Tenderness

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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Mrs Milne tilted her head. ‘Now, she’s a mote shy,’ she said in a low voice, ‘but don’t you pay no mind to her if she starts being silly on you. It’s just her way.’ I smiled, uncertainly. In a second Gracie had begun her ascent; a few seconds more, and she was in the room and at her mother’s side.I had expected some extraordinary beauty. Grace Milne was not beautiful — but she was, I saw at once, rather extraordinary. Her age was hard to judge. She might, I thought, have been anything between seventeen and thirty; her hair, however, was as yellow and fine as flax, and hung loose about her shoulders like a girl’s. She was clad in an odd assemblage of clothes - a short blue dress, and a yellow pinafore, and beneath that gaudy stockings with clocks upon them, and red velvet slippers. Her eyes were grey, her cheeks very pale. Her features had a strange, smooth quality to them, as if her face was a drawing to which someone had halfheartedly taken a piece of india-rubber. When she spoke her voice was thick and slightly braying. I realised then, what I might have guessed before: that she was rather simple.I saw all this, of course, in less than a moment. Grace had put her arm through her mother’s and, on being introduced to me, had indeed hung back rather shyly. Now, however, she gazed with obvious delight at the jacket that I held before me, and I could see that she was desperate to seize its coloured sleeve and stroke it.And after all, it was a lovely jacket. I asked her, ‘Would you like to try it on?’She nodded, then glanced at her mother: ‘If I might.’ Mrs Milne said she might. I raised the jacket for her to step into, then moved around her to fasten the buttons. The scarlet serge and the gold trim went bizarrely well with her hair, her eyes, her dress and stockings.‘You look like a lady in a circus,’ I said, as her mother and I stood back to study her. ‘A ring-master’s daughter.’ She smiled - then took a clumsy bow. Mrs Milne laughed and clapped.‘May I keep it?’ Gracie asked me then. I shook my head.‘To be honest, Miss Milne, I don’t believe that I can spare it. Had I only two the same ...’‘Now Gracie,’ said her mother, ‘of course you can’t keep it. Miss Astley needs the costume for her theatricals.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I went to the pocket of my coat, and drew out the photograph of Kitty and me, that I had got from Jenny, at the Boy in the Boat; and I carried it to the bookcase and set it there, beneath the other portraits. ‘Your Lilian,’ I said, ‘may have got a thrill from gazing at Eleanor Marx. Sensible girls used to put pictures of me on their bedroom walls, five years ago.’‘Stop boasting,’ she answered. ‘All this talk about the music hall. I’ve never heard you sing a song to me.’She had taken my place in the armchair, and now I went and nudged at her knees with my own. ‘Tommy,’ I sang - it was an old song of W. B. Fair’s - ‘Tommy, make room for your uncle.’She laughed. ‘Is that a song you used to sing with Kitty?’‘I should say not! Kitty would have been too afraid, in case there was a real torn in the crowd who got the joke and thought we meant it.’‘Sing me one of the ones you sang with Kitty, then.’‘Well...’ I was not sure I liked the idea; but I sang her a few lines of our song about the sovereigns - strolling about the parlour as I did so, and kicking my moleskinned legs. When I finished, she shook her head.‘How proud she should have been of you!’ she said softly. ‘If I’d been her -’ She didn’t finish. She only rose, and came to me, and drew back the shirt where it flapped beneath my throat, and kissed the flesh that showed there, until I trembled. She had seemed chaste as a plaster saint to me, once; she had seemed plain. But she was not chaste now - she was marvellously bold and frank and ready; and the boldness made her bonny, made her gleam, like a kind of polish. I could not look at her and not want to touch her.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She turned to me and shook her head, and smiled; but again, her smile seemed sad.‘Just tired.’My jug and bowl were on the side. I poured a little water out and carried it to her, for her to wash her hands and splash her face. The water spotted her dress, and dampened the fringe of her hair into dark little points.She had a purse swinging at her waist, and now she dipped her fingers into it and drew out a cigarette and a box of matches. She said, ‘I am sure your mother would disapprove, but I’m just about busting for a smoke.’ She lit the cigarette, and drew upon it heavily.We gazed at one another not speaking. Then, because we were weary and there was no where else for us to sit, we sat upon the bed, side by side, and quite close. It was terribly strange to be with her in the very room - on the very spot! - where I had spent so many hours dreaming of her, so immodestly. I said, ‘It ain’t half strange -’ But as I said it she also spoke; and we laughed. ‘You first,’ she said, and drew again upon her fag.‘I was just going to say, how funny it is to have you here, like this.’‘And I,’ she said, ‘was going to say how funny it is to be here! And this is really your room, yours and Alice’s? And your bed?’ She looked about her, as if in wonder - as if I might have taken her to a stranger’s chamber, and be trying to pass it off as my own - and I nodded.She was silent again, then, and so was I; and yet I sensed that she had more to say, and was only working up to saying it. I thought, with a little thrill, that I knew what it was; but when she spoke again it wasn’t about the contract, but about my family - about how kind they were, and how much they loved me, and how lucky I was to have them.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  vb. 1. deal fully or adequately‏ גּמלז with, nent out to. 2.wean. 3.ripen (As.‏ gamdlu, deal with, benefit, e.g. VR 35°; NH‏ * "706 אנמלא Aram. bp; ; v. Palm. n.pr.‏ ,33 perh. orig. com-‏ ; 7 ",סז גמילת Nab.n.pr.f.‏ plete, accomplish, cogn. 191;—Ar. Jed is col-‏ lect, iid be beautiful, goodly) —Qal 2% +‏ yx 1‏ מל Imv.‏ ; +%לְז טא מל ]קת ;+13° bp) Pr 11+; pass.‏ 8 ָּמְלָה ,1203 Inf.‏ Ts a5; bps v 131°°;—1. a. deal out to, do‏ ָּמוּל she doeth him‏ ְמְלַתָהוּ טוב ולא רע to, c. 2 ace.‏ כִּי ‘ADDS NAS‏ הַטוּבָה ;”31 good and not evil Pr‏ for thou hast done unto me the‏ ואכי aes)‏ הרְעָה ;24% ₪ ד good but I have done unto thee the evil‏ pers.‏ ל .6 ;3% unto Gn 50°" Pr‏ (ה)רע do evil‏ Is 3°; do good wnto, 2 acc. Is 6377; cf. also‏ pers.‏ על we) beh Prii”. b. with‏ אִיש חֶסָד deal bountifully with y 13° 116’ 119” 1428; ©.‏ ace. pers. reward 28 227! (=y18"), perh. also‏ mad why should he reward‏ ְְמלְנִי nbwan‏ הוּאת me with this reward 2? 28 19%. ©. recompense,‏ repay, requite, in a bad sense, with 2 acc.‏ with by‏ ;137° ץ 32° y 7°; with 5 pers. Dt‏ pers. 2Ch. 20" ¥ 103” Jo4*. 2. wean a child‏ (complete his nursing) 1 8 1°34 1 K 11 Hor;‏ ּמוּלי weaned child 131° Is 11°; 3PM‏ מל weaned from milk Is 28°. 3. trans. ripen, bear‏ intrans. become ripe‏ ;17% גוא ripe (almonds)‏ מל 1 (grapes) Is18°. Niph. Jmpf. Din‏ Gn 21%; Inf. 2237 Gn 21° ;—be weaned.‏ Toa n.m., dealing, reeompence, benefit מלך.1 (94+11%צג--‎ 055 etc.; pl.sf. wD} 103:;--1. OD baa dealing of the hands Ju 9% Pr r2¥ ל) "3 18 (ישוב ל)‎ MY). 2. deal- ing, hence (from context) equivalent of dealing, recompence : c. suff. Ob™ גמלך ישוב בראשך‎ , Jo 4°" (2), so with 5 IW y 28%; ndyi 137° Pr 19”; absolutely ל‎ bag שלֶם (הַשִיב)‎ Ts 9 66° Je 51° La 3%; by Jo 45 47; as an" ג‎ אלהים‎ the recompence of God. 3. benefit: by בגמול עליו ;1032 + תשכחי כל גמוליו‎ according to the benefit (done) unto him 2 Ch 32” 168 גם n.pr.m. (weaned) a chief of the‏ ָּמוּל1 Levites 1 Ch 247. also bana ma (Je 48%).‏ n.f. °°" dealing, reeompence‏ ְּמוּלֶה dealings Is 59°;‏ פמולות S19% cf. 23; pl.‏ 2 ג'-- DS God of recompence.‏ ְמַלוּת 51° Je‏ n.m. benefit—pl. c. Aram. sf.‏ [תַגמוּל]1 all his benefits 0 me W116”.‏ בְּלדמָּנְמוּלְהי by‏ 1 ּמִלִיאֶל‎ n.pr.m. (reward 07 000 a prince of Manasseh Nu 1” 2” **ץ‎ 10%, cf. Mishn. ,גמליאל‎ Palm. 705" "4, 60 TapadmA Acts 5™.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  They learned to move with consummate caution lest they squash an insect or trample on a blade of grass; they did not pluck fruit from a tree but waited till it fell to the ground. Like all renouncers, they had to eat what they were given, even meat, but must never ask for any creature to be killed on their behalf. 84 Jain meditation consisted simply of a rigorous suppression of all antagonistic thoughts and a conscious effort to fill the mind with affection for all creatures. The result was samayika (“equanimity”), a profound, life-changing realization that all creatures were equal. Twice a day Jains stood before their guru and repented of any distress they might, even inadvertently, have caused: “I ask pardon of all living creatures. May all creatures pardon me. May I have friendship for all creatures and enmity toward none.” 85 Toward the end of the fifth century, a Kshatriya from the tribal republic of Sakka in the foothills of the Himalayas shaved his head and donned the renouncer’s yellow robe. 86 After an arduous spiritual quest during which he studied with many of the leading gurus of the day, Siddhatta Gotama, later known as the Buddha (“awakened one”), achieved enlightenment by a form of yoga based on the suppression of antagonistic feelings and the careful cultivation of kindly, positive emotions. 87 Like Mahavira, his near contemporary, the Buddha’s teaching was based on nonviolence. He achieved a state that he called nibbana, b because the greed and aggression that had limited his humanity had been extinguished like a flame. 88 Later the Buddha devised a meditation that taught his monks to direct feelings of friendship and affection to the ends of the earth, desiring that all creatures be free of pain, and finally freeing themselves of any personal attachment or partiality by loving all sentient beings with the “even-mindedness” of upeksha. Not a single creature was to be excluded from this radius of concern. 89 It was summed up in the early prayer, attributed to the Buddha, recited daily by his monks and lay disciples. Let all beings be happy! Weak or strong, of high, middle or low estate Small or great, visible or invisible, near or far away, Alive or still to be born—may they all be perfectly happy! Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere. May nobody wish harm to any single creature, out of anger or hatred! Let us cherish all creatures as a mother her only child! May our loving thoughts fill the whole world, above, below, across,— Without limit; a boundless goodwill toward the whole world, Unrestricted, free of hatred and enmity!

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  And yet, as we opened our hearts to each other, making space for the tears, for the silence, and for the confusion that comes with not having all the answers, we started to truly see each other. And with that seeing came a sense of closeness that I believe brought a profound peace for both of us. It didn’t diminish the loudness and the pain of the outside world—if anything it gave us more bandwidth to sit with it. As we had been holding our breath before, therapy became a space where the exhale was possible. I invite you to start seeing other people as well—people who are totally different from you, people whom you would pass by on the street or sit next to on a plane and not give a second thought to. We’re all in our own little bubbles, looking down into our phones rather than seeing each other’s faces—the faces right in front of us. Yes, we’re all wildly different from one another and no one is going to get exactly what you’ve gone though. We can feel alone pretty quickly by telling ourselves that “no one understands.” And sure, no one has had your lived experience. But we do have one thing in common: we are all living together, in this world, right now. We’re all trying to grapple with the new realities that each day brings. We don’t have to go at it alone. Our ability to empathize can vary, but I do believe that most people want to be there for the people around them. Rather than telling yourself that no one cares about you or that people will only hurt you (indeed, some will), I challenge you to hold on to a hope that there are people—people you don’t even know yet— who want to do right by you. There are people who do want to understand. People exist who care that you are hurting. They want to be there for you, in whatever way they can. And perhaps you can be there for someone else as well. We don’t have to know all the answers or say all the “right” things to show love for our fellow human beings. Sometimes, we just need to show up and to listen. Your presence alone can be your power to heal yourself and to help offer healing to someone else. A NEW WAVE TO RIDE: What are some ways that you can get more connected to your community and the people around you? What stops you from reaching out and how can you break through this fear? A NEW NARRATIVE IN OUR STORIES When we learned how to sit together in the space, something powerful happened for Nikita.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  He followed me halfheartedly through a few stretching exercises before we started up the graveled driveway onto the main road. It was a perfect day, the sun cut with a steady breeze, the road empty except for a distant woman, walking with a basket of kindling on top of her head. After less than a quarter of a mile, Bernard stopped dead in his tracks, beads of sweat forming on his high, smooth forehead. “I’m warmed up, Barry,” he said, gulping for air. “I think now we should walk.” The University of Nairobi campus took up a couple of acres near the center of town. The courts were above the athletic field on a slight rise, their pebbled asphalt cracked with weeds. I watched Bernard as we took turns shooting, and thought about what a generous and easy companion he’d been these last few days, taking it upon himself to guide me through the city while Auma was busy grading exams. He would clutch my hand protectively as we made our way through the crowded streets, infinitely patient whenever I stopped to look at a building or read a sign that he passed by every day, amused by my odd ways but with none of the elaborate gestures of boredom or resistance that I would have shown at his age. That sweetness, the lack of guile, made him seem much younger than his seventeen years. But he was seventeen, I reminded myself, an age where a little more independence, a sharper edge to his character, wouldn’t be such a bad thing. I realized that he had time for me partly because he had nothing better to do. He was patient because he had no particular place he wanted to go. I needed to talk to him about that, as I’d promised Auma I would—a man-to-man talk …. “You have seen Magic Johnson play?” Bernard asked me now, gathering himself for a shot. The ball went through the netless rim, and I passed the ball back out to him. “Just on TV.” Bernard nodded. “Everybody has a car in America. And a telephone.” They were more statements than questions. “Most people. Not everybody.” He shot again and the ball clanged noisily off the rim. “I think it is better there,” he said. “Maybe I will come to America. I can help you with your business.” “I don’t have a business right now. Maybe after I finish law school—” “It must be easy to find work.” “Not for everybody. Actually, lots of people have a tough time in the States. Black people especially.” He held the ball. “Not as bad as here.”

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  If Israel observed these laws, Yahweh promised, he would always live in their midst. God and Israel traveled together. If they chose to disregard his commandments, Yahweh would “walk with them” as a punitive force. 53 He would devastate their land, destroy their shrines and temples, and scatter them among the nations. This—P implied—had come to pass. The people of Israel had not lived lives of holiness, and that was why they were now in exile. But if they repented, Yahweh would remember them, even in the land of their enemies. “I will place my ‘Tabernacle’ [ mishkan ] in your midst and I myself will not despise you. I will walk about among you.” 54 Babylonia could be a new Eden, where God had walked with Adam in the cool of the evening. For P, a man of the Axial Age, holiness had a strong ethical component and was no longer a merely cultic matter. It involved absolute respect for the sacred “otherness” of every creature. In the law of freedom, 55 Yahweh insisted that nothing could be enslaved or owned, not even the land. In the Jubilee Year, which must be proclaimed every fifty years, all slaves must be freed and all debts canceled. Even though they lived separate, holy lives, Israelites must not despise the stranger: “If a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must treat him like one of your own people and love him as yourselves. For you were strangers in Egypt.” 56 This was a law based on empathy. The experience of suffering must lead to the appreciation of other people’s pain. Your own sorrow must teach you to feel with others. P was a realist, however. The commandment to “love” did not require the people to be constantly filled with warm affection. P was not writing about feelings. This was a law code, and P’s language was as technical and reticent as any legal ruling, where emotion would be out of place. In Middle Eastern treaties, to “love” meant to be helpful, loyal, and to give practical support. The commandment to love was not excessively utopian, therefore, but was within everybody’s grasp. From start to finish, P’s vision was inclusive. Yet at first reading, the dietary laws seem harsh and arbitrarily selective. How could a God who had blessed all the animals on the day of creation dismiss some of his creatures as “unclean” or even as “abominations”? We naturally endow words such as “impure” or “abomination” with ethical and emotional significance, but the Hebrew tamei (“impure”) did not mean “sinful” or “dirty.” It was a technical term in the cult, and had no emotive or moral overtones. As in Greece, certain actions or conditions activated an impersonal miasma that contaminated the temple and drove God out. 57 For P, death was the basic and prototypical impurity: the living God was incompatible with dead bodies.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  Toward the end of October I finally got a chance to pay Reverend Wright a visit and see the church for myself. It sat flush on Ninety-fifth Street in a mostly residential neighborhood a few blocks down from the Louden Home projects. I had expected something imposing, but it turned out to be a low, modest structure of red brick and angular windows, landscaped with evergreens and sculpted shrubs and a small sign spiked into the grass—FREE SOUTH AFRICA in simple block letters. Inside, the church was cool and murmured with activity. A group of small children waited to be picked up from day care. A crew of teenage girls passed by, dressed for what looked like an African dance class. Four elderly women emerged from the sanctuary, and one of them shouted “God is good!” causing the others to respond giddily “All the time!” Eventually a pretty woman with a brisk, cheerful manner came up and introduced herself as Tracy, one of Reverend Wright’s assistants. She said that the reverend was running a few minutes late and asked if I wanted some coffee. As I followed her back into a kitchen toward the rear of the church, we began to chat, about the church mostly, but also a little about her. It had been a difficult year, she said: Her husband had recently died, and in just a few weeks she’d be moving out to the suburbs. She had wrestled long and hard with the decision, for she had lived most of her life in the city. But she had decided the move would be best for her teenage son. She began to explain how there were a lot more black families in the suburbs these days; how her son would be free to walk down the street without getting harassed; how the school he’d be attending had music courses, a full band, free instruments and uniforms. “He’s always wanted to be in a band,” she said softly. As we were talking, I noticed a man in his late forties walking toward us. He had silver hair, a silver mustache and goatee; he was dressed in a gray three-piece suit. He moved slowly, methodically, as if conserving energy, sorting through his mail as he walked, humming a simple tune to himself. “Barack,” he said as if we were old friends, “let’s see if Tracy here will let me have a minute of your time.” “Don’t pay him no mind, Barack,” Tracy said, standing up and straightening out her skirt. “I should have warned you that Rev likes to act silly sometimes.”

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  I also spoke of anything to do with his physical self with love and acceptance. For example, he fell in kindergarten and broke a front tooth, and it turned gray. The dentist said to wait for it to fall off rather than extract it. I immediately named it “the Leader Tooth” and we created a whole story about it. When the tooth fell out, what I told him was that the Leader Tooth had fallen out. When it was revealed he had a slight curve in his spine we needed to monitor, I told him he was lucky to have a “permanent gangsta lean,” knowing he is the kid who would love that. He still relishes his lean. All this has not been about cultivating his vanity but really about giving him a map and a vocabulary and a practice of loving himself, not abstractly but concretely. For him to understand that his body is extraordinary in what it can do. We have had cyclical sex talks. At ages four, then eight, then twelve, then again around fifteen, and none since. They have always been precise, frank, and age-appropriate, dictated by him. His questions have been great and even instructive for me. He is a very private young man, so now I am told to stay at bay. But I still compliment him anytime I notice something that I find particularly healthy in his engagement with his own body or with the young women and men in his life. I celebrate his body-positive and sexually healthy attitudes, his physical intimacy with his male friends, his feminist ideas, which come so naturally to him, the fierce way he respects the young women he has close relationships with, and their comfort and trust and intimacy with him. I am explicit about how amazing that is, how rare and necessary for him and for them. Without making things awkward, I gently connect the dots—I try to tell him that sex should be a lot like how they hang out in his room watching movies or talking for hours, and that sexual pleasure belongs to him just like love and friendship and ideas and dreams belong. I think he gets that. Tips for Raising Sexually Liberated KidsZahra Ala

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  I began spending several hours a week with those children and their parents. The mothers were all in their late teens or early twenties; most had spent their lives in Altgeld, raised by teenage mothers themselves. They spoke without self-consciousness about pregnancy at fourteen or fifteen, the dropping out of school, the tenuous links to the fathers who slipped in and out of their lives. They told me about working the system, which involved mostly waiting: waiting to see the social worker, waiting at the currency exchange to cash their welfare checks, waiting for the bus that would take them to the nearest supermarket, five miles away, just to buy diapers on sale. They had mastered the tools of survival in their tightly bound world and made no apologies for it. They weren’t cynical, though; that surprised me. They still had ambitions. There were girls like Linda and Bernadette Lowry, two sisters Dr. Collier had helped get high school equivalencies. Bernadette was now taking classes at the community college; Linda, pregnant again, stayed at home to look after Bernadette’s son, Tyrone, and her own daughter, Jewel—but she said she’d be going to college, too, once her new baby was born. After that they would both find jobs, they said—in food management, maybe, or as secretaries. Then they would move out of Altgeld. In Linda’s apartment one day, they showed me an album they kept full of clippings from Better Homes and Gardens. They pointed to the bright white kitchens and hardwood floors, and told me they would have such a home one day. Tyrone would take swimming lessons, they said; Jewel would dance ballet. Sometimes, listening to such innocent dreams, I would find myself fighting off the urge to gather up these girls and their babies in my arms, to hold them all tight and never let go. The girls would sense that impulse, I think, and Linda, with her dark, striking beauty, would smile at Bernadette and ask me why I wasn’t already married. “Haven’t found the right woman, I guess,” I would say. And Bernadette would slap Linda on the arm, saying, “Stop it! You making Mr. Obama blush.” And they would both start to laugh, and I would realize that in my own way, I must have seemed as innocent to them as they both seemed to me.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There was a little noise from the rest of the house - a laugh, and the closing of a door, and the rushing of water through distant pipes. But then all was calm again; and soon there were only the gentle sounds of her undressing: the tiny volley of thuds as she pulled at the buttons on her bodice; the rustle of her skirt, and then of her petticoat; the sighing of the laces through the eyes of her stays. At last there came the slap of her feet on the floorboards, and I guessed that she must be quite naked. I had turned the gas down, but left a candle burning for her. I knew that if I opened my eyes now, and tilted my face, I should see her clad in nothing but shadows and the candle-flame’s amber glow. But I did not turn; and soon there was another rustling, that meant she had pulled on her nightgown. In a moment the light was extinguished; the bed creaked and heaved; and she was lying beside me, very warm and horribly real. She sighed. I felt her breath upon my neck and knew that she was gazing at me. Her breath came a second time, and then a third, then: ‘Are you asleep?’ she whispered. ‘No,’ I said, for I could pretend no longer. I rolled on to my back. The movement brought us even closer together - it really was an extremely narrow bed - so I shifted, rather hurriedly, to my left, until I could not have shifted any further without falling out. Now her breath was upon my cheek, and warmer than before. She said, ‘Do you miss your home, and Alice?’ I shook my head. ‘Not just a little?’ ‘Well...’ I felt her smile. Very gently - but quite matter-of-factly - she moved her hand to my wrist, pulled my arm above the bedclothes, and ducked her head beneath it to place her temple against my collar-bone, my arm about her neck. The hand that dangled before her throat she squeezed, and held. Her cheek, against my shallow breast, felt hotter than a flat-iron. ‘How your heart beats!’ she said - and at that, of course, it beat faster. She sighed again - this time her mouth was at the opening of my nightgown, and I felt her breath upon the naked skin beneath - she sighed and said, ‘So many times I lay in that dull room at Mrs Pugh’s and thought of you and Alice in your little bed beside the sea. Was it just like this, being with her?’ I didn’t answer her. I, too, was thinking back to that little bed. How hard it had been, having to lie next to slumbering Alice, my heart and my head all filled with Kitty.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  She was so good and honest, after all- I should have hated to have had to lie to her.Indeed, I should have hated to have had to abuse her, in any way. When she worked so hard and grew so weary, it made me pace about the room and wring my hands, and want to shake her. It was not her job at the girls’ home that so exhausted her, it was the endless guild and union work - the piles of lists and ledgers she would place upon the supper-table, when the supper-things had been cleared off it, and squint at, all night long, until her eyes were red, and creased as currants. Sometimes, since I had nothing better to do, I would take a chair and sit beside her, and make her share the chores with me: she gave me envelopes to address, or other little harmless tasks I could not muddle. When, in spring, the Guild set up a local seamstresses’ union, and Florence began visiting the home-workers of Bethnal Green - all the poor women who worked long hours, alone, in squalid rooms, for wretched pay - I went with her. The scenes we saw were very miserable, and the women were pleased to be visited, and the Guild was grateful; but it was for Florence’s sake I really went. I couldn’t bear for her to do the dreary task, and walk the East End streets, at night, alone.And then - as I have said, a housekeeper will look for any little thing to liven her day - I began to labour for her, in the kitchen. She was thin, and the thinness looked wrong on her: the sight of the shadows at her cheeks made me feel sad.

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

  But in all these cases the living and present person was the vehicle of the healing power; in the second case Luke records merely the popular belief, not the actual healing; and finally neither Christ nor the apostles themselves chose that method, nor in any way sanctioned the superstitions on which it was based.877 At all events, the New Testament and the literature of the apostolic fathers know nothing of an idolatrous veneration of the cross of Christ or the bones and chattels of the apostles. The living words and acts of Christ and the apostles so completely absorbed attention that we have no authentic accounts of the bodily appearance, the incidental externals, and transient possessions of the founders of the church. Paul would know Christ after the spirit, not after the flesh. Even the burial places of most of the apostles and evangelists are unknown. The traditions of their martyrdom and their remains date from a much later time, and can claim no historical credibility. The first clear traces of the worship of relics appear in the second century in the church of Antioch, where the bones of the bishop and martyr Ignatius († 107) were preserved as a priceless treasure;878 and in Smyrna, where the half-burnt bones of Polycarp († 167) were considered "more precious than the richest jewels and more tried than gold."879 We read similar things in the Acts of the martyrs Perpetua and Cyprian. The author of the Apostolic Constitutions880 exhorts that the relics of the saints, who are with the God of the living and not of the dead, be held in honor, and appeals to the miracle of the bones of Elisha, to the veneration which Joseph showed for the remains of Jacob, and to the bringing of the bones of Joseph by Moses and Joshua into the promised land.881 Eusebius states that the episcopal throne of James of Jerusalem was preserved to his time, and was held in great honor.882 Such pious fondness for relics, however, if it is confined within proper limits, is very natural and innocent, and appears even in the Puritans of New England, where the rock in Plymouth, the landing place of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620, has the attraction of a place of pilgrimage, and the chair of the first governor of Massachusetts is scrupulously preserved, and is used at the inauguration of every new president of Harvard University. But toward the middle of the fourth century the veneration of relics simultaneously with the worship of the saints, assumed a decidedly superstitious and idolatrous character.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother drove her to the emergency room, and Dayi refused to undress. The doctor let her keep her clothes on under the gown, and the nurse cut a slit in her long sleeve to draw her blood. They better not ask me to shit into anything, Dayi said. I shit for no one. The doctors said it was a stroke. She was transferred to a room where machines charted her brainwaves into mountain ranges. There were bags of fluid feeding the veins in her arms. She was discharged early, given a warning: No high-stress activities. No sodium. When the doctor asked if we had a history of heart disease, my mother said no, we have no history, just stories, just a long record of surviving our countries. Dayi’s left side was paralyzed for a week after. She could only walk in circles, turn corners. Her dead thumb slumped forward, and I liked to flick it back and forth with my tongue. Our word for stroke meant the middle wind. When the school called, asking why I had missed so many days, I said, My aunt suffered two winds. At home, Dayi still refused to take off her clothes when my mother tried bathing her, so my brother and I dragged her into the backyard, hosing her down with all her clothes on. Her clothes so cheap the color slid right off the cloth. She spat water at us and swore the whole time, said there was no reason for a woman like her to be clean. _ Dayi told me stories: How Ama carved faces into the fruit to make all her daughters laugh, how one of the neighbor boys accidentally killed one of her chickens with a fastball and Ama made him eat the baseball in front of her. How she worked the oxen till their hip-bones were lace-holed, how she cured colds by stirring dung into tea. How Ama taught my mother how to tie a string around the waist of a dragonfly and leash the other end to her finger, teaching her to see the sky through the fogged glass of its wings. My mother said she didn’t remember any of these stories. She began to suspect they weren’t really sisters: We’d picked up the wrong woman at the airport and the real Dayi had turned into a goose and flown out of the plane engine. One night, my mother called my fourth aunt to confirm. Jie, my mother said. How do we know it’s her? My fourth aunt told her to bring Dayi to water. Anything that resembled a river. You need to see her inside a memory.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  There’s no such thing as forward or backward, she said, her finger circling in the air. There was no such thing as progress, just accumulation: A long time ago, she told me, when a man died of exhaustion while building the Great Wall, the man behind him just bricked his body into the wall and kept going. That’s why it’s studded with skulls, she said. Why it’s shaped like a spine. It’s a burial ground, not a building. I asked her if this story was meant to comfort me. She told me not to worry. We’re not alive. We’re just between deaths right now. She laughed and reached around for my tail: It thrummed like an antenna, broadcasting her touch all over my body. If we stayed in here, she said, and the water kept outgrowing us, what do you think would happen? I told her we’d drown, but Ben said I was wrong. We’d grow gills, she said. Holding open the stall door, she walked me to the sinks, water receding around us. It listened to her feet when she told it to leave. She turned off the faucet, her cage bobbing in the sink. The pendant-key punctuated the center of her chest. Lifting the cage with both hands, she offered it to me. If she unlocked it, I wondered, would the shadow-bird leave? Would we see it flee? Ben said she’d let me hold the cage if I let her see my tail whenever she wanted. When I asked her why, she said, I like what it does to my hand . It behaves like it’s befriended something wild. I said she could steal it from me anytime. In her hands, my tail was potential, a hilt waiting to be drawn from me. Later—when we were in the classroom closet for our time-out, having flooded the bathroom and cut PE—I whispered to Ben in the dark that I might still eat her someday. Her laughter lit the dark between us, torched it to ash. When I told her to stop laughing, that it could really happen, Ben said I shouldn’t be afraid of what the tail wanted me to be. You’re becoming the species that will save you. But neither of us knew what I needed to be saved from. Neither of us knew what a beast was born to do. MOTHER Rabbit moon (I) Three stories, then you can live. The first: We are born stone. Papakwaka is our mountain, the nipple-peak we are weaned from. A rock cracks itself against the side of the mountain and spills two yolks, one brother and one sister. They are the only animals on the island, and the girl gets lonely. She asks her brother to marry her so she can birth a family. She invents trees to be her bridesmaids. The brother refuses to marry his own sister, so the sister solicits him as a stranger, her face foreign with smeared ash. We owe our bodies to that betrayal.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  We spent every day with our shoulder blades unsheathed, our T-shirts knotted up to show our belly buttons, our elbows rubbing like flint when we walked down the hallways side by side, skin sparked with tanbark-burns from wrestling on the playground. We licked each other down to wicks. We ditched ESL together. In history class, instead of memorizing the order of the presidents, we played fuck/marry/kill with the Founding Fathers and decided to kill all of them. We squatted in the baseball diamond and read books below our recommended age level. The Madeline books were my favorite because I liked to pretend I was a French orphan who ate bread and butter for breakfast in a cathedral full of fatherless girls, where the only boy owned a guillotine. I told Ben I related to the guillotine the most: I, too, was a direct descendant of gravity, born from women who belonged inside their countries the way blades belonged inside a body. The Madeline girls all wore black bows in their hair, so I tied one in mine, though it was the same color as my hair and therefore invisible. In the first book, Madeline falls into a river and gets saved by a dog. She adopts the dog and names her Genevieve. My mother looked at the pictures in every book I hid behind the toilet at home, tearing out pages she said I was too young to understand. For example, she said, I was too young to know what a river means, what shape it can slur into. She tore out the page where Genevieve saves Madeline from the water, gripping the girl’s neck in her mouth: It was the scene I reenacted with Ben on the playground. She flailed on her back in the gravel, pretending to drown, while I flipped her over and nipped her sweat-plated neck, my teeth tenderizing the bone there. I dragged her to the tanbark shore, panting through my nose, feeling her pulse ripen sweet in my mouth as a pear. Ben’s favorite books were paperback romances she stole from the teacher’s purse, but she pronounced breast like beast and neither of us understood how a nipple could be pink, unless it was raw or diseased: Like pink eye, I said. Pink nipple. It’s contagious. We both swore never to rub our nipples after reading, in case we exhibited symptoms of salmonella. We guessed that the women in these books had not been properly cooked inside their mothers before birth.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  On Sundays, our mother woke us up with the end of her broom to clean every room, saran-wrapping the sofa and spitting on the windows to lubricate the light that entered them. To keep my language clean: gargle saltwater twice a week. To keep your teeth from leaving you on wings: tally them every night with your tongue. She rinsed the dishes so bright we had to squint while eating; she sang to a knife in the sink as if auditioning to be its blade. We can never be clean enough for this country, she said. Weekly, my father accused her of loving the apartment better than her husband, of kneeling to clean but never kneeling for him. My mother said that keeping a clean home was a sign of wealth and keeping a husband was a sign of stupidity. When my father raised his hand, my mother always raised something else—a vase, a chopstick, a sofa cushion—not to deflect the blow, but to meet it midair, to return it. When my father took off his belt, we held on to the other end to anchor it, give back its gravity. Sometimes he beat us with it just to hear us beg him to stop. This is the only thing I can give you, he said. Not money or a house. Just this, his hands overflowing with us, just this: his mercy. Some Sundays, after my mother finished scrubbing every seat in the apartment that had fraternized with our asses, my father taught us to make kites with rice paper and disposable chopsticks and twine, our arms acting as spools. He told us to draw eyes onto our kites, or else they’d be blind to the path of their own flight. In the backyard, the kites tugged me onto my toes, the paper wings so thin the stars teethed through them. My father told me stories of flying over a salt lake, his kite slitting the sky’s belly, the winds so strong they could hike a child up onto a cloud. My father tethered me by stepping on my feet. While my brother punctured his kites on trees and powerlines, the string lurching out of his hands, I could fly for hours, even at night, my paper kite a second moon, a man-made light. My father stayed up with me and watched. He told me that kites were once used for war. Once, an approaching army set up camp just outside the city. The army was banked on all sides by a fog thick as milk. To trick the enemy, the city strapped children to paper kites, gave them gourd-flutes to blow as they flew. The army, walled by fog, heard the children making music in the sky and assumed they were surrounded. The men surrendered within an hour. The city was saved by its smallest members.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  “In my last two years in high school, the Old Man’s situation improved. Kenyatta died, and somehow the Old Man was able to work again in government. He got a job with the Ministry of Finance and started to have money again, and influence. But I think he never got over the bitterness of what had happened to him, seeing his other age-mates who had been more politically astute rise ahead of him. And it was too late to pick up the pieces of his family. For a long time he lived alone in a hotel room, even when he could afford again to buy a house. He would have different women for short spells—Europeans, Africans—but nothing ever lasted. I almost never saw him, and when I did, he didn’t know how to behave with me. We were like strangers, but you know, he still wanted to pretend that he was a model father and could tell me how to behave. I remember when I got my scholarship to study in Germany, I was afraid to tell him. I thought he might say I was too young to go and interfere with my student visa, which had to be approved by the government. So I just left without saying good-bye. “It was only in Germany that I began to let go of some of the anger I felt towards him. With distance, I could see what he had gone through, how even he had never really understood himself. Only at the end, after making such a mess of his life, do I think he was maybe beginning to change. The last time I saw him, he was on a business trip, representing Kenya at an international conference in Europe. I was apprehensive, because we hadn’t spoken for so long. But when he arrived in Germany he seemed really relaxed, almost peaceful. We had a really good time. You know, even when he was being completely unreasonable he could be so charming! He took me with him to London, and we stayed in a fancy hotel, and he introduced me to all his friends at a British club. He was pulling out chairs for me and making a great fuss, telling all his friends how proud he was of me. On the flight back from London, I noticed a little glass tumbler his whiskey was being served in, and I said I was going to filch it, and he said, ‘There’s no need for such things.’ He called the stewardess and asked her to bring me a whole set of the glasses, as if he owned the plane. When the stewardess handed them to me, I felt like a little girl again. Like his princess.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ama remembered the river was conceived not by the sea but by a body: It had been pissed down the mountain Papakwaka, cleaving streams into the stone. Ama propped herself above the riverwoman’s ribs. The mud slapped against itself, a sound like farting, and they both laughed. Ama kneeled between the riverwoman’s knees and touched with her tongue the black hair there, gummy with mud and moonmilk. Ama’s tongue was its own language, a language that didn’t need to be taught to it. When the riverwoman came in her mouth, Ama didn’t rinse it for days, kept tonguing the salt between her teeth. The riverwoman flipped onto her stomach and the mud opened around her, her limbs waning back into her body. Red scales rushed up her belly like a flame and she slid forward through silt, belly-flopping back into the river. Back home, Ama undressed and scrubbed the mud from her dress, but it had ground itself too deep into the weave and become inseparable from the fabric. She shook it out, went outside to dry it anyway, and saw something clinging to its hem. A scale the size of her toenail. Ama placed the scale on her tongue and sucked on it all day until it blurred away. When her belly rose as rapidly as bread, she knew this would be her last daughter. Ama thought of the riverwoman whose belly never left the ground, the way her hips gave into honey. The scale Ama swallowed: It must have doubled itself inside her, daughtering. This daughter was only hers. Hers and the river’s. Hers and the dead’s. This daughter—my mother—was the one Ama would see as her second body, a liability. Months later, when Ama tossed all her daughters off the bridge and into the river red, she would watch the snakes warring over their meat. She was waiting for the riverwoman to bring her daughters out of the water, her tongue hooking their mouths, dragging them back to the surface. While Ama was dropping her daughters into the river, trying to skip the last baby like a stone, she thought of water as the best of all mothers. Water had none of its own wants: It served only the thirst of others. Ama knew being needed was a kind of divinity, and she was tired of being that good, that god. When she dropped my mother into the river last, Ama thought: I am returning her to the river that will raise her better, raise her like a flood I will run from. _