2016 Christmas Letter

At Christmas, I like to send a yearly recap to all of my friends and relatives who are now scattered in the different places that life has landed them.  And with life being what it is (life), some years are filled with more milestones than others.  2016 has been one of those years.

Holiday Greetings!
Since I have no idea where to begin this 2016 recap, I’ll start with the passing of my daddy.   He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last November after becoming ill with a multitude of symptoms (almost all of which he kept to himself).  Because of his age and overall health, surgery was not an option.  And knowing that the devastating side effects of chemo and radiation would only hasten the inevitable, dad chose to be cared for at home.   The man who throughout the years taught me important things like how to connect with people through conversation (he never met a stranger), how to rake and burn a big pile of leaves without catching the neighborhood on fire, and how to back up a 24 foot U-Haul truck with a car hitch attached to the back without running someone over, also taught me about how to listen to and take care of someone I love who I know is dying.  Until his last breath in the very early hours of the morning on June 8^th, I learned from him how to be a better person.  Lordy, but I loved having him in my life…

 On the Work Front

We finally developed our GPL Park!  We’ve only been dreaming about it since 2008.  But after a series of successful grants and increased public interest this past year, we were able to get a sidewalk, security lighting, sod, raised planting beds, benches and a gazebo.  I had trees and shrubs delivered this morning…

 Our library hosted the annual state library convention in April.  This was a noteworthy achievement for the GPL considering Gadsden doesn’t have a convention center.  We were only able to pull the whole thing off with the help of every single GPL staff member working their fingers to the bone, and almost every local downtown partner loaning us space for events and breakout sessions.  400+ librarians, vendors and authors converged on Gadsden for three days.  We survived.  It was marvelous.

We are about to join forces with friend and educator Chip Rowan to bring his Beautiful Rainbow Catering Company & Garden into the library as a permanent partner in our cafe.  Chip works with young adults with cognitive disabilities, teaching culinary and business skills for future employment.  He is currently working through the Gadsden City School system, but hopes to one day become an independent employer of some of his graduates.  We are renovating our existing café to hold an educational kitchen, a dining area for guests, a classroom/boardroom for additional learning, and an office for the day-to-day transactions of running a café/catering company.  Because Chip and his guys currently grow much of the food they use in their catering jobs, we have agreed to turn over all eight of our raised planting beds that are located in our GPL Park to the Company.  These young chefs-in-training have catered several events for us this year.  They are excited about the amazing food that they create, and are just as excited about sharing it with our community.  I am looking forward to spending my lunch time in their café come January of 2017!

 The final event in our Gadsden Reads is this Tuesday.   With the help of attorney Bryan Stevenson and his Equal Justice Initiative of Montgomery, we are dedicating a memorial to Bunk Richardson, a man wrongly lynched here in 1906.  This all came about through our choosing of Stevenson’s book Just Mercy for our 2016 reading initiative which set into motion a community-wide discussion of the justice system as it pertains to ethnicity, mental health, socioeconomics, gender, and age. We are now openly talking about our local history of marginalizing certain groups within our community.  It has not been an easy series of programs.  Some folks are happy to finally be heard.  Others question why we’re “stirring things up.”  It’s just shameful and wrong to keep sweeping these things under the rug.

 On the Home Front

2016 was another DIY year for us.  I spent a great deal of time staining and painting the rafters and ceiling of the patio Eric built back in 2015.  We ripped out the dropped ceiling of laundry room to expose the old beadboard that was hidden underneath.  Eric built a sliding barn door to close off the laundry from the kitchen should we ever need to.  We added buried electrical out to the garage for a security system.  And after a lifetime of using ice cube trays, I have an icemaker in my fridge.  Eric installed it I’m sure because of some deep desire to provide ice cubes for his wife and dog.   As much as I am enjoying the ice, it still seems unnatural to have so much at my disposal.

Wishing you a wonderful holiday and much love,
c

Marching Forward

We had almost a foot of snow last week.  Most of Alabama closed up shop and didn’t reopen for business until temps climbed a day later. 

Luckily, the roads and bridges were clear for our first Gadsden Civil Rights Unity Walk across Memorial Bridge.  The walk, hosted by the GPL, was to honor those individuals from Gadsden who in some way contributed to the Civil Rights Movement and to honor those events that took place in Gadsden/Etowah County during (before and after) the Civil Rights Movement.  My thoughts turned to Bunk Richardson, wrongly accused and lynched from the trestle bridge in 1916 for the rape and murder of a white woman; Baltimore postman William Lewis Moore, who was shot to death in 1963 on Highway 11 in Etowah County as he walked his letter of desegregation from Maryland to Mississippi; James Hood, whose entry in 1963 as one of the first African American students at the University of Alabama was initially barred by Governor George Wallace’s “stand in the schoolhouse door;” Alan Cohn and Alvin Lowi, shot by sixteen-year-old Jerry Hunt while fleeing a firebombed Temple Beth Israel; a teenaged Robert Avery and James Smith hitchhiking north in 1963 to participate in the March on Washington; Emory Boggs, set on fire (and later died) in 1975 by Stanford Lewis Collins in a robbery gone horrifically wrong. 

Our diverse little group made its way west on the bridge, led in song by Jeanette Allen and SCLC President Marcia Kendrick.  We walked within steps of the statue of Emma Sansom, Civil War heroine who pointed the way for Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest to safely cross Black Creek and pursue Union forces.  The irony was not lost on me that on THIS day, she pointed the way for a different kind of soldier…

Copyright Eric T. Wright.  With permission.

Once we reached the gazebo of City Hall, Ms. Kendrick spoke about the importance of education and of remembering our history.  We then joined hands and sang We Shall Overcome.  As the small crowd broke up and Ms. Kendrick was pulled aside by television crews for interviews, I slipped away with Ms. Allen and Mr. Smith (one of the teens who hitchhiked to D.C. back in 1963) to walk back across the bridge to our cars and to notify the city street crew of the end of our walk...

A Bait & Switch of Sorts

Quick update on the months of August, September and October:

August never happened.  I don’t remember August at all, so…it just didn’t exist this year.  June, July, September, October.  Yep.  That was how my calendar looked.

Mid-September was our annual family trip to Ft. Walton Beach Florida where we rested up in the calm that is before the inevitable storm of fall programming (for me) and football season photo assignments (for Eric).  No obligations to anything except eating, swimming, and hanging with family. 

Late September was spent with the entertaining and controversial YA author Chris Crutcher, who was in town for our Gadsden Reads Banned Books Week.  Several public speaking engagements, a visit to the Etowah County Detention Center to speak with our female Substance Abuse Program inmates and two school visits (Gadsden City High and my alma mater, Southside High…Go Panthers!) then Chris was back on a plane to Washington State.  An incredible writer and a wonderful person with which to converse.  He GETS people.  He GETS behavior.  He GETS teenagers.  And the students love him.  They flock to him to ask him questions, or to tell him how his stories aren’t just stories, he's writing about their lives.  It is pretty powerful to be in a room where Chris Crutcher is talking to a hundred-plus students, students who keep asking him great question after great question, students who stay after his talk to ask him more personal questions before wandering away to their next class.  We want to bring him back.  We have to bring him back. 

Tex was in attendance of Chris’ library talk.  He came into my office a couple of hours before the event and wanted to know who Chris was, what kind of books did he write, where was he from, and was there going to be free food.  When I mentioned that Chris wrote young adult books about being a teenager and other stuff, Tex just sort of nodded without too much interest.

Me:  “He sometimes uses curse words and writes about sports and about teens who get in trouble.  Nothing that you’d be interested in.”

Tex (interest suddenly piqued):  “Really?  He writes cuss words in his books?”

Me:  “Yup.  Not all of them, but some of them.  Says that he sometimes finds out the most popular profanity at events just like the one we’re having tonight.  So, maybe you shouldn’t come…

Tex:  “Oh, I’m coming alright.  Is he selling books?”

Me:  “The library is.  We have The Sledding Hill for $10.”

Tex:  “I sure wish I had $10 to buy that book with.”

Me:  “Well, I’ll buy you a copy and you can have him sign it, if you even come tonight.  But I’m still not sure you should…

And so that is how I not only got a thirteen-year-old boy to come to an author reading at the GPL, but I also got a copy of The Sledding Hill into his hands.  Now, I don’t know if Tex will ever notice that there is no profanity in that book, but I do hope he notices characters in the story who share some similar hardships as those he faces.  They may be subtle similarities, but they are similarities nonetheless.  And I hope that he one day understands that there are other folks who have walked the same path that he walks, and that he’s not alone.  And all it took was the promise of a free book, free food and maybe some new profanity.

Love Letter to a Challenged Book

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We kicked off Banned Books Week Gadsden Reads Fahrenheit 451 last night with a participatory performance art piece, a ceremony celebrating intellectual freedom and our right to read.  The audience sat on borrowed church pews and faced a borrowed alter covered in candles.  The candles sat on replicas of banned books.  At the foot of the altar were the charred remains of discarded books, a reminder of what could happen if the right (or wrong) circumstances occurred within a community.  Our officiant was Mario Gallardo, artist, art teacher (at Gadsden State Community College) and director of the Walnut Gallery (the newly acquired Walnut Gallery space is an old church from which Mario loaned the borrowed pews and alter), dressed in his academic robes.

The service was reverential and reflective.  Thoughtful movements that took the participant from writing the name of their favorite book on a page torn from a banned book (The Great Gatsby), rolling that page into a scroll and tying it with twine.  Destroying the scroll by casting it into a fire pit.  Lighting a candle in memory of that book.  Finally, writing a love letter to the lost book.  It was moving.

I was unable to write down the name of my favorite book, nor was I able to write a love letter to it, just too busy with minutiae.

But I did write that love letter after the fact.  And here it is, dedicated to Jaimie.  You deserve better.

My Dearest Absalom, Absalom,

I’ll never forget the August that I first read you, an August that was hotter than the stoked fires of hell’s floor furnace.  I started reading you at Sherry Yates’ cabin on the banks of the Chattooga River in Cedar Bluff, Georgia, little more than a stone’s throw from Cornwall Furnace, that furnace built by the Noble Brothers in 1862-63 to supply Confederate forces with pig iron for products used in the War Between the States, the same furnace that was blown out by Union forces a year after it began production. 

You confused me, Absalom, Absalom, what with how you jumped around a lot and wouldn’t hold still long enough to tell me the whole story all at once.  I wanted to take you and hold you under the water to show you, to bring you up just long enough for you to catch your breath and tell me what was happening by Gawd.   Who were all these people that you kept introducing long after new characters should have EVER been introduced?  And why the hell were you repeating yourself over and over again like I wasn’t listening to you?  I WAS LISTENING!  You just didn’t notice because you were too busy being all stream of consciousness…

I suffered that August to finish you, suffered not just at the cabin by the Chattooga, but back in the old chicken coop at momma and daddy’s place in the country, me perched on an upended milk crate.  And later in the parking lot of the University while sitting in my car before going to speak with my advisor, my reading interrupted only by the talking alarm on the car beside me that calmly cautioned "Step away from my ride." anytime anyone breathed the same air as it.

Absalom, Absalom, I sweated you out in the August humidity, sweated you out like a fever, or a night of too much liquor.  I sweated you out so much that I thought I had seen the last of you with your final sentence, “I don’t hate it!" because I thought I hated you and never wanted to see you again!

I should’ve hated you Absalom Absalom especially after what all you put me through but I didn’t and I don’t I love you Absalom Absalom I love you so much I read you two more times AND hosted a pub crawl in your honor and I am currently encouraging my dear friend Jaimie who is reading you AT THIS VERY MOMENT I tell her that you are worth it because you are you are

My sincerest regards,

Carol

Dear Gadsden or Banned Books Week Gadsden Reads Fahrenheit 451

There were several disturbing photos on the front page of the Gadsden Times a couple of days ago.  The images were of Gadsden Public Library director Amanda Jackson and yours truly pulling banned and challenged books off of the shelves of our library.  These books were temporarily taken out of circulation to the public and will remain out of circulation until September 23rd, which is the date of our first Banned Books Week Gadsden Reads Fahrenheit 451 program.  On September 23rd, we will put all those books back on the shelves from which they were pulled and celebrate their being released back into public circulation.  During the month that our banned/challenged books are out of circulation, any student who needs any of those books for a school assignment will be allowed to check those books out.  Otherwise, those books are not available to the general public.

Why is the GPL doing this?  That is a question that I have been asked many times in the past three days by concerned citizens who saw the photos in the Gadsden Times of the books being removed.  My answer is this:  As American citizens, we have access to, and the right to read any book that we desire at any time we desire it.  We have earned this “freedom to read” by virtue of being a democracy, a democracy that has been defended by its citizens and its armed forces for a very long time.   Our pulling of the banned and challenged books from our GPL collection for a few weeks will be inconvenient, but it will not be anything like the inconvenience that people all over the world experience every day of their lives when they are denied access to information-a denial of access to information that is not temporary.

This is an exercise in experiencing what it would be like to not have access to Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.  But it is also an exercise in experiencing what it would be like to not have access to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House On the Prairie and Martin Hanford’s Where’s Waldo.  To Kill A Mockingbird.  Webster’s Dictionary.  The Holy Bible.  All of these books have been challenged and/or banned here in the United States and all over the world.

But what the GPL is doing is just an exercise.  Next month all these books will be back on the shelves of our public library, and we will go back to living our lives the way we were living them.  But if even one person in Gadsden thinks differently about the relationship between books and reading to a healthy society, if one person in Gadsden is more willing to stand up for their Freedom to Read, if one person in Gadsden is more likely to call their local library to fight to have challenged books put back on their shelves, then we will have accomplished what we set out to accomplish for Banned Books Week Gadsden Reads.

And as for all of the folks here in Gadsden with whom I’ve spoken over the past couple of days, folks who saw the photos in the Gadsden Times and were concerned that we were removing books permanently from our collection, folks who saw the photos in the Gadsden Times were worried that something terrible was happening in their community, I want to thank you for your concerns and for your calls.  I am thankful that you noticed something was wrong and that you spoke up.  I am thankful that you were willing to stand up for your right to read and to fight to keep books on the shelves of your public library.   I am thankful for your vigilance.

Banned Books Week Gadsden Reads Fahrenheit 451 is supported by funds granted through the Freedom to Read Foundation Judith F. Krug Memorial Fund.

More on our September programs soon.