Morningstar: Growing Up with Books
Ann Hood
Introduction
? Growing Up with Books ?
WHEN I WAS FOUR YEARS OLD, FOR REASONS NO ONE in my family could explain, I picked up my older brother Skip’s reading book and I read it. This was in 1959 or 1960, but I can still remember staring at that page and reading the words Look! Look! In that instant, all of my cells seemed to settle into place and I had one thought: I want to live inside a book.
I did not grow up in a family that owned books. My great-grandparents had immigrated from Italy in the late 1800s as part of the large exodus of southern Italian farm laborers who, burdened by heavy taxes, low pay, and harsh living conditions, came to the United States to work in the mills for higher wages and security. Their daughter, my grandmother Mama Rose, left school in third grade for a job in the big textile mill that loomed over the neighborhood. She never learned to read or write, except for her slow, careful, seemingly painful signature. Of her ten children, their education interrupted by the death of their father and the start of World War II, only three graduated from high school. The girls all went to work in various factories—making artificial flowers or luggage or soap; the boys became barbers or mechanics. Reading was not something for which they had time or inclination.
My father, a small-town Indiana boy from a family of nine, dropped out of high school to join the navy and see the world. He had a love for cheap paperbacks that he read at sea, Zane Grey and James Cain. But I never saw him read a book at home. In fact, I never saw anyone read a book at home.
Yet I did grow up with stories, stories told around the kitchen table on Saturday afternoons or after dinner during the week. Aunts and uncles, great-aunts and-uncles, cousins and second cousins and cousins twice removed, relatives with confusing family ties, all sat and drank black coffee and talked into the night. I learned early that you had to earn your place at that table. Your story had to start with a hook, include vivid details, have strong characters, and be full of tension or someone who talked louder and could tell her story better would overpower you. Truman Capote said that he learned how to write a story not from reading but from sitting on his aunts’ front porch in Alabama and listening to them tell stories. This was my earliest education in the art of storytelling too.
But I yearned for another kind of story, the kind I found in books. When I was very young, each village in our town had its own library. These villages had all evolved around mills, and they had their own ethnic population: the French-Canadians and Irish and Italian and Portuguese and Polish, each a chapter in our town’s own immigrant history. The Italians lived in Natick, and the Natick Library sat in a basement on a sad dead-end street on the banks of the Pawtuxet River, the river that led to all the mills being built in West Warwick and all the immigrants—like my great-grandparents—who flocked there for work. When I was a young child, the Pawtuxet River was brown and sluggish, topped by a yellowish foam. It flooded frequently. The books in that small library smelled of polluted water and mold and dank cellar air. I only got to go there a few times in first grade before it was shut down for good, but I remember picking up the books and bringing them to my nose, inhaling deeply. To me, that terrible smell was wonderful.
My small school at the bottom of the hill where our house was perched had no school library. Instead, each teacher had books on shelves in the back of the classroom—books we were not allowed to read until we’d finished all of our class work: the smudged blue mimeographed worksheets, the arithmetic written in pencil on small rectangular off-white paper, the connect-the-dots alphabet on yellow lined paper. I found it hard to concentrate on any of it. The books behind me seemed to whisper for me to come. I would glance over my shoulder, a fat pink eraser clutched in my hand, and read the titles, already trying to choose which one I’d read when I finally—finally!—finished my times tables.
It’s hard to describe the magic that books held for me then. Even our class reading books brought me my happiest moments at school. I was an awkward, shy kid. Bad at sports and ignorant of playground etiquette, I usually sat alone on the blacktop and played jacks during recess, swiping up the shiny jacks and small red ball over and over so often that the side of my right hand was always scraped. But when Miss Dwyer or Mrs. McMahon announced it was time to get into our reading groups, I was always the first one to pick up my chair and sit in the circle, book immediately open in my lap. If my teacher had to go to the bathroom, she would order the class to take out their reading books and announce that Ann was going to read aloud until she got back. What pleasure I took in that, even though no one listened as I read. I didn’t care. I was in the world of stories and words, a world I preferred to the classroom or playground.
But what is a child who loves books that much supposed to do when she has no access to them? Every week at home Time magazine arrived, and every month we got Reader’s Digest. In the early evening, just before supper, the paperboy brought the evening newspaper. And so my earliest reading was “Milestones” in Time; “Life in These United States,” “Humor in Uniform,” “Drama in Real Life,” and “How to Build Your Word Power” quizzes in Reader’s Digest; “Dear Abby,” horoscopes, and “Hints from Heloise” (save your old onion bags and use them for hairnets!) in the newspaper.
Until second grade. That’s when I finally got a real book to read.
MY COUSIN GLORIA-JEAN—a year older, dark curly haired to my straight blond—went to Maisie E. Quinn, the new elementary school in town. Like us, our schools were physically opposites: hers a rambling one-story with lots of windows; mine, painted yellow with shiny wood floors and old enough that our grandmother and parents had gone there. Maisie E. Quinn had a cafeteria; we ate our brown-bag lunches at our desks. And Maisie E. Quinn had a library.