Library of Congress's Blog, page 58

Julia Sand: The Letters to President Arthur, Now Digital

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It is excerpted from an essay she wrote for the Library’s collection of the Chester Alan Arthur Papers.

“The hours of Garfields life are numbered—before this meets your eye, you may be President. The people are bowed in grief; but—do you realize it?—not so much because he is dying, as because you are his successor.”

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Julia Sand letter to Chester Arthur, Aug. 27, 1881.  Manuscript Division.

With this startlingly frank statement, Julia I. Sand of New York City began her Aug. 27, 1881, letter to Vice President Chester A. Arthur, then in near seclusion at his home in New York City while President James A. Garfield fought for his life in Washington, D.C. It was the first of 23 extraordinary letters Sand wrote to Arthur between 1881 and 1883, which form part of the Chester Alan Arthur Papers at the Library.

On July 2, 1881, a mentally-disturbed office seeker named Charles J. Guiteau shot President Garfield in Washington, D.C. Guiteau’s self-proclaimed motive for shooting Garfield was to remove the reformist Garfield from office to make way for Arthur, who represented the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party dedicated to the status quo, which included political patronage.

“What President ever entered office under circumstances so sad!” Sand continued. “And now your kindest opponents say: ‘Arthur will try to do right’—adding gloomily—‘He wont succeed, though—making a man President cannot change him.’”  “But making a man President can change him!” Sand predicted. “At a time like this, if anything can, that can. Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine.”

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Chester Arthur, 1882. Prints and Photographs Division.

She appealed to his sense of history. “Your name now is on the annals of history. You cannot slink back into obscurity, if you would. A hundred years hence, shool [sic] boys will recite your name in the list of Presidents & tell of your administration. And what shall posterity say? It is for you to choose whether your record shall be written in black or in gold. For the sake of your country, for your own sake & for the sakes of all who have ever loved you, let it be pure & bright.”

Garfield died on Sept. 19, 1881. After taking the oath of office at his home, Arthur became the 21st president. Sand continued to write with unsolicited advice and a sense of humor, hoping to ensure that Arthur’s record would be written in gold.

Born in New York in April 1848, Julia Isabella Sand was educated, witty and exceptionally literate. She was well-versed and opinionated on politics of the day. She was knowledgeable about the reputations of the men with whom Arthur interacted.

Whereas Sand’s mind was expansive, her physical world was confined, and once described herself as an invalid.  “…I have not been in society for years,” she once wrote Arthur. “I rarely go out of the house.”  She made allusions in other letters to physical “disadvantages,” such as “deafness, lameness,” spinal troubles, and headaches.

She asked no favors of Arthur, sought no position for herself and felt free to speak to him with honesty. She referred to herself as his “little dwarf” who served much like a dwarf in a royal court who could tell the king hard truths.

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Sand’s strong opinions on the Chinese exclusion bill, March 1882.

She expressed strong opinions on Chinese exclusion legislation in 1882, for example, and appealed to Arthur to veto the bills passed by Congress. “A congress of ignorant school boys could not devise more idiotic legislation,” she thundered. “It is not only behind the age, but behind several ages—not only opposed to the spirit of American institutions, but opposed to the spirit of civilization all the world over. … It is mean & cowardly—more than that, it is a step back into barbarism.” Arthur’s initial veto of the Chinese Exclusion Bill “delighted” Sand, but his signature on a revised bill brought her wrath down upon him. She reminded him again of his legacy, in that “nothing that you can do after will obliterate your Presidential record. That will stand, for, or against you.”

Arthur apparently never replied to these letters. But on Aug. 20, 1882, the day after she wrote him a plaintive letter, the president arrived at her door “in a very smart brougham with two horses and two men on the box dressed in claret colored livery,” a nephew later recalled.

To Sand’s chagrin, most of her family was at home and she felt too flustered to have the substantive, private conversation with Arthur she desired. A comment Arthur made to her, however, confirms that he had read her letters. “You said you would like sometime to tell me the real truth on several points, in regard to which I had fake impressions.” (Julia relied heavily on newspapers for information, and she eagerly wished to hear Arthur’s perspective on what the media had gotten wrong.)

Though she continued to write him, she never saw or heard from him again. He served out his presidency and died of a kidney ailment in 1886. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Sand was committed to a “lunatic asylum” that same year, and appears to have remained institutionalized until her death in 1933.

Her relationship with the president might have been lost to history if not for one odd detail. Though Arthur had ordered the burning of most of his personal papers shortly before his death, her letters were spared. Were her letters just overlooked? Or did Arthur want later generations to know of her influence on him?

For Sand’s sake, let us think President Arthur intended for her letters to be read someday. “If I could think that I had influenced you in the smallest degree” in following “the path of duty,” she wrote him in May 1882, “I should feel that I had not lived in vain.”

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Dav Pilkey Introduces a New Character!

Today, two special treats!

Dav Pilkey stops by every Friday to let us into the creative world in which he creates “Dog Man” or “Captain Underpants” or any of his other comic adventures. You can tap into the complete series on our Engage or Families pages.

In the first video, Dav reads a section of “Dog Man: Lord of the Fleas.” Books are great because you get to add your own imagination to flesh out characters, sounds or situations — but it’s also a treat to hear how the author themselves portray it all.

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Dav is always generous with his how-to drawing lessons and this week is no different. Here, he shows us how to draw Snug, a new character in the series. Get your drawing stuff ready and hit “play” when you’re set!

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Color Your World with the Library

Break out your crayons, markers, colored pens and pencils! The Library has new images, adapted from our collections, for you to color as you wish. Staying within the lines is totally optional.

The coloring pages are part of the Library’s growing package of school activities and learn-from-home material — and just fun stuff to do — that we’ve adapted from our collections since COVID-19. They can be found on the Library’s Families page, along with how-to-draw sessions from Dav Pilkey (of “Dog Man” fame); writing tips from Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature; and tutorials on how to make a mini book, among others. There’s more on the Engage page, too.

Ready to color? Check out this lovely photo of the Jefferson Building:

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The Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Presto, you can color it on this page. Click on the link, print out the image and you’re set![image error]

If you have my (lack of) fine motor skills, you might want to take on something simpler, such as this Works Progress Administration poster advertising a pet show. The coloring book page is all yours. (There are two images on the link; the pooch is the second one.)

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“Pet Show,” WPA poster, between 1936-39. Drawing: Arlington Gregg. Prints and Photographs Division.

There are plenty of other pictures to choose from, but perhaps none more challenging than the Library’s mosaic of Minerva. The coloring book page has plenty of room for all the detail you can muster, so don’t rush.

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Mosaic of Minerva by Elihu Vedder in the Thomas Jefferson Building. Photo: Carol Highsmith.

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Free to Use and Reuse: Maps of Cities

Cities grow, adapt and change, like all living things. The Library’s map collections show this in all sorts of unexpected ways, offering a vision of days gone by, of what “normal” once looked like.  We present you with some fascinating glimpses of the cities of yesteryear in this edition of the Library’s Free to Use and Reuse sets of copyright-free images.

The good news about these, if you haven’t seen them before, is that they are yours for the taking — print them out, blow them up into huge posters, use them for laptop screensavers. It’s your choice. In the past few months, we’ve highlighted classic movie theaters, genealogy, maps of discovery and exploration and so on, but there are lots more.

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Panoramic map of Yerba Buena, 1846-47. Bosqui Eng. & Print. Co. Geography and Maps Division.

In this edition, let’s start where Tony Bennett left his heart — San Francisco. It looked a little different in 1846, the scene this map depicts, before the gold rush that gave the hometown football team its mascot (the ’49ers). It was Mexican-held territory and known as Yerba Buena for the aromatic herbs that grew in the area. Sleepy, not much doing, a long way from anywhere.  Then, gold was discovered in the nearby foothills. Four years later, California was a state. Mark Twain, who rose to fame in the city’s rough-and-tumble journalism and literature scene, was still two two decades away. The city’s architectural icon, the Golden Gate Bridge, wasn’t built for another nine decades.

You marvel, looking at these houses in 1846, at how quiet the nights would have been, how starry the skies.

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Detail of panoramic map of D.C., c 1888. E. K. Johnson. Geography and Map Division.

Speaking of bucolic backwaters…how about the nation’s capital? (We kid because we love, D.C.!) The District of Columbia was few people’s idea of paradise in the late 19th century. Swampy, hot, with nothing like the sophistication of Philadelphia, New York or Boston, the city still had ambitions, though. The above map shows part of the city’s proposal to host the “World Exposition of 1892 and the Permanent Exposition of the Three Americas.”

The 1892 World’s Fair, as it was commonly known, was a big deal. It was to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus landing in the Americas. D.C. was game for it, entering an ambitious bid that included much of what is now the National Mall for a strip of permanent exhibits.

To get oriented, you’ll see the Capitol Building off to the far right and the Washington Monument dead center. But the Lincoln Memorial, which should be at the map’s far left, is not there, as it wouldn’t be built for another three decades. The Jefferson Memorial, today somewhere around those four lakes at bottom right, wouldn’t be built for another five.

Instead, where the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool are today, developers proposed permanent exhibits for the “Three Americas,” a middle one devoted to “Working Models of  Great American Inventions” and the third, closest to the Washington Monument, devoted to a “State and Territorial Exhibit.”

It never happened. The World Exposition picked Chicago. It opened in 1893, covered nearly 700 acres, drew more than 25 million people and is famous for the debut of, among other things, the Ferris Wheel. Also, of course, there was the small matter of serial killer H.H. Holmes living nearby, which gave us Erik Larson’s terrific 2002 book, “The Devil in the White City.” So maybe D.C. was better off all the way around missing this thing.

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New York City. Currier & Ives, 1883. Geography and Maps Division.

And of course, New York, New York, big city of dreams. In 1883, it was easier to see that Manhattan really is an island, boats thereby being essential transport. Books, loading docks, wharves, piers — they’re everywhere. A few years earlier in this era, Walt Whitman (whose papers are at the Library) penned his immortal “Crossing Brookyn Ferry.” Here he is, catching that view in a verse:

“Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?
The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?”


A city of poetry, in any era.

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Jason Reynolds: A Book Cover For Your Life

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Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, is back with another weekly writing challenge. This time? Create a book cover. Any book cover. If you’re stuck, make a cover for a book about your own life.

It’s a great exercise, particularly the last one. It makes you think on a couple of different levels.

One, you have to consider your life in visual terms — one or two pictures, symbols or shapes. Two, the colors you choose are critical. A black and red cover, you’ll agree, is much different than a blue and yellow one. Three, the title? The industry standard is five or fewer words; a couple more for an explanatory subhead.

As someone who has written about other people for years — and written a memoir — I can tell you it’s much easier to do this for other people than it is for ourselves.

In part, this is because we’re accustomed to summing up other people in shorthand. We do it all the time. For famous people, it’s simple. Elton John, pop star? His bestselling memoir of last year was named “Me.” Plus a picture of him on the cover. Easy! People loved it!

But what about the rest of us, who are not world-famous pop stars? How do we convey the heart of our story to readers?

In 2018, an unknown historian named Tara Westover published a memoir. She told a colorful tale of growing up in a remote part of Idaho with a survivalist family. Her parents did not send her to school. Still, she went on to obtain many academic degrees, including a Ph.D. from University of Cambridge University in England.

[image error]She called her memoir “Educated.” The cover was a drawing of a sharpened pencil (like students use in school). The color scheme was warm, red and amber and yellow. Within the outline of the pencil was an image of a mountain peak, part of the landscape that had dominated Westover’s childhood. And within that was a tiny image of a woman hiking, looking at the peak (the writing tip of the pencil) in the distance.

What does that image say? A young woman on an adventure. The one-word title tells the goal of that adventure. The subhead, “A Memoir,” clarifies the type of story she’s telling. Brilliant.

This gets complicated when we turn our gaze inward, though. While we don’t know much about the interior lives of other people, we know ourselves to be a swirling, contradictory mass of thoughts, emotions, fears and dreams. These can’t be easily expressed, much less in a couple of words and images. Plus, you have to decide on one mood or idea you want this cover to convey — which means you have to exclude all the others that are also important to you. That’s the last lesson the exercise teaches — editing your thoughts and making tough decisions.

So, what’ll it be for the story of your life?

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Dav Pilkey At Home — Plus Baby Frogs!

Dav Pilkey is back with another pair of short drawing tutorials and cheerful messages. It’s sort of the brand for the author and illustrator of “Dog Man” and “Captain Underpants” fame, and we’re delighted to have him drop by on Fridays for awhile.

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You can’t go wrong with baby frogs, and as adorable as they are, they’re pretty easy to draw, too. At least, so my kids tell me. (Mine keep turning out a little more wobbly than this.) Dav has plenty of other drawing lessons, which you can find on our Engage page. Grab a marker and jump right in!

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The Veterans History Project: Remembering V-E Day

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Gladyce “Pepper” Nypan, posing shortly after boot camp. Gladyce Nypan Collection, Veterans History Project, AFC2001/001/10236.

This is a guest post by Megan Harris, a senior reference specialist for the Library’s Veterans History Project, part of the American Folklife Center.

When the war ended, Gladyce “Pepper” Pederson Nypan cried, her tears dripping down into her dinner of mashed potatoes and gravy.

Benjamin Cooper wrote a love letter to his wife. Alfred Newman watched his comrades fire off live ammunition, so intense was their celebrating. Jerome Yellin was still high in the sky over Japan, completing his 19th mission as a fighter pilot with the 78th Fighter Squadron. It wasn’t until he landed that he heard the news of the enemy’s surrender.

When the war ended, George Sakato was recovering from combat injuries in a military hospital in England, and Robert Augur had recently returned from the Philippines to marry his hometown sweetheart. When the war ended, George Pearcy’s parents had just found out that their son had died as a prisoner of war seven months earlier, and was never coming home.

All of these stories and more are part of VHP’s newest installment of our online exhibit, Experiencing War, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. Drawing on 15 individual narratives from the Veterans History Project, the exhibit explores the wartime experiences of just a sample of the 16 million Americans who spent the war in uniform, and the lasting effects of service that endured far beyond the victories in Europe (V-E Day) and Japan (V-J Day) in May and September 1945.

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Contemporary of Benjamin Cooper, November 23, 2010. Benjamin Cooper Collection, Veterans History Project, AFC2001/001/29737.

“War’s end” might conjure up images of jubilant crowds in Times Square, with nurses being kissed by sailors, and the other joyful celebrations around the globe which took place on V-E and V-J Day. But the personal stories included in the online exhibit complicate this perspective, revealing a deeper, more nuanced view of the end of the war and what it meant for those who served.

For example, those tears shed by Pepper Nypan? Those were tears of sorrow, not joy. She cried as she journeyed home after mustering out, realizing that her time in the Marine Corps had come to an end and she might never again see the women with whom she had served and developed incredibly close bonds. Benjamin Cooper’s romantic letter to his wife contained words of love, but also descriptions of what he had seen when his unit liberated Dachau, sights that would continue to haunt him for decades. George Sakato recovered from his wounds, but because of his ethnicity, his heroism in combat went unrecognized for over 50 years. He finally received the Medal of Honor in 2000. Though George Pearcy did not survive the war, his POW diary did, thanks to Robert Augur’s efforts (for the full story of Pearcy and Augur’s friendship and diaries, check out these three blog posts from 2016).

Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, we look back at these stories to understand how deeply and dramatically the war changed everything—from the landscape of American society to global politics, and, perhaps most importantly, the course of individual lives. For more stories of the end of the war, check out these previous web features, commemorating the 65th and 70th anniversaries.

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Something Fishy…

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From “The Fishes of North America,” 1898. Illustration by John Petrie. Rare Books/Special Collections. 

This is a guest post by Andrew Gaudio, a reference librarian in the Researcher & Reference Services Division. 

Human beings have been fishing for a very long time, but the actual study of fish did not begin until the middle of the 16th century. Things were not exactly precise.

At the time, the definition of a fish was any animal that lived in water. Dolphins, whales, and even hippopotami were all considered fish. We can agree this was a little too broad. (For the record, a fish is a limbless cold-blooded vertebrate with gills and fins living in water.)

Enter the hero of our story, French zoologist Pierre Belon. In 1551, he published “L’historie naturelle des estranges poissons marins,” or, “The Natural History of Strange Marine Fish.” The publisher was one R. Chaudiere of Paris (no further information survives). It ran about 110 pages, had 10 woodcut images of fish as well as a picture of a sea serpent, hippopotamus and a dolphin.

Where’s the hero stuff, you ask?

Right in front of you! This was the first book ever printed to contain an image of a fish!  Johannes Gutenberg had set off the revolution in Western publishing (using movable metal type) in Germany in 1455, but more than a century later, this was the first tome to picture a fish. (The things you learn at the Library!) This makes Belon’s work one of the foundational works of ichthyology, the scientific study of fish.

Second – and this is important — Belon backed into his spot in history. He was actually writing about dolphins (which are mammals). The only reason fish are pictured at all is to make sure readers could tell the difference between certain species of fish and dolphins.

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From “L’historie naturelle des estranges poissons marins,”  Paris, 1551. 

For example, the image above is a woodcut of a tuna. Here’s Belon’s description: “Seemingly the tuna, being a very large fish, having some likeness with the dolphin, has given rise to the occasion –  by many who may not recognize it – to suspect it for a dolphin. But in the end to remove this error, I wanted to provide its image, and moreover adding nothing of its description, for I do not claim to put anything in writing in this book, which does not suit the exterior and interior anatomy of the dolphin.”

So, while Belon was there first, we need a pretty big asterisk by his achievement.

By the 1700s, the modern definition of fish had emerged. Ever since, books about fish have looked more like current science. One of the first detailed studies of fish is the 22 volume “Histoire naturelle des poissons,”  or “Natural History of Fish,” by French ichthyologists Achille Valenciennes and Georges Cuvier. Their book was so massive that it was published over the course of 20 years, from 1828 to 1849.  It described over 2,000 species of fish, classified them into different families and groups, then gave them scientific names in Latin. Many of these names are still in use. A copy of this massive work is held in our general collections. Alas, it is not yet digitized, so it isn’t available online.

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Title page of “The Fishes of North America,” by William Harris. 1898.

Of course, no discussion of fish would be complete without the late 19th century series, “The Fishes of North America,” by William Harris.  It was published as a monthly subscription from 1891 to 1898, targeted at anglers who had an interest in the details of the fish they were most likely to catch.

Each section – called a fascicle — contained two lithographs of Petrie’s paintings. At left is an image of the title page of the first fascicle. At the top of this story is Petrie’s image of a yellow perch.

These are just a handful of the rare and unique items we have on ichthyology in our vast collections. You can check them out in our online catalog.

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Stone/Blackwell Marriage: To Love And Honor, But Not “Obey”

This is a guest blog by Elizabeth A. Novara, a historian in the Library’s Manuscript Division. The wedding described here can be found in the Blackwell Family Papers .

On May 1, 1855, Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell were joined together in marriage. The well-publicized wedding ceremony, 165 years ago this month, was unusual for the time.

For one, Stone insisted on retaining her birth name, a decision that was shocking in a period where women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands. Two, the couple protested married women’s subordinate status in society by removing the word “obey” from their marriage vows. They also published a formal protest pamphlet arguing for equality in marriage.

The original pamphlet is featured in the Library’s “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” exhibition in the section “Love and Protest in a Suffrage Marriage.” Also included in the exhibition is one of the letters that Blackwell and Stone exchanged as they planned their vows.

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Lucy Stone with daughter Alice Stone Blackwell, ca 1857. Prints and Photographs Division.

Stone had originally decided never to marry, as she did not want to submit to a husband’s demands and legal rights. But Blackwell’s persistence and his dedication to equal rights principles changed her mind. Their protest pamphlet underscored the legal restrictions married women endured at the time: A wife was not entitled to her own person, guardianship of children, ownership of real estate or her own wages, nor could she inherit property in most circumstances. The beginning of the protest illustrates how strongly they felt about these injustices:

“While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it our duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.”

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Henry Browne Blackwell, ca 1850s, Prints and Photographs Division.

Meanwhile, in the 1840s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women’s rights supporters in various states had successfully fought for the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts, which allowed wives to control their own property. Still, these acts did not completely rectify married women’s status in society. Nor did they go unchallenged.

Stanton, who had organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, wrote to Stone upon hearing about her decision to retain her name. Stanton declared, “Nothing has been done in the Woman’s Rights movement for some time that so rejoiced my heart as the announcement by you of a woman’s right to her name. To take a name is one of the first steps in freedom, and one of the first demands in a republican government.”

Stone’s contributions to the suffrage movement are often overshadowed by figures such as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but Stone was just as important to the movement. Stone’s correspondence demonstrates her activism as well as her connections with anti-slavery activists and equal-rights advocates. As a student at Oberlin College in 1847, Stone already knew she would fight for abolition and women’s rights. In a handwritten copy of a letter to her mother, she wrote, “I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.” She did. Stone became a famous orator, holding audiences spellbound with her anti-slavery and women’s rights speeches.

In 1869, when the suffrage movement split over supporting the 15th Amendment, which granted voting rights to African American men but not to women of any race, Stone and Blackwell agreed to place their wishes on hold. They hoped women’s suffrage would be granted soon after the 15th Amendment was passed. It wasn’t.

Still, Stone and her husband continued to support equal rights for women and founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in 1869. Stanton and Anthony formed a rival organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). To rally support for the cause of voting rights for women, Stone and Blackwell began publishing The Woman’s Journal in 1870. It would far outlast Anthony’s rival journal, The Revolution, which ceased publication in 1872.

When the women’s suffrage movement reconciled in the 1890s and formed the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), Alice Stone Blackwell (Stone and Blackwell’s only daughter) played a significant role. She became the editor of The Woman’s Journal, which was the primary national journal for the suffrage movement until it ceased publication in 1931. She also published a biography of her mother in 1930.

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The couple late in life, gathered for a family photo, ca 1880 to 1890. Back row, l-r: Dr. Emily Blackwell, Ainsworth Spofford, Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone; (front row, l-r): Henry Browne Blackwell, Florence Spofford, Sarah (Partridge) Spofford.

While Lucy Stone did not take the Blackwell name, she did become part of an extraordinary family, full of women and men interested in improving their world. You can discover more about them by transcribing some of their correspondence, diaries and other historical documents online. In addition to the newly released digital collections, both the Blackwell Family Papers and the NAWSA Records are available for crowdsourced transcription via the Library’s By the People project.

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Jason Reynolds: Grab the Mic Newsletter

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This is the May newsletter by Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

When I was a kid, bedtime was bad times. Not because I didn’t like pillows and sheets, or my Pound Puppy blanket. Wait, do you know what the Pound Puppies are? Were? Are? No? Okay, well, basically they were these little stuffed dogs, each one with a different set of spots, and different-colored floppy ears. But they all had sad eyes. Not sure why I loved them so much, but as soon as I finish writing this letter, I’m going to call my mother and ask her why she surrounded me with images of abandoned puppies, which you would think would be the reason bedtime was hard for me. But . . . nope. The reason I struggled so much to have a good night after saying goodnight was because I was afraid of the dark.

It’s hard to describe what the dark felt like to me. But I’ll try.

The dark was thick and it seemed to make the skin heavy on my bones.

The dark was empty and suddenly it felt like it could disappear me.

The dark was cold, even in the summer. Even with a blanket tucked under my chin.

The dark was silent. So silent that it made all the invisible things in my room seem loud.

The dark was . . . scary. There’s no other way to say it.

So after I snuck out of my room and crawled into bed with my parents at least a thousand times (who am I kidding . . . five thousand times), my mother decided she would start leaving my bedroom door cracked, figuring a sliver of light is all I’d need to find slumber. But the hallway and kitchen were too loud. My older brother was testing out his stereo speakers, and my mother was on the phone joking around with her sisters, and there was no way I could sleep through all that. So she finally decided to get me a night light. A tiny little plug-in that provided the amount of glow a candle flame creates. Just enough to see my toys on the floor and to ensure they weren’t moving on their own. Until I saw things moving across the wall. Big things. And whenever I would jump up to see what they were, they would attack. And whenever they would attack I would fight back, swinging at the air until frantically snatching the blanket over my head and hoping for morning.

This was an every-night thing.

Until I realized what was moving across the wall, was me. My shadow. And when I tried to fight it, it would fight me. Because it was me. My arms and legs kicking in bed, and the long shadow of those same arms and legs moving across the orange dim of my room.

Once I figured this out—okay, so . . . I have to be honest with you. I didn’t figure this out. Seriously, I had no idea what was going on. I went crying to my older brother, and he told me what was happening. Told me how shadows worked, and then showed me how to make shapes with my hands to make shadow puppets on the walls.

A dog. A rabbit. A bird. All of which were described by my older brother as a “dog monster,” a “rabbit monster” and a “bird monster,” because that’s the kind of big brother he was. But whenever I would climb into bed and make these “monsters” come to life on the walls of my room, they didn’t scare me anymore. Because they were mine. And they were me. I was in control. I made them so I could talk to them, tell them how I felt, tell them to protect me from any moving toys while I slept, especially since the Pound Puppies apparently weren’t going to do it.

Eventually my mother took the night light out of my room. Back to darkness. And at first, I would put my hands in the air and bend them into the shapes of animals. And even though I could no longer see them on the wall, I believed them to be there. And I still do.

I still know it’s me who creates my fear, and me who creates the protectors that save me from it. The only difference is, 25 years later, those shadow puppets have left the wall and now live on the page.

For more information about Jason Reynolds, visit: loc.gov/engage.

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