Part 1 of My Goodreads "Biblio-Memior"

This is from the little writing section they give you in Goodreads, I flirted with using it for a time, but it never caught on enough with me. If you want to see the original post, go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/570087-biblio-memior?chapter=1



This portion will cover my life from the earliest books I remember reading until right before I read Invisible Man, which means it is a very short part that leads into the real years of me becoming an active reader.


I obviously do not know exactly when I gained any kind of literacy. My mother was a widow at that time and I learned through a combination of her and the preschool I went to operating in the basement of a local Baptist church in Temple Hills, Maryland. I was literate enough to be able to read and “write” by the time I went to start my primary school education. The school I went to was mostly attended by African-Americans as the effort to re-segregate American public schools was well under-way by the time I was born (1990). Green Valley Elementary School was the base of my education and the teachers and librarian I had in those years were vital to me, though I only recognize this now. In particular, my school librarian of those years, Mrs. Montgomery (neé Pickett) was a big influence. But like all things I start at home.

My mother supplied me with the usual kid’s books, the ones I remember being the Dr. Seuss canon, Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts franchise and The Bible. I also received my first comic book from her, a collector’s issue of the X-Men that I read a little, but quickly discarded and cannot remember the issue number. She also took time after her work to have me trace over sentences she had dotted-lined herself, ensuring that I would have some sort-of writing ability when I started school.

At school I picked-up a well-sprung of knowledge. I was not a conscious book-worm at that time, but I probably took to reading books more than the average child did. I discovered more of the “mainstream” children’s western cannon like Maurice Sendak, Curious George and Madeline, but now demographics come into play. Because the make-up of my school was overwhelmingly African-American (and this being the years before Federally-mandated testing could wreak havoc with a teacher’s lesson-plan) in the aftermath of the federally-mandated plague of crack-cocaine, the school's teachers and principal felt that extraordinary methods could be taken to make sure that getting an education was shown to be necessary and important. What were these extraordinary methods? They had the nerve to teach young African-American kids…about themselves and their history…outside of the month of February! It was the 1990s: the era of Malcolm X’s legacy being rehabilitated, the Million Man March was happening, the era where Hip-Hop showed it was not gonna die-out as some wild fad like Disco. In the D.C. area we had the influence of Chuck Brown and Go-Go that shapes the heart of every black partisan of The “D-M-V.” These exterior influences trickled into our classrooms and meant that I got exposed to the works of Ezra Jack Keats, whose works were so rooted in urban culture that I thought he was an African-American for many years until I found-out that he was a WWII veteran and the son of Jewish immigrants. Books like Abiyoyo, Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters, Anansi The Spider, and Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears were some of the cornerstones of my literary education. The poetry of Langston Hughes and Shel Silverstein also had a big impact. Silverstein is the eternal poet laureate of rebellion for every adolescent youth, while Hughes is the poet among poets for African-Americans. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a very big influence with me absorbing his speeches and endless biographies about him. I would not get a formal introduction to Malcolm X until I read Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary.

The latter part of my elementary to early middle school years saw a growing interest in two specific parts of my identity. Firstly, it was thought by the general culture at that time that my generation would benefit from knowing our culture and history. So my mother started giving books on African-American history and culture. We regularly frequented a Pan-Africanist bookstore in the area called Caravan Books. These books aged from young readers to adult and in the beginning I mostly looked at the pictures. I was not allowed to watch T.V. during the week so this and my toys (and later video games) were my constant companions. The Black Americans of Achievement series was a well-spring of knowledge on the who’s-who of famous African-Americans. I learned a lot about the history of African-American culture in those years thanks to book like that and Profiles of Great African-Americans. But it was not just books about African-Americans that I read, but also works like Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes which would prep me for more mature works in the future like The Diary of a Young Girl and Night. I also started reading Paul Sloane’s Lateral Thinking Puzzles which would be some of the first explicit material that challenged the status quos of my life up-to-that-point (it is ironic that those books were given to me by my grandmother: gate-keeper of the status quo). Also, though I still read The Peanuts in The Washington Post, a new comic-strip started to appear that had my peers and I mesmerized: The Boondocks. In a world of Charlie Browns and Garfields and Doonesburys we had a comic-strip that spoke are language and existed in a world like ours. I started to venture into different styles of music and after watching a PBS documentary at the end of 5th grade, Jazz would be the first style of music I would dip into outside the bubble of Hip-Hop/R&B/Gospel that I was raised in.

Middle school years (2001-2004) at Thurgood Marshall Middle School were difficult for me. I was a magnet for bullying and the neighborhood which I moved to after my mother remarried was, at the time was, in a hard decline. I have not used dates a lot in this narrative so-far because like with any history, the earliest years are as much legend and myth as fact. I find it hard to remember what has happened from what I think happened. This was before I became serious about reading books and I did not always really read what I was reading. During my dark middle school years, I would be given an assignment by one of the worst teachers of my school career to research an author. I would have to read some of his book as research for the assignment. This would mark the end of myth and the beginning of history for me as a reader and person.

End of Part 1.