Banned Books: Don’t Even Try It

Disclaimer: I wrote this essay a year ago and posted it on Substack. I wrote a short post this past August and for some reason, I ended up with two Substack accounts. I just discovered this. I am awaiting help in combining the two accounts. I am reposting and it so happens this is Banned Books Week.

Banned books.  That is an oxymoron from where I sit. I am a reader and have always been, from the moment I learned to read overnight in Kindergarten.

My home was filled with books. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father who at one time did substitute teaching, was a realtor and later, a director at HUD, and both were voracious readers, especially my Dad.

We had a bookcase full of books ranging from novels to various forms of nonfiction. Some of the titles I remember were James Baldwin’s, The Fire Next Time, Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker, and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The books were there and if you could read them, it was for the taking.

I remember Flo, my younger sister, who was about 12 at the time, was sitting in the middle of the living room engrossed in Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, considered racy for the 1960s. My Dad walked in and did a double take.

“Flo, what are you reading?” He knew full well what she was reading. Flo didn’t even look up. “Valley of the Dolls.” Daddy stood there momentarily, then hunched his shoulders, shook his head, walked out, and then went about his business. Hey, it was on the bookshelf.

I read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time at maybe 13. So much of what I read was over my head, but I plowed through it. I was so engrossed in Baldwin’s language and conviction; I could not put it down.  Baldwin has since become one of my all-time favorite authors and I find myself going back to his writings repeatedly.

To that point, I do not know why I pulled the “maybe you should wait until you get a little older” with my daughter, Rebecca. Terry McMillan was all the rage in the early 1990s. Her best seller, Waiting to Exhale about four Black women negotiating love and relationships had been number one on bestseller lists for months. Of course, I read it while noticing Rebecca’s roving eyes when she entered my bedroom while I was reading. When I finished, she said, “Mommy, I want to read it”, She was 11, turning 12 in a few weeks. I tried it. “Well, maybe when you get a little older.”

“Ding, ding, ding”. Loud bells were going off in my head. What the hell, Dera. No, you did not. Well, when I found her reading the book in the tub, she was more than halfway through it. I threw up my hands. Why had I even tried it? 

I thought back to Rebecca’s fourth-grade class in the late 1980s when she was attending a Christian school. The teacher sent home the Scholastic Books reading lists just as all her other teachers had in previous grades where the parents send his back with the child with a check for the books selected. Only this reading list had some books crossed out. Black Xs on various books. This was Rebecca’s first year at the school, but I sent a note for her teacher to call me. Mrs. Watkins called me on her break the next day. I asked her why some of the books were crossed out. Her reply was,” Oh those are the books we don’t allow our kids to read.” I hesitated. One of the books that were Xed was The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. That wasn’t one of the books Rebecca and I had selected but suddenly the rebellion in me wanted Rebecca to read that book.  

I said, “No, we don’t do that. We let Rebecca choose her books.”

“But that book is about witchcraft.” Mrs. Watkins replied.  

We went back and forth and we ended the conversation with a truce of sorts. If I wanted to order any of the banned books, I would need to order on my own, and not through the schoolbook order. Then in sixth grade, at another school, the teacher told me Brooklynn couldn’t read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith as her free reading time choice in class. I came up to the school and asked her what, pray tell, was wrong with the book. I was told the derogatory names that the Irish and Italians were called wasn’t acceptable. Again, I went round and round with this teacher and I won that round. Rebecca finished reading that book for her free reading time. But I found myself perusing every free book choice and felt bad about caving into that school’s book policy sensitivities.

Now we are in the age of extreme conservatism where those in power not only want to gatekeep what our children are taught and reading in our schools, but also want to censure what adults read. When I went on a family trip in late summer of 2022 to Disney World in Orland, Florida, I would come back to my hotel room, turn on the television and was greeted with school board and community meetings with folks who wanted to ban books. Schools in Florida don’t want their children reading books, about racism, diversity, and gay rights. They don’t want books on former President Obama or his wife, but welcome books about former President Donald Trump. They want history books with skewed views about American history in general and Black history, in particular. It is all too much.

But somebody is going to explain to me how these extremists think they control what books are in the library for public use. Libraries have always been a safe place for people to borrow books and expand their knowledge. How are you going to tell me the works of Tony Morrison, James Baldwin, and Zora Neale Hurston do not belong in the public library?

I looked on the list of 2023 banned books and I saw Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston. Surprise does not begin to describe my feelings. This book. What can I say? This book is at the top of my all-time favorites. I have read this book numerous times and always got that feeling of home.  I first read TEWWG in my early 20s and fell in love with Janie and admired her perseverance. But rereading it when I returned to college in my late 30s and read in an English class, I felt I was coming into my own as a woman.

I assume it is on the banned list presumably for some of the language and the domestic violence is prevalent. But, how can these people dare say, it should not be in a public library?  Must everything read be joy, happiness, and laughter? I cannot with these people. There has to be something really unsatisfactory with one’s life to make it their mission in life to demand others adhere to their code of conduct.

No banning of books, no matter the topic or who wrote them. I do not trust anyone who bans books or thinks they should be banned. Keep your hand off books. Don’t even try it.