An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [31]
I was afraid, too, that my letter would disappoint him by betraying my ignorance, which was just beginning to attract my own notice. What, for example, was this noisome-sounding substance called cheesecloth, and what do scientists do with it? What, when you really got down to it, was enamel? If candy could, notoriously, “eat through enamel,” why would anyone make trays out of it? Where—short of robbing a museum—might a fifth-grade student at the Ellis School on Fifth Avenue obtain such a legendary item as a wooden bucket?
The Field Book of Ponds and Streams was a shocker from beginning to end. The greatest shock came at the end.
When you checked out a book from the Homewood Library, the librarian wrote your number on the book’s card and stamped the due date on a sheet glued to the book’s last page. When I checked out The Field Book of Ponds and Streams for the second time, I noticed the book’s card. It was almost full. There were numbers on both sides. My hearty author and I were not alone in the world, after all. With us, and sharing our enthusiasm for dragonfly larvae and single-celled plants, were, apparently, many Negro adults.
Who were these people? Had they, in Pittsburgh’s Homewood section, found ponds? Had they found streams? At home, I read the book again; I studied the drawings; I reread Chapter 3; then I settled in to study the due-date slip. People read this book in every season. Seven or eight people were reading this book every year, even during the war.
Every year, I read again The Field Book of Ponds and Streams. Often, when I was in the library, I simply visited it. I sat on the marble floor and studied the book’s card. There we all were. There was my number. There was the number of someone else who had checked it out more than once. Might I contact this person and cheer him up? For I assumed that, like me, he had found pickings pretty slim in Pittsburgh.
The people of Homewood, some of whom lived in visible poverty, on crowded streets among burned-out houses—they dreamed of ponds and streams. They were saving to buy microscopes. In their bedrooms they fashioned plankton nets. But their hopes were even more vain than mine, for I was a child, and anything might happen; they were adults, living in Homewood. There was neither pond nor stream on the streetcar routes. The Homewood residents whom I knew had little money and little free time. The marble floor was beginning to chill me. It was not fair.
I had been driven into nonfiction against my wishes. I wanted to read fiction, but I had learned to be cautious about it.
“When you open a book,” the sentimental library posters said, “anything can happen.” This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.
The suggestions of adults were uncertain and incoherent. They gave you Nancy Drew with one hand and Little Women with the other. They mixed good and bad books together because they could not distinguish between them. Any book which contained children, or short adults, or animals, was felt to be a children’s book. So also was any book about the sea—as though danger or even fresh air were a child’s prerogative—or any book by Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. Virtually all British books, actually, were children’s books; no one understood children like the British. Suited to female children were love stories set in any century but this one. Consequently one had read, exasperated often to fury, Pickwick Papers, Désirée, Wuthering Heights, Lad, a Dog, Gulliver’s Travels, Gone With the Wind, Robinson Crusoe, Nordhoff and Hall’s Bounty trilogy, Moby-Dick, The Five Little Peppers, Innocents Abroad, Lord Jim, Old