First came the library at the Downey School where I was elementally educated. I could still, if pressed, draw out a little floorplan of the library: where the fiction stood, the card catalogs, the biographies, check-out.
I did not know my reading habits were being watched, did not even know that the librarian could, and apparently did, keep an eye on my ever-increasing appetite. At some point, she must have conferred with my teacher and they decided they had a live one on their hands.
I was invited to join a book club and once a month I sat with some other pre-geek types at the round work table to talk about the latest book. We were just called weirdos then. We read books awarded the Newbery Medal named for eighteenth-century British bookseller John Newbery. I think it was called The Newbery Book Club.
This was in the sixth grade which was a banner year for other reasons -- namely my not talking for three months -- but it was in the fourth grade that I learned to swim in books. I remember taking the long descent down into the pages. On one report card, Miss Devlin wrote "she is quick to pick up a book instead of checking her work." This can still be said of me.
In the early 1970s we read such winners as The Island of The Blue Dolphin by Scott O'Dell; The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth Speare and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg.
One book, The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox started me on my earliest book-reading-tangent-obsession that I can recall. When I read about the slaves, I needed to know more so I ordered other books from the Scholastic Book Service about the slave ships and the Civil War. That led to a book about Lincoln's assassination with photos of the hanging of all the conspirators -- Mary E. Surratt, Lewis T. Powell, and the others.
I kept the books in the bookshelf my dad built in above my bed. I was scared and fascinated by those photos and the descriptions of what slaves endured. I would look at the photos over and over and finally tuck the book back up above my head. I knew the book was closed and the events long past, but they seemed to be alive, creeping down the shelf and into my brain.
Sometimes, I recast my life, my uncontrollable future into these two categories: that of slave and assassin. At first, it was easy for me to label one good and one bad, easy to tell them apart. One I would have no choice about. I would be forced into it but I would manage to squeeze dignity and pride. The other was my choice, a bad choice, because I was bad.
Eventually, after many nights studying those photos, particularly those of Mary Surratt, I got the categories all mixed up. There is nothing remarkable about Mary Surratt, in the photos I saw, but maybe that was it. She didn't give a clue of badness. Something smoldered, "sulky," my mother would call it, and she called me the same thing too. Somehow I got the idea that Mary could have made some bad choices but not really been bad.
Still, the whole thing haunted me; I felt my wondering veering off into a thick confusion. I was not sure at all how to live, how to live my life, whatever that was. I only knew how to do a few things, it seemed -- setting the table, teasing my sister, doing a one-handed cartwheel. There was more, of course, and I realized that some of them, going to school and church, I just found myself doing. I had to do them.
Long a troubled sleeper, I spent many of those nights trying to keep my eyes opened in case of ambush or capture.