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 The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  And as though some mysterious cord stretched between them, Stephen’s heart was troubled at that very moment; intolerably troubled because of Morton, the real home which might not be shared with Mary. Ashamed because of shame laid on another, compassionate and suffering because of her compassion, she was thinking of the girl left alone in Paris—the girl who should have come with her to England, who should have been welcomed and honoured at Morton. Then she suddenly remembered some words from the past, very terrible words: ‘Could you marry me, Stephen?’ Mary turned and walked back to the Rue Jacob. Disheartened and anxious, David lagged beside her. He had done all he could to distract her mind from whatever it was that lay heavy upon it. He had made a pretence of chasing a pigeon, he had barked himself hoarse at a terrified beggar, he had brought her a stick and implored her to throw it, he had caught at her skirt and tugged it politely; in the end he had nearly got run over by a taxi in his desperate efforts to gain her attention. This last attempt had certainly roused her: she had put on his lead—poor, misunderstood David. 3Mary went into Stephen’s study and sat down at the spacious writing-table, for now all of a sudden she had only one ache, and that was the ache of her love for Stephen. And because of her love she wished to comfort, since in every fond woman there is much of the mother. That letter was full of many things which a less privileged pen had best left unwritten—loyalty, faith, consolation, devotion; all this and much more she wrote to Stephen. As she sat there, her heart seemed to swell within her as though in response to some mighty challenge. Thus it was that Mary met and defeated the world’s first tentative onslaught upon them. CHAPTER 431T here comes a time in all passionate attachments when life, real life, must be faced once again with its varied and endless obligations, when the lover knows in his innermost heart that the halcyon days are over. He may well regret this prosaic intrusion, yet to him it will usually seem quite natural, so that while loving not one whit the less, he will bend his neck to the yoke of existence. But the woman, for whom love is an end in itself, finds it harder to submit thus calmly. To every devoted and ardent woman there comes this moment of poignant regretting; and struggle she must to hold it at bay. ‘Not yet, not yet—just a little longer’; until Nature, abhorring her idleness, forces on her the labour of procreation.

• From The World of Biblical Israel (2013)

  147 people then make a covenant with God, promising to “put away all these [foreign] wives and their children” (Ezra 10:3). o The book of Ezra closes with a decree that all returnees should put aside their foreign wives and remain separate from “the people of the land.” • Nehemiah served as governor of Judah during the same period as Ezra, and much of the material about intermarriage from the book of Ezra is repeated in the book of Nehemiah. • Although it seems unlikely that the oath of all the Israelite men to put aside their foreign wives and their children was ever carried out on a large scale, the issue of intermarriage was clearly important to the community of returned exiles. They had managed to maintain their Judean identity as worshipers of the Israelite god while in Babylonia, but upon returning to Judah, they found that those who had stayed in the land did not share the same sense of national identity and boundary marking. Public Reading of the Torah • A second focal point for the restored and reconstituted Judean community is the temple and the Torah of Moses. In the books of Ezra-Nehemiah, the lengthy transition to a Torah-centered community is sacralized in a single remembered event. • We learn that Ezra gathered all the people of Israel to Jerusalem in the seventh month. He stood on a raised wooden platform or pulpit, flanked by laity and Levites, and he opened “the book of the law of Moses which the Lord had given to Israel” (Neh. 8:1). • Ezra then leads a kind of liturgy. He blesses the Lord, his god, and the people respond, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands, bowing their heads, and worshipping their god, whom they understand to be in some way present in this gathering around the Torah. 148 Lecture 20: The New Israel—Resettling the Land • While Ezra presents the Torah and reads from it, the Levites are described as “helping the people understand the law.” We must remember that the Torah was in Hebrew, and many of the people gathered would no longer speak or understand Hebrew. • During this Second Temple period, we begin to see several developments that will become foundational to early Judaism: the elevation of the Torah and the study of the Torah to a religious and community-forging ritual, the elevation of the role of scribes, and the elevation of the status of the Levites as translators of the law for the people. Carr, An Introduction to The Old Testament, pp. 207–228. Kessler, The Social History of Ancient Israel, pp. 128–157. 1. What factors contributed to internal divisions and debates in the Judean community during the time of the rebuilding of the temple? 2. Why might Persia have adopted a policy of repatriating exiles and sponsoring the rebuilding of local temples and shrines? Suggested Reading Questions to Consider

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  The house smelled of gingerbread, and we’d eaten everything: the scraps of dough, raisin eyes, and fresh cookie shapes taken from the oven. We ran back and forth to the front window to watch for our father. Our baby sister stirred in her wrappings from her winter newborn nap. Every passing car and we were at the window again. It was Saturday night, and our father had left late morning to pick up the Christmas tree. My brother kept asking our mother, “When’s Daddy coming home?” And she always answered the same: “He’ll be home any minute.” She anxiously paced the kitchen, checking the baking sheets of cookies and chopping and frying the potatoes and meat. It was long past time for dinner, and we were hungry and cranky. I set the table with plates and glasses while my brother seriously set the forks. At two years old, he was already our mother’s “little man.” He shadowed her, and usually she didn’t mind, but tonight the baby was restless and there was no sign of our father. Since the baby had been born, my brother had been clingy and whiny. That night he was an outright nuisance. I had to keep shooing him from the coffee table covered with ornaments we’d unpacked for the Christmas tree. He’d already broken one of the glass soldiers, and I had cut my finger while sweeping up the slivers. My brother asked yet again about our dad. I elbowed him a sharp one in the ribs. He cried, the baby cried, and I was in trouble for hitting again. “As the older sister, you’re to take care of your little brother. That’s your responsibility.” My mother shamed me. The sniffling boy nestled his head against her skirt as she soothed the sobbing infant and heated up the bottle of formula at the stove. She sent me to my room. I refused to cry. I only cried when Daddy hit our mother. I felt terrible that I had hit my little brother. Shamed , as my mother said. It’s a word I turned over and over in my mouth, and it didn’t fit with the smell of gingerbread and frying potatoes. It didn’t fit with the sparkle of the ornaments waiting to be put on the tree. I went to my hiding place in the closet in the bedroom I shared with my brother. I pulled out my crayons. I picked through them. Most were half eaten by my brother. He always managed to find them, no matter where I hid them. My latest hiding place was in the corner of the closet, in the back of the trunk my father used at school. I drew on the wall. I imagined I was painting like my grandmother, whose painting of a warrior from our tribe hung in the living room. I looked at my drawings hidden behind our hanging clothes: here’s the baby in her cradleboard, and here’s my father hunting deer.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Archbishop Cranmer appears in an unfavorable light. His first wife, "Black Joan," died in childbed before his ordination. Early in 1532, before he was raised to the primacy of Canterbury by Henry VIII. (August, 1532), he married a niece of the Lutheran preacher Osiander of Nürnberg, and concealed the fact, the disclosure of which would have prevented his elevation. The papal bulls of confirmation were dated February and March, 1533, and his consecration took place March 30, 1533. The next year he privately summoned his wife to England; but sent her away in 1539, when he found it necessary to execute the bloody articles of Henry VIII., which included the prohibition of clerical marriage. He lent a willing hand to the divorces and re-marriages of his royal master. And yet with all his weakness of character, and time-serving policy, Cranmer must have been an eminently devout man if he translated and reproduced (as he certainly edited) the Anglican liturgy, which has stood the test of many generations to this day.620 John Knox, the Luther of Scotland, had the courage, as a widower of fifty-eight (March, 1563–64), to marry a Scotch lass of sixteen, Margaret Stuart, of royal name and blood, to the great indignation of Queen Mary, who "stormed wonderfully" at his audacity. The papists got up the story that he gained her affection by sorcery, and aimed to secure for his heirs, with the aid of the Devil, the throne of Scotland. His wife bore him three daughters, and two years after his death (1572) contracted a second marriage with Andrew Ker, a widower.621 The most unfortunate matrimonial incident in the Reformation is the consent of Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer to the disgraceful bigamy of Landgrave Philip of Hesse. It is a blot on their character, and admits of no justification. When the secret came out (1540), Melanchthon was so over-whelmed with the reproaches of conscience and a sense of shame that he fell dangerously ill at Weimar, till Luther, who was made of sterner stuff, and found comfort in his doctrine of justification by faith alone, prayed him out of the jaws of death. In forming a just estimate of this subject, we must not only look backward to the long ages of clerical celibacy with all its dangers and evils, but also forward to the innumerable clerical homes which were made possible by the Reformation. They can bear the test of the closest examination. Clerical celibacy and monastic vows deprived the church of the services of many men who might have become shining stars. On the other hand, it has been calculated by Justus Möser in 1750, that within two centuries after the Reformation from ten to fifteen millions of human beings in all lands owe their existence to the abolition of clerical celibacy.622 More important than this numerical increase is the fact that an unusual proportion of eminent scholars and useful men in church and state were descended from clerical families.623

• From Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (1997)

  e [8] , makes this eloquent statement: …“the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence.” (italics his) On an emotional and intellectual level, Dr. Gilligan’s insight is profound and accurate, but how does it translate into the biological level of instinctive functioning? To the non-thinking world of the felt sense, I believe that justice is experienced as completion. Without discharge and completion, we are doomed to repeat the tragic cycle of violent re-enactment, whether it be through “acting out” or “acting in.” It is humbling to own up to the fact that a significant portion of human behavior is performed from hyper-aroused states due to incomplete responses to threat. Most of humanity appears to be fascinated, perhaps even mesmerized by those of us who “act out” our search for justice. There are countless books detailing the lives of “serial-killers,” many of them best-sellers. The theme of justice and revenge is probably the subject of more movies than any other single topic. Underlying our powerful attraction to those who “act out” is the urge for completion and resolutio n- or, what I call “renegotiation” of trauma. In a renegotiation, the repetitive cycle of violent re-enactment is transformed into a healing event. A transformed person feels no need for revenge or violenc e- shame and blame dissolve in the powerful wake of renewal and self-acceptance (see Chapter Fourtee n– Transformation ). Unfortunately, there are very few examples of this phenomenon in literature and films. The movie Sling Blade has many of the transformative qualities inherent in a traumatic renegotiation. Our mundane “collision scenario” is much more a part of everyday life than the stuff movies are made of, and therefore, more telling. On page 133 of Violence, Gilligan writes: “If we want to understand the nature of the incident that typically provokes the most intense shame, and hence the most extreme violence, we need to recognize that it is precisely the triviality of the incident that makes the incident so shameful. And it is the intensity of the shame, as I said, that makes the incident so powerfully productive of violence.” When people are overwhelmed and cannot successfully defend themselves, they often feel ashamed. When they act violently, they are seeking justice and vengeance for having been shamed.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Having learnt that the lady’s husband, though he came of a good family, was very greedy and corrupt, he came to an arrangement with him whereby he would give him five hundred gold florins for allowing him to sleep for one night with his wife. But what he actually did was to gild five hundred coins of silver, called popolini, which were in everyday use at that period, and, having slept with the man’s wife against her will, he handed these over to the husband. Subsequently the story became common knowledge, so that the scoundrelly husband was not only cheated but held up to ridicule. And the Bishop, being a wise man, feigned complete ignorance of the whole affair. The Bishop and the Marshal were frequently to be seen in one another’s company, and one day, it being the feast of St John,3 they happened to be riding side by side down the street along which the palio4 is run, casting an eye over the ladies, when the Bishop spotted a young woman (now, alas, no longer with us, having died in middle age during this present epidemic), whose name was Monna Nonna de’ Pulci. You all know the person I mean – she was the cousin of Messer Alesso Rinucci, and at the time of which I am speaking she was a fine-looking girl in the flower of youth, well spoken and full of spirit, who had recently been married and set up house in the Porta San Piero quarter. The Bishop pointed her out to the Marshal, then he rode up beside her, clapped his hand on the Marshal’s shoulder, and said: ‘How do you like this fellow, Nonna? Do you think you could make a conquest of him?’ It seemed to Monna Nonna that the Bishop’s words made her out to be less than virtuous, or that they were bound to damage her reputation in the eyes of those people, by no means few in number, in whose hearing they were spoken. So that, less intent upon vindicating her honour than upon returning blow for blow, she swiftly retorted: ‘In the unlikely event, my lord, of his making a conquest of me, I should want to be paid in good coin.’ These words stung both the Marshal and the Bishop to the quick, the former as the author of the dishonest deed involving the niece of the Bishop’s brother, and the latter as its victim, inasmuch as she was one of his own relatives. And without so much as looking at one another, they rode away silent and shamefaced, and said no more to Monna Nonna on that day. In this case, therefore, since the girl was bitten first, it was not inappropriate that she should make an equally biting retort. FOURTH STORYCurrado Gianfigliazzi’s cook, Chichibio, converts his master’s anger into laughter with a quick word in the nick of time, and saves himself from the unpleasant fate with which Currado had threatened him.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  How could I explain the water jar left empty by the river to my mother, who deciphered my burning lips as shame? My imagination swallowed me like a mica chip. In it, I had seen the water monster fighting with lightning. He broke trees, stirred up killer winds. In it, I had lost my brother to a spear of flame. I saw my beloved there, hidden in the skin of the suddenly vulnerable. I was taken with a fever and nothing cured it until I dreamed my fiery body dipped in the river where it fed into the lake. My father carried me as if I were newborn, as if he were presenting me once more to the world. And when he dipped me I was pronounced healed. My parents immediately made plans to marry me to an important man who was years older and would provide me with everything I needed to survive in this world. It was a world I could no longer perceive. I had been blinded, when I was most in need of a drink, by a man who was not a man. He stole my secrets, those created at the brink of language. When I disappeared it was in a storm that destroyed the houses of my relatives. My baby sister was found sucking on her hand in the crook of an oak. And though it may have appeared otherwise, I did not go willingly. That night when I had seen my story strung on the shell belt of my ancestors, I was standing next to a man who could not look me in the eye. The oldest woman in the tribe wanted to remember me as the girl who disobeyed, who gave in to her desires before marriage and was destroyed by the monster disguised as the seductive warrior. Others saw the car I was driving as it drove into the lake early one morning, the time the carriers of tradition wake up, before the sun or the appearance of red birds. They found the empty six-pack on the sandy shores of the lake. The power of the victim is a power that will always be reckoned with, one way or the other. When the proverbial sixteen-year-old woman walked down to the lake, within her were all the sixteen-year-old women who had questioned their power from time before time. Years later, she walked out of the lake and headed for town. No one recognized her. The story of the girl and the water monster was a story no one told anymore. My stepfather was paying more and more attention to me as I grew into womanhood. I did everything I could to stay out of his way. I did not want his eyes on me. Like most teenage girls, I felt sensual and awkward all at once. My body had its own mind, its own wisdom. I was tethered to its cycles. I was up and I was down.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Jamie and her Barbara were starvation-poor, so poor that a square meal came as a godsend. Stephen would feel ashamed to be rich, and, like Mary, was always anxious to feed them. Being idle at the moment, Stephen would insist upon frequently taking them out to dinner, and then she would order expensive viands—copper-green oysters straight from the Marennes, caviare and other such costly things, to be followed by even more sumptuous dishes—and since they went short on most days in the week, these stomachic debauches would frequently upset them. Two glasses of wine would cause Jamie to flush, for her head had never been of the strongest, nor was it accustomed to such golden nectar. Her principal beverage was crème-de-menthe because it kept out the cold in the winter, and because, being pepperminty and sweet, it reminded her of the bull’s-eyes at Beedles. They were not very easy to help, these two, for Jamie, pride-galled, was exceedingly touchy. She would never accept gifts of money or clothes, and was struggling to pay off the debt to her master. Even food gave offence unless it was shared by the donors, which though very praiseworthy was foolish. However, there it was, one just had to take her or leave her, there was no compromising with Jamie. After dinner they would drift back to Jamie’s abode, a studio in the old Rue Visconti. They would climb innumerable dirty stone stairs to the top of what had once been a fine house but was now let off to such poor rats as Jamie. The concierge, an unsympathetic woman, long soured by the empty pockets of students, would peer out at them from her dark ground floor kennel, with sceptical eyes. ‘Bon soir, Madame Lambert.’ ‘Bon soir, mesdames,’ she would growl impolitely.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I liked their writhing aliveness, their black no-question eyes, and their tongues that flashed like lightning. They smelled like cool melon, stronger toward dusk and dew. And then my mother interrupted the party with a command: “Joy! Come in here right now and put on a shirt.” I bristled with injustice. “Why doesn’t my brother have to come in and put on a shirt?” “He’s a boy.” “But we look the same.” “Don’t argue with me, girl, or I’ll have you pick a switch.” I went inside to put on a shirt. I knew better than to talk back. In that small moment the earthy delight of being five years old, of being utterly body and breath, came falling down. I saw the Christian law of forthright tied-tight shoes ahead of me. I saw scratchy lace and flounce, my mother’s girding girdles, the shame of “down there,” the bowed heads, and the closed doors of house or church. As I pulled my T-shirt over my head to cover my girl-shame, I decided that though temporarily I had to acquiesce, I would have nothing to do with it. I would find a way, my way. I ran back outside into the flare of twilight to join my brother and our friends, and jumped back into our game of war. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] By the time I started school the family included two more children, another sister and a brother. In kindergarten the students were divided into groups after naptime and sent to various activity stations around the spacious classroom. The activities varied from drawing to jumping rope to stringing beads. The two kind, elderly teachers who wore matronly dresses and black boxy shoes with laces liked to see the “cute little Indian girl” stringing beads, so I was often first assigned to play there. Drawing was my favorite station. I loved the smell of crayons on newsprint. I smelled each crayon before using it and felt each color as a friendly field of possibility. One day I lost myself in a drawing as I discovered a design similar to the joined-hands circle of paper dolls made by cutting a folded sheet of paper. When I glanced up and around the table, I noticed that the other children were all drawing the same house, the same lollipop tree, and the same sun with a smiling face. I broke through my shyness and asked, “Why are you copying each other?” The other children looked at me, then at my drawing. They began copying me. For me drawing was dreaming on paper. I didn’t always know what was going to appear there. I followed the instinct of color, of line. I understood there were many kinds of houses. Some did not exist in the city in which I lived. The one I used to draw again and again was a round house with a tree at the center. The stairs wound around the outside of the house.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The Vicar would soon play a sterner game than cricket, while Alec must put away his law books and take unto himself a pair of wings—funny to associate wings with Alec. Colonel Antrim had hastily got into khaki and was cursing and swearing, no doubt, at the barracks. And Roger—Roger was somewhere in France already, justifying his manhood. Roger Antrim, who had been so intolerably proud of that manhood—well, now he would get a chance to prove it! But Jonathan Brockett, with the soft white hands, and the foolish gestures, and the high little laugh—even he could justify his existence, for they had not refused him when he went to enlist. Stephen had never thought to feel envious of a man like Jonathan Brockett. She sat smoking, with his letter spread out before her on the desk, his absurd yet courageous letter, and somehow it humbled her pride to the dust, for she could not so justify her existence. Every instinct handed down by the men of her race, every decent instinct of courage, now rose to mock her so that all that was male in her make-up seemed to grow more aggressive, aggressive perhaps as never before, because of this new frustration. She felt appalled at the realization of her own grotesqueness; she was nothing but a freak abandoned on a kind of no-man’s-land at this moment of splendid national endeavour. England was calling her men into battle, her women to the bedsides of the wounded and dying, and between these two chivalrous, surging forces she, Stephen, might well be crushed out of existence—of less use to her country, she was, than Brockett. She stared at her bony masculine hands, they had never been skilful when it came to illness; strong they might be, but rather inept; not hands wherewith to succour the wounded. No, assuredly her job, if job she could find, would not lie at the bedsides of the wounded. And yet, good God, one must do something! Going to the door she called in the servants: ‘I’m leaving for England in a few days,’ she told them, ‘and while I’m away you’ll take care of this house. I have absolute confidence in you.’ Pierre said: ‘All things shall be done as you would wish, Mademoiselle.’ And she knew that it would be so. That evening she told Puddle of her decision, and Puddle’s face brightened: ‘I’m so glad, my dear, when war comes one ought to stand by one’s country.’ ‘I’m afraid they won’t want my sort . . .’ Stephen muttered. Puddle put a firm little hand over hers: ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, this war may give your sort of woman her chance. I think you may find that they’ll need you, Stephen.’ 3There were no farewells to be said in Paris except those to Buisson and Mademoiselle Duphot.

• From Trash (1988)

  Cass hugged me again, her eyes watching me closely. “We can always leave.” She didn’t look as if the idea bothered her at all. “The music hasn’t even started.” I drank again, concentrating on feeling angry rather than self-conscious or ashamed. The last of the audience was milling past us while a piano chord sounded from the front of the hall. A little group of men and women passed us, the women defiant in silky skirts and the men holding the women close to them. One of the women stared at Billy and giggled when Billy grinned at her. The man with her looked nervous and impatient, but the woman didn’t seem to want to head for her seat. Like a pigeon transfixed by a snake, she was pinned to the far wall by Billy’s green-eyed stare. I almost laughed out loud. “I don’t care who they sleep with,” I whispered to Cass, “I just wish they wouldn’t tell so many lies about it.” “Mean bitch,” Cass quipped, not meaning it at all. Roxanne looked over at me strangely, her face working as if she were making up her mind about something. She looked up at Billy, who was still watching the woman against the far wall. “Hell,” Roxanne said, “these days I can’t tell who’s lying and who is just passing time.” “Passing time,” I repeated. I ignored Cass’s offer of another drink. Instead I turned and put my arm around Roxanne’s shoulders, watching with her as the audience settled down and Cass and Billy whispered behind us. I watched the way the women moved, the muscles that stood out in their necks, the way their eyes went from dark to light in the changing light. My teeth clenched, but I just held on to Roxanne, and kept my hip pressed close to Cass’s long legs. Most mornings when I woke there in the early dawn, I would lie still and think about the stories Anna told me. She didn’t really talk much to the other women in the house, not even the ones who came to sit on her water bed and smoke her dope—none of them knew she was arrested ten years ago. “Hell, they’d put me on posters and platforms if they did.” She laughed softly at the stories they told her, telling about her childhood now and then, but mostly getting them to talk. When I joined them to sit on the floor and drink a beer, Anna started teasing me about whether I’ve been over playing pool. “Just to watch,” I told her, and we both laughed. “I hate that pool hall.” Mona was embroidering a red-and-gold labrys on the back of her jacket.

• From Trash (1988)

  Did I look like that? Would I look like that when I grew up? I remembered Aunt Grace putting her big hands over my ears and turning my face to catch the light, saying, “Just as well you smart; you an’t never gonna be a beauty.” At least I wasn’t as ugly as Shannon Pearl, I told myself, and was immediately ashamed. Shannon hadn’t made herself ugly, but if I kept thinking that way I just might. Mama always said people could see your soul in your face, could see your hatefulness and lack of charity. With all the hatefulness I was trying to hide, it was a wonder I wasn’t uglier than a toad in mud season. The singing started. I sat back on my heels and hugged my knees, humming. Revivals are funny. People get pretty enthusiastic, but they sometimes forget just which hymn it is they’re singing. I grinned to myself and watched the men near the road punch each other lightly and curse in a friendly fashion. You bastard. You son of a bitch. The preacher said something I didn’t understand. There was a moment of silence, and then a pure tenor voice rose up into the night sky. The spit soured in my mouth. They had a real singer in there, a real gospel choir. SWING LOW, SWEET CHARIOT . . . COMING FOR TO CARRY ME HOME . . . AS I WALKED OUT IN THE STREETS OF LAREDO . . . SWEET JESUS . . . LIFT ME UP, LIFT ME UP IN THE AIR. . . . The night seemed to wrap all around me like a blanket. My insides felt as if they had melted, and I could just feel the wind in my mouth. The sweet gospel music poured through me and made all my nastiness, all my jealousy and hatred, swell in my heart. I knew. I knew I was the most disgusting person in the world. I didn’t deserve to live another day. I started hiccupping and crying. “I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry.” How could I live with myself? How could God stand me? Was this why Jesus wouldn’t speak to my heart? The music washed over me . . . SOFTLY AND TENDERLY. The music was a river trying to wash me clean. I sobbed and dug my heels into the dirt, drunk on grief and that pure, pure voice. It didn’t matter then if it was whiskey backstage or tongue kissing in the dressing room. Whatever it took to make that juice was necessary, was fine. I wiped my eyes and swore out loud. Get those boys another bottle, I said. Find that girl a hard-headed husband. But goddamn, get them to make that music. Make that music! Lord, make me drunk on that music. The next Sunday I went off with Shannon and the Pearls for another gospel drive.

• From Trash (1988)

  I do not have fantasies. Fantasy opens me up; I become fantasy. I am the dangerous daughter, thigh-stroking, soft-tongued lover, the pit, the well, and the well of horniness, laughter rolling up out of me like gravy boiling over the edge of a pan. I become the romantic, the mystic, the one without shame, rocking myself on the hip of a rock, a woman as sharp as coral. I make in my mind the muscle that endures, tame rage and hunger to spirit and blood. I become the rock. I become the knife. I am myself the mystery. The me that will be waits for me. If I cannot dream myself new, how will I find my true self? “What about you?” Judy leaned toward me with an intent expression. “Do you have fantasies?” The roar in my ears was my heart, an ocean of shame and rage. My leg muscles pulled tight and cramped. My belly turned liquid and hot under my navel. I would throw up if I opened my mouth. I would throw up. My muscles failed me, failed me completely. “Not much, not really.” Peter denied Christ three times before cockcrow. I cursed myself for being such a piece of shit, such a piece of chickenshit. “Not any more, not really.” I kept my eyes on my hands where they twisted in my lap. If I looked up I might say anything, anything. Waking up and not being able to go back to sleep, I sit with a cup of coffee and my journal. I’ve kept one off and on since school, after the guidance counselor told me it was a way to keep control of your life, to look back and see your own changes. I don’t look back at it much, though, never seem to have the time, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes writing in it is a way of smoothing things out inside me. The morning after the concert, I didn’t write about the concert or Roxanne or even Cass. I wrote about the muscles of the mind, what my old sensei used to call the secret of all karate, the disciplined belief in yourself. “We are under so many illusions about our powers,” I wrote, “illusions that vary with the moon, the mood, the moment. Waxing, we are all-powerful. We are the mother-destroyers, She-Who-Eats-Her-Young, devours her lover, her own heart; great-winged midnight creatures and the witches of legend. Waning, we are powerless. We are the outlaws of the earth, daughters of nightmare, victimized, raped, and abandoned in our own bodies. We tell ourselves lies and pretend not to know the difference. It takes all we have to know the truth, to believe in ourselves without reference to moon or magic.

• From Trash (1988)

  “Still,” she says, “you’re so good with children, so gentle.” I think of all the times my hands have curled into fists, when I have just barely held on. I open my mouth, close it, can’t speak. What could I say now? All the times I have not spoken before, all the things I just could not tell her, the shame, the self-hatred, the fear; all of that hangs between us now—a wall I cannot tear down. I would like to turn around and talk to her, tell her . . . “I’ve got a dust river in my head, a river of names endlessly repeating. That dirty water rises in me, all those children screaming out their lives in my memory, and I become someone else, someone I have tried so hard not to be.” But I don’t say anything, and I know, as surely as I know I will never have a child, that by not speaking I am condemning us, that I cannot go on loving you and hating you for your fairy-tale life, for not asking about what you have no reason to imagine, for that soft-chinned innocence I love. [image file=image_285.jpg] Jesse puts her hands behind my neck, smiles and says, “You tell the funniest stories.” I put my hands behind her back, feeling the ridges of my knuckles pulsing. “Yeah,” I tell her. “But I lie.” Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee My Grandmother Mattie always said my Great-grandmother Shirley lived too long. Shirley Wilmer, of the Knoxville County Wilmers, married Tucker Boatwright when she was past nineteen, and he was just barely sixteen. Her family had a peanut farm off to the north of Knoxville, a piece of property they split between the five sons. Shirley was the only daughter. Her inheritance was a cedar chest full of embroidered linen and baby clothes that she and her mama had gotten together over the years—that and sixty dollars in silver that her daddy gave her, a fortune in those days. Granny Mattie swore that when Grandma Shirley died, those silver coins were still tied in the same cloth in which she had gotten them. Two of Grandma Shirley’s children died of the flu after gathering melons on a frosty fall day. People swore you could cure the flu with a bath of hot oil and comfrey, but Shirley wasn’t the kind to gather herbs and certainly not the kind to spend her silver on someone who would. She’d never wanted children anyway—not really—and hated the way her body continuously swelled and delivered. She called the children devils and worms and trash, and swore that, like worms, their natural substance was dirt and weeds. Shirley Boatwright believed herself to be one of the quality. “The better people,” she told her daughters. “They know their own. You watch how it goes; you watch how people treat me down at the mill. They can see who I am. It’s in the eyes if nothing else.”

• From Trash (1988)

  The stuff on those yellow pads was bitter. I could not recognize myself in that bitter whiny hateful voice telling over all those horrible violent memories. They were, oddly, the same stories I’d been telling for years, but somehow drastically different. Telling them out loud, I’d made them ironic and playful. The characters became eccentric, fascinating—not the cold-eyed, mean, and nasty bastards they were on the yellow pages, the frightened dangerous women and the more dangerous and just as frightened men. I could not stand it, neither the words on the page nor what they told me about myself. My neck and teeth began to ache, and I was not at all sure I really wanted to live with this stuff inside me. But holding on to them, reading them over again, became a part of the process of survival, of deciding once more to live—and clinging to that decision. For me those stories were not distraction or entertainment; they were the stuff of my life, and they were necessary in ways I could barely understand. Still I took those stories and wrote them again. I made some of them funny. I made some of them poems. I made the women beautiful, wounded but courageous, while the men disappeared into the background. I put hope in the children and passion in the landscape while my neck ached and tightened, and I wanted nothing so much as a glass of whiskey or a woman’s anger to distract me. None of it was worth the pain it caused me. None of it made my people or me more understandable. None it told the truth, and every lie I wrote proved to me I wasn’t worth my mother’s grief at what she thought was my wasted life, or my sister’s cold fear of what I might tell other people about them.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  ‘Oh alas, sir,’ replied Ser Ciappelletto, ‘I have one sin left to which I have never confessed, so great is my shame in having to reveal it; and whenever I remember it, I cry as you see me doing now, and feel quite certain that God will never have mercy on me for this terrible sin.’ ‘Come now, my son,’ said the holy friar, ‘what are you saying? If all the sins that were ever committed by the whole of mankind, together with those that men will yet commit till the end of the world, were concentrated in one single man, and he was as truly repentant and contrite as I see you to be, God is so benign and merciful that He would freely remit them on their being confessed to Him; and therefore you may safely reveal it.’ Then Ser Ciappelletto said, still weeping loudly: ‘Alas, father, my sin is too great, and I can scarcely believe that God will ever forgive me for it, unless you intercede with your prayers.’ To which the friar replied: ‘You may safely reveal it, for I promise that I will pray to God on your behalf.’ Ser Ciappelletto went on weeping, without saying anything, and the friar kept encouraging him to speak. But after Ser Ciappelletto, by weeping in this manner, had kept the friar for a very long time on tenterhooks, he heaved a great sigh, and said: ‘Father, since you promise that you will pray to God for me, I will tell you. You are to know then that once, when I was a little boy, I cursed my mother.’ And having said this, he began to weep loudly all over again. ‘There now, my son,’ said the friar, ‘does this seem so great a sin to you? Why, people curse God the whole day long, and yet He willingly forgives those who repent for having cursed Him. Why then should you suppose He will not forgive you for this? Take heart and do not weep, for even if you had been one of those who set Him on the cross, I can see that you have so much contrition that He would certainly forgive you.’ ‘Oh alas, father,’ said Ser Ciappelletto, ‘what are you saying? My dear, sweet mother, who carried me day and night for nine months in her body, and held me more than a hundred times in her arms! It was too wicked of me to curse her, and the sin is too great; and if you do not pray to God for me, it will never be forgiven me.’

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  I liked their writhing aliveness, their black no-question eyes, and their tongues that flashed like lightning. They smelled like cool melon, stronger toward dusk and dew. And then my mother interrupted the party with a command: “Joy! Come in here right now and put on a shirt.” I bristled with injustice. “Why doesn’t my brother have to come in and put on a shirt?” “He’s a boy.” “But we look the same.” “Don’t argue with me, girl, or I’ll have you pick a switch.” I went inside to put on a shirt. I knew better than to talk back. In that small moment the earthy delight of being five years old, of being utterly body and breath, came falling down. I saw the Christian law of forthright tied-tight shoes ahead of me. I saw scratchy lace and flounce, my mother’s girding girdles, the shame of “down there,” the bowed heads, and the closed doors of house or church. As I pulled my T-shirt over my head to cover my girl-shame, I decided that though temporarily I had to acquiesce, I would have nothing to do with it. I would find a way, my way. I ran back outside into the flare of twilight to join my brother and our friends, and jumped back into our game of war. [image "6706.jpg" file=Image00008.jpg] [image "6709.jpg" file=Image00009.jpg] [image "6711.jpg" file=Image00010.jpg] By the time I started school the family included two more children, another sister and a brother. In kindergarten the students were divided into groups after naptime and sent to various activity stations around the spacious classroom. The activities varied from drawing to jumping rope to stringing beads. The two kind, elderly teachers who wore matronly dresses and black boxy shoes with laces liked to see the “cute little Indian girl” stringing beads, so I was often first assigned to play there. Drawing was my favorite station. I loved the smell of crayons on newsprint. I smelled each crayon before using it and felt each color as a friendly field of possibility. One day I lost myself in a drawing as I discovered a design similar to the joined-hands circle of paper dolls made by cutting a folded sheet of paper. When I glanced up and around the table, I noticed that the other children were all drawing the same house, the same lollipop tree, and the same sun with a smiling face. I broke through my shyness and asked, “Why are you copying each other?” The other children looked at me, then at my drawing. They began copying me. For me drawing was dreaming on paper. I didn’t always know what was going to appear there. I followed the instinct of color, of line. I understood there were many kinds of houses. Some did not exist in the city in which I lived. The one I used to draw again and again was a round house with a tree at the center. The stairs wound around the outside of the house.

• From Trash (1988)

  Title Page Copyright Page Introduction Deciding to Live - Preface to the First Edition River of Names Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee Mama Gospel Song I’m Working on My Charm Steal Away Monkeybites Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know Demon Lover Her Thighs Muscles of the Mind Violence Against Women Begins at Home A Lesbian Appetite Lupus Compassion INTRODUCTION Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories T he central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she birthed me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it. My family’s lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how I tried to squeeze us in. There was this concept of the “good” poor, and that fantasy had little to do with the everyday lives my family had survived. The good poor were hardworking, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables. I worked after school in a job provided by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, stole books I could not afford. We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed. Everything I write comes out of that very ordinary American history. There is no story in which my family is not background, even as I have moved very far from both Greenville, South Carolina, and the poverty to which I was born. I remain my mother’s bastard girl, a woman who treasures her handmade family, my own adopted bastard child and the lover/partner who has nurtured and provoked me for more than fifteen years. We become what we did not intend, and still the one thing I know for sure is that only my sense of humor will sustain me.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Whilst deriving little comfort from all this, the two brothers nevertheless went off to a friary and asked for a wise and holy man to come and hear the confession of a Lombard who was lying ill in their house. They were given an ancient friar of good and holy ways who was an expert in the Scriptures and a most venerable man, towards whom all the townspeople were greatly and specially devoted, and they conducted him to their house. On reaching the room where Ser Ciappelletto was lying, he sat down at his bedside, and first he began to comfort him with kindly words, then he asked him how long it was since he had last been to confession. Whereupon Ser Ciappelletto, who had never been to confession in his life, replied: ‘Father, it has always been my custom to go to confession at least once every week, except that there are many weeks in which I go more often. But to tell the truth, since I fell ill, nearly a week ago, my illness has caused me so much discomfort that I haven’t been to confession at all.’ ‘My son,’ said the friar, ‘you have done well, and you should persevere in this habit of yours. Since you go so often to confession, I can see that there will be little for me to hear or to ask.’ ‘Master friar,’ said Ser Ciappelletto, ‘do not speak thus, for however frequently or regularly I confess, it is always my wish that I should make a general confession of all the sins I can remember committing from the day I was born till the day of my confession. I therefore beg you, good father, to question me about everything, just as closely as if I had never been confessed. Do not spare me because I happen to be ill, for I would much rather mortify this flesh of mine than that, by treating it with lenience, I should do anything that could lead to the perdition of my soul, which my Saviour redeemed with His precious blood.’ These words were greatly pleasing to the holy friar, and seemed to him proof of a well-disposed mind. Having warmly commended Ser Ciappelletto for this practice of his, he began by asking him whether he had ever committed the sin of lust with any woman. To which, heaving a sigh, Ser Ciappelletto replied: ‘Father, I am loath to tell you the truth on this matter, in case I should sin by way of vainglory.’ To which the holy friar replied: ‘Speak out freely, for no man ever sinned by telling the truth, either in confession or otherwise.’ ‘Since you assure me that this is so,’ said Ser Ciappelletto, ‘I will tell you. I am a virgin as pure as on the day I came forth from my mother’s womb.’

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  It is an interesting fact, that the same archbishop who had taken a prominent part in the persecution of English Protestants under Queen Mary, and who administered the last and truly evangelical comfort to the dying Emperor, became a victim of persecution, and that those very words of comfort were used by the Emperor’s confessor as one of the grounds of the charge of heresy before the tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. Bartolomé de Carranza was seven years imprisoned in Spain, then sent to Rome, lodged in the Castle of St. Angelo, after long delay found guilty of sixteen Lutheranizing propositions in his writings, suspended from the exercise of his episcopal functions, and sentenced to be shut up for five years in a convent of his order. He died sixteen days after the judgment, in the Convent Sopra Minerva, May 2, 1576, "declaring his innocence with tears in his eyes, and yet with strange inconsistency admitting the justice of his sentence."333 In less than two months after the decease of the Emperor, Queen Mary, his cousin, and wife of his son, died, Nov. 17, 1558, and was borne to her rest in Westminster Abbey. With her the Roman hierarchy collapsed, and the reformed religion, after five years of bloody persecution, was permanently restored on the throne and in the Church of England. In view of this coincidence, we may well exclaim with Ranke, "How far do the thoughts of Divine Providence exceed the thoughts and purposes of men!"334 His Tomb. From Yuste the remains of the once mighty Emperor were removed in 1574 to their last resting-place under the altar of the cathedral of the Escorial. That gloomy structure, in a dreary mountain region some thirty miles north of Madrid, was built by his order as a royal burial-place (between 1563 and 1584), and combines a palace, a monastery, a cathedral, and a tomb (called Pantheon). Philip II., "el Escorialense," spent there fourteen years, half king, half monk, boasting that he ruled the Old and New World from the foot of a mountain with two inches of paper. He died, after long and intense suffering, Sept. 13, 1598, in a dark little room facing the altar of the church. Father and son are represented in gilt-bronze statues, opposite each other, in kneeling posture, looking to the high altar; Charles V., with his wife Isabella, his daughter Maria, and his sisters Eleonora and Maria; Philip II., with three of his wives, and his weak-minded and unfortunate son, Don Carlos. The Escorial, like Spain itself, is only a shadow of the past, inhabited by the ghost of its founder, who entombed in it his own gloomy character.335 § 53. The Diet of Worms. 1521.