Overdue: Reckoning with the Public Library

by Amanda Oliver

When he was done laughing, he said, “Oh yeah, what’s a typical day? You read a bunch of books with kids on your lap?”

The library I inherited was a mess. In addition to the collection being largely out of order, it had also not been properly weeded in over sixty years, and many of the resources were outdated and damaged. Books on the shelves were about countries that had dissolved, planets that were no longer planets, and several were about someday landing on the moon.

I quickly realized that my time spent perfecting Word Jenga would have been better used reading some—any—literature about managing a classroom.

I eventually walked down to Malachi’s first grade classroom and found his young teacher in a similar state. Later, we would both come to learn that Malachi’s home life was difficult and that he, as well as his single mother, had multiple learning disabilities. Malachi’s mom adored and loved him, but she often relied on physical punishment to manage his behavior.

That winter, Angelo’s kindergarten teacher discovered that his father had been putting him inside of a turned-off oven when he got to be “too much.”

Angelo struggled to follow classroom routines, but loved to play basketball, so I would end some days in the gym with him and a teacher friend, aiming basketballs at the hoops.

I always sat with my students—on the floor, in corners, on top of tables, in stairwells. I put my body near theirs and repeated the same thing: “Whatever you do or say, I’m not going to leave you.” This was the best way I found to prove myself to be a safe person for my students: letting them know I would stick it—whatever it was—out with them.

No one had taught me to do any of this, and I did not know if it was best practice or what my students—most of them Hispanic, Latino, Black, and Asian—needed. No part of any teaching training had prepared me for how much my students needed, so I relied on what I knew from my own experiences. I began to build my pedagogy around caring for the child first and the learning second. I was able to do this, in part, because my role in the school community as a librarian was not tied to standardized test scores. They could “fail” at using the library, and it didn’t impact a grade or my paycheck.

Rhee had resigned as the school district’s chancellor. Rhee left in her wake IMPACT, the unpopular teacher effectiveness rating system tied to standardized test scores. Teachers delivering low test scores could be demoted or fired at the end of the year.

Back then I did not know the term white saviorism, nor did I consider myself to be participating in it. No part of me thought I was uniquely capable of helping or teaching or leading because I was White.

I had no understanding that a small number of billionaires owned the majority of America’s wealth, in part because I was young and naive, but also because the American economy had shifted drastically between 1980 and 2010. Technological advances combined with late twentieth-century deregulation and deindustrialization created something like a second Gilded Age, with changes that I was too young to fully understand while still in grade school and too young and perhaps self-absorbed to realize in the first years of college.

I now understand that the identity work gives us is often deeply tied up in a capitalist American culture, and choosing to deeply align with our jobs and job titles as who we are often diminishes or eliminates altogether a meaningful sense of inherent self-worth as human beings. All human beings deserve shelter, food, health care, and safety regardless of their levels of capitalist productivity.

But the letter also serves as a reminder to me that the lower you are on the socioeconomic ladder, the more your moral character is dependent on your work ethic and how productive you can be.

Wealthy people develop them differently, in more controlled and comfortable ways: through higher education, wellness classes, TED Talks, and similar. They do this in the comfort of their own spaces and rarely, if ever, out of any necessity. I saw these and similar, more overarching understandings begin to come to a head after I moved to DC, and they became more and more frustrating and heartbreaking as I continued working in a Title I school environment.

There is a seriousness to DC that can feel maddening to outsiders and soothing to residents.

People know how to be alone and how to leave others alone in DC, and I missed the relief of it all.

John Kerry lived just up the street, and I became familiar with the Secret Service agents who sat outside his home. I’d pass them on my walk to grab coffee, one in the driver’s seat and one in the passenger seat, and we’d share a smile and nod.

Ripley’s book analyzes and compares the American education system to international education systems, focusing on three American high school students who studied for a year in Finland, South Korea, and Poland.

Another teacher and I spent the rest of the year discreetly throwing on our “blinders” at staff meetings as a cue to each other that we thought something being said was out of touch or unhelpful.

I was reminded of why I had loved Thomson so much—diverse communities, especially communities that are marginalized and underserved, are often more welcoming, accepting, and warm.

A good window lets the outside participate. —Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem MY

When I think about gentrification, especially rapid gentrification like this, I think about the loss of the there there, a concept first described by Gertrude Stein in Everybody’s Autobiography. Novelist Tommy Orange gives it brilliant further context: “The place where [Stein had] grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore.”2

In 2014, a fourteen-year-old girl named Jahkema Princess Hansen was murdered in her living room where she was watching television with a twelve-year-old friend. Hansen had been scheduled to testify as a witness to a shooting in the neighborhood. She was shot in the head, torso, and leg, and her friend was wounded. Her home was less than a block from the library.

The gray carpets were covered in stains from drinks and food and—I’d find out much later—blood.

I thought of the concept of “sick building syndrome”—a term used to describe various nonspecific symptoms that occupants of a building experience that cause an increase in sickness and absenteeism. Northwest One seemed like the type of building that might lead to that, if it wasn’t already.

My official title at Northwest One was the grammatically suspect “children librarian.”

“We try not to diagnose our customers or talk about their mental health,” Frank interjected. “It’s not our place to say. We don’t know.”

Officially named John Doe0031NW1 in the police report, the man had broken the second rule of category four of the DC Public Library Rules of Behavior: “Directing a specific threat of physical harm against an individual, group of individuals, or property.”

Circling something with questions is how I normally cope with a complex situation—how I imagine many librarians do—but I didn’t like any of the answers I came up with.

Like employees of the DMV, or restaurants, or hotels, librarians expect to encounter people from many backgrounds, experiences, and moods.

Find empathy before anger, fear, or confusion. Find empathy before you lose your cool. Find empathy before you lose your shit. Empathy is a first line of defense in public servant jobs—people a...

It can also become incredibly grating to constantly meet unkindness with a version of kindness, gritting your teeth until nice comes out. It was particularly hard for me as a woman who sometimes felt, and feels, like our expected neutral state is nice.

None of my experiences with police officers as an adult had been positive, and I did not inherently trust them to protect me.

The area shelters were often full, and even though DC had—and has—laws in effect to ensure people are sheltered in below-freezing temperatures, some people, especially those struggling with their mental health, did not feel comfortable going to these locations.

As Peter Moskowitz has written, “Someone who learned about gentrification solely through newspaper articles might come away believing that gentrification is just the culmination of several hundred thousand people’s individual wills to open coffee shops and cute boutiques, grow mustaches and buy records. But those are the signs of gentrification, not its causes.”

Similarly, author Jeff Chang writes, “Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.”

When I still lived in the Pacific Northwest I went to see the house that inspired the Pixar movie Up. The empty and boarded home of Edith Macefield was in Seattle’s trendy Ballard neighborhood, awkwardly wedged between an LA Fitness and a UPS store with a wire fence running along the front of it.

Any time someone Googles “Northwest One,” Wayne will be there. I understand this stake he’s made, and he deserves it.

If it is inaccessible to the poor, it is neither radical nor revolutionary. —Jonathan Herrera

The Mount Vernon Square library was subsequently renamed Central Public Library and moved to a larger location in 1972, where it still remains today as the central branch of DCPL: the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.2

During my employment, deciphering who made what decisions within DCPL was not something I easily understood, even with access to an organizational chart that outlined who answered to whom.

I liked processing the books people put on hold and discovering which names checked out stacks of books I began to build my own reading lists around.

I began to know and care for my coworkers, too. Darrion’s dry sense of humor and contrarian nature made for animated conversations in the back office, ones where I felt safe asking questions or sharing still-processing thoughts, which came as a relief in an environment that was often nearly impossible to process in real time.

My questions required energy and time, and K–12 educators can attest to the fact that there is very little of both in a school day. But at the public library, at Northwest One, Chris and Darrion always went with my outbursts, questions, and concerns in similar ways.

We naturally bounced ideas and thoughts off one another, genuinely seeking each other’s thinking, including criticism and pushback. It was this that was essential to our bond: any disagreement came with an unspoken agreement that it did not lessen our views of one another as humans.

We all understood the exhaustion, anger, trauma, and sadness of it all and that these feelings sometimes came in overwhelming waves that compromised our abilities to be professional or to uphold our better sides. More times than I can remember, I said something in the back office that ultimately I did not mean. Chris and Darrion knew this inherently. I was deeply thankful for the mutual respect, humility, and care that existed between us.

Frank, like any manager or boss, had to walk a fine line between overseeing our work and being our friend. He sometimes joined in the animated back-office conversations with Darrion and Chris and revealed his own thoughts about the struggles at Northwest One. He was also pragmatic—a former solider who had served multiple tours in Iraq and had a certain level of soldierlike control and order that permeated all his actions and conversations.

In the greater scheme of the daily stress and chaos of Northwest One, addressing Jackie’s actions fell to the bottom of the priority list for everyone. We needed each staff member to man the branch, and no one in the system wanted to be reassigned to Northwest One.

All the staff members went by their first names, except for Ms. Williams and Ms. Olson, and I was told on day one to never call either of them by theirs. It was a matter of respect—they were the matriarchs of large families and knew the branch, the patrons, and the neighborhood better than anyone else. They had little patience for complaining and certainly not for dramatics.

Any time a coworker or boss had called work a family in my past, it had felt like a way to coerce us into additional labor or to ignore some glaring imbalance of power or responsibilities.