She sensed that what her aunt spoke of as love was something else – a bribe, a threat, an indecent will to power. She knew that the kind of imprisonment that love might impose was also, mysteriously, a freedom for the soul and spirit, was water in the dry place, and had nothing to do with the prisons, churches, laws, rewards, and punishments, that so positively cluttered the landscape of her aunt’s mind.
I was there, then, for the, in a way that hadn’t nothing to do with me. I was there, then, for them, like Fonny was present, like my baby, just beginning now, out of a long, long sleep, to turn, to listen, to awaken, somewhere beneath my heart.
He longed for a light that would teach him, forever and forever, and beyond all question, the way to go; for a power that would bind him, forever and forever, and beyond all crying, to the love of God... For it was time that filled his mind, time that was violent with the mysterious love of God.
And if it’s children you’re after, well, you can do that in five minutes and you you haven’t got to love anybody to do it. If all the children who get here every year were brought here by love, wow! baby, what a bright world this would be!
That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body. It.
There were so many things one did not dare to know. And were they all patiently waiting, like demons in the dark, to spring from hiding, to reveal themselves, on some rainy Sunday morning?
But men have no secrets, except from women, and never grow up in the way that women do. It is very much harder, and it takes longer for a man to grow up, and he could never do it at all without women.
To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and if I can respect this, both of us can live. Neither of us, truly, can live without the other: a statement which would not sound so banal if one were not so endlessly compelled to repeat it, and act on that belief.
My soul is a witness for my Lord. There was an awful silence at the bottom of John’s mind, a dreadful weight, a dreadful speculation. And not even a speculation, but a deep, deep turning, as of something huge, black, shapeless, for ages dead on the ocean floor, that now felt its rest disturbed by a faint, far wind, which bid it: ‘Arise.
I loved my country, but I could not respect it, could not, upon my soul, be reconciled to my country as it was. And I loved my work, had great respect for the craft which I was compelled to study, and wanted it to have some human use. It was beginning to be clear to me that these two loves might, never, in my life, be reconciled: no man can serve two masters.
Yes, it does indeed mean something – something unspeakable – to be born, in a white country, an Anglo-Teutonic, antisexual country, black. You very soon, without knowing it, give up all hope of communion. Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away.
People pay for what they do, and, still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead. The crucial thing, here, is that the sum of these individual abdications menaces life all over the world. For, in the generality, as social and moral and political and sexual entities, white Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.
He was still big, black, and loud; at the age of twenty-three – he is a little older than Fonny – he was already running out of familiar faces.
The tragedy of this country now is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care. What they care about is their safety and their profits. What they care about is not rocking the boat. What they care about is the continuation of white supremacy, so that white liberals who are with you in principle will move out when you move in.
I suppose this is why I asked her to marry me: to give me something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.
Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.
The blacks have a song which says, ‘I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.’ No American film, relating to blacks, can possibly incorporate this observation.
Someone once said to me that the people in general cannot bear very much reality. He meant by this that they prefer fantasy to a truthful recreation of their experience. People have quite enough reality to bear, by simply getting through their lives, raising their children, dealing with the eternal conundrums of birth, taxes, and death.
And if one despairs – as who has not? – of human love, God’s love alone is left. But God – and I felt this even then, so long ago, on that tremendous floor, unwillingly – is white. And if His love was so great, and if He loved all His children, why were we, the blacks, cast down so far?
White people are trapped in a history they don’t understand” and “Ignorance allied with power is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.