I won’t say that I dislike Edwards library, which is located on the east side and is the unofficial marker of the transition from populated east Ladoga to sparsely populated east Ladoga. I will say that nowadays I opt for the public library in west Ladoga because I think that they have the type of librarians that I’m used to; older women who seem to love organization and had built up intimate knowledge of their library to the point that they could tell you the availability of a book off the tops of their heads. The librarians at Edwards are definitely a smart group of people, they are much more diverse than the west Ladoga librarians, and much younger, but they don’t run a library the way that I’m used to. They rely heavily on their technology, which is not a bad thing really, but it feels like something other than a library, a media center, and most everyone there goes for the internet access. I wonder if Eunice liked the direction of Edwards, she must have experienced it with computers and TV viewing rooms that had been upgraded from private study rooms with chalk boards. It’s not bad, though, and I applaud the way that the library remains a staple of the community, but the public library feels like a timewarp to the nineties that I love to slip into.
When I arrived there, I talked to Edwards’ head librarian, a tall black man that I recognized from my youth, I used to see him in school but was never really introduced to him because he is a couple of years younger and he did not live in the northeast back then. His name is Rick and he was perfect for the library, very pleasant and calm demeanor, soft spoken with thick rimmed black glasses. I forgot how tall he was until he stood to shake my hand and I had to look up at him.
We caught up fast and I asked him if he knew of any librarians that had worked at Edwards when Eunice was alive; she had passed in 2008.
“I started in 2008, I knew Mrs. Eunice. I wasn’t a librarian, I mostly just helped out however I could. She used to be the scary woman at the end of the street, I grew up close to her house. One day my mom sent me over to her house to return something she had borrowed from Mrs. Eunice, a frying pan or something, and I was shaking by the time I made it to her doorstep. Her house was creepy back then, with all that kudzu climbing up the bricks, and the tall trees around it made it dark, and she was old and she had that witch mole on her nose. Me and my friends stayed out of her way. But that day with the frying pan, she invited me in, made me sit down and eat cookies and she just started talking. And I sat there all afternoon laughing with her. Back then she would only tell me funny stories about her life. She lived in Ladoga back when most black people still picked cotton for a living and she seemed to appreciate all the change she had witnessed in the world. She said she didn’t like TVs when she first saw them, she couldn’t understand what people would use them for; of course she thought that a person could get everything they needed from a book or a newspaper, something printed. She came to love them, though, she was a big fan of a good story regardless of the media.”
Rick obviously had a lot of affection for the woman. I asked him, “Did she ever tell you the horror stories that she knew?”
“I wouldn’t call them horror stories, but I see why someone might. They’re gruesome tragedies. You ever hear the one about the most beautiful woman in Ladoga who skinned herself alive? That was her daughter, Victoria Carlton, she went by Vicky. If you know the story, Vicky was so beautiful that every guy in town couldn’t stay away from her, no matter how hard they resisted. And Vicky, fed up with the attention, decides to cut off her skin to make herself repulsive. Only, that’s not really how it happened. Everyone who knew Vicky, knew that she was the most beautiful woman in Ladoga while she alive, but only a few know that she was psychotic, probably bipolar or schizophrenic, sadly her parents didn’t know enough to help her. Mrs. Eunice said she knew something was wrong with her, but they could never afford a good diagnosis. And while it is true that Vicky did skin herself alive when she was about twenty-five, and Mrs. Eunice found her dead in the bathroom in a pool of her own blood and strips of the skin from her arms and face floating in it, she didn’t do it to stop boys from hollering at her, she did it because she had an emergence of vitiligo and she thought that it was something much worse. Yea, its kind of a horror story, but all I hear when I hear that story is Mrs. Eunice mourning the loss of her child. I feel bad for Vicky’s daughter too, I understand why she left town, I would have too.”
Apparently, Vicky had a named Vances who went to live with her father in Tennessee after Vicky’s death. Rick told me that he never really knew Vances, but she had gone to Edwards Elementary until she moved.
I asked Rick if he knew about TAOT, if he had ever read it before.
“I have seen it. For a long time I thought Deborah made it because she used to always talk about writing Ladoga stories, but she didn’t know what it was when I asked her about it.”
Deborah is another librarian at Edwards who was reading to a group of kids in the nook that the stairwell to the second floor created in a corner. The second floor of the library seems to hover over the first because it is only half the size and is reinforced by two huge wooden beams that are covered in patron art. Every Wednesday, Deborah reads books to younger children in the nook that I was told had retained its purpose throughout the life of the library; it had always been the corner where a storyteller would sit before a gathered crowd. The corner was noticeably void of electronics and if the kids had cell phones that day with Deborah, they ignored them for the time that she read stories about Orísha and Odúwa, the God-sons of the Nigerian God Arámfè, who were sent to bring leadership and purpose to the Earth. There was an easel next to Deborah and she would periodically change the pictures that Rick told me she had drawn herself.
“She loves reading to kids and she never goes for the easy sell,” Rick said as we watched her from the front desk. “Most of the kids here would rather hear the Odyssey than Dr. Seuss.”
Deborah was also an elementary school teacher in town and had moved to Ladoga after college when she joined Teach for America about ten years ago.
“I don’t think she has time to write a newsletter,” Rick said, “she spends a lot of time on her illustrations. She wants to draw children’s books, tell stories like the Myths of Ife without dumbing them down so kids can be introduced to big concepts at a young age.”
She was a talented illustrator. She liked to use a thick black line that I assumed she achieved with marker, and she used watercolors to bring the work to a muted life; the scene she depicted of the brothers on their descent to Earth, as the jealous Odúwa attacks to steal Orísha’s bag of wisdoms, had a palette that evoked the centuries over which the story itself had lived.
There were other librarians there that day, restocking shelves, helping people check out books or with computers, but Rick said he was sure that none of them were V.I.V. “Techies, like most of the people here, do blogs, not newsletters.”
He told me that a while back, you could find a small stack of the current TAOT on the front desk, but the library’s administrator had put up a sign that forade distribution of materials without expressed consent. Maybe the administrator was trying to smoke V.I.V. out. But Rick said the stack stopped appearing shortly after.
“Did Eunice know about it?” I asked Rick.
“She must have. I don’t know when they started leaving them here, but Mrs. Eunice was probably still alive when they still showed up. We never talked about it, though.”
I left Edwards Library with two thoughts in my head; first, that Rick could be V.I.V. and was working hard to remain anonymous, and second, that it was very likely that I still had no clue at all who V.I.V. was. I did invite Rick and Deborah to coffee and we met about a week later. Mr. Smith joined us, I wanted him to talk to them and ask them questions, maybe he could spot the V.I.V. that either of them was trying to hide. Mr. Smith knew Rick and expressed the same surprise that I imagine many people express at the news that a man over six and half feet tall was not a basketball player, but a calmly librarian. “And I only say that because I’ve seen you play and you aren’t bad. It’s a good thing that you prefer books to sports, though, you seems to be doing very well for yourself and you won’t have to worry about your knees giving out.”
Rick agreed. “All that jumping and running. I’d much rather sit around and discuss the news with teenagers.” Rick had a position of authority at the library, second only to the head administrator whom I had not met. I have never even seen the man, actually, I, like most people, had only ever encountered the person who did Rick’s job and assumed them to be in charge of everything. He said his official title was Second Administrator which meant that he executed the plan for the library that the head administrator concocted seemingly in secret, locked behind the doors of his office on the first floor. Rick usually hung around the front desk and on a normal day, there would be a group of mostly teenagers voicing their opinions about various news items Rick would tell them about. When he wasn’t doing that, he did boring administrative paperwork or made boring administrative phone calls. He would walk around the library when he could to make sure everything was in place.
Deborah said that Rick was a good boss, that it was his idea for her to illustrate classics for story time. “I mean, I’ve always been interested in finding a way to make literature interesting,” Deborah said, “but he suggested that I try it out for story time.”
Needless to say, Mr. Smith was a big fan of Deborah and her teaching techniques. They got lost in a conversation that Rick and I only listened to when we weren’t carrying on our own conversation. I asked Rick where he would look if he had to guess where V.I.V. was. He said, “I don’t know, really. Edwards was a good place to start. I honestly think that V.I.V. is a middle aged black woman who lives on the eastside. I don’t know why, maybe I’m just hoping that she is, that she’s not your average Caucasian reporter, because I’m sure that my opinion of TAOT would change dramatically.”
“Why’s that,” I asked.
“I’m a racist, I guess. I don’t hate white people but it would be hard for me to retroactively hear about all the problems of black people in east Ladoga from the very people who created those problems. And that’s not to say that every white person on the west side directly caused problems for the black people on the east, or that all black east siders have problems, but historically, black people owe their problems to white people.”
I knew that Rick could not be V.I.V. then, Rick had a righteous attachment to the eastside’s history that would have been reflected in TAOT were he the editor. I asked him for his solution to the ills of Ladoga’s black community and he said, “I don’t know what’s sustainable or practical, I’m just a librarian, but I see the kids in this community every day and so many of them don’t know that a world even exists outside this community, and maybe if we can show them that, it will motivate them to work towards it.”
I pointed out that it wasn’t necessarily white people who limited the horizon of black children, maybe in a convoluted, metaphysical sense, but not in a practical one. The real perpetrators had to be the parents. “Would you be let down if V.I.V. is a parent, since it seems that most of the kids you see everyday are being hindered by their parents?”
“If it’s a white parent, maybe. But I don’t agree with you, you can’t just dump it all on parents.”
And we had the intellectual equivalent of a fight. Rick left and I explained to Mr. Smith and Deborah where the rift started.
“This is going to sound like a double standard but black people are very touchy about race because of the amount of racism that we encounter on a daily basis,” Mr. Smith explained. “It’s such a defining thing for us because to other people we are our skin color before any things else, so when someone tries to challenge our knowledge of our own experience, its feels akin to telling a fish how to swim or a bird how to fly.”
“The word race is funny, right?” Deborah said leaning onto the table. “I mean, they made it up just so you can politely ask someone what their skin color is before you see them in person. It’s funny that we need that word. You can’t have racial equality if race exist. Race is predicated on separation, and the human hive mind is so narrow minded that it assumes that multiple choices illicit the ranking of those choices. So we either have to become a smarter species or do away with race altogether, short of that, people will always be very sensitive to the topic.”
We moved on and I was glad that Deborah had stayed despite my disagreement with Rick. I asked Deborah about TAOT, if she had a guess who was behind it.
“Oh, I know who it is,” she said confidently, and I looked at Mr. Smith with real excitement in my eyes. “It’s a group of teenagers from the west side. That afterschool program that’s close to the brick plant in the south, they do all types of stuff there, gymnastics, karate. They have some computers that the kids use for school work. I wanted to send my daughter there but I can’t afford it, its top after school care. When we went to visit, I saw them printing up an issue, apparently the teenagers who go there do it as an activity or something.”
I looked at Mr. Smith and his face mirrored my own confusion; the notion that kids in an after school program were creating a densely packed newsletter with allusions to literature that most school teachers had not heard of, was hard, if not impossible to believe. And why would kids from the westside tell the east side Cain and Abel story?
PRL Serials 