He wanted to be master, to speak with authority which could only come from God. it was later to become his proud testimony that he hated his sins – even as he ran towards sin, even as he sinned. He hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and hated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenseless city of his mind.
To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you.
Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality.
But he was to find, as the prophets had found, that the whole earth became a prison for him who fled before the Lord. There was peace nowhere, and healing nowhere, and forgetfulness nowhere. In every church he entered, his sin had gone before him. It was in the strange, the welcoming faces, it cried up to him from the altar, it sat, as he mounted the pulpit steps, waiting for him in his seat. It stared upward from his Bible: there was no word in all that holy book which did not make him tremble.
He did not wonder. He had once told Esther that if the Lord ever gave him a son he would call him Royal, because the line of the faithful was a royal line – his son would be a royal child. And this she had remembered as she thrust him from her; with what had perhaps been her last breath she had mocked him and his father with this name. She had died, then, hating him; she had carried into eternity a curse on him and his.
We are in a rough situation – but, if you really want to think about it, ain’t nothing new about that. That’s just exactly, daughter, when you do not give up. You can’t give up.
The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not he had ever, really, been present at his life. For if he had ever been present, then he was present still, and his world would open up before him.
Sometimes you were here all day long and you read or you opened the window or you cooked something – and I watched you – and you never said anything – and you looked at me with such eyes, as though you did not see me. All day, while I worked to make this room for you.
I saw myself, sharply, as a wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.
In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law – in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.
A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay.
Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you.
C’est leur innocence qui constitue leur crime.
They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law – in a word, power.
I defended myself, as I imagined, against the fear my father made me feel by remembering that he was very old-fashioned. Also, I prided myself on the fact that I already knew how to outwit him. To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced. As for one’s wits, it is just not true that one can live by them – not, that is, if one wishes really to live.
The artistic objects by which they are surrounded cannot possibly fulfill their original function of disturbing the peace – which is still the only method by which the mind can be improved – they bear witness instead to the attainment of a certain level of economic stability and a certain thin measure of sophistication. But art and ideas come out of the passion and torment of experience: it is impossible to have a real relationship to the first if one’s aim is to be protected from the second.
Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives.
I have seen and heard and endured the secrets of desperate white men and women, which they knew were safe with me, because even if I should speak, no one would believe me.
It was the kind of encounter one watches with a smile simply because it is so rare that people enjoy one another.
Why, then, is it not possible that all things began with the black man and that he was perfect – especially since this is precisely the claim that white people have put forward for themselves all these years?