The History of Reading
Woven together with narrative and story, words became the blocks with which I stepped into other worlds and rhythms of life.
In Vitro
I like to think while I was swimming in the amniotic fluids of my mother’s uterus that, as unlikely as it would seem, she read to me. I imagine her leaning back in a rocking chair and gently stroking her belly while cracking open a book and reading softly to no one but me. That's a nice fairy tale to begin a story, but this is no fairy tale. The truth is my mother was barely out of her early twenties, already a mother of five, mostly boys, struggling desperately to hold onto her sanity while her husband worked late-night shifts to support them. We were a black and blue-collar family headed by a father with a high school degree suitable for work in a San Jose printing factory and a mother with no degree at all and only a vague notion of having wanted to be a teacher. At twenty-five, she had me and then, a few years later, a seventh and last, burdening her with the seemingly endless task of raising a brood she was unprepared to care for.
We lived in Richmond, the industrial town where I grew up. Located some miles north of Berkeley, the city’s main places of employment were the Kaiser hospital and the Chevron gas refinery. There were no major museums, art galleries, or theaters that I was aware of, but there was the public library, whose services my siblings and I took advantage of whenever we could. Our immersion in the arts came from television, mostly from PBS in those pre-cable days. In the mornings we soaked up programs like Sesame Street, Electric Company, Reading Rainbow, and children’s nature programs while our father slept and our mother did chores. The arts were for San Francisco or, at the very least, Berkeley and Oakland, but these towns were as remote to us as New York or Paris. The only times we ever ventured into Oakland was when we visited my maternal grandparents, neither of whom were as heavily invested in the arts.
Our world was within the narrow confines of the West Contra Costa County district.
And yet there was always reading. My parents never openly encouraged it. No, we were not that kind of family. But it was there, slight as a hummingbird’s wing, the feeling that something important was going on between the pages of a book. With his reading glasses perched low on his nose, my father would read the West County Times newspaper at the head of the dining room table after coming home from work, or, on those nights he had off, a galley copy of the Reader’s Digest books that were free samples from his job. Unlike my father, my mother never read for her own pleasure (though during the early morning hours she’d read and cut out the horoscope section in the paper which she, often to our annoyance, used to predict our days according to our zodiacs), but she did read to my younger brother and me, perhaps a book of fairy tales we checked out at the library. It was never stated but it was there: this is what you do, as prevalent as brushing your teeth or wiping your ass. Studies have shown that children whose parents read will likely take up the habit as well. This was how my reading began: in minor, but solid experiences.
Funk & Wagnalls
My father had invested in a complete set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias, whose imitation leather brown covers and fake gold leaf edges lined the top shelf in the foyer closet. At the time it didn’t seem unusual that we stored a whole set of encyclopedias in the hallway closet, but looking back at it now I can’t help but be amused. What did this say about us other than the fact that we didn’t have enough books to justify a library? The encyclopedias were not only a means of extracurricular education for my younger brother and me, but were also story books. We had developed an interest in Greek mythology and found that the encyclopedias were an encomium of every Greek mythological creature imaginable. We poured over each page, reading the detailed descriptions of Perseus, Helen of Troy, and Hercules; marveled over the pictures of creatures like pegasus, the griffin, and centaur. We sat on the front hallway stairs, going from one entry to the next, and read everything we could on the subject. These were our comic books, our superheroes. When the original version of the movie Clash of the Titans was released, my mother took my brother and me to an afternoon matinee. Already well-versed in the myths of Perseus, Zeus, and Andromeda, I felt knowledgeable and ahead of the curve at the age of eleven.
Along with the Funk & Wagnalls I had the dictionary. This dictionary fit easily in the hands, had a soft green cover, and alphabet tabs that, before search engines, were algorithmic marvels. I loved flipping through the flimsy pages and landing on a word I’d never heard before, much less could pronounce: aardvark, kachina, zwieback. I was enamored with words and my dictionary fed my obsession. Years later, in college, I took a class on the history of the English language, which I failed miserably. Stripped down to their etymological and morphological parts, words became elusive and inaccessible. I loved them not necessarily for their meaning, but for their melody and rhythm. When it was just me and my dictionary, sounding out each word in my head, I had a connection to a music I’d never heard before. Woven together with narrative and story, words became the blocks with which I stepped into other worlds and rhythms of life.
Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary
The first book that I called my own was the children’s classic Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans. It was a gift from my Kindergarten teacher Mrs. Grace. She handed out books to her students on the last day of class before it broke for summer. I wasn’t impressed by her selection, which she picked arbitrarily from a stack on her desk. In fact, I was jealous of the kids who got books that looked, from the covers at least, a lot more interesting than mine. After that year I was envious. I was a shy, lonely, miserable kid. I wanted what they had, whatever it was they had that made them more outgoing and less vulnerable to teases and funky, side-long glances. But when I took the book home something else happened: I read it and the elusive thing which made it a classic emerged from its pages. I was attracted to the sketches, the beautiful but simple pencil and watercolor drawings that were as warm and comforting as a blanket. Reading the book as an adult, I was reminded of those initial feelings, the sense that the Parisian world Bemelmans depicted was safe and inviting. But the simple story eventually won me over as well. Twelve girls under the care of Miss Clavel explore the city with its famous landmarks––the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Church of the Sacre Coeur. Madeline is the smallest, but the most fearless of the girls, “pooh-poohing” tigers and walking the ledge of a bridge. After an attack of the appendix, she is rushed to the hospital, offering another opportunity for Miss Clavel and her eleven charges to go on a trip. Again rereading, I’m swept back into Madeline’s world and my own childhood: the pot of flowers by the window; the bed with the crank, and the “crack on the ceiling with the habit of sometimes looking like a rabbit.” What must have gone through my brain reading these lines as a six-year old without a friend in the world? “Good night, little girls! Thank the lord you are well!” after the girls cry out with their own false appendicitis pains, “...that’s all there is––there’s isn’t any more.”
Mrs. Grace, who again taught me for my sixth grade class, took us to a school book sale for a fundraiser I can't recall. The sale was held in small room on campus where books were lined neatly on top of foldaway tables. I must have been ten or eleven by then, scanning the front covers for something to buy with my very own money. This was my first: not a gift or a rental from the library, but my own book bought and paid for with my own cash. I wanted something special. I saw among the selections The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and a collection of short stories by H.P. Lovecraft. Being a post-civil rights baby, I knew who Douglass was; had never heard of Lovecraft, but the book’s intriguing, chiaroscuro cover attracted my attention. I plucked both soft covers from the table, handed my five dollars to the woman manning the lock box filled with bills and coins, and walked proudly back into the sunlight with my classmates. I showed everyone my acquisition of the Narrative, and they nodded approvingly, but secretly I coveted the tales of Lovecraft. It seemed weird, and at that age I was developing an interest in the weird––tales of UFO abductions and Bigfoot sightings which were rampant on TV in those sun-lit days of the late 1970s.
However my reading experiences with both were mixed. I devoured the Narrative, an easy read despite its difficult story of Douglass’s childhood in slavery, his covert attempts to become literate, and his eventual escape. The writing was simple enough that a child could grasp the complex and often contradictory realities of slavery, broadening my understanding of the social awareness my teachers at King had instilled in all of their students at an early age. If I didn’t make the connection then, I certainly do now: the idea of reading a book written more than a century before I was born by a man for whom reading was a crime. There is a beauty and an irony to that.
Lovecraft, on the other hand, was an entirely different story. While I enjoyed reading some of the stories, the others were far more difficult to grasp. The language was arcane and oblique. I didn’t understand any of it. I couldn’t read more than a paragraph before my head got dizzy and I had to stop. Eventually I gave up trying. I blamed myself. I thought there was something wrong with me (another irony, given what I now know of Lovecraft’s virulent racism). It took me a long time to find any pleasure in reading again.
The Wonder Years
After my experience with Lovecraft, my reading became more sporadic. I read for school assignments, but rarely for my own pleasure. In spite of being moved by what I thought was a beautiful description of the scales of a much-sought-after marlin in The Old Man and the Sea, I did not search out for more works by these writers. My reading choices were spread out over months, not weeks. I remained aloof.
By my junior year at John F. Kennedy high school, it was obvious to me that I had a problem. That semester I had taken a psychology class that was taught by bearded and tweed-elbowed Mr. Weaver, who one day decided to teach us the differences between illiteracy and aliteracy. He asked us to anonymously write down on a slip of paper the last book we read for pleasure and when we read it, then turn it in. After a few minutes of head scratching, I scribbled down Dune, which I’d read a year or so earlier. The fact that I had trouble remembering this bothered me, but I was more troubled when Mr. Weaver read my slip in front of class. A boy sitting nearby whispered, “I read that,” but I was more struck by hearing my teacher say aloud how long ago it was since the last time I’d read anything outside of class assignments. I felt embarrassed, ashamed. I wanted to be a writer and I knew even then that writers read. It was the Golden Rule: good writers read. His lesson became a weird, anonymous form of intervention. I recognized I had a problem even if nobody else thought so or much less gave a shit.
That afternoon, I went down to the school library and rented a book. I chose it haphazardly, attracted mainly by the picture on its cover of a harlequin terrorized in a fun house. The book turned out to be Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Camus was a stranger, and so was his existentialism, but I was attracted to this experience in Algeria. The clean, sun-scrubbed sentences had a tactile quality to them. I could feel the heat of the Algerian sun as it bleached the white sand on which Mersault committed murder, feel the grainy, white-washed walls of his prison cell. The world seemed real and inordinately indifferent to the actors traipsing on its stage. I might not have known anything about existentialism, but I felt it in those coldly accurate sentences. After I finished The Stranger, I checked out Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, a novel as far removed from the goings-on in Algeria as I was. What I recall from that novel was one effectively written passage. The protagonist is watching a parade go by when he notices a young girl in the crowd eating a watermelon, its sticky juice dribbling down her arm. In that moment, I experienced that sweet fruit, the stickiness on the arm, the pent-in closeness of the crowd, the noise and heat. I was right there, back into the experience of reading.
After Hours
After high school, no college. Being the first in my family to graduate, I could barely imagine college. I hated high school where I faded indifferently into the background. I didn’t think college would be any different. I regret it now, but at the time I was relieved to be finished with the whole business. I became a recluse and wrote, mostly bad poetry, short stories, a one-act play, a novel. Though I didn’t have much access to books, I continued to read––my brother's cast-off sci-fi novels, paperbacks my mom bought at the grocery store, Harlequin romances I ordered from Reader's Digest, but mostly newspapers and magazines. Lots of them. They seemed to have come by the dozens into the house––lifestyle and fashion magazines, whose glossy pages sported night life highlights in midtown Manhattan and the latest runway creations from New York to Milan; entertainment magazines about the current releases and celebrity gossip; art and photography magazines. In an attempt to keep in touch however tenuously with the literary world, I, like a starveling, devoured book and movie reviews, interviews with writers, novel excerpts. Occasionally, another of my older brothers delivered me books as though they were supplies to my lonely outpost: books on writing (John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction), plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun; August Wilson’s Fences), anthologies, poetry, and novels by black authors.
He introduced me to black writers, an ironic twist considering I grew up in an all-black community and went to schools where the student bodies were racially diverse. Now, another more familiar world opened up to me. At the age of fourteen, I decided I was going to be a writer, but I didn’t know what kind of writer I wanted to be. These writers gave me a clue: Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Gloria Naylor, Hansberry. When Steven Spielberg adapted Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Color Purple into an Oscar-nominated film, it seemed every black girl except me was walking around the high school campus with a copy of that book in her arms. It had been something of a revelation in the black community, controversial too. Black women’s voices vs. black male pride. I watched the battle from a distance, not sure where I stood. When I finally read the book years later, I found it the least controversial in its depiction of a young black girl discovering her voice in a racially and sexually oppressive world. I continued to read Walker’s work, including her book of essays In Our Mothers Gardens, which introduced me to Zora Neale Hurston. I had more influences.
Then one Christmas, my brother gifted me The Bluest Eye and Beloved. That was it: the turning point. I’d never read Toni Morrison before. I read The Bluest Eye first. Beloved intimidated me. I’d read a review of it in the local newspaper the year earlier; knew what it was about before I opened the paperback. It was an intellectual, emotional, and psychological challenge I was yet unprepared for. The Bluest Eye, with its tough subject matter and its fragile protagonist, was comparably gentler. I could watch from a comfortable distance Pecola Breedlove’s tragic self-hatred and slow disintegration into madness. Sethe’s madness however became my own. It loomed everywhere, coloring everything it touched. It was inescapable. And yet there was an endurability to it, a sturdy resistance. There was also confidence in both stories, to the language, to those sentences. A toughness. Morrison set a standard I knew I’d never be able to achieve, but I had a standard nonetheless.
Her call was to observe more than surfaces, more than the trite, but to dig deeply, fearlessly. I was no longer reading simply for pleasure. I was learning. She invited me to become a writer, and I did.