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Libraries Function
as Magical, Sacred Places
(By Stacy Jones, August 13, 2005) |
At
4:40 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, I am barreling down the streets
of Memphis. I am on a mission. I am headed to a place that, after
churches, seems one of the most marvelous, holy, sacred places
on earth.
I hurtle through green lights,
zip into the left lane past slow-moving cars in the right lane,
and finally find myself at my destination, the central branch
of the Shelby County Public Library, with 10 minutes to spare.
At the last moment possible moment, I have had a desire to check
out a book a fellow writer and friend recommended to me the week
before: Brad Watson's "The Heaven of Mercury." I had
already looked it up on the online catalog system to make sure
the library had the book checked in on its shelves, so I knew
if I could get there in time, that copy would be mine for the
next three weeks.
Since I tend to arrive perpetually
late, I slip in the large doors and scamper to the second floor
to the Fiction section only minutes before the announcement that
the library will be closing at 5:00 p.m. I decide also at the
last minute to grab a collection of short stories by Larry Brown,
the late, well-esteemed writer from Oxford, along with Eudora
Welty's "Delta Wedding." I figure these three books
will satisfy the Mississippi fix I am craving.
Like me, Eudora Welty stands among
the host of writers who felt a special fondness for the public
library. She wrote about her experience in the library in her
best-selling memoir "One Writer's Beginnings":
"I never knew anyone who'd grown up in Jackson without being
afraid of Mrs. Calloway, our librarian," Welty writes. "She
ran the library absolutely by herself, from the desk where she
sat with her back to the books and facing the stairs, her dragon
eye on the front door, where who knew what kind of person might
come in from the public?"
Welty describes Mrs. Calloway's
supreme reign and her own willingness to bend to it for the privilege
of reading: "As you came in from the bright outside, if
you were a girl, she sent her strong eyes down the stairway to
test you; if she could see through your skirt she sent you straight
back home: you could just put on another petticoat if you wanted
a book that badly from the public library. I was willing; I would
do anything to read."
In my own time, we had abandoned
petticoats for pants and shorts, but I know exactly the level
of Welty's devotion. As a child, I would have done almost anything
to be able to visit the public library, check out a stack of
books almost taller than my skinny arms could carry, and pore
over them for the next two weeks.
Unlike Welty and others who lived
in town and were able to walk or ride their bicycles to the library,
I could not. I lived in a rural area where a trip to the library
had to be made by car, since it was about five miles away.
My first remembrances of the Northeast
Mississippi Regional Library involve going with my brother Greg.
Venturing into the children's section, walking under that colossal
wooden rainbow was akin to entering another realm, a sanctum
of books, each offering another world to explore.
I think the first book I ever checked out was a picture book
about trains. I wish now I could recall the title.
However, I soon discarded picture
books for texts that told stories with words, a tool I would
learn to love more and more each day. I checked out many of the
selections that were popular with youngsters of my day: Gertrude
Chandler Warner's "Boxcar Children," Beverly Cleary's
"Ramona and Beezus," and Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little
House on the Prairie" series, to name only a few.
It was there in that library, in
Corinth, Mississippi, that I fell in love with books. Now an
English teacher and a writer, a student of language, I love them
more than ever. And I will never enter another library without
returning to those days, especially the summers, I spent lost
amidst the shelves of the Northeast Mississippi Regional Library.
Much has changed since that time.
For one, most all library holdings can now be looked up on a
computer database. Back then, we relied upon a literal card catalog
to point us in the right direction.
But other things have not changed.
Just a couple of weeks ago, my brother Greg and I stopped in
at the Corinth Library to check our e-mail, another modern convenience.
As we sat beside each other at the computers, Greg leaned over
to me and said, "The library still smells like it used to
when we would come in here, doesn't it?"
I took a deep breath, inhaled that
institutional aroma of cardboard, paper, and inks. "It does,"
I said. It felt like coming home.
(Stacy Jones, a Southerner,
is a Master of Fine Arts student in fiction writing at The University
of Memphis. She is a native of Guys, Tenn., and her columns,
which appear on Saturdays, are archived at Southern-Drawl.com.) |
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