(Note: I edited the title of this post in 2020 to clarify the post’s content.)
I have no interest in reviewing books, but I enjoy sharing how they make me feel.
This month I began reading Wayne Wiegand’s Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library. The book is all about what libraries have been and what they are: spaces of learning, community, protest, elitism, stubbornness, and dreams. Telling the history of the public library through the voices of the people who have used it, Wiegand brings me so close to the patrons of the past that, at times, I feel as if their stories are my own.
As I read about the nineteenth-century librarians that tried to keep women and kids from reading fiction because they believed it would destroy their minds, I think about radio stations of the 1980’s that would not play a song with the word “sex” in it, and people who use their contempt for one baggy-pants-wearing, profanity-loving rapper as an excuse not to respect any rap musicians or any rap music at all. As I read about police kicking “derelicts” out of a public library reading room over a century ago, I think about a 21st century world where sociologically invisible homeless people get arrested into physical invisibility, and where a 90-year-old man gets arrested for giving them food to eat. I read about libraries banning Huckleberry Finn, and I think about how people will never stop hunting messengers, because it is so much easier to silence the ones talking about real-and-ugly things than it is to face real-and-ugly things and understand where they are coming from. As I think about the black people Wiegand writes about, the ones who could not visit the library they paid their taxes to support, or who had to use a “separate” entrance, I see my daddy before I was born, a black man going to the colored section of everything, and how his face looked when he told me about that experience years later. I am upset, but I am glad, too, so glad that my daddy and my mama did not break, so glad I grew up seeing a black librarian on a regular basis. I read about patrons boycotting libraries that wouldn’t stock the books they wanted to read, and I am cheering in my head. I want to reach back in time and fist bump the boycotters; I want to talk to the nineteenth-century fiction-loving women, and tell them we’re still fighting, – no, sadly, the fight is not over, but things have gotten better – somewhat – we lose ground sometimes, but we keep fighting, keep marching, keep fighting, thank you, thank you for dreaming, Sisters, thank you for everything you did.
This is what falling in love with a book feels like for me. I don’t usually write about a book affair before it’s over, but this one may not be over for at least two more renewals, and I didn’t want to wait that long to tell you how it felt.
Book details: Wiegand, W.A. (2015). Part of our lives: A people’s history of the American Public Library. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
I updated the title of this post in 2020 to reflect the subject matter.
(Blog post: Copyright 2017 Stacy Torian)
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Stacy Torian 