I don’t consider myself to be a dreamer, or particularly imaginative. I like to stick to facts when I’m able. It annoys me when my boss says things to me about my value, that I am too expensive for menial work, like processing new clients. To me that is a flight of his imagination; that my value to his company can be measured in the hourly wage that he pays me and that I accept. Of course I am worth more than my salary in the existential sense and I take issue with the valuation of my person as though I am one of my unfortunate ancestors; but as a son of capitalism, my biggest issue is that I don’t think that my boss realizes how good of a person that I am because I don’t demand higher pay and better benefits. I say son of capitalism because the history of America’s economic system has taught me that in order to become a man of note I must know my own worth and demand it, through action and attitude. So if I consistently perform in a way that produces good results for my company’s bottom line, then I know that I should expect compensation commensurate with the quality I produce. I know for a fact that I would make much better money at a different law firm. I know a paralegal at a firm in downtown close to the court and he is salaried with great health insurance, retirement and bonuses. But I guess loyalty keeps me where I am. When I moved to Charlotte after college, I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I just didn’t want to move back to my parent’s house in Ladoga. I applied for a position at the Observer, but they hired me as an intern so I had to find something that would pay the bills. Looking for a job was honestly difficult for me because I didn’t have an IT, finance, or medical background. I applied for jobs at every place that was hiring at the time and only got calls back from seemingly upstart insurance companies that paid based on commission, essentially door to door insurance sales. I’d expected my degree to afford me better opportunities but instead I blew through the savings I’d earned at the bookstore where I worked in college for four years. I eventually got a call from my current boss who was looking for an assistant, specifically not a paralegal because he’d had bad experiences in the past, to help him with paperwork and briefs. He was patient with me in the beginning because I had no experience with law or legal writing and he even paid for a couple classes at the community college for me to become more familiar with legal research and citations. Because I was eager for steady income, I accepted my hourly pay and unpaid vacations and personal days. And it’s been enough, but the reality is that I am getting older and my responsibilities are changing. I have to give Mary a house, I have to grow up.
That’s all a very stark contrast to my yesterday when I was in Ladoga for my book club meeting at the public library. It’s a mixed group of people, most are middle-aged women, and the youngest is in his late twenties. The librarian who organizes the club, Lebarbara Wilson, is the head librarian and she is a very authoritative woman in her sixties. She looks young for her age, but her attitude is a true indicator of the times that had reared her. She is adept at technology and even uses the glasses that are connected to the internet and overlay information on her everyday, but she insists on pencils, pens and paper, on tangible books, even if those things have become a rare find in younger generations. She is very good at her job and instituted the book sharing system that incorporates every library in Ladoga, including the schools, and even a few from neighboring towns. Mrs. Wilson is very knowledgeable of Ladoga’s history and she is happy to talk with anyone interested, though when I talked with her it felt more like a lecture than a conversation. Ladoga has two libraries that are not connected to a school, one on each side of town, and though they have a contentious history, the two entities have recently united in their desire to be a resource for knowledge for the community. It’s a long story, but for a brief overview I’ll say that the first library in Ladoga was founded in east Ladoga during the Civil War antebellum period by an educated white abolitionist man who was born in the south, educated in the north, and found himself teaching in Ladoga after the war when the town didn’t even have a school. The man, Henry Babel, helped to found present day Ladoga High School and also wanted to form a public library for the town as well. The East West divide existed by then and all municipal decisions were made by land owning white males on the West Side, and they soundly rejected Babel’s library as an unnecessary excuse to tax people. The recently freed blacks in the East Side were relatively prosperous after the war, most sharecropped or continued as farm hands on the West Side of town and apparently every morning and in the afternoon when work ended, there was a procession of the workers who dragged the sun to the West Side and left it there when they went home. They had founded their own school soon after the war, present day Edwards Elementary school, and leaders of the East Side embraced Babel’s plans that had been rejected on the West Side. It took five years to fill a room with books in what was known then as Edwards Academy, named for Peter Edwards who was a slave in Ladoga in the 1840’s who learned to read and escaped his master to Canada with the help of William Wells Brown himself. The Edwards library expanded over the years and by the time Ladoga public library was built on the West Side, Edwards Library had its own building with two floors. Edwards Library isn’t the place that I loved to walk to as a kid. It’s close to the Northside Park and when I was young there were activities throughout the summer that encouraged kids to read when school was out. They had weekly readings for kids throughout the year as well. As the public library got bigger and bigger, the more enthusiastic librarians moved to the West Side leaving Edwards to the lackadaisical and disengaged group that run it today. I didn’t tell my girlfriend at the time because she was completely against living in Ladoga, but I applied for a job there, and they passed because they only hired people with a master’s in library sciences.
The public library is nice though, and Mrs. Wilson has plans to expand the programs that she has created, like the book club, to Edwards in the near future. Mrs. Wilson chooses the books for the club and for our discussion yesterday we talked about Ayn Rand’s Anthem which I enjoyed the first time that I read it, enough for me to seek out other books by Rand. To this day I am only halfway through the Fountainhead and I never understood why I casually drifted away from it without the slightest curiosity to find out how the story ended. After re-reading Anthem, I wondered if I was too young to understand then that I was philosophically different from Rand who seemed to be saying a lot of things that I liked the most at the time. I was particularly into Thoreau’s Walden then and I latched on to the idea of embracing the things that made one different and being at peace with solitude. But Thoreau says explicitly what I think Rand fails to elaborate on, the idea that strong, self sufficient people need visitors and other people, if only sparingly. They both decried the idea of strong central government and the corruption of those who find themselves in a position of power, but Thoreau’s interactions with others while he was at the pond did not seem corrosive like the character interactions in the Fountainhead. If I had been raised solely on the Fountainhead as a guide to my humanity, I would be very skeptical of forming any attachment with any person ever. Anthem is not as bad, there is a seemingly successful love story in there, but on rereading it, I was struck by the one-sided view of it, that having a strong sense of community with representative government would necessarily lead to suppression of individuality. But I guess that’s the nature of all dystopian future novels. You can make a similar criticism about Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984. I prefer the message that we should not empower our government to make decisions about how we live our everyday lives and we have a responsibility to be pilots of our own destiny, but should never forget that we are propped up to be our best selves by others around us who are well meaning. It is hardly ever the case that a man found success or freedom or prominence completely on his own, everyone needs help in some form or another, and we should encourage everyone to at least be sympathetic and willing to lend a hand because that may be the action necessary to start a chain of events that will lead to whatever success story we will hear in the future. Most people in the book club just echoed the overarching theme of Anthem, big government is a no-no.
After the club meeting, I was approached by Miriam Taylor who is a stay-at-home mother of three and volunteers as a cook at the local homeless shelter when she has the time. Her family lives in the West Side and her husband works at the brick factory. She appreciated my reading of Anthem and said that she had not thought about it that way when she read it. “I think government takes too much from people and uses it wrong, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t know the value of community. We do all need each other.” She had a thick southern accent and it made our conversation very enjoyable for me. We sat in the book club meeting room after everyone had left and eventually we talked about other books we had recently enjoyed. She asked me if I’d read any of the fiction by the Reverend Dr. Lloyd Wright from the Pewter St. Baptist Church on the West Side and I told her that I had. The Reverend Dr. has self published two works of fiction, both of which I devoured in a couple of weeks despite their length. Both are very well edited and are about a character named Silas Truth who goes to hell in his dreams and is haunted by his visions in his waking life. Silas loses his job as a bank executive in the first novel and before long he is abandoned by everyone around him because of his apparent madness. Silas is not religious at all throughout the first novel and there is only mention of hell in the book; only a demon that Silas encounters in hell directly mentions God. Silas eventually drinks himself to homelessness and one night he is asleep under a bridge, he has a very vivid dream of being in hell and talking with a demon who is knowledgeable of human history and arts (the demon is glib and I imagined him with an English accent when I read it). Through conversation, Silas learns that the demon is sympathetic to humans whose souls find their way to the fiery realm and he believes that their eternity of torture is unfair. He even defends the most vile killers and rapists, who he believed served some good end. even if it was difficult to pinpoint that good end. The demon even says to Silas, “God works in mysterious ways.” The first novel ends when Silas realizes that his visions of hell, though maddening at times, should not keep him from living a productive life and he expresses determination to get some semblance of his old life back. The second novel chronicles Silas’s long slow journey up from rock bottom and ends when he realizes that he has no interest in getting back what had been so easy to lose. He sees all of the people and situations that surrounded him before as the cause of his break and he looks for a life that is more fulfilling. The Reverend Dr. is currently working on the third book in the series that will be published by a major publishing house once complete. Miriam loved both books because, “I have to find out if that demon is a good guy or a bad guy. He seemed bad in the first book, but in the second, I don’t think Silas would have got out of the gutter without him.” The allegiance of the demon is a great running mystery in the books that are honestly not horrible and worth the read. They are long, but read at a quick pace.
Miriam made me curious to flip through the Reverend Dr.’s books when I got home and I wondered if the Reverend was right in his world view that I had extrapolated from his writings. He thinks much more highly of man than my friend Job who planted the seed in my head that has me questioning the generosity that I have for others who are not my close family. The Reverend Dr. seems to think that man is a force for good in the cosmos that has the ability to bring the seemingly insignificant and relatively microscopic life of the Earth to prominence in the universe and that this prominence is ultimately a good and necessary thing. Even if the character Silas is a crazy man fueled by the deceptive goading of a hell spawn, that hell spawn is at the mercy of the man to disseminate whatever evil message it could hope to transmit. Silas’s journey demonstrates the interconnectivity of everything, even the seemingly evil. Anything can inspire a man to do things that are good for everyone around him. I imagine that Silas will become something great by the end of the series that will have profound effects on the ways that other characters in the novel relate to one another, their planet, and everything around it. Or maybe the Reverend Dr. will make the demon a long-con style manipulator, who will put Silas in a place of power in order to pray on the masses that blindly followed him. I wouldn’t be surprised and that would be more true to life than my idealism I suppose. I expect more from the Reverend Dr. though, the tone of the works lean towards my expectations.
PRL Serials 