Bring back our books
Book bans are how we lose our imagination.
I love books. As a child, I read everything. I was such a voracious reader that my mom sometimes joked that she “couldn't keep enough food or books in the house.” Growing up, books were an escape for me. Living in Oakland, a city where it wasn't safe to be outside in a Black girl's body, I relied on books to carry me to places that my feet couldn't.
Now, I understand that, although I grew up poor and working class, my access to books was a privilege. According to a survey by YouGov, many Americans own books but they don’t own very many. More than a third of Americans own less than 25 books. About 9 percent of Americans polled said that they own no books at all. People who are older, who make more money, and who have more college degrees have more books. But, this wasn’t my story growing up. My mother finished high school but only went to two years of community college, a fact that she still laments. She grew up in extreme poverty and made a life for her two children largely on her own. My mother introduced me to books despite a world that reserves reading for people who are wealthier, more educated, and older than she was when she started her reading journey.
My dear aunt, who has been a school teacher, principal, and administrator in Oakland all my life, tells me frequently that her deepest concern for young Black students is that they don't possess a love for reading. She tells me how many of them don’t have bookshelves in their homes like I did growing up. And, I know that what she's really saying is their parents probably haven't encouraged them to chase the written word like my mother did for me.
You see, my mother is one of those Dean Koontz, Stephen King, John Grisham readers. She always loved authors who wrote many books that usually came out back-to-back. She dabbled in Danielle Steele but also loved the Black Feminist greats like Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Terri McMillan. I'd see my mother often, at the hairdresser, the nail shop, or in line somewhere, with her nose deep in a book. She'd be engrossed as if transported to an alternate universe, one far away from the echoes of gun shots, helicopters, and sirens that marked the real world around us. Books were my mother's escape. And, just the same way, they became mine.
I started off at 10 years old with Goosebumps and The Babysitters Club before I snuck over to my mother's shelves and began chasing her escape dreams, too. Grisham and King never attracted me but Steele did. McMillan did. Walker did. I started reading Morrison at 11 years old, learning the names Pecola, Sula, Sethe, Denver, and Beloved before my twelfth birthday. Soon, I'd learn the name Janie because my love of books would take me to the local Diamond Public Library, in search of more books by Black women. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston was first. Then, when I was 12, my Grandma Clara, my father's mom, snuck me How Stella Got Her Groove Back, a book by McMillan that my mother had hidden from me.
“She's mature enough to read it, Cynthia,” my grandma told my mother.
I wasn't. But, I said I was.
“She understands everything happening in the book,” she implored her.
I didn't. But, I said I did.
I would say anything to get my hands on that book. If I had to lie, steal, or kill, I'd do it. There was clearly something in there that I wasn't supposed to know which made me want to know it even more.
The curiosity had won. I had to keep going. I soon discovered the sex-laced tales of Eric Jerome Dickey. I read through every single copy my mother owned. Sister, Sister, Milk in My Coffee, Friends and Lovers, and Cheaters. My mom released herself of the constant need to remind me that 14 years old wasn't old enough to be reading such things.
I followed my journey to The Coldest Winter Ever by Sistah Souljah, cutting school and sitting at the Burger King across the street from Oakland Technical High School so I could finish the book in two days. Through my French fries and chicken nuggets, I knew that day, the day I skipped school to read, that I was hooked. There was a certain curiosity that had taken hold of me and it would never let go. I didn't want it to. Me and my books were in a relationship. We were making the things of dreams.
That passion has stayed with me all my life. I walk past books and feel as though they are calling to me, making eyes at me. I buy more books than I have time to read. My “To be Read List” stretches along like Santa's list of the naughty and nice kids he's rewarding and punishing each Christmas. There are stacks of books outside of my many bookshelves. If I can't buy a copy of a book for myself (because I already own it), then I'm compelled to buy a copy for someone I love or admire. I can't live without books. They are a sort of lifeblood to me. A portal to my imagination. A key that unlocks my fullest potential and self.
So, as an educator and a lifetime lover of books, it breaks my heart knowing that books are in a state of crisis. Book bans across the country have targeted the very authors who set me on my path as a young reader. These bans have the potential to produce gaps in student learning outcomes and reduce the foundational knowledge young people have about the world around them. Not only that, they take away opportunities for students, like I once was, to see themselves reflected back. A world without books means a world without dreamers. What a sad world that would be.
I can’t help but see this moment as a call-to-action. When I first read stories out of Florida, of teachers forced to cover books with paper bag covers and remove Morrison from their libraries, I cried for them. The injustice of banning the written word reminded of my own efforts to find books years ago, many of them out-of-print or so seldom read that librarians couldn’t find them anywhere.
In my classroom, I work to combat this attack on my beloved books. As I have always done, I base every lecture, every course, and every discussion (no matter the topic) on a fundamental ethic of reading deeply and widely. My syllabi are riddled with “optional” texts for students like I was, hungry for more words, willing to skip class just to find them. I prioritize reading over grades because reading comprehension is the way to a good grade. And, I remind students that the only way to become the intellectuals they intend to be is if they choose to study, first.
Our students and children deserve a world where words are free. They deserve to find love in the pages of books that smell like life preserved. These generations after us are hungry for knowledge, for purpose, and for vision. We owe them a way forward, a way to freedom. It’s in books.