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 City of Night (1963)

  I would never talk to anyone first I would merely wait at the pick-up places for someone to talk to me—while, about me, I would see squads of other youngmen aggressively approaching the obvious street-scores. My inability to talk first was an aspect of that same hunger for attention whose effects I had felt even in El Paso—the motive which had sent me away from that girl who had climbed Cristo Rey, long ago, with me: I had sensed her yet-unspoken demands for the very attention which I needed, and she had sensed them in me too, I am certain.... And so, in the world of males, on the streets, it was I who would be the desired in those furtive relationships, without desiring back. Sex for me became the mechanical reaction of This on one side, That on the other. And the boundary must not be crossed. Of course there were times when a score would indicate he expected more of me. Those times, inordinately depressed, I would walk out on him instantly. Immediately, I must find others who would accept me on my own terms. From the beginning, I had become aware of overtones of defensive derision aimed by some scores at those youngmen they picked up for the very masculinity they would later disparage—as if convinced, or needfully proclaiming their conviction, that the more masculine a hustler, the more his masculinity is a subterfuge: “And when we got into bed, that tough butch number— he turned over on his stomach and I —...” a score had told me about a very masculine youngman I had seen on the streets. Later, I would hear that story more and more often. Whether that was true or not of the others, with me, there were things which categorically I would not—must not—do to score. To reciprocate in any way for the money would have violated the craving for the manifestation of desire toward me. It would have compromised my needs.... The money which I got in exchange for sex was a token indication of one-way desire: that I was wanted enough to be paid for, on my own terms. Yet with that childhood-tampered ego poised flimsily on a structure as wavering and ephemeral as that of the streets (and a further irony: that it was only here that I could be surfeited, if anywhere), it needed more and more reassurance, in numbers: a search for reassurance which at times would backfire sharply—insidiously wounding that devouring narcissism. In a bar with two men from out of town who have come to explore, on vacation, this make-out world of Times Square, I agree to meet them later at their hotel room in the East 20s. When I got there that night—and after I had knocked loudly several times—the door opened cautiously on a dark room. One of the men peeked out, said, hurriedly in order to close the door quickly: “Im sorry but weve got someone else now; lets make it tomorrow.”

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Crusading was the first cooperative act of the new Europe as it struggled back onto the international stage. It appealed to the knights, who were men of war and wanted an aggressive religion, and would remain a major passion in the West until the end of the thirteenth century. This was, of course, an idolatrous catastrophe and one of the most shameful developments in Western Christian history. The Crusaders’ God was an idol; they had foisted their own fear and loathing of these rival faiths onto a deity they had created in their own likeness and thus given themselves a sacred seal of absolute approval. Crusading made anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe and would indelibly scar relations between Islam and the West. But it was not the whole story. At the same time as Christians were slaughtering Muslims in the Near East, others were traveling to Spain to study under Muslim scholars in Cordoba and Toledo. Here they discovered the works of Aristotle and other Greek scientists and philosophers whose work had been lost to them after the fall of Rome. They also encountered the work of the Jewish and Muslim faylasufs. With the help of the local Jews, European scholars translated these writings from Arabic into Latin, and by the beginning of the thirteenth century, a wide array of Greek and Arabic scientific and philosophical works had become available to Europeans. This influx of new knowledge sparked an intellectual renaissance. The discovery of Aristotle in particular showed theologians how to present their doctrines in a coherent system. This reminds us that in any age, the religious life is always multifarious, varied, and contradictory—even within a single individual. One of the most famous Europeans of the period was Francis of Assisi (1181–1226). His life and career show us that while some Europeans were engaged in scholarly rationalism, others like Francis had no time for theology of any kind and were far more literal-minded than the apophatic Anselm. Yet Francis’s literalism, like that of the pilgrims, was neither intellectual nor doctrinal but practical. He represented a strand of popular piety that saw the life of Christ as primarily a miqra to be imitated literally down to the last detail. Francis emulated the absolute poverty of Christ in his own life; he and the Franciscan friars who followed him begged for their food, went barefoot, owned no property, and slept rough. He even reproduced the wounds of Christ in his own body. And yet this gentle saint seems to have approved of the Crusades and accompanied the Fifth Crusade to Egypt, though he did not take part in the fighting but preached to the sultan.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Above all, many of us forgot that religious teaching was what the rabbis called miqra. It was essentially and crucially a program for action. You had to engage with a symbol imaginatively, become ritually and ethically involved with it, and allow it to effect a profound change in you. That was the original meaning of the words “faith” and “belief.” If you held aloof, a symbol would remain opaque and implausible. Many people today can work with the symbolism of the modern God in this way; backed up by ritual and compassionate, self- emptying practice, it still introduces them to the transcendence that gives meaning to their lives. But not everybody is able to do this. Because “faith” has come to mean intellectual assent to a set of purely notional doctrines that make no sense unless they are applied practically, some have given up altogether. Others, reluctant to abandon religion, are obscurely ashamed of their “unbelief” and feel uncomfortably caught between two sets of extremists: religious fundamentalists, whose belligerent piety they find alienating, on the one hand, and militant atheists calling for the wholesale extermination of religion, on the other. Idolatry has always been one of the pitfalls of monotheism. Because its chief symbol of the divine is a personalized deity, there is an inherent danger that people would imagine “him” as a larger, more powerful version of themselves, which they could use to endorse their own ideas, practices, loves, and hatreds—sometimes to lethal effect. There can be only one absolute, so once a finite idea, theology, nation, polity, or ideology is made supreme, it is compelled to destroy anything that opposes it. We have seen a good deal of this kind of idolatry in recent years. To make limited historical phenomena—a particular idea of “God,” “creation science,” “family values,” “Islam” (understood as an institutional and civilizational entity), or the “Holy Land”—more important than the sacred reverence due to the “other” is, as the rabbis pointed out long ago, a sacrilegious denial of everything that “God” stands for. It is idolatrous, because it elevates an inherently limited value to an unacceptably high level. As Tillich pointed out, if it assumes that a man-made idea of “God” is an adequate representation of the transcendence toward which it can only imperfectly gesture, a great deal of mainstream theology is also idolatrous. Atheists are right to condemn such abuses. But when they insist that society should no longer tolerate faith and demand the withdrawal of respect from all things religious, they fall prey to the same intolerance. Some atheists are unhappy about this militancy. For Julian Baggini, atheism means “open-hearted commitment to truth and rational enquiry,” so that “hostile opposition to the beliefs of others combined with a dogged conviction of the certainty of one’s own beliefs ... is antithetical to such values.”

• From City of Night (1963)

  Outside, Buzz said: “Why did you play square? You wanted to bug him, didnt you?” It wasnt asked in annoyance—almost, instead, in amusement. “You knew the scene. You kept putting him on.” “I hope I didnt screw up anything for you.” “Hell, no. Wanna know something? I kind of dug seeing you put him down. Hell, most of the people hes got there—I got for him. When he needs someone, he calls me. He’d called me that he needed someone—well—you know—your type—to replace that kid that left.” “The skinny one,” I laughed. “Why did you play square?” he repeated. In my mind I could still see clearly the delirious face of that man with the bleeding nose. “I don’t know,” I said. Throughout the time I will be in San Francisco, I wont see Buzz again. I’ll hear a few days later that he was busted for “harboring” two youngmen involved in a robbery.... People just disappear, in one way or another. You seldom know what really happened to anyone, except as your own life may have touched theirs.... And even then— The fastidiously dressed man next to me at the Stirrup Club on Turk Street has been wordlessly drawing on a piece of notebook paper. Earlier today someone had mentioned this bar to me, and I had come here for the first time tonight—knowing what I would find.... Now the man slides the paper toward me. On it is the lightly outlined figure of a man wearing tall boots, lovingly and in detail drawn so that they shine. The figure also wears a wide garrison belt and an open jacket, both as sharply and shiningly indicated as the boots. About us in this malebar are a number of men—some young, others not so young—dressed similarly: black shiny jackets, boots. The goodlooking ones—and sometimes the not-so-good-looking ones—pose imperiously for the others ogling them. Just as the queens become a parody of femininity, many in this leathered group are parodies of masculinity: posing stiffly; mirror-practiced looks of disdain nevertheless soliciting those they seek to attract. I was ready to push the slip of paper back to the man beside me, resenting it, when I heard him say: “Thats how you should be dressed, youngman. Those Wellington boots youre wearing arent nearly enough. Really, Im a good judge of character.” I faced him for the first time. In his late 30s, he looks like a college professor. He is obviously trying to suggest elegance. “I dont know what youre talking about,” I said curtly.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  At ease now, and out of all fear of any doubt or suspicion on his side, I addressed myself in good earnest to my repose, but could obtain none; and in about half an hour’s time my gentleman waked again, and turning towards me, I feigned a sound sleep, which he did not long respect; but girding himself again to renew the onset, he began to kiss and caress me, when now making as if I just waked, I complained of the disturbance, and of the cruel pain that this little rest had stole my senses from. Eager, however, for the pleasure, as well of consummating an entire triumph over my virginity, he said every thing that could overcome my resistance, and bribe my patience to the end, which now I was ready to listen to, from being secure of the bloody proofs I had prepared of his victorious violence, though I still thought it good policy not to let him in yet a while. I answered then only to his importunities in sighs and moans, “that I was so hurt, I could not bear it... I was sure he had done me a mischief; that he had... he was such a bad man!” At this, turning down the clothes, and viewing the field of battle by the glimmer of a dying taper, he saw plainly my thighs, shift, and sheet, all stained with what he readily took for a virgin effusion, proceeding from his last half penetration: convinced, and transported at which, nothing could equal his joy and exultation. The illusion was complete, no other conception entered his head, but that of his having been at work upon an unopened mine; which idea, upon so strong an evidence, redoubled at once his tenderness for me, and his ardour for breaking it wholly up. Kissing me then with the utmost rapture, he comforted me, and begged my pardon for the pain he had put me to: observing withal, that it was only a thing in course; but the worst was certainly past, and that with a little courage and constancy, I should get it once well over, and never after experience any thing but the greatest pleasure. By little and little I suffered myself to be prevailed on, and giving, as it were, up to the point of him, I made my thighs, insensibly spreading them, yield him liberty of access, which improving, he got a little within me, when by a well managed reception I worked the female screw so nicely, that I kept him from the easy mid-channel direction, and by dexterous wreathing and contortions, creating an artificial difficulty of entrance, made him win it inch by inch, with the most laborious struggles, I all the while sorely complaining: till at length, with might and main, winding his way in, he got it completely home, and giving my virginity, as he thought, the coup le grace, furnished me with the cue of setting up a terrible outcry, whilst he, triumphant and like a cock clapping his wings over his down-trod mistress, pursued his pleasure: which presently rose, in virtue of this idea of a complete victory, to a pitch that made me soon sensible of his melting period; whilst I now lay acting the deep wounded, breathless, frightened, undone, no longer maid.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  I was then, by Mrs. Cole, brought in, and presented to him, in a loose dishabille fitted, by her direction, to the exercise I was to go through, all in the finest linen and a thorough white uniform: gown, petticoat, stocking, and satin slippers, like a victim led to sacrifice; whilst my dark auburn hair, falling in drop-curls over my neck, created a pleasing distinction of colour from the rest of my dress. As soon as Mr. Barville saw me, he got up, with a visible air of pleasure and surprise, and saluting me, asked Mrs. Cole, if so fine and delicate a creature would voluntarily submit to such sufferings and rigours, as were the subject of his assignation. She answered him properly, and now, reading in his eyes that she could not too soon leave us together, she went out, after recommending to him to use moderation with so tender a novice. But whilst she was employing his attention, mine had been taken up with examining the figure and person of this unhappy young gentleman, who was thus unaccountably condemned to have his pleasure lashed into him, as boys have their learning. He was exceedingly fair, and, smooth complexioned, and appeared to me no more than twenty at most, though he was three years older than what my conjectures gave him; but then he owed this favourable mistake to a habit of fatness, which spread through a short, squab stature; and a round, plump, fresh coloured face gave him greatly the look of a Bacchus, had not an air of austerity, not to say sternness, very unsuitable even to his shape of face, dashed that character of joy, necessary to complete the resemblance. His dress was extremely neat, but plain, and far inferior to the ample fortune he was in full possession of; this too was a taste in him, and not avarice. As soon as Mrs. Cole was gone, he seated me near him, when now his face changed upon me, into an expression of the most pleasing sweetness and good humour, the most remarkable for its sudden shift from the other extreme, which I found afterwards, when I knew more of his character, was owing to a habitual state of conflict with, and dislike of himself, for being enslaved to so peculiar a lust, by the fatality of a constitutional ascendant, that rendered him incapable of receiving any pleasure, till he submitted to these extraordinary means of procuring it at the hands of pain, whilst the constancy of this repining consciousness stamped at length that cast of sourness and severity on his features: which was, in fact, very foreign to the natural sweetness of his temper.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  His voice was a mild baritone, and not at all unpleasant; there had been a burst of applause at his first appearance, and there was another round of satisfied clapping now, and one or two cheers. His song, however, was a strange one: he sang of a son that he had lost, named ‘Little Jacky’. There were a number of verses, each of them ending on the same refrain - it might have been, ‘Where, oh where, is Little Jacky now?’ I thought it queer he should be there, singing such a song, alone. Where was Kitty? I drew hard on my cigarette. I couldn’t imagine how she would fit into this routine, in a silk hat, a bow-tie and a flower ... Suddenly a horrible idea began to form itself in my mind. Walter had taken a handkerchief from his pocket, and was dabbing at his eye with it. His voice rose on the predictable chorus, and was joined by not a few from the hall: ‘But where, oh where, is Little Jacky now?’ I shifted in my seat. I thought, Let it not be that! Oh please, oh please, let the act not be that! But it was. As Walter called his plaintive question, there was a piping from the wing: ‘Here’s your Little Jacky, Father! Here!’ A figure ran on to the stage, and seized his hand and kissed it. It was Kitty. She was dressed in a boy’s sailor-suit - a baggy white blouse with a blue sash, white knickerbockers, stockings, and flat brown shoes; and she had a straw hat slung over her back, on a ribbon. Her hair was rather longer, and had been combed into a curl. Now the band struck up another tune, and she joined her voice with Walter’s in a duet. The crowd clapped her, and smiled. She skipped, and Walter bent and wagged a finger at her, and they laughed. They liked this turn. They liked seeing Kitty - my lovely, saucy, swaggering Kitty - play the child, with her husband, in stockings to the knee. They could not see me, as I blushed and squirmed; they would not have known why I did it, if they had. I hardly knew it, myself; I only felt myself smart with a terrible shame. I could not have felt worse if they had booed her, or pelted her with eggs. But they liked her! I looked at her a little harder. Then I remembered my opera glasses, and pulled them from my pocket and lifted them to my eyes, and saw her close before me, as close as in a dream. Her hair, though longer, was still nut-brown.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  This attack on black women, their bodies, and character has long-standing historical underpinnings; and it has long been an issue with varying consequences for and responses from black women. To assert their subjectivity and contest pathologized sexual infamy, African American women of the early black women's club movement, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, embraced dissemblance and propriety with regard to sexuality. In response to having been marked as morally/sexually depraved and outside the realm of womanhood-and the protection and attendant characteristics this designation provided-black women, mostly from the middle class, adopted respectability, propriety, and a politics of silence surrounding sexuality as a means to challenge their stigmatization as the quintessence of deviance. This cult of secrecy became deeply entrenched within various segments of the black community, manifesting especially, and assuming its most institutionalized form, in the black women's club movement.30 The efforts of these clubs, which joined together to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), were concomitantly subversive and recuperative. They not only actively challenged racism and sexism, but also sought to rescue black women and the larger black community from sexual and moral infamy by creating "positive" images and adopting conventional bourgeois propriety in regards to sexuality, morality, and domesticity. To this end, late-nineteenth - and earlytwentieth-century African American women writers, some of whom belonged to the National Association of Colored Women or other professional organizations and literary societies, were invested in portraying black people, specifically African American women, in accordance with a politics of respectability and the attendant strictures of the racial uplift paradigm. Frances Harper and Nella Larsen, for instance, created characters in compliance with respectability and the norms of their times, as examinations of Iola Leroy in Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) and Helga Crane in Larsen's Quicksand (1928) clearly demonstrate. Harper avoids representing Iola as a woman with sexual desire or longings. Moral and respectable, Iola glorifies motherhood and domesticity, all the while exuding "saintliness" and sexual repression. Helga, though appearing in literature nearly thirty-six years after Iola, is not much more progressive in terms of sexual empowerment, expression, or desire. Running from her sexuality and never confronting it or her sexual repression, Helga marries a fundamentalist preacher spontaneously and "prematurely"-with marriage being an institution in which sex is sanctioned and legitimated-not only confining herself to domesticity and motherhood, but becoming even more repressed and despondent.

• From Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2016)

  No longer could I envision a future in which most of our shoes were made there. We needed new factories, in new countries, fast. To me, Taiwan seemed the next logical step. Taiwanese officials, sensing Japan’s collapse, were rapidly mobilizing to fill the coming void. They were building factories at warp speed. And yet the factories weren’t yet capable of handling our workload. Plus, their quality control was poor. Until Taiwan was ready, we’d need to find a bridge, something to hold us over. I considered Puerto Rico. We were already making some shoes there. Alas, they weren’t very good. Also, Johnson had been down there to scout factories, in 1973, and he’d reported that they weren’t much better than the dilapidated ones he saw all over New England. So we talked about some sort of hybrid solution: taking raw materials from Puerto Rico and sending them to New England for lasting and bottoming. Toward the end of 1974, that impossibly long year, this became our plan. And I was well prepared to implement it. I’d done my homework. I’d been making trips to the East Coast, to lay the groundwork, to look at various factories we might lease. I’d gone twice—first with Cale, then with Johnson. The first time, the clerk at the rental car company declined my credit card. Then confiscated it. When Cale tried to smooth it over, offering up his credit card, the clerk said he wouldn’t accept Cale’s card, either, because Cale was with me. Guilt by association. Talk about your deadbeats. I couldn’t bring myself to look Cale in the eye. Here we were, a dozen years out of Stanford, and while he was an eminently successful businessman, I was still struggling to keep my head above water. He’d known I was struggling, but now he knew exactly how much. I was mortified. He was always there at the big moments, the triumphant moments, but this humiliating little moment, I feared, would define me in his eyes.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  Mattie heads to North Carolina, secures a job, and never marries, choosing instead to raise her son alone; and her sexual life is nonexistent by her own choice and inclination. Based on textual inferences, her single sexual encounter with Butch, in which she begets their son, Basil, is her only sexual experience. As a single mother with a child, Mattie's status and subject position are questioned and difficult to negotiate, as is especially evident in her attempts to secure housing. She must confront and navigate her way around interlocking apparatuses: her race, gender, and sexuality concomitantly. Denied housing by white landlords because of her race, she fares no better in the "neatly manicured black neighborhoods," emblematic of a black respectability, in which her gender/sexual status-as an unmarried woman with a child born out of wedlock-marked her as "unacceptable." Moreover, it constitutes an explicit and visible breach of the classical black female script, those culturally prescribed mandates governing "acceptable" black womanhood. As mentioned, it is constituted by black women's expected racial loyalty and solidarity, sexual fidelity to black men, self-abnegation, and the idealization of marriage and motherhood. While she does not violate the script entirely, she does transgress its tenets pertaining to the regulation of black women's sexuality through black men, as well as overstep its mandates governing marriage. Issues of legitimacy, or lack thereof-her being a single mother-take shape in the queries of those she meets, "Where's your husband?" to which her response would invariably incite a disapproving, "`This is a respectable place!"' (30). As a subject with exterior visible evidence, a child, that she has transgressed the behavioral and sociosexual strictures for women, Mattie is denied far more than housing. "Unmarried persons are punished" and are "denied sexual citizenship" by "society for their `transgressions"'; and, "as sexual subjects, rather than sexual citizens, African Americans have historically been punished and victimized for asserting their sexual independence and seeking control over their own bodies."' Mattie, consequently, is unable to secure housing; and she eventually takes up residence in the private home of Eva Turner, a five-time widowed woman who is raising her granddaughter (Louciela, who is Basil's age) after the child's parents ran off. Unlike those who discriminated against Mattie, "Miss Eva" is nonjudgmental regarding Mattie's breach of the "politics of respectability" and mother-out-of-wedlock status, yet, paradoxically, she later scrutinizes Mattie on the basis of her sexual disposition: "'Tain't natural, just 'tain't natural." [...] "What I'm talkin' 'bout is that I ain't hear you mention no man involved in all them exciting goings-on in your life-church and children and work. It ain't natural for a young woman like you to live that way. I can't remember the last time no man come by to take you out." [.. .I "Ain't you ever had no needs in that direction? No young woman wants an empty bed, year in and year out." (36-37)

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Si quieres saber qué está pasando con Cole, pregúntale a él. En cuanto a quién le alquilo una habitación, no es asunto tuyo. Deslizo mis dedos por mi cabello, olvidándome de darle un estilo. Se queda en silencio por un momento, y no la miro mientras saco mi teléfono del cargador y lo guardo en el bolsillo. Se para a mi lado y toma mi barbilla, forzándome a enfrentarla. Me alejo. —¿Qué? —Estás sonrojado. —Hace calor —le respondo. Pero debajo de mi piel, mi sangre se calienta y mi corazón late con más fuerza. Recojo mi café, tomando un sorbo para ocultar mi nerviosismo. La mujer es un tiburón. Puede oler sangre a través de un océano. —Sé cómo luces después de correrte —acusa—. Entonces, la pregunta es... ¿es ese dulce pedazo de culo adolescente que está arriba o alguien nuevo? Bajo mi taza de golpe, mirándola. —Suficiente. Maldita sea. Olvidé lo inteligente que es. Ni siquiera he salido de la casa, y ni siquiera puedo entender lo que siento por la única persona con la que me he encontrado. Increíble. Dirigiéndome a la mesa, me siento, me pongo los calcetines y las botas y recojo todo lo que necesito para el día. —Cole renunció a su trabajo en la planta —dice finalmente—. Hace tres días. Miro hacia arriba, deteniendo lo que estoy haciendo. ¿Tres días? —Déjame darte un consejo. —Se vuelve condesciende—. La crianza de los hijos no se detiene cuando cumplen los dieciocho años y cuando ya no tienes que pagar manutención. Él todavía te necesita. —Perdóname si no tomo lecciones de crianza de una mujer que se embarazó para tener un boleto de comida por el resto de su vida. —Me vuelvo hacia ella, inmovilizándola con mi mirada—. Tal vez renunció para no tener que trabajar por nada ya que lo haces sentir culpable para que te dé la mitad de sus cheques de pago. Me da una bofetada, y mi cabeza se mueve a un lado. Pero solo me río.

• From Ulysses (Kindle edition — verify full work) (1922)

  -WOMAN S ERA A relationship between black people, representation, and political subjectivity has always existed and, at times, has been contingent upon representations of black womanhood. Still, this relationship has been more pronounced during particular historical moments. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African Americans, having been negatively stereotyped as uncivilized, ignorant, and licentious within a racially hegemonic society, were relegated to an inferior status and deemed ineligible for full civic and political rights. In an effort to counter ubiquitous negative images and secure sociopolitical equality, some African Americans, largely under the influence of black intellectuals and activists, subscribed to certain codes of conduct-namely, respectability and propriety-to uplift and empower the race through acts of self-definition and determination. Bourgeois behavior and mores, including the espousal of Victorian sexual conduct, served for blacks, then, as a means of racial and sociopolitical advancement.' While such strategies affected the black community collectively, they had their most pronounced effects on black women, who were seen as symbols of their race. Having been characterized as licentious and immoral, as the very antithesis of "ideal" (white) womanhood, black women were perceived as responsible for so-called black deviancy and pathology. In light of this and their sexual violation by white men especially during slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow-with their putative lasciviousness serving as justification for such crimes-black women embraced respectability as both protection and countermyth. Deploying propriety and a rhetoric of moral superiority in various aspects of life and culture, they challenged prevailing images of black women particularly and African Americans generally. Their comportment and public display of "respectable" behavior served as forms of counterrepresentation, as well as racial uplift and advancement. These very female behavioral codes surrounding black womanhood can be seen not only in black women's literature and the black women's club movement, but also in newspapers, journals, and periodicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as this chapter's opening epigraph illustrates.

• From City of Night (1963)

  Like a bull ready to charge, the fatman lowers his head, places his hands on the table. “I’ll tell you,” he says to Skipper, and in acute awareness of what will happen, I want suddenly to stop his words. I start to get up, but the fatman is already saying to Skipper: “My friend here,” indicating the skinny man, “would like you to go home with him. He hasnt got the guts to ask you, and so I offered to buy you for him—no big deal like youre used to: just for tonight.” The skinny man, even drunk, blinked incredulously. Skipper passes his hand dazedly over his face, as if trying to place the scene in his mind. “Yeah?” he mutters. “Yeah?” Again I want to leave quickly. This blacked-in scene, in focus, has become excruciatingly real. But helplessly aware that the bull is already charging—the beer and hard liquor churning vilely inside me—I hear the fatman’s words go on ineluctably: “Will you go with him?” he has asked Skipper. The skinny man, grasping all at once for the vestiges of sobriety, said, almost in tears: “Leave me alone, will you? Will—you—please—leave—me—alone—please!” “Well?” the fatman asks Skipper. “I’ll go with him—” Skipper muttered. “Good,” said the fatman. But he seems disappointed; as if somehow he has expected another climax. “—for thirty bucks,” Skipper finishes. And by the way the fatman blows out the smoke in relief, I know this is what hes been waiting for. “Thirty dollars!” he roars. “One for every year, huh?—and a few years thrown into the bargain? Is that how you figure it?” “Thirty bills,” Skipper repeated. His head almost touched the table. “I can get several for that price,” the fatman boasts. “Any of them! Take my pick of em!” “Leave me alone,” the skinny man is muttering. “Twenty-five bucks,” Skipper said, clenching his fists. “Too much,” the fatman says laughing. Painfully, I see the bewilderment on Skipper’s face as he looks up now from the table in amazed stupor—to face the fatman, the score—the Enemy.... As Skipper reaches into his pocket, removing the group of pictures from an envelope, I hear something inside of me shout to him: Dont! ... realizing that Skinper is about to barter for his Youth. But already there are two frayed clippings in Skipper’s hand. “Look,” he says triumphantly to the fatman. “I was in the columns.” The fatman reaches for the clippings. He looked at them carefully. “Oh,” he said dully, “you escorted a young actress to a nightclub.” He reads the other. “This one doesnt have a name. All it says is that she was escorted by a young actor.” “Yeah,” says Skipper, “but it was Me....” The fatman returns the clippings to him.

• From Educated (2018)

  I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she had been, she became that mother for the first time. I love you, I wrote, and closed my laptop. —MOTHER AND I SPOKE only once about that conversation, on the phone, a week later. “It’s being dealt with,” she said. “I told your father what you and your sister said. Shawn will get help.” I put the issue from my mind. My mother had taken up the cause. She was strong. She had built that business, with all those people working for her, and it dwarfed my father’s business, and all the other businesses in the whole town; she, that docile woman, had a power in her the rest of us couldn’t contemplate. And Dad. He had changed. He was softer, more prone to laugh. The future could be different from the past. Even the past could be different from the past, because my memories could change: I no longer remembered Mother listening in the kitchen while Shawn pinned me to the floor, pressing my windpipe. I no longer remembered her looking away. My life in Cambridge was transformed—or rather, I was transformed into someone who believed she belonged in Cambridge. The shame I’d long felt about my family leaked out of me almost overnight. For the first time in my life I talked openly about where I’d come from. I admitted to my friends that I’d never been to school. I described Buck’s Peak, with its many junkyards, barns, corrals. I even told them about the root cellar full of supplies in the wheat field, and the gasoline buried near the old barn. I told them I’d been poor, I told them I’d been ignorant, and in telling them this I felt not the slightest prick of shame. Only then did I understand where the shame had come from: it wasn’t that I hadn’t studied in a marble conservatory, or that my father wasn’t a diplomat. It wasn’t that Dad was half out of his mind, or that Mother followed him. It had come from having a father who shoved me toward the chomping blades of the Shear, instead of pulling me away from them. It had come from those moments on the floor, from knowing that Mother was in the next room, closing her eyes and ears to me, and choosing, for that moment, not to be my mother at all. I fashioned a new history for myself. I became a popular dinner guest, with my stories of hunting and horses, of scrapping and fighting mountain fires. Of my brilliant mother, midwife and entrepreneur; of my eccentric father, junkman and zealot. I thought I was finally being honest about the life I’d had before.

• From Memoirs of Fanny Hill (1749)

  My happiness, however, with him did not last long, but found an end from my own imprudent neglect. After having taken even superfluous precautions against a discovery, our success in repeated meetings emboldened me to omit the barely necessary ones. About a month after our first intercourse, one fatal morning (the season Mr. H.... rarely or never visited me in) I was in my closet, where my toilet stood, in nothing but my shift, a bed gown and under petticoat. Will was with me, and both ever too well disposed to baulk an opportunity. For my part, a whim, a wanton toy had just taken me, and I had challenged my man to execute it on the spot, who hesitated not to comply with my humour: I was set in the arm chair, my shift and petticoat up, my thighs wide spread and mounted over the arms of the chair, presenting the fairest mark to Will’s drawn weapon, which he stood in act to plunge into me, when, having neglected to secure the chamber door, and that of the closet standing a-jar, Mr. H.... stole in upon us, before either of us was aware, and saw us precisely in these convicting attitudes. I gave a great scream, and dropped my petticoat: the thunder-struck lad stood trembling and pale, waiting his sentence of death. Mr. H.... looked sometimes at one, sometimes at the other, with a mixture of indignation and scorn; and, without saying a word, spun upon his heel and went out. As confused as I was, I heard him very distinctly turn the key, and lock the chamber door upon us, so that there was no escape but through the dining room, where he himself was walking about with distempered strides, stamping in a great chafe, and doubtless debating what he would do with us. In the mean time, poor William was frightened out of his senses, and, as much need as I had of spirits myself, I was obliged to employ them all to keep his a little up. The misfortune I had now brought upon him, endeared him the more to me, and I could have joyfully suffered any punishment he had not shared in. I watered, plentifully, with my tears, the face of the frightened youth, who sat, not having strength to stand, as cold and as lifeless as a statue. Presently Mr. H.... comes in to us again, and made us go before him into the dining room, trembling and dreading the issue, Mr. H.....sat down on a chair whilst we stood like criminals under examination; and, beginning with me, asked me, with an even firm tone of voice, neither soft nor severe, but cruelly indifferent, what I could say for myself, for having abused him in so unworthy a manner, with his own servant too, and how he had deserved this of me?

• From Educated (2018)

  I imagined myself in Cambridge … Then I was hunching in a bathroom, my arm behind my back, my head in the toilet. … Scholar or whore, both could not be true. One was a lie.

• From Educated (2018)

  It was like getting beaten by a zombie, I write. Like he couldn’t hear me . Shawn knocks. I slide my journal under the pillow. His shoulders are rounded when he enters. He speaks quietly. It was a game, he says. He had no idea he’d hurt me until he saw me cradling my arm at the site. He checks the bones in my wrist, examines my ankle. He brings me ice wrapped in a dish towel and says that next time we’re having fun, I should tell him if something is wrong. He leaves. I return to my journal. Was it really fun and games? I write. Could he not tell he was hurting me? I don’t know. I just don’t know. I begin to reason with myself, to doubt whether I had spoken clearly: what had I whispered and what had I screamed? I decide that if I had asked differently, been more calm, he would have stopped. I write this until I believe it, which doesn’t take long because I want to believe it. It’s comforting to think the defect is mine, because that means it is under my power. I put away my journal and lie in bed, reciting this narrative as if it is a poem I’ve decided to learn by heart. I’ve nearly committed it to memory when the recitation is interrupted. Images invade my mind—of me on my back, arms pressed above my head. Then I’m in the parking lot. I look down at my white stomach, then up at my brother. His expression is unforgettable: not anger or rage. There is no fury in it. Only pleasure, unperturbed. Then a part of me understands, even as I begin to argue against it, that my humiliation was the cause of that pleasure. It was not an accident or side effect. It was the objective. This half-knowledge works in me like a kind of possession, and for a few minutes I’m taken over by it. I rise from my bed, retrieve my journal, and do something I have never done before: I write what happened. I do not use vague, shadowy language, as I have done in other entries; I do not hide behind hints and suggestion. I write what I remember: There was one point when he was forcing me from the car, that he had both hands pinned above my head and my shirt rose up. I asked him to let me fix it but it was like he couldn’t hear me. He just stared at it like a great big jerk. It’s a good thing I’m as small as I am. If I was larger, at that moment, I would have torn him apart. —“ I DON’T KNOW WHAT you’ve done to your wrist,” Dad told me the next morning, “but you’re no good on the crew like that.

• From Educated (2018)

  “I only hope he has made some impression on you.” I didn’t understand. “Come this way,” he said, turning toward the chapel. “I have something to say to you.” I walked behind him, noticing the silence of my own footfalls, aware that my Keds didn’t click elegantly on stone the way the heels worn by other girls did. Dr. Kerry said he’d been watching me. “You act like someone who is impersonating someone else. And it’s as if you think your life depends on it.” I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. “It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.” He waited for an explanation. “I would enjoy serving the dinner,” I said, “more than eating it.” Dr. Kerry smiled. “You should trust Professor Steinberg. If he says you’re a scholar—‘pure gold,’ I heard him say—then you are.” “This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you . You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lights—but that is the illusion. And it always was.” I wanted to believe him, to take his words and remake myself, but I’d never had that kind of faith. No matter how deeply I interred the memories, how tightly I shut my eyes against them, when I thought of my self, the images that came to mind were of that girl, in the bathroom, in the parking lot. I couldn’t tell Dr. Kerry about that girl. I couldn’t tell him that the reason I couldn’t return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life. At BYU I could almost forget, allow what had been to blend into what was. But the contrast here was too great, the world before my eyes too fantastical. The memories were more real—more believable—than the stone spires. To myself I pretended there were other reasons I couldn’t belong at Cambridge, reasons having to do with class and status: that it was because I was poor, had grown up poor. Because I could stand in the wind on the chapel roof and not tilt. That was the person who didn’t belong in Cambridge: the roofer, not the whore. I can go to school, I had written in my journal that very afternoon. And I can buy new clothes. But I am still Tara Westover. I have done jobs no Cambridge student would do.

• From The Case for God (2009)

  Crusading was the first cooperative act of the new Europe as it struggled back onto the international stage. It appealed to the knights, who were men of war and wanted an aggressive religion, and would remain a major passion in the West until the end of the thirteenth century. This was, of course, an idolatrous catastrophe and one of the most shameful developments in Western Christian history. The Crusaders’ God was an idol; they had foisted their own fear and loathing of these rival faiths onto a deity they had created in their own likeness and thus given themselves a sacred seal of absolute approval. Crusading made anti-Semitism an incurable disease in Europe and would indelibly scar relations between Islam and the West. But it was not the whole story. At the same time as Christians were slaughtering Muslims in the Near East, others were traveling to Spain to study under Muslim scholars in Cordoba and Toledo. Here they discovered the works of Aristotle and other Greek scientists and philosophers whose work had been lost to them after the fall of Rome. They also encountered the work of the Jewish and Muslim faylasufs . With the help of the local Jews, European scholars translated these writings from Arabic into Latin, and by the beginning of the thirteenth century, a wide array of Greek and Arabic scientific and philosophical works had become available to Europeans. This influx of new knowledge sparked an intellectual renaissance. The discovery of Aristotle in particular showed theologians how to present their doctrines in a coherent system. This reminds us that in any age, the religious life is always multifarious, varied, and contradictory—even within a single individual. One of the most famous Europeans of the period was Francis of Assisi (1181–1226). His life and career show us that while some Europeans were engaged in scholarly rationalism, others like Francis had no time for theology of any kind and were far more literal-minded than the apophatic Anselm. Yet Francis’s literalism, like that of the pilgrims, was neither intellectual nor doctrinal but practical. He represented a strand of popular piety that saw the life of Christ as primarily a miqra to be imitated literally down to the last detail. Francis emulated the absolute poverty of Christ in his own life; he and the Franciscan friars who followed him begged for their food, went barefoot, owned no property, and slept rough. He even reproduced the wounds of Christ in his own body. And yet this gentle saint seems to have approved of the Crusades and accompanied the Fifth Crusade to Egypt, though he did not take part in the fighting but preached to the sultan.

• From Educated (2018)

  I said I didn’t need a doctor. The ulcers would heal, and someone had already treated the toe. Robin’s eyebrow rose. “Who? Who treated it?” I shrugged. She assumed my mother had, and I let her believe it. The truth was, the morning after Thanksgiving, I had asked Shawn to tell me if it was broken. He’d knelt on the kitchen floor and I’d dropped my foot into his lap. In that posture he seemed to shrink. He examined the toe for a moment, then he looked up at me and I saw something in his blue eyes. I thought he was about to say he was sorry, but just when I expected his lips to part he grasped the tip of my toe and yanked. It felt as if my foot had exploded, so intense was the shock that shot through my leg. I was still trying to swallow spasms of pain when Shawn stood, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Sorry, Siddle Lister, but it hurts less if you don’t see it coming.” A week after Robin asked to take me to the doctor, I again awoke to her shaking me. She gathered me up and pressed me to her, as if her body could hold me together, could keep me from flying apart. “I think you need to see the bishop,” she said the next morning. “I’m fine,” I said, making a cliché of myself the way not-fine people do. “I just need sleep.” Soon after, I found a pamphlet for the university counseling service on my desk. I barely looked at it, just knocked it into the trash. I could not see a counselor. To see one would be to ask for help, and I believed myself invincible. It was an elegant deception, a mental pirouette. The toe was not broken because it was not breakable. Only an X-ray could prove otherwise. Thus, the X-ray would break my toe. My algebra final was swept up in this superstition. In my mind, it acquired a kind of mystical power. I studied with the intensity of the insane, believing that if I could best this exam, win that impossible perfect score, even with my broken toe and without Charles to help me, it would prove that I was above it all. Untouchable. The morning of the exam I limped to the testing center and sat in the drafty hall. The test was in front of me. The problems were compliant, pliable; they yielded to my manipulations, forming into solutions, one after the other. I handed in my answer sheet, then stood in the frigid hallway, staring up at the screen that would display my score. When it appeared, I blinked, and blinked again. One hundred. A perfect score. I was filled with an exquisite numbness. I felt drunk with it and wanted to shout at the world: Here is proof: nothing touches me.