Ed. — From the Sunday, June 19, print edition.
VIRGINIA BEACH — I was a college senior when I encountered my literary love. That year, Shippensburg University offered two separate literature courses offering coverage of minority and woman writers previously omitted or prohibited from the literary canon and classroom.
I recall how I felt that September when I entered Dr. Catherine Dibello’s room – excited, anxious, and ready for a new challenge. I had always loved learning – and books, well, they were like food, necessary sustenance.
However, as I had moved through my college years, I often wondered when I would find the stories that did more than touch a nerve. I wanted subject matter that fired me up, taught me something new – wondrous or awful – and made me think, I mean think, about my place in the world, my relationships with others and the shaping of my perspectives. It wasn’t until Dr. Dibello’s courses that I found the stories that did what literature should do – shook my world and defined my future.
Flash forward to the end of that year and my time in Dibello’s classroom. I had one course to take over the summer to finish my degree. I knew geology would be a trial in attention, so I asked Dibello if she could provide me with a reading list related to the courses I had taken with her. She was more than willing to do this, but she had an even better idea. She gave me free access to her office shelves, which were jammed with books, most of which I had never encountered. I was hooked.
We had studied a few of the writers that year, but there were so very many I did not know. I recall how Dibello’s eyes lit up when she saw my excitement upon entering her cramped space. It is cliché to say I was like a kid in a candy store, but that is the emotion that flared.
Before I could touch the books piled on the shelves, the chairs and the floor, Dr. Dibello pulled one from the many on her desk and handed it to me like the rarest gift: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
It was the summer of 1988. Walker’s novel had been banned from many schools since its publication in 1982. It was deemed vulgar, pornographic and offensive in its depictions of rape, incest, homosexuality, spousal abuse and racism. I knew all of this but didn’t know the story between the book covers. Per a young person’s typical reaction to prohibition, I couldn’t wait to crack the spine.
That summer, I read everything Walker had written. Then I read the works of her newly (to me) unearthed foremother Zora Neale Hurston. After that came Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Gloria Naylor, Richard Wright, John Wideman and James Baldwin. The list goes on through my years in graduate school when I branched out to study Native American, Hispanic and Asian writers as well, focusing on the women writers within these groups. By the time I finished my doctorate, I was excited to teach my specialty, contemporary literature with a focus on race and gender.
A banned book defined my career and changed the course of my life.
Books have the power to do that.
Occasionally, a former student will reach out and tell me how the books I chose for our classes and the discussions about them that followed affected their lives profoundly and positively. They note how the stories speak across the years to the issues we now face. I am honored by their comments and the sense that I carried on Dibello’s legacy. And I am reminded that if not for a banned book, I would not have found the spark that ignited my teaching – and made me the person I am today.
I am disheartened by today’s impulse to protect our children from too much too soon by banning books. As adults, we have the power to expand the world for our children – or not.
Perhaps, approaching the issue of kids and books would be better served if we committed to the route of “when” rather than “if.” And we should do so knowing that, at some point, our children will make their own choices – having, I hope, unlimited access to the books on the shelves of teachers who seek to open doors rather than close them.
The author is a former Virginia Beach Planning Commissioner and college professor. Reach her at leejogger@gmail.com.
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