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 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

  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 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 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 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.

• 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 Giovanni's Room (1956)

  'Strange?' asked Giovanni. 'Why?' And Jacques giggled. I was suddenly ashamed that I was with him. 'All these men'—and I knew that voice, breathless, insinuating, high as no girl's had ever been, and hot, suggesting, somehow, the absolutely motionless, deadly heat which hangs over swamp ground in July 'all these men/ he gasped, 'and so few women. Doesn't that seem strange to you?' 'Ah/ said Giovanni, and turned away to serve another customer, 'no doubt the women are waiting at home.* Tm sure one's waiting for you/ insisted Jacques, to which Giovanni did not respond. Well. That didn't take long/ said Jacques, half to me, half to the space which had just held Giovanni. 'Aren't you glad you stayed? You've got me all to yourself/ 'Oh, you're handling it all wrong,' I said, lie's mad for you. He just doesn't want to seem too anxious. Order him a drink. Find out where he likes to buy his clothes. Tell him about that cunning httle AHa Romeo you're just dying to give away to some deserving bartender.' *Very funny/ said Jacques. 'Well/ I said, 'faint heart never won fair athlete, that's for sure.' 'Anyway, I'm sure he sleeps with girls. They always do, you know/ GIOVANNI'S ROOM 43 Tve heard about boys who do that. Nasty little beasts/ We stood in silence for awhile, *Why don't you invite him to have a drink with us?' Jacques suggested. I looked at him. Why don't I? Well, you may find this hard to believe, but, actually, I'm sort of queer for girls myseK. If that was his sister looking so good, I'd invite her to have a drink with us. I don't spend money on men/ I could see Jacques struggling not to say that I didn't have any objection to allowing men to spend money on me; I watched his brief struggle with a slight smile, for I knew he couldn't say it; then he said, with that cheery, brave smile of his: 1 was not suggesting that you jeopardize, even for a moment, that'—he paused—*that immaculate manhood which is your pride and joy. I only suggested that you invite him because he will almost certainly refuse if I invite him.' *But man/ I said, grinning, 'think of the confusion. He'll think that I'm, the one who's lusting for his body. How do we get out of that?' If there should be any confusion,* said Jacques, with dignity, 1 will be happy to clear it up.' We measured each other for a moment. Then I laughed. Wait till he comes back this way. I hope he orders a magnum of the most expensive champagne in France.' I turned, leaning on the bar. I felt, somehow, —

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  When my daughter was a baby I read somewhere that, while labeling their infants’ body parts (“here’s your nose,” “here are your toes”), parents typically include a boy’s genitals (at the very least, “here’s your pee-pee”) but not a girl’s. Leaving something unnamed makes it quite literally unspeakable: a void, an absence, a taboo. Nor does that silence change much as girls get older. Adolescent penises insist on recognition. Enter any high school and you’ll see them scrawled everywhere: on lockers, on notebooks, on desks, on clipboards. Boys cannot seem to restrain themselves from drawing their sexual organs, loud and proud, on any blank surface. But whither the bushy vulva, the magnificent minge, the triangular twat? Did I hear an “eww”? Exactly. Even the most comprehensive sex education classes stick with a woman’s internal parts—uteri, tubes, ovaries. Those classic diagrams of a woman’s reproductive system, the ones shaped like the head of a steer, blur into a gray Y between the legs, as if the vulva and the labia, let alone the clitoris, don’t exist. Imagine not clueing a twelve-year-old boy into the existence of his penis! And whereas males’ puberty is characterized by ejaculation, masturbation, and the emergence of a near-unstoppable sex drive, females’ is defined by . . . periods. And the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. Where is the discussion of girls’ sexual development? When do we talk to girls about desire and pleasure? When do we explain the miraculous nuances of their anatomy? When do we address exploration, self-knowledge? No wonder boys’ physical needs seem inevitable to teens while girls’ are, at best, optional.

• From Girls & Sex (2016)

  At the beginning of every interview I conducted, I asked which pronoun—or combination of pronouns—to use when referring to a girl’s sexual partners. Many identified unambiguously as straight or gay, others as bisexual or bi-curious. Several times an interview itself became a place to explore incipient feelings. Lizzy, for instance, a soft-spoken eighteen-year-old in the first month of her freshman year at a mid-Atlantic college, fidgeted and blushed through much of our discussion, staring at the floor or past my shoulder as she spoke. A miasma of low-grade depression seemed to hover around her, and she was so unresponsive that I began to wonder why she had volunteered to talk to me at all. She told me she had been the type of girl who was excluded and bullied in high school, called “bitch” and “fat” by the “athletic-pretty-smart ‘whole package’ girls that boys generally like.” Still, she did have a boyfriend during her junior year, a fellow clarinetist in the school orchestra named Will. “I never really felt sexual desire for him, though,” she said. “It was more like he was my best friend. We would hang out, watch TV, go to the movies. Sometimes we’d kiss a little bit, but not full-on making out.” I asked her what those sessions felt like. She shrugged. “Nice, I guess. It wasn’t really my thing. To be honest, I don’t really understand what’s so great about it.” After about four months, Will began to push her to go further—much further—via increasingly insistent texts: “We should totally have sex!” he wrote, and “Come on! It will be fun! It will be great!” and “Why not? I don’t understand!” “I told him he was making me uncomfortable,” Lizzy said. “We’d never even done anything below the neck! But he would just keep bringing it up, texting me over and over.” Although Lizzy didn’t think she should have to justify a disinterest in intercourse with a boy she’d barely kissed, one who demonstrably had no respect for her limits and whose conversational skills did not extend past the keyboard, she nonetheless tried. Maybe, she said, her reluctance stemmed from shame over her body. “You see a lot of models and superstars, and they’re so skinny and gorgeous,” she said, looking down at her soft belly. “Even shopping for clothes—clothes are cut for people who are skinny, and I’m just not skinny.” Then she shook her head. “But really, I wasn’t attracted to him enough to even want to try. It was just, ‘Oh, no! He wants to have sex and I don’t.’” After two months of fending him off, she suggested they “take a break.” Will, her supposed “best friend,” never spoke to her again.

• From Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir (2017)

  Though it was obvious the odds were against them, the bettors had two things in their favor: the wagers were very small, and the ongoing “glory be” hope of receiving a sudden stroke of great good fortune relieved some measure of their lifelong, poverty-induced despair. I knew firsthand about this daily anticipatory excitement inherent in betting on the numbers because I occasionally, and secretly, placed a small bet myself (despite my parents’ admonitions), often with nickels or dimes I filched from the store cash register. (This recall of my petty theft makes me, even now, cringe with shame.) My father repeatedly pointed out that only fools would bet against such big odds. I knew he was right, but, until I got older, it was the only game in town. I made the bets through William, one of the two black men working in the store. I always promised him 25 percent of my winnings. William was an alcoholic and a lively, charming man, though not a paragon of integrity, and I never knew whether he truly placed my bets or simply pocketed my dimes or booked the bet himself. I never hit the number, and I suspect that, if I had, William, most likely, would have begged off by saying the numbers runner had not come that day or some similar concocted story. I finally abandoned the enterprise when I had the great good fortune of discovering baseball betting pools, craps, pinochle, and, above all, poker.

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

  Shepard, Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989), 239. 37. For the “Bible school dropout,” see Preston, “Bakker Given 45 Years”; for the Bakkers’ extravagant lifestyle, see Elizabeth LeLand, “Jim and Tammy Bakker Lived Life of Luxuriant Excess,” Ocala Star- Banner, May 24, 1987; Richard N. Ostling, “Of God and Greed: Bakker and Falwell Trade Charges in Televangelism’s Unholy Row,” Time (June 8, 1987): 70–72, 74, esp. 72. On living in a trailer and later excesses, see Shepard, Forgiven, 35, 110, 133, 180, 201, 249, 264, 551. 38. On Jim Bakker’s use of his poor class background in his religious message, see Richard N. Ostling, “TV’s Unholy Row: A Sex-and-Money Scandal Tarnishes Electronic Evangelicalism,” Time (April 6, 1987): 60–64, 67, esp. 62. On prosperity theology, see “Jim Bakker,” in Randall Herbert Balmer, Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2004), 50–52; and Axel R. Schafer, Countercultural Conservatives: American Evangelicalism from the Postwar Revival to the New Christian Right (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 125. On the “cheesy” nature of the Jim and Tammy show, see Brian Siang, “Jim & Tammy Faye’s Fall from Grace Is Perfectly Clear,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 8, 1987. 39. On Tammy’s drug addiction, see “Tammy Bakker Treated,” [New Orleans] Times-Picayune, 1986; and Ostling, “Of God and Greed,” 72. On sex scandals and Hahn revelations, see Associated Press story, “Playboy Interview with Jessica Hahn,” [Spartanburg, SC] Herald Journal, September 22, 1987; Horace Davis, “Hahn’s Story—In Hahn’s Words,” Lakeland [FL] Ledger, October 9, 1987; “Fletcher Says Bakker Bisexual,” Gadsden [AL] Times, December 5, 1988; “As He Faces Likely Indictment, New Sex Accusation: Bakker Says Christianity in Disarray,” Ellensburg [WA] Daily Record, December 5, 1988; “Bakker Defrocked by Assemblies of God,” Lodi [CA] News-Sentinel, May 7, 1987; Montgomery Brower, “Unholy Roller Coaster,” People, September 18, 1989, 98–99, 102–4, 106, esp. 104; Mary Zeiss Stange, “Jessica Hahn’s Strange Odyssey from PTL to Playboy,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 105–16, esp. 106; “The Jessica Hahn Story: Part 1,” Playboy, November 1987, 178–80; “The Jessica Hahn Story: Part 2,” Playboy, December 1987, 198; “Jessica: A New Life,” Playboy, September 1988, 158–62. 40. On sending out the appeals for money on the first of the month, see Montgomery, “Unholy Roller Coaster,” 106; Nicholas Von Hoffman, “White Trash Moves Front and Center,” Bangor Daily News, April 8, 1987. Hoffman’s editorial appeared alongside a cartoon of Satan meeting with his minions, holding a paper marked “T.V. Evangelicals.” Satan is saying, “Then it’s agreed. The hostile takeover will not be attempted. The enterprise in question being too sleazy for our consideration.” For the typical viewers of televangelist shows, see Barry R. Litman and Elizabeth Bain, “The Viewership of Religious Television Programming: A Multidisciplinary Analysis of Televangelism,” Review of Religion 30, no.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  122 James Baldwin cameabreast and, as though hehad seen some all-revealing panicin my eyes, he gave me a look contemptuously lewdand knowing; just such a look as hemight have given, but a few hours ago,tothe desperately well-dressed nym- phomaniac ortrollop who was trying tomake himbelieveshe wasalady.And in another second, had ourcontact lasted, I was certain thattherewould eruptintospeech, outof all thatlight andbeauty, somebrutalvariation of Look,baby, Iknow you, Ifeltmy faceflame, I feltmy hearthardenandshake as I hurried pasthim,trying to look stonilybeyond him. He had caught me by surprise, forI had,some- how, not really beenthinking of himbut ofthe letter inmy pocket,ofHella and Giovanni. I got to the othersideofthe boulevard, not dar- ingtolookback,andIwondered what he had seen in me to elicitsuch instantaneous con- tempt.I was toooldto suppose thatit hadany- thingtodo with my walk,or theway I heldmy hands,ormy voice— which, anyway, he had not heard.Itwas something else andI would neversee it. I would never dare to see it. It would belike looking at the naked sun.But, hurrying, and not daring now to look at any- one, male or female, who passed me on the wide sidewalks, I knew that what the sailor had seen in my unguarded eyes was envy and desire: I had seen it often in Jacques' eyes and my reaction and the sailor's had been the same. But if I were still able to feel affection and if he GIOVANNI'S ROOM 123 had seen it in my eyes, it wouldnot have helped, for affection, for the boysIwas doomed to look at, was vastly more frightening thanlust. I walked farther thanI had intended,for I did not dare to stop while the sailormightstill be watching. Near the river, on ruedesPyra- mides, I sat down ata cafe table and opened Hella's letter. Mon cher,she began, Spainismyfavorite country mais ca n'empeche que Paris est toujoursma villepreferee, I longto beagain among all thosefoolish people, running for metrosand jumping off of busesand dodging motorcycles and having traffic jams andadmir- ingall that crazy statuary inall those absurd parks. I weep for the fishy ladies inthePlace de la Concorde,Spain is not likethatatall. Whatever elseSpain is,it is not frivolous. I think, really,thatI would stayin Spain for- ever — if I hadnever beentoParis. Spain isvery beautiful, stony and sunnyand lonely.But by and by yougettired of olive oil and fish and castanets and tambourines — or, anyway, Ido. I want to comehome, tocome home to Paris. It's funny, I'venever felt anyplace washome before. Nothing has happened to mehere — I suppose that pleases you, I confess itratherpleases me. The Spaniards are nice, but, of course,most of them are terribly poor, theones who aren't are impossible, Idon't like thetourists, mainly Eng- lish and American dipsomaniacs, paid, my dear.

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

  Distraught commentators twisted the facts of the case, offering up an odd collection of rationales in order to exonerate the third president from charges of immorality. One, Sally was beautiful (and Monica was cheap). Two, Clinton was an adulterer (and Jefferson was a widower of long standing). Three, Jefferson was a brilliant man whose words elevated him above his bodily urges (and the merely glib Clinton was unable to rise above his unimpressive origins). To conflate the impulses of Jefferson and Clinton was a leveling that upright Americans should not countenance. 30 Another editor saw the Lewinsky episode differently. After Clinton survived the impeachment ordeal and emerged stronger and more popular, he looked for explanations. If hating Clinton was irrational, then so was loving him. It was the “Elvis principle,” the journalist concluded, that subliminal desire all Americans have for kings. JFK had Camelot; Reagan was Hollywood royalty; Clinton and Elvis (“the King” to his millions of fans) were “rags to riches” monarchs. The kind of kings Americans looked up to were men with a hard-to-explain sex appeal and a gentle hubris. The point was that a little white trashiness could be a blessing in disguise. In the appearance-driven world of modern American politics, arrogance of style carried weight, and repressed, suit-and-tie candidates such as Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis were not in the same league as Clinton. To exude that redneck chic—to have a little Bubba—was better than being a dull, invisible, cookie-cutter politician indistinguishable from the pack. 31 Figuring out Clinton remained a favorite pastime. In 1998, looking on with horror at the trumped-up presidential adultery scandal, the novelist Toni Morrison drew her own conclusions. The violation of privacy, the ransacking of the presidential office when he was “metaphorically seized and body searched” was for her the kind of treatment black men faced. No matter “how smart you are, how hard you work,” you will be “put in your place.” Clinton had overreached. He was “our first black president,” Morrison mused. The “tropes of blackness” were apparent in his upbringing in a single-parent and poor household, and in his working-class ways, his saxophone playing and love for junk food. This Clinton really was Elvis-like. He was not the redneck Elvis who still had devotees in the 1990s, but the “Hillbilly Cat” Elvis of the 1950s, the youth who transgressed the boundaries between black and white—something that was only possible to do in comfort among the lower ranks of southern society. 32 Clinton’s title of “first black president” was reaffirmed at the 2001 Congressional Black Caucus Dinner. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2007, Andrew Young, the Carter adviser who had been a friend to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said that Clinton was “every bit as black as Barack.” How strange was that: the son of a Kenyan was less black than a Bubba from Arkansas? Young was treating blackness as a cultural identity, and Obama’s childhood in Hawaii and Jakarta lacked Dixie roots.

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

  Case in point: in 1633, Winthrop presided over the trial of a man accused of robbery. Upon conviction, his estate was sold and used to repay his victims. He was then bound for three years of service, and his daughter, as added collateral, bound for fourteen. This was typical. The 1648 Laws and Liberties established two classes of an even lower order who could be divested of liberty: Indians captured in “just wars,” and “strangers as willingly sell themselves, or are sold to us.” The “strangers,” in this case, were indentured servants from outside the colony as well as imported African slaves. 44 For servants, seventeenth-century New Englanders relied most heavily on exploitable youth, male and female, ages ten to twenty-one. By law, single men and women were required to reside with families and submit to family government. Children were routinely “put out” to labor in the homes of neighbors and relatives. The 1642 Massachusetts General Court’s order for the proper education of children treated apprentice, servant, and child as if all were interchangeable. Parents and masters alike assumed responsibility to “breed & bring up children & apprentices in some honest Lawfull calling.” Family supervision policed those who might otherwise become “rude, stubborn & unruly.” 45 Monitoring the labor of one’s own offspring became the norm, as landed families retained control over the males well into adulthood. Young men could not leave the family estate, nor escape their father’s rule, without endangering their inheritance. So family members worked long hours, as did servants of various ranks. While the extended Puritan family functioned with less recurrence to acts of ruthlessness than the system adopted during the tobacco boom in Virginia, legal and cultural practices muddied the distinction between son and servant. 46 Thus the Puritan family was at no time the modern American nuclear family, or anything close. It was often composed of children of different parents, because one or another parent was likely to die young, making remarriage quite common. Winthrop fathered sixteen children with four different wives, the last of whom he married at age fifty-nine, two years before his death. Most households also contained child servants who were unrelated to the patriarch; during harvest season, hired servants were brought in as temporary workers, and poor children were purchased for longer terms as menial apprentices for domestic service or farm-work. The first slave cargo arrived in Boston in 1638. Winthrop, for his part, owned Indian slaves; his son purchased an African. 47 While servants were expected to be submissive, few actually were. Numerous court cases show masters complaining of their servants’ disobedience, accompanied by charges of idleness, theft, rudeness, rebelliousness, pride, and a proclivity for running away.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  GIOVANNI'S ROOM 77 it may notbe safe. You are afraid it may change you. Whatkind of friendship have you had?' I said nothing. 'Or forthat matter/ hecontinued, 'what kind of loveaffairs?' Iwassilentforsolongthathe teasedme, saying, 'Comeout, comeout, whereveryou areT AndIgrinned,feelingchilled. 'Love him,' said Jacques, with vehemence, love him andlet him love you.Doyou think anything elseunder heaven really matters?And how long, at the best,can it last? sinceyouare both menandstill have everywhere to go?Only five minutes,Iassure you, only five minutes, and mostofthat, helas!in the dark.And if you thinkof them as dirty, thenthey will be dirty — they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing,you will be despising yourfleshand his. But youcan makeyour time togetherany- thing but dirty;you can give each othersome- thing which will make bothof you better — for- ever —ifyou will notbe ashamed, if youwill only notplay it safe.'He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac, Touplay it safe long enough,' he said, ina differenttone, 'and you'll endup trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever — like me.' And he finished his cognac, ringinghisglass slightly on the barto attract the attention of Madame Clothilde. Shecame at once, beaming; and inthatmo- 78 James Baldwin ment Guillaume daredto smileat the redhead. Mme, Clothilde poured Jacques a fresh cognac and looked questioningly at me, thebottle poised over my half full glass.I hesitated. *Et pourquoi pas?"sheasked, with a smile. So I finishedmy glassand shefilled it.Then, for the briefest of seconds,sheglancedat Guillaume; who cried, *Et le rouquin IdlWhat's the redhead drinking?' Mme. Clothildeturnedwiththeairofan actress about to deUver theseverely restrained last linesofan exhausting andmighty part. *On foffre, Pierre/shesaid, majestically. What will you have?' —holding slightly aloftmeanwhile the bottle containingthemostexpensivecognac in the house. *Je prendraiun petitcognac,' Pierremumbled aftera moment and, oddly enough,he blushed, which madehim, inthelight ofthe pale,just- rising sun, resemble a freshly fallenangel. Mme. ClothildefilledPierre's glass and,amid a beautifullyresolvingtension, asofslowly dimmingfights, replaced thebottle ontheshelf and walkedback tothecash register; offstage, in effect, into thewings, where she began to recoverherself by finishing the lastofthe champagne. She sighed andsipped and looked outwardcontentedlyintothe slowlyrising morn- ing. Guillaumehad murmured a *Je m'excuse un instanty Madame/ and now passed behind us onhis wayto the redhead. I smiled. Things myfather never told me/

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  30 James Baldwin to remain in that house withhim and Ellen. And I maneuvered my father so well that he actually began to believe that my finding a job andbeing on my own wasthe direct result of his advice and atribute to the wayhe had raised me. Once I was out of the house of course, it became much easier to deal with him and he never had any reason tofeel shut out of my life for Iwas always able, when talking about it, totellhim what he wished tohear. And we got onquite well, really, forthe vision I gave my father of my life was exactly thevision in which Imyself most desperately needed tobelieve. For Iam —or I was—one of those people whopride themselves ontheir willpower, on their abiUty tomake a decisionandcarry it through. This virtue,likemostvirtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed andthe masters of their des- tinycanonly continueto believe this by becom- ingspecialists in self-deception. Theirdecisions arenot really decisionsat all— a realdecision makes onehumble, one knows thatitisat the mercy of more things thancan be named—but elaborate systemsof evasion, of illusion, de- signed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. Thisis certainlywhat my decision, made solong ago in Joey's bed,came to.I had decided to allow no roomin the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well — by not looking at the universe, by not GIOVANNI'S ROOM 31 looking at myseK, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion. Even constant motion, of coiurse, does not preventon occasional mysteri- ous drag, a drop, likean airplane hitting an air pocket. And there werea number of those, all drunken, all sordid, one very frightening such drop whileI wasin the Army which involved a fairy who was later court-martialed out. The panic his punishment caused inme was as close as I ever cameto facing in myself the terrors I sometimes saw clouding another man's eyes. What happenedwas that, all unconsciousof what this ennui meant, I wearied of the motion, wearied of the joyless seas of alcohol, wearied of theblunt, bluff, hearty, andtotally meaning- less friendships, weariedof wandering through the forests of desperate women, wearied of the work,whichfed meonlyin the most brutally literalsense.Perhaps,aswe say in America,I wantedto findmyself.Thisisan interesting phase, not current asfarasIknow in thelan- guageofanyother people,which certainlydoes notmean what it says butbetrays a nagging sus- picion that something has been misplaced. I think nowthat if 1had had any intimation that theself I wasgoing tofind wouldturnouttobe onlythe same self from which I hadspentso much time in flight, Iwould have stayed at home. But, again, I think I knew, atthevery bottom ofmy heart, exactly what I was doing whenItookthe boat for France.

• From Giovanni's Room (1956)

  But no matter what was happening in that room, my mother was watching it. She looked out of the photograph frame, a pale, blonde woman, dehcately put together, dark-eyed, and straight-browed, with a nervous, gentle mouth. But something about the way the eyes were set in the head and stared straight out, some- thing very faintly sardonic and knowing in the set of the moudi suggested that, somewhere beneath this tense fragility was a strength as various as it was unyielding and, like my father's wrath, dangerous because it was so entirely unexpected. My father rarely spoke of her and when he did he covered, by some mys- terious means, his face; he spoke of her only as my mother and, in fact, as he spoke of her, he might have been speaking of his own. Ellen spoke of my mother often, saying what a remarkable woman she had been, but she made GIOVANNI'S ROOM 21 me uncomfortable. I felt that I had no right to be the son of such a mother. Years later, when I had become a man, I tried to get my father to talk about my mother. But Ellen was dead, he was about to marry again. He spoke of my mother, then, as Ellen had spoken of her and he might, indeed, have been speaking of Ellen. They had a fight one night when I was about thirteen. They had a great many fights, of course; but perhaps I remember this one so clearly because it seemed to be about me. I was in bed upstairs, asleep. It was quite late. I was suddenly awakened by the sound of my father's footfalls on the walk beneath my window. I could tell by the sound and the rhythm that he was a little drunk and I remem- ber that at that moment a certain disappoint- ment, an unprecedented sorrow entered into me. I had seen him drunk many times and had never felt this way—on the contrary, my father sometimes had great charm when he was drunk—but that night I suddenly felt that there was something in it, in him, to be despised. I heard him come in. Then, at once, I heard Ellen's voice. 'Aren't you in bed yet?' my father asked. He was trying to be pleasant and trying to avoid a scene, but there was no cordiality in his voice, only strain and exasperation. T thought,' said Ellen, coldly, 'that someone ought to tell you what you're doing to your son.' — 22 James Baldwin What Tm doing to my son?' And he was about to say something more, something awful; but he caught himself and only said, with a resigned, drunken, despairing calm: 'What are you talking about, Ellen?' Do you really think/ she asked—I was cer- tain that she was standing in the center of the room, with her hands folded before her, stand-