People Moved & People Died: Baltimore Rowhouse as Library
2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2022.0081
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Library Science and Administration
ResumoPeople Moved & People Died: Baltimore Rowhouse as Library Rafael Alvarez (bio) I picked up my daughter at the airport a few years ago, arriving in an ’06 Toyota Tacoma with a camper top. Once upon a time, I kept a mattress, a jar of peanut butter and a reading light in the bed of the truck, traveling from one end of the country to the other—up and down, side to side— several dozen times. I stopped at public libraries and used bookstores at every turn, from Vegas to Van Horn. In Mississippi, I traded one of my books about Baltimore for two chili dogs. By the time Amelia rolled her suitcase to the back of the truck, those days were long gone, undone by eyes weakened from decades of reading and eldercare that kept me close to home. By the time of my daughter’s visit, there wasn’t room in the back of the truck for anyone to sit, much less stretch out. It was strewn (piled, heaped, massed) with several hundred books: classics, trash both cool and insipid along with oversized volumes of art and masterpieces still clothed in obscurity. As I heaved Amelia’s bag, she stood behind me with her smartphone, filming the moment, as she likes to do, without my knowledge. “Where did you get all these books, Dad?” “People moved and people died.” That Christmas, Amelia gave me a red sweatshirt emblazoned with black capital letters: people moved and people died. Thus is the verity that transformed a modest East Baltimore rowhouse from a working class home of few books (my gallego grandfather regularly read the Evening Sun, a Spanish Bible, and not much else) into a library the equal of any in smalltown America. As my collection grew—by ones and twos, leaps and bounds—I bought the houses on both sides of my grandparents’ Greektown rowhouse to accommodate this multiplying, living thing. ________ This is how you accumulate doodads and dingbats you never fathomed would wash up at your door. People discover your interests—passions, obsessions—and begin to irrigate it with stuff. “Oh,” they think at a yard sale or junk shop, “he’ll love this!” [End Page 116] For my mother, it’s all manner of giraffes. Keeping with her need to know every little thing, she likes how the tallest of animals “can see above everything.” In other homes, particularly kitchens and bathrooms, frogs or toadstools (with or without the toad) might line the windowsills. There once lived a friendly dentist in Baltimore named Hugh Hicks who collected light bulbs, some 75,000 of them. The tooth man welcomed the curious at his Charles Street office in Mount Vernon with cookies. Amidst the world’s biggest and smallest bulbs in his office were a couple of floodlights used in an Elvis Presley movie, and speaking of the King, I had a serious Presley phase in the late 1980s while teaching a fiction workshop at Miss Bonnie’s Elvis Bar on Fleet and Port Streets near the waterfront. Without spending a dime, my house soon became Graceland on Patapsco. I will always love Elvis, the dirt-poor kid from Tupelo (where, in 1988, I filled a spice jar with powdery red clay for Miss Bonnie), but I don’t chase him anymore. ________ Across the past six decades, nothing has sustained my interest—not even the barnacled leviathan of rock and roll—like books. Nested upon stories my father and grandfather told (one-legged German sailors running confectionaries and bicycles carved from wood), the written word has grounded and guided me from the time I learned to read. I was aided in that most valuable of skills by Catholic nuns, Dr. Seuss, and the sports pages of the News-American when the Baltimore Orioles were great. In grade school, books became inextricable with romantic intrigue; when the two collided, it was like the splitting of the atom. Eighth grade— The Sun Also Rises—and a dark-haired, fair-skinned girl named Sandy who signed notes passed below the eyes of Sister Constance Ann, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Many years later, having quit The Sun to work...
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