Library Sketches, Part 2

A friend of mine was in Alabama last week, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, ending in a walk with 80,000 others across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I’d been thinking about her a lot while she made her pilgrimage south, so it seemed appropriate then to be at the Central Public library last week to hear Eric Foner on his new book, Gateway to Freedom: the Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, a mix of black and white faces in the crowd:

Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law Professor and a former student of Foner's, began the program by asking the question, "Why hidden?"

 






















Foner called his book a hidden history because so many of the people who formed the loose network of conductors and footmen that made up the Underground Railroad were unknown to American history. During Foner's research, he came across names he'd never heard before, accounts hidden away in library stacks, unread.

"What interests me about these underground conductors is that it was actually an interracial organization, or set of organizations. It’s an example not that common in American history, of black and white people working together for a common cause. There was tension, there were problems, but they managed to communicate with each other, [to send] people to each other and that’s what strikes me."

Kennedy brings up Louis Napoleon as one of his favorite unknowns.

Napoleon, an illiterate, free black man, worked as a porter for abolitionist and editor, Sidney Howard Gay; Napoleon did the footwork for much of Gay's abolitionist activities in and around New York City, finding fleeing slaves at the docks and train stations. Despite signing his name with an X, Napoleon managed to go to court and get writs of habeus corpus in support of fugitive slaves. In one famous case, a lawyer for a slave owner asked sarcastically, "Who is this Louis Napoleon, the Emperor of France?" and John Jay II, the lawyer representing the slave, said, "No, he’s a much better man." 

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After the program I ran into Peggy Powell, Nancy Gilmore and Samuel Foster, docents at LA museums— Powell and Foster at the CA African American Museum, Gilmore at the Science Center and a volunteer archivist at the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum, which houses a large collection of African American memorabilia. 

They were eager to talk; Gilmore wished the program were twice as long. Foster found it informative. All wanted to see a continuation of the conversation.

Peggy Powell revealed a hidden family history of her own when she talked about her great, great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Lightfoot, and his journey along the Underground Railroad, from Kentucky to Ontario, led by a conductor named Henson, a story she had just discovered.

 

Which proves a point about the system we call the Underground Railroad. It was a fluid moving river, a many branched tributary, for people to help fugitive slaves along the way to freedom. I would be overly optimistic to think anything might change in the narrative that's told in our history books, due to Foner's Gateway to Freedom, but in the meanwhile, let's continue the conversation.



A podcast of this talk (and all ALOUD programs) can be found at: http://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/aloud

Winter Sky, library and some drawings

Day after election, caught on the wind, these words:  
"All I want from Obama in the next four years," said jogging guy to buddy, "is something small, humble and achievable."  Small, humble and achievable. That stray bit of conversation became my mantra for the rest of the day: smallhumbleandachievable; smallhumbleandachievable. I kept repeating those words like a prayer.

White sky tonight coming home from the Central Library, where Jonathan Letham and Daniel Mendlesohn (The Lost) were in discussion about the "essay." Their conversation flowed back and forth about writing, about structure, about length and form; about fiction v. faction, (i.e., what is made up, possibly based on fact, or not, versus what is fact, based on one's own perceptions, which may be, or not, true, got that?). Nothing was said about politics, though we were all floating on the historic moment.  

For someone who's been working nights, it was nice to be back in the library hearing a weighty discussion about ideas. Something I'm realizing from taking courses at Art Center: artists don't necessarily tell you why they do the things they do. They don't sit around discussing the who, why, where, when and what fors like writers do, like these writers did so openly tonight. They handle "what's behind the curtain" (Jonathan L's reference to why he began writing essays) in a different way. 

Whenever it snowed in Louisville, where I grew up, the sky would turn white, like it did tonight. I can see that winter sky, with bare cold branches silhouetted against it, the clouds low and heavy, with a light snow coming down, making the road slippery. Let's say I'm heading out of the East End in my VW, through the park towards downtown, taking the curves with a slide.

For most of my childhood I didn't even know real artists existed, and definitely not in Louisville, but one day I saw an ad in the newspaper announcing an art show in the West End, so my friend H and I went, and we discovered that the West End, or, as it was called back then, the black section of town, wasn't so far away, certainly not as far as we'd been told. Also discovered were real artists, living real artists' lives, and from that point on, we went back as often as we could, or at least til the end of senior year. During that winter, the sky was the same in the West End as it was in the East End, with those dark bare branches silhouetted, and I was amazed it had taken this long to find out.

 

Bringing art back into my life is like revisiting the West End, meeting artists who approach life in mysterious ways, taking bits of reality, mixing it with how they see the world and producing something more beautiful than beautiful, truer than true, realer than real, or the converse, taking something and destroying it, the same as writers do, framing, structuring, making shit up, exploiting circumstance, forming words into what isn't necessarily real, but true.

 

Some drawings/paintings from my contemporary illustration class with the Clayton Brothers, Christian and Rob. Check out their incredible work at: www.claytonbrothers.com/

ALOUD Program at LAPL: www.lfla.org/aloud 

Click on pics to see as slideshow. 
 

Blogging for the Library

 Sign of the times: library protest in front of Central Public Library

If you think librarians are quiet, mousey people (meaning, given to uttering tiny squeaks and wearing buns) you are so wrong. Needless to say, I'm thinking of the librarians of my youth and promoted in films and on TV; even now, we think of librarians as having small voices. But tell that to Erica Silverman, a children's librarian and book author, who gave an impassioned speech in front of the Central Public Library on Monday morning, where people had gathered to protest the Monday library closures. She wasn't buying it, not for a moment, and told the crowd so when she raised her head and shouted to the top of the uppermost office buildings surrounding the library (let me just say, I'm sure they heard her), "Unslam these Doors!" 

"We HEAR you."

If you haven't heard: the Los Angeles City Council voted to eliminate hundreds of library positions, 20 of which were full-time librarians and that many more library clerks, extend furlough days and close library doors on Sundays and Mondays as a result of a 22 million dollar budget shortfall. Expect more cuts in October; at the same time the Mayor has hired a "Job Czar" whose salary we can only imagine. What the heck? That makes no sense. The city's broke, there's no arguing the fact, but nothing could be worse in a recession, say the librarians, their union and their patrons, then limiting library hours now, just when people need the library the most. 

 

Another sign of the times held by a protester

So, I'm doing what these librarians have asked us, as bloggers, to do: reach out to those who love our city libraries. Please call or email your City Council member and protest these closings. For children everywhere who need the library on Monday, who need it on Tuesday and Wednesday and the rest of the week; for job seekers who need the library's resources now more than ever; for the homeless who need somewhere to sit and something to read; for teenagers who love computer games but don't own computers; for researchers and scholars who uncover the library's treasures; and for just ordinary people like you and me who want to check out books: tell the Mayor and your Councilmember to "Unslam these Doors!"

 Kerry Madden, YA author and biographer of Harper Lee

Tony what-me-worry?

This library worker's sign says it all

To keep up with activities related to the Los Angeles Public Library closures, check out http://www.facebook.com/savethelibrary.