There’s been some interesting overlapping on my radar that involve lynching, black holes, horny toads, and the frightening rise in book banning.  A 2021 Washington Post article, “Lynchings in Mississippi Never Stopped,” begins “Since 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi, according to court records and police reports. ‘The last recorded lynching in the United States was in 1981,’ said Jill Collen Jefferson, a lawyer and founder of Julian, a civil rights organization named after the late civil rights leader Julian Bond. ‘But the thing is, lynchings never stopped in the United States. Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped. The evil bastards just stopped taking photographs and passing them around like baseball cards’.” 

            This brought to mind my first library job at the Texas Legislative Reference Library (LRL) where I was the night reference librarian.  I’d worked in the Texas Legislature for five years before growing weary of the outright meanness and/or greed of so many of the elected officials.  The LRL’s director said that, since I was familiar with the legislative players and process, he’d hire me if I enrolled in the University of Texas graduate library school.  This job provided a leg up the professional ladder, but few visited at night and I was a glorified page, shelving books and paper copies of bills.  Shelving books in public libraries and seeing what others have looked at is interesting, but the LRL’s books were dry as dust except one about lynching.  It described one of the most horrific lynchings on record that occurred in 1930 in Sherman, Texas, where I’d attended Austin College, the oldest in the state.  The surrounding neighborhoods had gradually integrated when I was a student canvassing the neighborhood for election campaigns, most residents were Black and had to be very aware of what had happened there only 40 years earlier.  

            Recalling the incredibly grisly details still makes me abashed and ashamed, but I’d forgotten that thin, obscure book’s title.  I emailed the LRL and asked about it.  Within an hour I had a reply that including the missing title “The Tragedy of Lynching” of 1933 by Arthur Raper, and a bunch of related sources, along with “If these titles aren’t what you’re looking for, please let me know and I will continue searching our collection.”  That’s real librarying!  Also included was the URL for the Texas Handbook Online article, “Sherman Riot of 1930” (https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/sherman-riot-of-1930 ) which went into details too disturbing for this publication. Suffice to say that mob violence continued for days, destroyed almost every Black-owned business, wracking the community. The victim was burned alive in the county courthouse vault where he’d been placed to keep him from the mob.  Teens threw gasoline into the building, men chopped up firehoses and beat up the firemen, all secure in knowing that the town’s leading citizens were standing by and that although the Governor had called out the militia, he’d ordered them no shooting. 

            It’s no wonder that today banning books dealing with racial history is endemic in Texas public and school libraries.  State Representative Matt Krause sent all Texas school superintendents a list of 800 titles and ordered them to report any in their school libraries and the money that was spent on them.  Conservative PACs successfully poured money into school board elections and across the state the new majorities on those bodies are ordering reconsideration of any books that were challenged in the past, even if they’d previously been approved.  Last August the superintendent overseeing Dawson Middle School in Southlake, Texas pulled “Life Is So Good,” a memoir by a Black man, George Dawson, the school’s namesake.  Dawson learned to read through a literacy program at age 98; 88 years earlier he witnessed a lynching of his friend Pete in Marshall, Texas.  “I cried for me,” Dawson wrote, “I cried for Pete. I cried for the little ones and for Mama and Papa. I cried for all the pain that there was in this world. Papa had his own tears and he just held me.”  The school district ruled that that’s too controversial, though parts of the book are OK.  Adding insult to injury, a Dallas Morning News article, “Fear of Retribution From Gov. Greg Abbott Contributes to Keller School Officials’ Push to Keep Deliberations About Which Books to Ban From Libraries Private” describes the scary rationalization school districts are using as an excuse to decide which books to ban in secret meetings that exclude the public.

            For the record, librarians try to serve their entire communities, even minorities, and they peruse thousands of new titles annually looking for those that some of their customers might want to read.  Censorious book banners look for things that they don’t like and want to keep away from the everyone else.  So what makes a good book?  The MasterClass.com article, “The 5 Elements of a Good Book,” says the best ones have strong, attention-grabbing openings, entertaining plots, and characters that “draw readers in, giving them someone to love, hate, or identify with.”  Librarian Oleg Kagan wrote in an online article, “A Librarian’s Guide to Choosing the Right Book for You!” that you should “Read what you like,” and a good way to determine that is to ask a librarian trained as a Reader’s Advisor, or DIY by utilizing NoveList, one of our public library’s free online tools that Kagan calls “a Reader’s Advisor’s secret weapon.  Novelist is a database of expert recommendations which includes lists of “read-alikes” (books that read like other books!) based on all sorts of appeals. My favorite thing about NoveList is their read-alike essays — short, insightful articles written by genre experts explaining an author’s (or a book) appeals and recommending others with similar appeals.” 

            Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s “The Conjure Woman” is included in NovelList, as are all Chesnutt’s other works.  Born in 1858, Chesnutt was an American educator, author, political activist and lawyer best known for his ground-breaking novels.  Though in the photo in his Wikipedia biography he looks as Anglo as the next Saxon, Chesnutt was one-eighth African American and proudly identified as such, despite being able to “pass” as white had he chosen.  Largely self-educated, Chesnutt was a licensed attorney who built a successful court-reporting company, and this enabled him to fulfill his passion: to write about Black lives as if they mattered, and his 1899 collection of short stories, “The Conjure Woman,” was his first book.

His 1982 Dictionary of Literary Biography article pulled no punches: “Despite the often clumsy and artificial plot devices in his novels, his portrayal of Black character is both varied and realistic.  No one until Chesnutt had invested the Negro common man … with a dignity which does not strain the bounds of credulity.”  Chesnutt particularly wanted to write about “the difficult issues of mixed race, ‘passing’, illegitimacy, racial identities, and social place” and “explored issues of color and class preference within the Black community.”

            This brings us to remorse, atonement, and horny toads.  Prim scientists call those gentle creatures “horned lizards,” but in my fresh boyhood memories, unsullied by gutters, they remain horny toads.  When I was ten my mom showed me a newspaper ad saying a man would buy baby horny toads for ten cents.  I captured at least 50 of them, each half the size of a matchbox, but that afternoon when we delivered them to the given address, the advertiser had fled officials seeking him for violating interstate commerce of wild animals.  We got home after dark intending to release them the next day, but that night my dog knocked the toad box over and they’d scattered throughout the house.  For months Mom gave me ugly looks when her vacuum found another one.  Now horny toads are endangered and I feel responsible and truly remorseful.  So I contributed to the Horned Lizard Conservation Society, learned about the universities and agencies working together in the Texas Horned Lizard Coalition breeding programs, and received a nice hat and a ton of atonement.  Perhaps someday modern book banners will feel some remorse for keeping others from information they desire.  That old Greek Aeschylus asked “What atonement is there for blood spilt upon the earth?”  Well, maybe books like George Dawson’s and Charles Chesnutt’s will help us realize the need for atonement, for, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “Remorse is memory awake.”