" Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination."
Toni Morrison, "Peril," The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
My mother was more into grocery stores. Second-hand stores. Little neighbor television and appliances enterprises. Church, of course. The neighborhood Catholic church and its accompanying school and recreation center.
My mother never thought to take me to a library. As a result, I can't remember where the library was located in our neighborhood.
I lived the first eleven years with my grandparents and, although both were readers, I don't recall either taking me to one or even uttering the word library . Nonetheless, my grandfather would skim pass the political and community news to read the sports section while my grandmother consumed gossip about the "next big" star featured in Rona Barrett's Hollywood celebrity magazine. It's no wonder I majored in English and minored in film during undergrad years.
But my love for books was triggered by my grandfather, a janitor for our courtyard building, who never allowed a book of any kind, on any subject, whether Huckleberry Finn , Silas Marner or Errol Flynn's racy autobiography, or any magazine, particularly a National Geographic or Life , reach the flames of the building's furnace.
It meant being the only child with a "library" of my own. How privileged was I to have access to these books. All children should be as lucky as the child with a heart condition!
Traveling to far off lands, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, whenever I picked up a book or magazine, made me seem as if I had magical powers. I could imagine anything! I could travel the Mississippi, see the South, those awful plantations, and know a little about slavery , about how people could have been treated as if inferior . I learned that those people were my people, my ancestors, African Americans determined to escape those plantations or die trying.
I wasn't afraid of the so-called "dark" continent. Human beings who looked like me lived there in Africa. Not the nuns or the priests, not the passable, light-skinned children always placed in the front rows, near the teachers, as if for protection.
From what?
I saw how the darker-skinned children's noses were placed in little circles the nuns drew on the blackboard. These children, my classmates, had to stand still while their noses were encircled in this drawn circle. Indicating what? Was it really because the culprit of supposed wrongdoing, spoke to a nearby classmate?
In those classrooms, we read the novels written for the Scholastic company. This was in the 1950s and early 1960s, and these books, adventurous narratives, nonetheless, featured white children playing on lawns and taking trips with parents to someplace like the Grand Canyon.
The Scholastic books now are troublesome to some Americans, concerned that these books include races of people and families, scenarios that differ from what had become the white middle-class standard.
Surrounded by adults in my grandparents' basement flat, not one of them tried to censor what I read. Nonetheless, I could see white fear in the faces of some nuns and priests, in the faces of store owners and clerks in the neighborhood and particularly at the Sears and Woolworth downtown.
I continued to read what was placed on the dining room table by my grandfather.
By high school, the Black bookstore called Timbuktu became a happening place for those of us nerdy enough to feel we could exist without books. Timbuktu sold books such as Soul on Ice and Wretched of the Earth. But it also had posters of Malcolm X, Huey Newton, and Sojourner Truth. If I didn't have money to spend at Timbuktu, I could accompany my mother (remarried to my father by then) to the Catholic Salvage, where, alone a far back wall, rows of used books by white authors (Hemingway and Faulkner) as well as Black authors (George Jackson, Alice Walker, and Angela Davis' If They Come in the Morning ) waited-- for me!
I still couldn't locate a library in the neighborhood, but I had some understanding of my ancestors had been and my place in the world.
In January 2024, MSNBC host Joy Reid spoke with the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, Tiffany Justice. I did an article that included a critique on Moms for Liberty last summer. By the time of this interview, half of me wanted to ignore the organization and its antics. Hateful people are exhausting. Major readers, they aren't. They want to protect their children. Their freedom. And that means, keeping their children ignorant of that history of America, founded on the enslavement of Africans.
The Southern Poverty Law Center declared Moms for Liberty "an anti-government extremist group;" yet, the organization believes that what it does is of value to those Americans who matter.
Does Mom for Liberty want to know why Pope Nicolas V "issued a series of papal bulls that granted Portugal the right to enslave sub-Saharan Africans"? Does the organization want to know how Africans, designated as pagans , were reduced "to perpetual slavery? How about Justice-- does she want to know how Europe and then the original colonies of the New World exploited Africans, establishing the TransAtlantic Slave Trade that allowed human beings to be considered "property" to be used for "profits"? And misused... abused...raped...tortured...killed?
Yet, here was the co-founder of Moms for Liberty on national television being treated with respect by a woman whose father was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and whose mother, a college professor from Guyana, hailed from ancestors, survivors the tyranny of enslavement. Here was Justice rallying the troops to oppose the reading of books predominantly by and about Blacks, Latinx, Indigenous, and LGBTQ-- yet, claiming all the while to Reid that Moms for Liberty wasn't banning books from the classroom or libraries.
No, Moms for Liberty isn't about calling for states to defund public libraries! No! But Moms for Liberty insists on having the right to remove books from public bookshelves because the organization knows what was best for all children! Really, she means white children in the US.
I don't think Tiffany Justice ever had the experience of entering a Timbuktu bookstore or rummaging through rows of used fiction and history. I don't think a Neruda poem ever spoke to her the way Malcolm spoke to a Black male student I taught 24-years-ago.
She might be nostalgic for those Scholastic books from back in the 1950s and early 1960s. The books that didn't include me and my ancestors.
I feel sorry for Americans so terrified that they will never recognize in an Ella Baker, a tower of courage, guts, leadership. They'll miss how the late Toni Morrison tried to represent women like Baker and Ida B. Wells in her character Baby Suggs in an effort to overcome fear.
On The Reid Out , as another MSNBC host pointed out, Justice zoned in on publications by the LGBTQ community; she referred to the "dildo" ( Yahoo News ) repeatedly . A little obsessed, huh?
Well, Reid did a good job. I'm not sure I would have passed up the opportunity. I guess that's what cable news is for.
But when I looked on at this woman, I was asking myself, what do these organizations like Moms for Liberty fear? Is it that perception of something being stolen? The unfairness of having to now share with the undeserving ? The inferior ?
It's a narrative of their own creation, isn't it? Fearful of their own narrative of horror! Their own created nightmare! Fearful of a haunting fiction of their own superiority so fantastic as to be in danger of slipping away"
