Chapter 21 #2
“I didn’t have much of a library where I was, because I lived in a compound outside Billings that was just a hair shy of a cult and they didn’t believe girls should read anything but Scripture, and they really didn’t believe that you could be born a girl and actually be a boy.
Like me. But there was a Bible room with a lot of tracts and books about hellfire, and that counted enough to offer me a door, and if I hadn’t gone and decided to live in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I’d be married by now to a man who was sixty-three years old and already had two wives barely out of middle school.
” All the fight went out of that taut jawline all at once.
“I tell you now, I’m not going back. You try to drag me out of this place and send me home, I won’t go.
I’ll throw myself in the Mississippi first, or off that castle wall of the painting I was hiding in. ”
“You won’t have to go back,” Beau told the boy, offering a fist bump, and Masako in her fluttering court silks stepped up next.
“I had no opportunities where I was, nothing at all, no kind of future, and now I’m a poet at the court of Lady Fujitsubo in Heian-period Japan . . .”
And then it was the man with the gold-braided coat and spyglass, a navy vet who’d been on the verge of killing himself thanks to post-deployment PTSD, until the Library offered him a door and a life spent sailing the high seas with Long John Silver.
And the shorter woman in the Regency spencer and bonnet: “I couldn’t have children in my world, and now that I live in Pride and Prejudice I have a beautiful little boy named John Fitzwilliam after his father—you take me out of my book, I’ll never see my son again.
” One by one they stepped forward, gave their stories.
Stories I’d heard in the night as they’d arrived, as I asked them if they were sure about testifying. Stories that tore my heart to shreds.
“These are just a few of the people the Astral Library has helped,” I said at last, as Sarah gave a terse account of the husband who’d beaten and belittled her until she fled into Arthur Conan Doyle’s London.
“There are more. So many more.” I held up another sheaf of papers, written statements from more than a hundred Patrons who hadn’t come in person but had answered the call, and looked from face to face around the Board table.
I saw flashes of sympathy, interest—I was getting through, I knew it.
“I ask you to pay our Patrons their due respect by reading these.”
I was bullied every day at school and I was failing all my classes and about to run away from home. Now I help rescue French prisoners from the guillotine with the Scarlet Pimpernel . . .
I solve mysteries with Hercule Poirot . . .
I live next door to the March sisters in Little Women and I got to help decorate for Meg’s wedding . . .
“On the first day I came here,” I said as the Board leafed through pages of testimony, “the Librarian told me that the Library offers sanctuary to booklovers in need. People who are desperate, who have nowhere else to go but between the pages. People who are fleeing something: an abuser, a bad life, a lack of choices. Here they have choices—”
“This child living in Anne of Green Gables,” the woman named Darla interrupted, looking accusingly at the girl who had testified first. “If her parents come looking for her, the Library Board could be held legally liable. Charges of kidnapping could very well be levied!”
I saw the girl shrivel inside her gingham apron, and stepped forward to put myself between her and Darla. “Her father was beating her with a plank and her mother was letting it happen. Fuck her parents. She belongs here, as long as she feels safe.”
“Of course we’re committed to protecting the children.
Which is why I feel we should turn our attention to this list of books deemed inappropriate for underage readers.
” Behind those thick glasses, a feverish gleam was lighting up Darla’s eyes.
Book banner, I thought. Or maybe book burner.
“If we can examine the Library’s catalog and begin pulling all titles deemed—”
“All in good time, Darla,” Elizabeth said, and I remembered her words in the Boston Public Library about book-banning types: I’ve found it’s easiest to just give them a seat at the table. Well, if this shiny-eyed drone started pulling volumes off my shelves . . .
“I think the real point,” Elizabeth was saying, “is that no underage Patron belongs here, regardless of home circumstances. Libraries can’t be interfering in private family matters; that’s a job for Child Protective Services.
I move to add an age minimum to the Patrons this facility has extended doors to. ”
One or two Board members looked uncertain but— “Seconded,” said the pretty bobblehead in the designer suit.
“And in the case of these various women who walked out of marriages—” She made a vague wave at Sarah and the others like her, without actually making eye contact with any of them.
“Do we really have the right, legally, to withhold information if their husbands make inquiries? As their legal next of kin, these men are entitled—”
“Are you serious?” I sputtered. “You don’t all agree with that, do you?” Hunting for the faces that had looked sympathetic just a moment ago, but they looked down at the table as murmurs began rising from the others.
“—might well open the Board up to lawsuits—”
“—unnecessary legal risk—”
“—accusations of overstepping—”
I fought to keep my voice even. “I’m telling you this place helps people in danger, and you are worried about lawsuits?
Look me in the eye, all of you, and tell me out loud that you’d rather have a little girl beaten with a two-by-four because it spares you some inconvenience.
I want that entered in your goddamn minutes. ”
Some shifting and muttering at that, but Elizabeth just blinked at me through her purple-framed glasses. “Public institutions have to remain controversy-free, Alix.”
“I thought the point of a library was to court controversy when necessary.” I looked at them: Elizabeth, Darla, Pink Cardigan, Wet Wipe, the Bobblehead, the two others—a man with a mouth like a pickle, a harried-looking human mouse who had been tasked with taking the minutes and barely looked up from her tablet.
“Libraries exist to help their patrons. If we don’t do that—”
A few chuckles ran around the table. “Alix, that’s a very old-fashioned viewpoint,” Elizabeth said, sounding indulgent.
“Then what?” I moved back to the table, laying my hands flat on its gleaming surface. “What does your new, modernized, twenty-first-century library exist to do, exactly?”
“It protects children from—” Darla began.
“Shut up about the children. You’re using the children as an excuse. I’m asking what your electronically advanced, shelf-culled library actually provides. Aside from clipboards and meeting minutes and salaries for people like you?”
Silence. None of them looked shifty or uncomfortable now—they just looked blank, as if I’d spoken in Latin.
One or two throats cleared, and then the man with the mouth like a pickle spoke up.
“I think we should address the matter of Darla’s list, especially as it intersects with the Astral Library’s standing operation known as the Banned Books Directive.
I for one am uncomfortable knowing that so many books deemed problematic have been specifically collected by this institution. ”
“If you want to talk about legal liability—”
“A strategic cull of the volumes listed as controversial would seem to be in order—”
“The children!” Darla bleated.
“Who are you, Goebbels in a library sweater?” I snarled. “What are you going to do, make a pile of books in the courtyard and strike a fucking match?”
“Alix, really.” Elizabeth tsked. “I’ve already told you about the Board’s stance against abusive language.”
“Right. What’s your stance on book banning?”
“Public institutions have to remain controversy-free,” she repeated serenely. “If that means that not all books remain forward-facing in today’s climate—”
“What kind of goddamn librarians are you?” My temples were starting to throb.
The books were definitely rustling more loudly on their shelves, the huge paper cutter was starting to raise and lower its long sharp arm in that ominous guillotine, chop chop chop, and the bronze globe under Beau’s elbow was spinning faster on its axis.
He gave me another encouraging look, but behind him I could see the Patrons shifting and whispering among themselves.
The Anne of Green Gables girl was crying silently under the arm of Masako in her layered court robes; Larry stood tall and taut and furious; Elaine the vampire had gone so still inside her garnet silks that she looked like a statue—or like she was going to shift into bat form and swoop off into the ceiling.
“I’m not sticking around for this,” Sarah said, picking up her skirts as if about to stalk off back to Sherlock Holmes’s London or her Thomas Cole painting or anywhere that didn’t have the Library Board arguing her future.
“Sarah, wait.” My Patrons had put themselves on the line; I was damn well going to keep fighting.
“Give me a moment,” I said to Sarah, the very first person I’d met inside a book world, the one I felt I’d maligned even if she’d never know how I’d once imagined she might be selling out her fellow Patrons.
I owed her better than that, and when she jerked out a nod I turned back to the Board, smoothing my hands over the book spines of my bodice.
The pages of my skirt rustled, and the Board looked up—in that dress I was impossible to ignore, and I took a deep breath that filled up every stitched word of it.
“I think you’ve all forgotten your purpose,” I began, feeling my way down the path of words I was so desperately trying to parse here for these suited skeptics.
“A library isn’t an ivory tower; it’s a place for real people with real needs.
Varied needs, complicated needs. A library is not a business. It isn’t about turning a profit—”
“Good luck keeping the doors open if it doesn’t,” Elizabeth said with one of her merry peals of laughter.
I looked at her a moment as the Board tittered and my Patrons rustled behind me.
Then I moved in a huge cloud of skirt to the oak counter where the paper cutter was chopping at air and put my hand on the arm’s long handle so the machine stilled.
I don’t know if the contraption was already about to give or if the Library knew what I wanted and gave it to me without so much as a screech of metal, but one yank and the paper cutter’s long arm came loose: a handled, one-sided blade with a lethal single edge like a cutlass.
I came back to the head of the table and without any ceremony at all gave my makeshift sword a whirl in one hand like the Pevensie kids readying for the Battle of Beruna, and then slammed it down into the polished surface of the table.
The paper-cutter blade sliced into the wood like butter.
I released it to stand there, vibrating in the middle of the table, and the Board’s tittering cut off like I’d sliced them.
“I’m still talking,” I said.
For the first time, Elizabeth and Darla the book burner and all the rest regarded me in complete silence.
No note-taking, no shuffling feet, no little whispers.
They looked shocked, of all things. They were allowed to come here and threaten me and my Patrons, but apparently I wasn’t allowed to push back.
I was the one who had to keep my voice down, keep my language nice, keep being deferential.
Fuck that.
“You have all forgotten what a library is supposed to be,” I said, looking from face to face over the quivering hilt of my library sword.
“It isn’t a business. It probably doesn’t turn a profit.
It isn’t about profit. A library—and I mean any library, even the most roach-infested underfunded branch in the worst part of the worst town you can imagine—is a sanctuary.
It’s one of the only places left where you can walk through the doors and draw breath and stay, without needing to buy something, without having to justify your presence.
It’s where kids go when their parents are nowhere to be found, and they want to feel less alone.
It’s where women go when their husbands aren’t safe to be around, and they need to research what their options are.
It’s where students go when they can’t get peace and quiet at home for their studying, and people looking for work can search job boards and fill out applications.
It’s where people who don’t have a computer or whose phones are broken can go look up when the next N.
K. Jemisin is coming out, or who their favorite celebrity is dating, or whether Fermat’s theorem has been solved, or whatever it is they’re asking themselves in the dark of the night.
A library is where you should be able to find the books that people are trying to ban, and exactly why people are trying to ban them.
It’s where people educate themselves when every school they’ve ever attended has failed them.
It’s where people are safe, or at least they should be.
” I drew a long breath. “Without libraries I would probably be dead. A great many people would probably be dead. They are sanctuaries. Cathedrals used to be sanctuaries, but that was only for people who believed in the same things, the same god—people who weren’t too different.
Libraries are sanctuaries for everyone, no matter how different.
“And this library—” I looked upward, along the beautiful barrel vault of its ceiling, where the books still fluttered like anxious birds.
“This is the library of libraries. The one where all the library ladders in the world start. The one where all the books are. The strongest place in the world, strong enough to hold out a thousand mobs, but you people can destroy it with the stroke of a pen. You take away this library’s ability to offer sanctuary, you strip its shelves of the books you don’t want causing controversy and strip its Patrons of their protection .
. .” My voice trailed off. “Well, I don’t know what will happen.
I truly don’t. But I assure you, it will be nothing good.
Because every tyrant of the world, from the sacking of the Library of Alexandria until now, cements their rule by targeting knowledge.
They do it with guns or they do it with book bans and board meetings, but that is where it starts.
“And you don’t want to find yourself on that side of history.”