A Time To Read: Rediscovering Ourselves in Classic Black Booksby Stephane Dunn | TheLoop21
I’d huddle under the covers, literally reading by flashlight after I’d worn out Mama’s indulgence and she ordered the light off and me to sleep. There was always some book I couldn’t let go of easily. Mama and my father helped create my reading addictions; there were always books – all the Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney fairytales, children’s encyclopedias and so forth, and I tagged along to the library with my big sister who remembers taking me to there for my first library card.
Between fifth and seventh grades, there were the Nancy Drew and Judy Blume books, Walter Dean Myers, and the 'Little House on the Prairie' series. In middle school, I fell upon 'Little Women' and 'The Grapes of Wrath,' John Steinbeck’s beautiful tragic tale of the Joads, a displaced family of poor white sharecroppers in the depression era that drew me again and again.
Then there was a turning point in my reading life somewhere around the summer before eighth grade. I combed the library shelves looking for something different – actually some more books by black writers - and discovered an autobiography I’ve never forgotten and reread many time. 'Coming of Age in Mississippi' by Anne Moody brought the Civil Rights movement alive for a post Civil-rights young girl like me, growing up in the Midwest, far removed from my Mom’s adolescence spent picking cotton in the South. I could imagine what it was like being a black girl, surviving despite being preyed upon by white and black men and fighting white supremacy amidst the constant threat of violence and death.
I was starved then for other stories by black voices and I found many – Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Mildred Taylor, Walter Mosley, Gloria Naylor, Charles Johnson, Malcolm X, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, and too many more to list them all. I was helped along from the tenth to twelfth grade when Mrs. Poe, my white English teacher, saw my passion for books, and opened up her considerable private collection of books by black authors to me. By senior year, I’d cried over Morrison’s Pecola, Alice Walker’s Celie, and Anne Petry’s (pre-'Coldest Winter Ever' and 'Push') urban black girl tale – 'The Street.' I was an average student by high school standards (somewhere between a low B and C range), but little did I know, my reading habit formed a foundation that would help me be successful in college. I was a disciplined reader and I loved it.
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