Our library shelves must show balance

Nearly 100 years ago, so goes my family story, my great-aunt Elizabeth Lee, a maiden lady in Macon, would close up her father Pat’s barbershop every evening, then open up her front room on Broadway to the line of factory workers, field hands, maids, house men and delivery men who wanted only one thing: to learn to read.

“Miss Lee,” my Auntie would say in recounting what her adult students implored of her. “All I want to do is learn how to read the Bible.”

These folks, who probably could have easily collapsed after a hard day’s work toting and lifting and cleaning for white folks, did not come in search of the ability to read the Sears catalog or the sharecroppers’ and legal contracts they signed. They yearned to read something beautiful and lyrical and meaningful.

I thought of Auntie Lee and her students recently as I read a New York Times front-page article, “Urban Fiction, as Graphic as the Streets, Finds a Place in Libraries,” that documented the shift on library shelves in the New York City area from mainstream African-American titles to works termed “street fiction.”

It’s not as if that was news to me. In fact, it confirmed what I was hearing from librarian friends in Georgia, Alabama and California — namely, that urban fiction featuring baby mama drama, pimps and “hos,” explicit sexuality and wanton crime was becoming the most popular addition in our public libraries.

For any number of reasons, I keep up with these kinds of cultural shifts. I am, myself, a self-proclaimed “library baby” who spent my childhood Saturdays in the colored library. I am also a novelist and a new publisher of a small independent press who made the move in reaction to the preponderance of just the kind of urban fiction that seems to be eating up our bookstore shelf space, along with our young people’s attention and minds.

But to read in the Times article about an avid reader and “devoted library-goer” who admirably enforces a daily reading hour in her household stating: “I don’t care what they read. I only care that they read,” I must speak out. If not for all the young minds that are absorbing this largely self-negating, poorly executed, barely edited (“Why can’t Johnnie Mae spell?”), repetitive work. Or for the residents of urban housing projects and suburban communities who aren’t embroiled in sexcapades and shootouts and shootin’ up. Then for the spirits of the folks who “just wanted to read the Bible.”

Yes, we must, indeed, care what they read. It is not enough to merely fill our minds with words and distractions and lowest common denominators. In these fragile, turbulent, uneasy times, it is more essential than ever to make sure that we and our children are digesting wisdom and strengths and possibilities and dreams of all kinds. Dreams that lead to the White House as well as the jailhouse. This is no time for one kind of reading, living or thinking.

There’s a great deal of literature out there between Toni Morrison and Iceberg Slim — good solid fiction and nonfiction by African-American writers that doesn’t require either a dictionary or a box of Wet Wipes, a broad shelf of novels and essays and memoirs that reflect everything from the contemporary stories of Tayari Jones to the fantastical science fiction of Octavia Butler. Graphic, yes. Exploitative, no.

Just who among us needs to live on a steady diet of crack-addicted mothers and abusive boyfriends and striving only for dollars and diamonds any more than we need to constantly read of war and death and destruction to realize that this goes on in the world? We all know this. But I recall that as I sat in the Monroe Street library back in 1950s Georgia, I wanted to read about something outside that narrow segregated sphere, whether it was the Bobbsey Twins or Nella Larsens’ “The Street.”

It behooves all those folks who decry the hijacking of African-American culture and literature by urban fiction to let their public libraries know that they wish a balance of high-brow, low-brow and everything in between on their bookshelves.

It does indeed matter what we read.

• Tina McElroy Ansa, a writer and publisher, lives on St. Simons.