Reasons to be Grateful, a guest post by Nadine Pinede

Books can be windows, mirrors, sliding doors, and in some cases, lifelines. And libraries are their sanctuaries.

This Thanksgiving season, I’ve been thinking about all the ways libraries have influenced my  life. Entering the US from Canada as the daughter of Haitian immigrants whose country was in a reign of terror, we sought safety. But at school, some of the first words I heard were “You’re the ones who caused AIDS,” and “Do you stick pins in dolls?”

My first sanctuary was the public library, where every visit was an invitation to discovery. I felt like an adventurer leaving for unexplored lands with my hands filled with books. I entered the citywide Read-a-thon and read close to 100 books in a week to win. It felt like a thrilling way to spend spring break.

The public library was also where I was first introduced to the American tradition of volunteerism. I joined Literacy Volunteers of America and tutored people like me, who were not native speakers of English but who wanted to learn the language around them. I met immigrants from many countries and learned about their cultures while sharing my own.

I taught English to mainly Spanish-speaking immigrants. I remember one young woman from El Salvador, a nation also in turmoil like my parents’ homeland, who described seeing her village burned to the ground because some farmers and students had dared protest corruption and abuse of power.

Later, I would learn those government forces were among the many around the world supported and sometimes trained by the US. And yet, her parents, like mine, who fled Francois Duvalier’s dictatorship in Haiti, saw the US as a sanctuary. History shows us how several things can be true at once. It was in our library that I started to see how connected our histories were, and why our stories matter. It was in our library that I first dreamed of being a writer, adding to a sea of stories that can burst the dams of fear, resisting those who would silence us.

The connections made at our public library also countered the loneliness in school.

I’d been asked by African American classmates, “Why do you talk like a white girl?” (That felt like a rhetorical question.) The first languages that surrounded me, when we lived in the supportive Haitian exile community in Montreal, were Haitian Creole and French. I didn’t learn English until I was 11, when we moved from Montreal to Guelph, Ontario. Back then it was a rural town with only two Black families I can remember. It was also the first place I heard the n-word. I also knew we were Haitian, but to some people, we were something they hated, without knowing the first thing about us. I hardly spoke for a year, until I could say a sentence in English without mistakes. When the teacher picked out my drawing and showed it to the class, I said with pride, “That is our house.”

Fortunately, my parents had taught us to be proud of our heritage and history, but that didn’t always translate into teachable moments. At a Connecticut public school where busing had begun but segregation was still the mindset, I remember avoiding the locker room because that’s where the leader of my bullies threatened to cut off my braids. At one point I turned around and slapped the biggest bully when she tried to yank my braids during a track race, and we were both sent to the principal’s office. Needless to say, that did not go down well with my mother, a lifelong teacher herself who expected straight A’s and no trouble.

Yet my mother was also the one who marched into school when hearing I was put in a remedial class because of my lisp. She made them give me an IQ test, and they put me in the gifted and talented class. I saw less of the bullies, but I was the only chocolate chip in a sea of vanilla.

I didn’t feel like I fit in anywhere, so I started taking my lunch to the school’s library, where I met the librarian Mrs. Dickerson. She became my guardian angel. She opened a whole new world of belonging, one that was set outside of our home, which was a like a sanctuary of Haitian culture. This extraordinary school librarian brought me anthologies of Black poetry, because she saw how much I loved poetry. I discovered the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Arts Movement. At her suggestion, I wrote a letter of thanks to Gwendolyn Brooks—and she wrote me back! Mrs. Dickerson encouraged me to enter the MLK Essay Contest. The theme was “My Dreams.” An hour later, when my essay was chosen as the winner, it was the first time I’d ever heard people clapping for me.

Mrs. Dickerson also introduced me to the extraordinary Rachel Robinson, the wife of baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who held an annual party at their beautiful Connecticut home for the Jackie Robinson Foundation. In all the ways she could, Mrs. Dickerson was telling me, you belong here. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Over the years I’m sad to have lost touch with her, but if she is reading this, I would say, “Thank you for giving me a lifeline.” The power of libraries and librarians can change the world.

This year, The School Library Journal launched a project called, “Reasons to Love Libraries.” Let’s keep counting the reasons to be grateful.

Meet the author

Nadine Pinede, PhD, is a poet, author, editor, translator, and education consultant. When the Mapou Sings, her debut verse novel set in 1930’s Haiti, was recently published by Candlewick Books.

About When the Mapou Sings

Infused with magical realism, this story blends first love and political intrigue with a quest for justice and self-determination in 1930s Haiti.

Sixteen-year-old Lucille hopes to one day open a school alongside her best friend where girls just like them can learn what it means to be Haitian: to learn from the mountains and the forests around them, to carve, to sew, to draw, and to sing the songs of the Mapou, the sacred trees that dot the island nation. But when her friend vanishes without a trace, a dream—a gift from the Mapou—tells Lucille to go to her village’s section chief, the local face of law, order, and corruption, which puts her life and her family’s at risk.

Forced to flee her home, Lucille takes a servant post with a wealthy Haitian woman from society’s elite in Port-au-Prince. Despite a warning to avoid him, she falls in love with her employer’s son. But when their relationship is found out, she must leave again—this time banished to another city to work for a visiting American writer and academic conducting fieldwork in Haiti. While Lucille’s new employer studies vodou and works on the novel that will become Their Eyes Were Watching God, Lucille risks losing everything she cares about—and any chance of seeing her best friend again—as she fights to save their lives and secure her future in this novel in verse with the racing heart of a thriller.

ISBN-13: 9781536235661
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Publication date: 12/03/2024
Age Range: 12 Years +

Filed under: Guest Post