High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [21]
One more valuable skill in my life.
She launched me on the project of cataloging and shelving every one of the, probably, thousand books in the Nicholas County High School library. And since it beat Home Ec III by a mile, I spent my study-hall hours this way without audible complaint, so long as I could look plenty surly while I did it. Though it was hard to see the real point of organizing books nobody ever looked at. And since it was my God-given duty in those days to be frank as a plank, I said as much to Miss Richey.
She just smiled. She with her hidden agenda. And gradually, in the process of handling every book in the room, I made some discoveries. I found Gone With the Wind, which I suspected my mother felt was kind of trashy, and I found Edgar Allan Poe, who scared me witless. I found that the call number for books about snakes is 666. I found William Saroyan’s Human Comedy, down there on the shelf between Human Anatomy and Human Physiology, where probably no one had touched it since 1943. But I read it, and it spoke to me. In spite of myself I imagined the life of an immigrant son who believed human kindness was a tangible and glorious thing. I began to think about words like tangible and glorious. I read on. After I’d read all the good ones, I went back and read Human Anatomy and Human Physiology and found that I liked those pretty well too.
It came to pass in two short years that the walls of my high school dropped down, and I caught the scent of a world. I started to dream up intoxicating lives for myself that I could not have conceived without the books. So I didn’t end up on a motorcycle. I ended up roaring hell-for-leather down the backroads of transcendent, reeling sentences. A writer. Imagine that.
The most important thing about the books I read in my rebellion is that they were not what I expected. I can’t say I had no previous experience with literature; I grew up in a house full of books. Also, I’d known my way around the town’s small library since I was tall enough to reach the shelves (though the town librarian disliked children and censored us fiercely) and looked forward to the Bookmobile as hungrily as more urbane children listened for the ice cream truck. So dearly did my parents want their children to love books they made reading aloud the center of our family life, and when the TV broke they took about two decades to get around to fixing it.
It’s well known, though, that when humans reach a certain age, they identify precisely what it is their parents want for them and bolt in the opposite direction like lemmings for the cliff. I had already explained to my classmates, in an effort to get dates, that I was raised by wolves, and I really had to move on from there. If I was going to find a path to adult reading, I had to do it my own way. I had to read things I imagined my parents didn’t want me looking into. Trash, like Gone With the Wind. (I think, now, that my mother had no real problem with Gone With the Wind, but wisely didn’t let on.)
Now that I am a parent myself, I’m sympathetic to the longing for some control over what children read, or watch, or do. Our protectiveness is a deeply loving and deeply misguided effort to keep our kids inside the bounds of what we know is safe and right. Sure, I want to train my child to goodness. But unless I can invoke amnesia to blot out my own past, I have to see it’s impossible to keep her inside the world I came up in. That world rolls on, and you can’t step in the same river twice. The things that prepared me for life are not the same things that will move my own child into adulthood.
What snapped me out of my surly adolescence and moved me on were books that let me live other people’s lives. I got to visit the Dust Bowl and London and the Civil War and Rhodesia. The fact that Rhett Butler said “damn” was a snoozer to me—I hardly noticed the words that mothers worried about. I noticed words like colour bar, spelled “colour” the way Doris Lessing wrote it, and eventually I figured out it meant racism. It was the thing that had forced some