, and she had perceived in this a sly dig at her Switzerland that had no navy. Or else it was because she fancied that whenever French was spoken, the game consisted in deliberately preventing her from directing and adorning the conversation. Poor lady, she was always in such a nervous hurry to seize control of intelligible table talk before it bolted back into Russian that no wonder she bungled her cue. “And your Parliament, sir, how is it getting along?” she would suddenly burst out brightly from her end of the table, challenging my father, who, after a harassing day, was not exactly eager to discuss troubles of the state with a singularly unreal person who neither knew nor cared anything about them. Thinking that someone had referred to music, “But Silence, too, may be beautiful,” she would bubble. “Why, one evening, in a desolate valley of the Alps, I actually heard Silence.” Sallies like these, especially when growing deafness led her to answer questions none had put, resulted in a painful hush, instead of touching off the rockets of a sprightly causerie.

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

  He was very quick and throwing his head aside, escaped the full force of the blow; still the seam of the new ball grazed his cheek-bone and broke the skin: everyone stood amazed: only people who know the strength of English conventions can realise the sensation. Jones himself did not know what to do but took out his handkerchief to mop the blood, the skin being just broken. As for me, I walked away by myself. I had broken the supreme law of our schoolboy honor: never to give away our dissensions to a master, still less to boys and masters from another school; I had sinned in public, too, and before everyone; I’d be universally condemned. The truth is, I was desperate, dreadfully unhappy, for since the breakdown of the fags’ revolt the lower boys had drawn away from me and the older boys never spoke to me if they could help it and then it was always as “Pat.” I felt myself an outcast and was utterly lonely and miserable as only despised outcasts can be. I was sure, too, I should be expelled and knew my father would judge me harshly; he was always on the side of the authorities and masters. However, the future was not to be as gloomy as my imagination pictured it. The Mathematical Master was a young Cambridge man of perhaps six and twenty, Stackpole by name: I had asked him one day about a problem in algebra and he had been kind to me. On returning to the school this fatal afternoon about six, I happened to meet him on the edge of the playing field and by a little sympathy he soon drew out my whole story. “I want to be expelled. I hate the beastly school”, was my cry. All the charm of the Irish schools was fermenting in me: I missed the kindliness of boy to boy and of the masters to the boys; above all the imaginative fancies of fairies and “the little people” which had been taught us by our nurses and though only half believed in; yet enriched and glorified life,—all this was lost to me. My head in especial, was full of stories of Banshees and fairy queens and heroes, half due to memory, half to my own shaping, which made me a desirable companion to Irish boys and only got me derision from the English. “I wish I had known that you were being fagged”, Stackpole said when he had heard all, “I can easily remedy that”, and he went with me to the schoolroom and then and there erased my name from the fags’ list and wrote in my name in the First Mathematical Division. “There”, he said with a smile, “you are now in the Upper School where you belong. I think”, he added, “I had better go and tell the Doctor what I’ve done. Don’t be down-hearted, Harris”, he added, “it’ll all come right.”

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  No. I insisted on lifting it myself, because why accept help (or your own limitations) when you can push and force? Why not lift heavy things by yourself? It’s what you’ve done emotionally most of your life, taking everything on with a cheery smile. (You should have I’m fine, damn it tattooed on your forehead.) And for the love of God, why remember that you are a couch potato, and tubers like you have no business impersonating CrossFit champs? Sigh. Unfortunately, I am still unable to answer most of those questions. My friend Wayne Muller, author and minister, captures my cleaning mania beautifully: “We take refuge in speed, we avoid the searing burning in the heart by chasing swiftly this way and that, we become a moving target, so it is more difficult for those unbearable feelings to find us. We refrain from rest, refuse to even pause. Faster feels better because it allows us to avoid accepting what we need.” When I’m trying to outrun my feelings, that’s exactly what I do. I give what energy I have to others or to my work, and if there’s any left, I tidy, I clean, I move at a supersonic pace to avoid myself. Maybe you can relate. But you know what helps me stop (beside back pain?): understanding what my body needs and why. Though it may not always feel like it, our bodies do so much for us while asking for little in return. Let’s get to know our beautiful beings a bit more. Doing so may reinspire you to care for yourself. TEND TO YOUR GARDEN Your body is an extraordinary ecosystem, and you are the custodian of your delicate inner terrain. Pretty amazing, right? Take a moment and visualize this with me. Imagine that inside your body, there’s a beautiful garden. A lush space full of all kinds of budding life—all working in harmony. Standing in that garden, we begin to realize that there’s no single choice that’s going to determine whether it’s healthy or not. Instead, there are dozens of factors that make a difference: the quality of the soil, the quality of the water, whether there’s enough sunlight, the presence or absence of pollutants, the presence or absence of nutrients, and so on. Whether you’re aware of it or not, there are dozens of decisions you make every day that help your garden either thrive or lose its vibrancy. The scientific study of the choices and conditions that determine whether your garden thrives is called epigenetics. Epi- literally means “above.” So these are the factors that have nothing to do with your genes but can still determine how they behave. Now, it’s true that your genes influence many aspects of your well-being. They’re like the seeds that were planted in your garden long before you ever got there. You had no control over those early seeds. But thankfully, those inherited seeds don’t have to determine your future.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  When I wasn’t getting whippings, I hid out at the library on 135th Street and forged notes from my mother to get books from the closed shelf and read about sex and having babies and waited to become pregnant. None of the books were very clear to me about the relationship between having your period and having a baby, but they were all very clear about the relationship between penises and getting pregnant. Or maybe the confusion was all in my own mind, because I had always been a very fast but not a very careful reader. So four years later, in my fourteenth year, I was a very scared little girl, still half-afraid that one of that endless stream of doctors would look up into my body and discover my four-year-old shame and say to my mother, “Aha! So that’s what’s wrong! Your daughter is about to become pregnant!” On the other hand, if I let my mother know that I knew what was happening and what these medical safaris were all about, I would have to answer her questions about how and wherefore I knew, since she hadn’t told me, divulging in the process the whole horrible and self-incriminating story of forbidden books and forged library notes and rooftops and stairwell conversations. A year after the rooftop incident, we moved farther uptown and I was transferred to a different school. The kids there seemed to know a lot more about sex than at St. Mark’s, and in the eighth grade, I had stolen money and bought Adeline a pack of cigarettes and she had confirmed my bookish suspicions about how babies were made. My response to her graphic descriptions had been to think to myself—there obviously must be another way that Adeline doesn’t know about, because my parents have children and I know they never did anything like that. But the basic principles were all there, and sure enough they were the same as I had gathered from The Young People’s Family Book. So in my fourteenth summer, on examining table after examining table, I kept my legs open and my mouth shut, and when I saw blood on my pants one hot July afternoon, I rinsed them out secretly in the bathroom and put them back on wet because I didn’t know how to break the news to my mother that both her worries and mine were finally over. (All this time I had at least understood that having your period was a sign you were not pregnant.)

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  to respect themselves as well as each other. Now you have made loneliness holy and useful and no longer needed now your light shines very brightly but I want you to know your darkness also rich and beyond fear. “Never Take Fire from a Woman” My sister and I have been raised to hate genteelly each other’s silences sear up our tongues like flame we greet each other with respect meaning from a watchful distance while we dream of lying in the tender of passion to drink from a woman who smells like love. Between Ourselves Once when I walked into a room my eyes would seek out the one or two black faces for contact or reassurance or a sign I was not alone now walking into rooms full of black faces that would destroy me for any difference where shall my eyes look? Once it was easy to know who were my people. If we were stripped to our strength of all pretense and our flesh was cut away the sun would bleach all our bones as white as the face of my black mother was bleached white by gold or Orishala and how does that measure me? I do not believe our wants have made all our lies holy. Under the sun on the shores of Elmina a black man sold the woman who carried my grandmother in her belly he was paid with bright yellow coin that shone in the evening sun and in the faces of her sons and daughters. When I see that brother behind my eyes his irises are bloodless and without color his tongue clicks like yellow coins tossed up on this shore where we share the same corner of an alien and corrupted heaven and whenever I try to eat the words of easy blackness as salvation I taste the color of my grandmother’s first betrayal. I do not believe our wants have made all our lies holy. But I do not whistle his name at the shrine of Shopona I do not bring down the rosy juices of death upon him nor forget Orishala is called the god of whiteness who works in the dark wombs of night forming the shapes we all wear so that even cripples and dwarfs and albinos are scared worshipers when the boiled corn is offered. Humility lies in the face of history I have forgiven myself for him for the white meat we all consumed in secret before we were born we shared the same meal. When you impale me upon your lances of narrow blackness before you hear my heart speak mourn your own borrowed blood your own borrowed visions Do not mistake my flesh for the enemy do not write my name in the dust before the shrine of the god of smallpox for we are all children of Eshu god of chance and the unpredictable and we each wear many changes inside of our skin. Armed with scars healed

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

  One day my father sent for me and I went with a petty officer to his vessel in the harbor: my right ear had bled on to my collar. As soon as my father noticed it and saw the older scars, he got angry and took me back to the school and told Mrs. Frost what he thought of her, and her punishments. Immediately afterwards, it seems to me I was sent to live with my eldest brother Vernon, ten years older than myself, who was in lodgings with friends in Galway while going to the College. There I spent the next five years, which passed leaving a blank. I learned nothing in those years except how to play “tig”, “hide and seek”, “footer” and ball. I was merely a healthy, strong, little animal without an ache or pain or trace of thought. Then I remember an interlude at Belfast where Vernon and I lodged with an old Methodist who used to force me to go to church with him and drew on a little black skullcap during the Service, which filled me with shame and made me hate him. There is a period in life when every thing peculiar or individual, excites dislike and is in itself an offense. I learned here to “mitch” and lie simply to avoid school and to play, till my brother found I was coughing and having sent for a doctor, was informed that I had congestion of the lungs; the truth being that I played all day and never came home for dinner, seldom indeed before seven o’clock, when I knew Vernon would be back. I mention this incident because, while confined to the house, I discovered under the old Methodist’s bed, a set of doctor’s books with colored plates of the insides and the pudenda of men and women. I devoured all the volumes and bits of knowledge from them stuck to me for many a year. But curiously enough the main sex fact was not revealed to me then; but in talks a little later with boys of my own age. I learned nothing in Belfast but rules of games and athletics. My brother Vernon used to go to a gymnasium every evening and exercise and box. To my astonishment he was not among the best; so while he was boxing I began practicing this and that, drawing myself up till my chin was above the bar, and repeating this till one evening Vernon found I could do it thirty times running: his praise made me proud.

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

  Reply to Objection 2: To wish one had not sinned on account of the shamefulness of vice is a good will: but this will not be in the wicked. Reply to Objection 3: It will be possible for the damned to repent of their sins without turning their will away from sin, because in their sins they will shun, not what they heretofore desired, but something else, namely the punishment. Reply to Objection 4: However obstinate men may be in this world, they repent of the sins indirectly, if they be punished for them. Thus Augustine says (QQ[83], qu. 36): “We see the most savage beasts are deterred from the greatest pleasures by fear of pain.” Whether the damned by right and deliberate reason would wish not to be?Objection 1: It would seem impossible for the damned, by right and deliberate reason, to wish not to be. For Augustine says (De Lib. Arb. iii, 7): “Consider how great a good it is to be; since both the happy and the unhappy will it; for to be and yet to be unhappy is a greater thing than not to be at all.” Objection 2: Further, Augustine argues thus (De Lib. Arb. iii, 8): “Preference supposes election.” But “not to be” is not eligible; since it has not the appearance of good, for it is nothing. Therefore not to be cannot be more desirable to the damned than “to be.” Objection 3: Further, the greater evil is the more to be shunned. Now “not to be” is the greatest evil, since it removes good altogether, so as to leave nothing. Therefore “not to be” is more to be shunned than to be unhappy: and thus the same conclusion follows as above. On the contrary, It is written (Apoc. 9:6): “In those days men . . . shall desire to die, and death shall fly from them.” Further, the unhappiness of the damned surpasses all unhappiness of this world. Now in order to escape the unhappiness of this world, it is desirable to some to die, wherefore it is written (Ecclus. 41:3,4): “O death, thy sentence is welcome to the man that is in need and to him whose strength faileth; who is in a decrepit age, and that is in care about all things, and to the distrustful that loseth wisdom [Vulg.: ‘patience’].” Much more, therefore, is “not to be” desirable to the damned according to their deliberate reason.

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

  Newsweek likewise lauded the work as an “extraordinary social document, grounded in exhaustive research and animated by a grand passion for personal and historical truth.” But it was all a lie. 4 Far from uncovering his real roots, it was discovered that the mega-selling author had invented his lineage. Controversy over his historical claims hit the news in 1977, as prominent journalists and scholars called his work a “fraud,” and the full story unfolded over the next five years. He had manipulated his family oral accounts and embellished his family tree in order to tell a grand tale of an exceptional heritage that never existed. For starters, the Gambian storyteller he relied upon merely told Haley what he wanted to hear. The historical Toby was not even born with the name Kunta Kinte—that genealogical lineage was pure fiction. While Haley’s Africa was not a caricature on the order of Tarzan’s overripe jungle, it was a half-conscious or self- conscious distortion: he converted Gambia into a place mirroring middle America, as a land of many villages. The actual village of his reputed ancestors, as Haley admitted, was a British trading post, not the symbolic West African “Eden” it was portrayed as, a pristine world to constitute for history-hungry African-Americans a reverse Plymouth Rock. 5 If that were the extent of the author’s crimes, it would be bad enough. But Haley’s attempts at research actually exposed far more serious errors. The birthdates of Kunta Kinte’s American progeny were wrongly given, and Haley attributed to his family tree the names of people to whom he was unrelated. Neither the white nor the black families archived in Roots matched existing historical records. As to his descent from the white Lea family of North Carolina, Haley completely invented a villainous cracker character named Tom Lea, who raped Kunta Kinte’s daughter, Kizzy (Haley’s alleged direct ancestor), and betrayed his own mulatto son, “Chicken George,” by selling off his family. This could not have occurred, because the historical Thomas Lea was already dead by that time. And Lea was not in fact Haley’s “po’ cracker,” but a prosperous landowner with sixteen thousand acres and numerous slaves; some of his relatives held prestigious political offices. The class element in Roots was, in this way, as wrong on the American side as on the African. Nor was there a shred of evidence that Haley’s lost Gambian ancestors were of an elite bloodline, and Toby/Kunte Kinte a breed and a class above the African American field hands who did the most backbreaking labor in the U.S. South. Yet for Haley, Kunta Kinte in America had to be fashioned as a man who honored the memory of his proud African ancestors; and in spite of his enslaved condition, he and his family had to set themselves apart from their low- class cracker relatives.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  " I have heard," said Simontault, " that one might sooner break two marriages than the love of a priest and his servant." -' I believe it," said Ennasuite, " for those who bind others in marriage know how to fasten the knot so tightly that it is only to be undone by death ; the doctors, too, maintain that spiritual language is more persuasive than other, and consequently spiritual love surpasses every other kind." *' I cannot pardon ladies," said Dagoucin, " who for- sake a well-bred husband or lover for a priest, however good-looking." " Leave our holy mother the Church alone, I pray you," said Hircan, " and be assured that it is a great pleasure for poor timid women to sin in secret with those who can absolve them ; for some there are who are much more ashamed of confessing a sin than of committing it." " You speak of such as know not God," said Oisille, "and imagine that secret things will not be revealed be- fore the whole host of Heaven. But I do not believe that it is for sake of confession that such women seek confessors. The enemy has so blinded them that they think much more of settling down upon a place that seems to them the most secret and secure, than of having absolution for the guilt of which they do not repent." " Repent, indeed ! " exclaimed Saffredent. " They think themselves much more saintly than other women, and I am sure that there are some who think it a great honour to them to persevere in intrigues of this sort." " From the way in which you express yourself," said ^ixthday^^ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 4^^ Oisille, "one would think you knew some such person. That being the case, I beg you will begin the day to- morrow by telling us what you know. There goes the last bell for vespers ; for the monks went away after our tenth novel, and left us to decide our dispute between ourselves." So saying she rose, and the company following her example, they went to church, where they found they were waited for. After vespers they supped, and not without talking over several fine tales. After supper they all went, according to custom, to divert themselves m the meadow, and then to bed, to have their memories clearer next day. 480 THE HEPTAMERON OF TIJE SEVENTH DAY.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  17. Saints and Modernity 130 Some of his choices were controversial, none more so than Edith Stein. She was born to a German Jewish family in 1891. She converted to Catholicism in middle age and became a nun, Teresa Benedicta, with the Discalced Carmelites, taking her full vows in 1938. She was killed during World War II at Auschwitz. Her canonization process was controversial for several reasons. Her beatification as a Christian martyr seemed to some critics at odds with the fact she was killed for her Jewish heritage. The timing of her canonization also seemed suspect: It came during the 1990s, a period when the Catholic Church was being criticized for its lack of response to Nazi atrocities during the war. Like the Catholics, the Anglican Church also divided its focus between martyrs and social reformers and embraced a wide-ranging group of artists, poets, and notables whose work had a strong religious focus. It recognized a wide variety of “heroes and heroines” in the wake of the Reformation. One of the earliest to be so recognized was the 17th-century reformer and religious leader George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, a group also known as the Quakers. Other Anglican heroes and heroines include Florence Nightingale and other social reformers, such as William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army. Nightingale is, of course, famous for revolutionizing battlefield medical care and organizing nursing care to professional standards of modern hygiene. Margaret Clitherow and the Jesuit lay brother Nicholas Owen are recognized as martyrs by the Catholic Church for their actions during the English Reformation. They are among a group known as the Forty Martyrs: Catholics killed in England under Protestant rule. 131 17. Saints and Modernity Anglican “heroes” also span the globe. Ini Kopuria, a police officer from the Solomon Islands, is honored as the founder of the Melanesian Brotherhood, an Anglican religious community created in 1925 that now spans Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea as well. The changes to the modern cult of the saints ref lect our changing world. We still need mystics, visionaries, and philosophers, even as the work of social reformers and exemplars of bravery and virtue in the face of injustice have become ever more relevant and urgent. Reading Duffin, Jacalyn. Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints, and Healing in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

• From The Surprising Lives of Christian Saints Course Guidebook (2023)

  97 13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru Martín was born into a diverse parish where nearly 40% of the children were illegitimate and biracial, like him. His mother was a servant in the household of Isabel Garcia Michel. We can assume that as a young child, he would have accompanied her about her tasks: cooking, cleaning, and perhaps watching the family’s children. Martín left no writings of his own, as he remained illiterate throughout his life. We know about him primarily through the testimony and hagiographies written by his many admirers in the decades after his death. These are problematic, of course, in the ways already discussed for other saints: They frame his life in terms of common saintly tropes. But they add an additional layer of complexity, viewing Martín through their prejudices about Afro-Peruvians’ social status, piety, and abilities. Lima was a remarkably integrated city, and young Martín would’ve been familiar with Spaniards, Creoles, Indians, and free and enslaved Afro-Peruvians. Despite this spatial integration, the ugly racism that accompanied European conquests and the exploitation of native and African labor pervaded Limeño society and Martín’s life. At one end of the social spectrum were the wealthy Spaniards, European elites who could freely access government positions, higher education, and a bevy of legal rights. At the other end were enslaved Africans and their descendants. Indians occupied a middle status—not enslaved, but not possessing full legal status and rights. Free biracial or mixed-race people, such as Martín and Juana, inhabited a f luid middle sphere—barred from many career paths and opportunities but extended comparatively more privileges and access by the Spaniards than their enslaved and free Black relatives. The racist concepts that permeated early modern colonial society also permeated religious language and ideas. The only positive Black models Martín may have heard promoted in public discourse were “exemplary” servants and slaves who were compliant, diligent, subservient, and pious. These undoubtedly shaped his sense of self and damaged his self-worth. Martín seems to have shown an early interest in a career as a healer, and his mother’s employer helped him get an apprenticeship with either an apothecary or barber. Even if his father had sponsored his education, however, Martín would have been barred from a career as a doctor. 13. Martín de Porres: Healer of Peru 98

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  ing very straight and still—*that you're the kind of man he ought to be when he grows up?' And, as my father said nothing: *He is growing up, you laiow.' And then, spitefully, Which is more than I can say for you.' 'Go to bed, Ellen,' said my father—sounding very weary. I had the feeling, since they were talking about me, that I ought to go downstairs and tell Ellen that whatever was wrong between my father and myself we could work out be- tween us without her help. And, perhaps which seems odd—I felt that she was disre- spectful of me. For I had certainly never said a word to her about my father. I heard his heavy, imeven footfalls as he moved across the room, towards the stairs. Don't think,' said Ellen, 'that I don't know where you've been.' Tve been out— drinking— ' said my father, •and now I'd like to get a httle sleep. Do you mind?' Tou've been with that girl, Beatrice,' said Ellen. That's where you always are and that's — 23 GIOVANNI'S ROOM where all your money goes and all your man- hood and seK-respect, too/ She had succeeded in making him angry. He began to stammer. If you think—if you tfeinfe—that Fm going to stand—stand—stand here—and argue with you about my pri- my private lifel—if you think I'm vate life going to argue with you about it, why, you're out of your mind/ T. certainly don't care,* said Ellen, Vhat you do with yourself. It isn't you I'm worried about. It's only that you're the only person who has any audiority over David. I don't. And he hasn't got any mother. And he only listens to me when he thinks it pleases you. Do you really think it's a good idea for David to see you staggering home drunk all the time? And don't fool your- self/ she added, after a moment, in a voice thick with passion, 'don't fool yourself that he doesn't know where you're coming from, don't think he doesn't know about your women!' She was wrong. I don't think I did know about them—or I had never thought about them. But from that evening, I thought about them all the time. I could scarcely ever face a woman without wondering whether or not my father had, in Ellen's phrase, been 'interfering' with her. 1 think it barely possible/ said my father, *that David has a cleaner mind than yours.' The silence, then, in which my father climbed the stairs was by far the worst silence my hfe 24 James Baldwin had ever known. I was wondering what they were thinking—each of them. I wondered how they looked. I wondered what I would see when I saw them in the morning.

• From The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)

  He’s lapping and lapping; I can see his eyes drifting peacefully from side to side, dreamily independent of the suckling action. Then the man sucking the cock comes up for air and you take his place, fitting yourself around a tumescence still warm and tasting of the other guy’s spit. You look up as someone else unbuttons the country boy’s shirt, revealing a hairless chest marbled by blue veins and decorated like a piece of wedding cake with two candle sockets in pink frosting—the erect nipples. Now everyone is at work on him at once, breath in his ear, lips on his lips, mouths on his balls, cock, and ass, that arm around his waist, as though he really is a bride and this the last-minute flurry of seamstresses fitting him into his gown. When he comes, he lets out a cry. His body stiffens and he leans back. You swallow gratefully the surprisingly meager but sweet semen, and the boy’s ecstasy sets off his bridal attendants, who shoot and shout in a chorus around him. The drunk is still snoring. In two seconds you’ve buttoned up, wrapped your raincoat around you, and rushed out into the flood of passengers flowing up the stairs and rivuleting into the night. Your hair is rumpled, your face flushed, and your hand still smells of the country boy. At the subway entrance you catch sight of the businessman just behind you. Without thinking, you glance at his trousers, not too bad, he looks at your wet knees the same moment, and you and he exchange the tiniest smile of wintry complicity. A beautiful young woman at the office to whom I’d confided the secret of my sexuality (she’d sworn never to betray my confidence) looked at me now with compassion during coffee breaks, held my hand, and treated me as though I had leukemia. From her scattered remarks I grasped that she thought homosexuality was a sadness, a wound, more a poetic disposition than a perverse activity. What would she have thought if she’d seen me on my knees in a subterranean slice of jungle inserted under the leafless, treeless forest of gray Manhattan? During lunch hour, in the cruisy toilet at the old Whitney Museum (when it was still next door to the Modern), I saw a painting student I’d met at the Eton art academy. He frowned at me and said, “I scarcely recognized you, you’ve become so fat—what a shame to ruin your looks when you’re still so young. How old are you?” “Twenty-three.” “Well, you look horrible, at least thirty; you should enjoy what’s left of your youth.” A week later I mentioned to Maria that my new suit bought on time from Rogers Peet must be made of an inferior fabric since it was already wearing thin just below my crotch.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I happen to have been a remarkably small child. I say remarkably for a reason: something about my size was such that perfect strangers could always be relied upon to remark on it. “You’re not very thick,” I recall a French doctor saying when I went to see him in Paris for an antibiotic prescription. This was true enough, but I grew tired of hearing it. I grew particularly tired of hearing it when it was presented as something I might otherwise have missed. I was short, I was thin, I could circle my wrists with my thumb and index finger. My earliest memories involve being urged by my mother to gain weight, as if my failure to do so were willful, an act of rebellion. I was not allowed to get up from the table until I had eaten everything on my plate, a rule that led mainly to new and inventive ways of eating nothing on my plate. The “clean-plate club” was frequently mentioned. “Good eaters” were commended. “She’s not a human garbage can,” I recall my father exploding in my defense. As an adult I came to see this approach to food as more or less guaranteeing an eating disorder, but I never mentioned this theory to my mother. Nor do I mention it to the new neurologist. Actually the new neurologist offers, in addition to gaining weight and doing physical therapy, a third, although equally wishful, answer: the exclusionary diagnosis I received in my late twenties notwithstanding, I do not have multiple sclerosis. He is vehement on this point. There is no reason to believe that I have multiple sclerosis. Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a technique not yet available when I was in my late twenties, conclusively demonstrates that I do not have multiple sclerosis. In that case, I ask, trying to summon an appearance of faith in whatever he chooses to answer, what is it that I do have? I have neuritis, a neuropathy, a neurological inflammation. I overlook the shrug. I ask what caused this neuritis, this neuropathy, this neurological inflammation. Not weighing enough, he answers. It does not escape me that the consensus on what is wrong with me has once again insinuated the ball into my court. I am referred to a dietitian on this matter of gaining weight. The dietitian makes (the inevitable) protein shakes, brings me freshly laid eggs (better) from a farm in New Jersey and perfect vanilla ice cream (better still) from Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue. I drink the protein shakes. I eat the freshly laid eggs from the farm in New Jersey and the perfect vanilla ice cream from Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue. Nonetheless. I do not gain weight. I have an uneasy sense that the consensus solution has already failed.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  So that’s what’s wrong! Your daughter is about to become pregnant!” On the other hand, if I let my mother know that I knew what was happening and what these medical safaris were all about, I would have to answer her questions about how and wherefore I knew, since she hadn’t told me, divulging in the process the whole horrible and self-incriminating story of forbidden books and forged library notes and rooftops and stairwell conversations. A year after the rooftop incident, we moved farther uptown and I was transferred to a different school. The kids there seemed to know a lot more about sex than at St. Mark’s, and in the eighth grade, I had stolen money and bought Adeline a pack of cigarettes and she had confirmed my bookish suspicions about how babies were made. My response to her graphic descriptions had been to think to myself—there obviously must be another way that Adeline doesn’t know about, because my parents have children and I know they never did anything like that. But the basic principles were all there, and sure enough they were the same as I had gathered from The Young People’s Family Book. So in my fourteenth summer, on examining table after examining table, I kept my legs open and my mouth shut, and when I saw blood on my pants one hot July afternoon, I rinsed them out secretly in the bathroom and put them back on wet because I didn’t know how to break the news to my mother that both her worries and mine were finally over. (All this time I had at least understood that having your period was a sign you were not pregnant.) What then happened felt like a piece of an old and elaborate dance between my mother and me. She discovers finally, through a stain on the toilet seat left there on purpose by me as a mute announcement, what has taken place; she scolds, “Why didn’t you tell me about all of this, now? It’s nothing to get upset over, now you are a woman, not a child any more. Now you go over to the drugstore and ask the man for . . .” I was just relieved the whole damn thing was over with. It’s difficult to talk about double messages without having a twin tongue. But meanwhile all these nightmarish evocations and restrictions were being verbalized by my mother: “Now this means from now on you better watch your step and not be so friendly with every Tom Dick and Harry . . .”

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  Tes/ 1 say lamely, 'sometimes.' 'On foot?' she inquires. 'Because the bus driver, he has not seen you, either.' All this time she is not looking at me but around the kitchen, checking off the list in her hand with a short, yellow pencil. I can make no answer to her last, sardonic thrust, having forgotten that in a small village almost every move is made under the village's collective eye and ear. She looks briefly in the bathroom. Tm going to clean that tonight,' I say. 1 should hope so/ she says. 'Everything was clean when you moved in.' We walk back through the kitchen. She has failed to notice that two glasses are missing, broken by me, and I have not the energy to tell her. I will leave some money in the cupboard. She turns on the GIOVANNI'S ROOM 91 light in the guest room. My dirty clothes are ly- ing all over. Those go with me/ I say, trying to smile. *You could have come just across the road,' she says. 1 would have been glad to give you something to eat. A little soup, something nourishing. I cook every day for my husband; what difference does one more make?' This touches me, but I do not know how to Indicate it, and I cannot say, of course, that eat- ing with her and her husband would have stretched my nerves to the breaking point. She is examining a decorative pillow. *Are you going to join your fiancee?' she asks. I know I ought to lie, but somehow I cannot. I am afraid of her eyes. I wish, now, that I had my drink with me. 'No,' I say, flatly, 'she has gone to America.' Tiensl' she says. 'And you—do you stay in France?' She looks directly at me. Tor awhile,' I say. I am beginning to sweat. It has come to me that this woman, a peasant from Italy, must resemble, in so many ways, the mother of Giovanni. I keep trying not to hear her howls of anguish, I keep trying not to see in her eyes what would surely be there if she knew that her son would be dead by morn- ing, if she knew what I had done to her son. But, of course, she is not Giovanni's mother. It is not good,' she says, 'it is not right for a young man like you to be sitting alone in a great big house with no woman.' She looks, for a

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNI'S ROOM 153 and borrowed ten thousand francs from him again.I told himthat Giovanniand I were going througha difficulttime but that itwould be oversoon. 'He was very nice aboutit/ said Giovanni. Tie can,sometimes, bea veryniceman/ We were sittingon a terrace nearOdeon. I looked at Giovanniand thoughtfora momenthownice it wouldbeifJacques wouldtake him offmy hands. *What areyou thinking?* askedGiovanni. For a moment I was frightened and Iwas also ashamed.1was thinking/ I said, 'thatI'dlike to get out of Paris.' *Where wouldyou like to go?'he asked. *0h, I don'tknow. Anywhere.Fmsick of this city/ I saidsuddenly,with a violencethat sur- prisedusboth.Tmtired of thisancient pile of stone and all these goddamsmugpeople. Every- thingyouputyourhands on here comes to piecesin your hands.' That/saidGiovanni gravely,'istrue.' He was watchingmewith a terribleintensity. Iforced myselfto look at him andsmile. 'Wouldn'tyou like toget outof here for awhile?'I asked. 'Ahrhe said, and raisedboth hands briefly, palms outward, ina kind ofmock resignation. 1 would like to gowherever yougo. I do not feelso strongly aboutParis as youdo, suddenly. I have never liked Parisvery much.' Terhaps/ 1 said — I scarcely knew what I was 154 JamesBaldwin saying — 'we could go tothecountry. Or to Spain/ *Ah/ he said, lightly, 'you are lonely foryour mistress/ I was guiltyand irritated andfullof love and pain.I wanted to kickhimandI wanted totake him inmy arms. 'That'snoreason to goto Spain/ I said sullenly. Td justlike tosee it, that's all. This city is expensive.' 'Well,' he said brightly, let us go toSpain. Perhaps it will remindmeofItaly.' 'Would yourathergo to Italy? Would you rather visit yourhome?' He smiled.1 donot think I have ahome there anymore.' And then:'No.I would notlike to goto Italy — perhaps,afterall,forthe same rea- son you donot wantto gotothe United States/ 'ButI am going to theUnitedStates/ Isaid, quickly. And helooked at me.1mean, I'm cer- tainly goingtogo backthere oneofthese days/ 'Oneof thesedays,'hesaid. 'Everything bad will happen— one of these days/ Why isit bad?' He smiled,'Why,youwill gohome and then you will find that home isnothome anymore. Then you willreaUy beintrouble. Aslongas you stay here,youcanalwaysthink: One day Iwill go home.'Heplayed withmythumb and grinned. "N'est-ce pas?' 'Beautifullogic/ Isaid.Toumean Ihave a home to go toaslongasIdon't go there?' He laughed. 'Well,isn't it true? You don't

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  All dates are given in the New Style: we lagged twelve days behind the rest of the civilized world in the nineteenth century, and thirteen in the beginning of the twentieth. By the Old Style I was born on April 10, at daybreak, in the last year of the last century, and that was (if I could have been whisked across the border at once) April 22 in, say, Germany; but since all my birthdays were celebrated, with diminishing pomp, in the twentieth century, everybody, including myself, upon being shifted by revolution and expatriation from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian, used to add thirteen, instead of twelve days to the 10th of April. The error is serious. What is to be done? I find “April 23” under “birth date” in my most recent passport, which is also the birth date of Shakespeare, my nephew Vladimir Sikorski, Shirley Temple and Hazel Brown (who, moreover, shares my passport). This, then, is the problem. Calculatory ineptitude prevents me from trying to solve it. When after twenty years of absence I sailed back to Europe, I renewed ties that had been undone even before I had left it. At these family reunions, Speak, Memory was judged. Details of date and circumstance were checked, and it was found that in many cases I had erred, or had not examined deeply enough an obscure but fathomable recollection. Certain matters were dismissed by my advisers as legends or rumors or, if genuine, were proven to be related to events or periods other than those to which frail memory had attached them. My cousin Sergey Sergeevich Nabokov gave me invaluable information on the history of our family. Both my sisters angrily remonstrated against my description of the journey to Biarritz (beginning of Chapter Seven) and by pelting me with specific details convinced me I had been wrong in leaving them behind (“with nurses and aunts”!). What I still have not been able to rework through want of specific documentation, I have now preferred to delete for the sake of over-all truth. On the other hand, a number of facts relating to ancestors and other personages have come to light and have been incorporated in this final version of Speak, Memory. I hope to write some day a “Speak on, Memory,” covering the years 1940–60 spent in America: the evaporation of certain volatiles and the melting of certain metals are still going on in my coils and crucibles.