Reading James Baldwin Again

Sadly, not many of the city’s school kids are, or can.

James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is my train book now. I read it on the subway from 23^rd Street to Chambers Street where I hold my sign, and back again. I keep it in my Patagonia book bag, and only take it out on those morning rides. I get a few pages read a day. 

Besides reminding me what a vividly talented and necessary writer James Baldwin was at such a young age, the book gets me riled up thinking how, if it means something to me, a gray-headed 67-year-old white man sitting there on the train, it would mean a world more to a teenage black kid. I guess I mean by that, boys mostly, but girls too. But boys come to mind because the week before LeBron chose to go back to Cleveland the paper there ran an almost-week-long story about a much-loved white tavern owner close to my age who was killed by five young black men, one who worked for him, at lunch time in his place. Their mug shots show five faces that look like they never read Go Tell It on the Mountain. Worse, they don’t look like they could have read it.

Neither do the young men that I watched on CNN one night last week that are dying, and causing the dying, in Chicago, with frightening frequency. CNN showed similar scenes of such homicidal randomness going on here, too. No books were reported to have been found in the hip pockets of any of the living, or the dead.

There are no bookstores in the neighborhoods those young men come from (or came from, in the case of the dead young victims) in Cleveland or New York or Chicago. Their mean streets are not a classic movie with a cool sound track that they watch, credits too, in NYU T-shirts. You and I don’t know how mean their streets really are, no matter that I’m reading, have read for 50 years, books like Baldwin’s. Besides not having bookstores there, there aren’t enough jobs there, or fathers there whose sports pages at the kitchen table might have triggered in their sons a daily hunger for reading. Not much on those streets would find a way to get a James Baldwin book into their hands.

The only place they might find a book like that would be in their school. That’s likely the only place they might find a person who would press such a book into their hands. The only place with a librarian who would know about what kids their age would be interested in reading, someone who could make suggestions to them about all sorts of books that might speak to them, books that might light a light for them, be a companion to them, be an inspiration.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.      -James Baldwin

Most of the faces on the young men I’m talking about, the ones with the guns who shoot other men and teenagers, have an empty look; they look like they didn’t go to school for a day, let alone till they were 16, which they had to have done, by law. You’ve seen those faces.

But all of them did go to school. What happened there? Or what didn’t happen there, that left them looking that way?

Cultures require schools. It’s where the books are. No matter the neighborhood. It’s where every kid gets a desk of their own. It’s where there’s a teacher, an adult who can read well, who can show them how to read, and show them all kinds of books and magazines that they might like. It’s a place to come every day where there are bright lights in rooms with big windows. There’s a library in the school too. A school is a perfect place to give order and promise to kids from the neighborhood. And it’s the place where all their friends go.

It continually seems a sin to me that the schools don’t teach every school kid to read well enough to eventually read James Baldwin. In the 10 or 12 years that the kids go to school every day because the law and the culture say they must, they should be helped to read easily. They should be able to read any book in the school’s library by the time they’re ready to graduate. But that doesn’t happen. Not in Cleveland, not in Chicago, not here in New York City.

You have to wonder if reading is the top priority of the city’s schools. You, who are reading this, may not have considered that. You read easily and the people you know do too. But tens of thousands of kids in the city’s schools don’t read well. Kids who’ve been going to school for years. Kids with a home room, and a desk of their own. Kids who see their friends there. Kids who have teachers. Kids who go from September to June. They’ve been going every year since they were six. Most of them don’t read nearly as well as they’re supposed to.

Things can’t keep being done at school like they’re being done now. The kids from the book-less

neighborhoods are being let down by the schools where all the books are. That seems crazy to me. It’s why I hold my sign.

They should try this: They should accept once and for all, that teaching these kids to read is what they’re there for. It’s what the kids need. It’s what the culture needs. I can’t think of one other priority that could rival reading. The schools should make sure that everything that goes on, in the schools that have failed, will be to get each student to be a facile reader. Not an OK reader. A good reader. The kids lives depend on it. A James Baldwin book should be as easy for them to read when they’re 16 as it was for you and me. This is of the gravest importance.

I think, having thought on it for some time, that the lost young men who are staring at us from mug shots, wouldn’t be, if the schools had done their job. The dead would be alive.

A Great Bookstore Makes a Move

St. Mark’s Bookshop picks a new neighborhood

I love it when people don’t give up. Especially when the trends are trending against them.

St. Mark’s Bookshop, the legendary intelligent store, on 9^th Street and Third Avenue, for reasons of rent, is
moving further east to 136 East 3^rd Street, a few storefronts west of Avenue A. I walked past the space a week ago. There was no sign up yet. The door was open so carpenters could go in and out. It’s a smaller space. But that will make for a good fit in that neighborhood. You probably don’t get down there often. It’s a cool part of town. Some part of you will wish you lived there. Go there to see the store. It’ll open any day, or may have already by the time you read this.

How great for the street, a famous bookstore. My street doesn’t have one.

The Land of No Plugs or Wires

Escaping to a city park

You feel lucky to be there when you’re sitting in a park. Living here, you might miss a back yard or a porch if you grew up with one. But when you’re on a bench in the shade with a book or a magazine or a newspaper and a cup of tea or coffee, you feel like you’re on vacation in a place you wished you lived.

I have four parks within a 15-minute stroll. To grab a book or the mail, and get out of the apartment, it’s a big perk of living here. And the people you see there. TV can’t compete. And there are enough vendors or bodegas or restaurants right across the street; you can stay for hours. Go Forth.

One of the great collections of stories. If you said they were the greatest stories, I couldn’t argue with you. This week I started reading them again. I feel lucky to be.

The Day The Music Died

And other things that happened outside of school.

I was the first one who heard that Buddy Holly died. My friends were in school. I had talked my mother into letting me stay home that day. It was winter and I told her I had a sore throat. Some days I just couldn’t go. Even though the Catholic grade school where I was in 6^th grade was right across the street. Some days I just wanted to stay home in bed and read the sports page and listen to the radio.

I think my mother understood. She was a little restless herself and knew about boredom. When I stayed home, she’d prop a big pillow-with-arms behind me. For lunch she’d bring me tomato soup with sometimes oyster crackers and a peanut butter sandwich with strawberry or raspberry jam on it.  There would be Canada Dry ginger ale, and always for dessert, lemon sherbet. She put the food on a little tray -table in front of me on top of my blanket.

Later, she’d leave me there and go the few blocks down to the one-block-long Main Street in our little town, and she’d go into Engel’s Cigar Store, where she seldom had reason to go, and buy three or four sports magazines that she hoped she was choosing right, and bring them home to me. She didn’t want me to look bored to her, or to sleep all day, or to just listen to the radio. She wanted me to read the rest of the day. She knew that would be a more stimulating way to spend my time.

While she was on Main Street, the news came over my radio on the nightstand that Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper had been killed in a plane crash in Iowa. It was hard to sit there in bed all alone with this knowledge. I wanted to tell my friends in the school I could see right out my window. I wanted to run over there. We all knew these singers. We all had older brothers and sisters who had their records. I liked Buddy Holly better than I liked Elvis who seemed like sort of a caricature to me, though I didn’t know that word then.

Two weeks ago while I was holding my sign, with its message of WHY NOT TEACH EVERY SCHOOL KID TO READ WELL, on the sidewalk in front of the Dept. of Education, two guys walked toward me.  They both were lean and alert like Bryan Cranston, and one of them said to me, ‘Oh God yes, I totally agree. I’m a teacher’. His partner, a few yards after they’d passed, smugly said, over his shoulder. ‘They’re not interested in learning to read.’ Yikes. That was the most cynical thing anyone’s said to me in the almost three years I’ve been standing there with my sign. I’ve been thinking about it ever since he said it in that tone of voice he used. My mother comes into it, when I think about it.  She knew what I wanted to read. She knew what would get me to be interested in reading. She knew to get me those sports magazines from the cigar store.

My father comes into it, too. He read all evening when he came home from work. He’d make himself a drink first, and then, in his cozy office/den, with a fireplace he’d even sometimes light in summer, he’d start to go through the newspapers and magazines that were in a stack on the ottoman in front of his chair. He read all the time. And he encouraged it in me. He would try to get me to read things in the paper beyond the sports page. He’d point out front page stories and hand me the paper. He’d fold the Wall Street Journal in half, length-wise, and show me the daily long essay that began on page one and tell me how I ought to get in the habit of reading it. I didn’t, of course. But I got his message about how much he cared about newspapers, and reading of any kind. So it surprised me when later in life he told me that he didn’t like to read when he was a kid, and that it had worried his father. So his father went down to maybe the same cigar store my mother went to and bought him some Nick Carter detective stories. I’d never heard of Nick Carter, but I later found out that they were hard-boiled tales for adult men that every other parent would have forbidden their kids to read.  Nick’s stories apparently worked for my father. My grandfather knew what would work.

Like my mother knew.

It got me thinking, and I’m still thinking about it. What If kids could read whatever they wanted? What if they don't want to read The Diary of Anne Frank or Sounder or The Book Thief or Great Expectations or To Kill a Mockingbird?, which they don’t really, at least not in school, not along with everybody else. Who wants to read the same book as everybody else is reading and then compete with everybody to see who can raise their hand and give the teacher the answer she wants to hear? Ugh. Kids want contraband. They don’t want books their teachers think are good. Anymore than they’d want to listen to music their teachers suggested. Think about it. A lot of kids think books and reading are boring. It’s music they go to for emotional information and stimulation. Or movies. What if they had their Nick Carter equivalent in school? Or all the sports magazines they wanted? Or music magazines or fashion magazines? People, US, Fast Company, XXL, Rolling Stone. Vogue, with Rihanna on the cover. Don’t you think they’d like to read those? Rather than leave their books behind in their locker when they were supposed to be taking them home, they’d try to steal these magazines. That’s what you want kids to want to do. You want them to want to steal the book they like it so.

When I moved here 17 years ago, one of the good bookstores I’d go in kept Jack Kerouac books and J.D.

Salinger books and Kurt Vonnegut books, and maybe some others, behind the counter, because kids would steal them from the shelves. That excited me to know that.

I think kids in the city schools should be able to read what they want. I think that would galvanize them to read. They would grow to want more than sports magazines, more than Nick Carter. Many of them would find the books that are important. And they would find out for themselves why they are. They’re going to need teachers who have an instinct for it though, like my mother and my grandfather had it. They’re going to need English majors at the very least to help them, and let them help themselves to reading what their natures are drawn to. English majors would know how that works. That’s the best thing I’ve thought of to answer the guy who bothered me the way he said what he said over his shoulder.

Better Rivers Than Amazon

Local bookstores are the way to go

Of course the parts of the city that have the reading needs that made me make my sign don’t have

neighborhood bookstores. That’s tragic.  Imagine how different part of the block would be if there were a good bookstore with a good window display. There used to be bookstores all over town. Fewer and fewer now. We all know that.

This book has writers from around the country write about their favorite bookstores. Towns or cities you might not think of as bookish, have a good store that means something to the community. We have some good ones still left here. But their rents aren’t getting any cheaper. Forget Amazon, that’s not like going in a real store. It’s just easy. Easy is what got our society in trouble; made us fat, too. Start tomorrow; no more Amazon. Look for a store that seems to fit you, and be a regular. 

Your Library Needs You Right Now

It only takes a minute

Libraries here are busier than ever. I see it at my neighborhood branch, Epiphany. It’s hard to find a seat

some days. The libraries need more money to keep up with the demands. They need more books. They need more computers. I think they need more hours, too. Some days they don’t open till noon. That’s crazy, in the cultural capital of the world.

There are form letters in the entrance to my branch now that they ask you to please sign. They are to convince the Mayor and City Council to increase funding for libraries in the next budget. You can find them at your branch, or you can sign online at NYPL.org. It takes a minute at most. Do it now, before you forget.  It’s your town.