I’ve learned that some of us, with these two ears of ours, though parallel and balanced, still hear like owls – with a particular precision. Owls have ears that almost function as longitude and latitude. At forty miles per hour and over three feet of freshly fallen snow, an owl can swoop down and locate the heart pulse of a mole twelve inches buried in white. I am humbled by that necessary focus. And though my brain is scattered as some memories might be, my receptors are finely tuned to decipher, and sometimes only this, complicated text into the reasons I am not loved.
The noise of the world, disconcerting and certain that the story you tell yourself about yourself is untrue is an incredibly lone making place. In sixth grade, when my mother found the crumpled piece of paper offering me a spot in the local magnet program, all I heard was my mother wanted to keep me from my friends, terrified of my neighborhood, terrified that I’d end up in the prisons that I’d find anyway. I could not hear the promise of intellectual challenges and a college education that the paper held for my mother. Back in the day, disputes with friends never fizzled, and because I never learned to throw my hands with the precision that I toss around nouns and verbs, I took a lot of L’s.
And maybe because of this, right when I needed to, somebody convinced me that the bridge to loving myself was realizing what a book might remind you of. Trust is a hell of a thing. At the Fairfax County Jail, a teacher, looking at my 120-odd pounds in the state jumpsuit that swamped me, asked what courses I was taking. In a year of incarceration no one wondered if I’d ever sat in one of those awkward desks with the rectangle for your chewing gum. I fell in love with a 60-year-old white woman because she said my intelligence reminded me of her son. An English teacher by trade, it was easy for her to convince me, whose last book checked out from the public library was Evelyn Wood’s Guide to Speed Reading. She had me reading it all - Sophie’s Choice to King Arthur.
Post that, post prison, post more books than I could name, I was damn near capable of, on something of a consistent basis, parsing out my life into more than moments of rejoice and recrimination. And then I started returning to prison. There is so much suffering Inside. And other things too. But suffering. The fear of all that might have been and all that will be.
I guess I mean to say that Inside I never parsed my life out between rejoice and recrimination. We were struggling towards something, and that struggle was clearest when we were together talking books. That’s what the Freedom Library is about. I, G-d willing, won’t be back on the side of things where I get to know that a Freedom Library matters. But even here, where sometimes every day is simply a struggle to find a way to get to the next day, I am reminded.
We called it a +29 party and honestly I might not have come. That morning I’d told someone on the team to cancel it. My life, usually toggling between the two poles, on this morning that flag had planted itself on weeping. But I kept the party on. As I’ve told a friend, New Haven is the pizza capital of America – and I live on one of the eleventeen major pizza thoroughfares in New Haven. And so we had the crew over. Mostly everybody. Sometimes things come up and folks can’t come through.
And we had names. Names of books. And those names led us to remember that we know each other in ways that should always remind us that we are never just angry or mean or too talkative, that we are never just loud, just any of these things. Because, and this is what I know, I saw the smiles when Blackouts by Justin Torres came up. When someone mentioned The Body Keeps the Score. Catch-22. Yes people defended Educated by Westover fiercely. And yes, I wept to myself thinking of how it felt to have My Broken Language’s author Quiara Alegría Hudes write me back and say she too understands what it means to try to ride a bicycle mile after mile in this New Haven County.
I bought The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, or plan to. I am reading Major Taylor’s biography. Someone mentioned Invisible Ache and I was reminded of how talking keeps you from disappearing, sometimes.
And yes, today, on my seat will be Hummingbird Salamander, because if we are lucky, we can turn every place we live into a Freedom Library.