A lesson of freedom

But because human beings have a hunger for stories and knowledge, the books kept coming, seemingly beyond the control of these dockside censors.

Eventually, Benjamin Franklin, in 1731 — years before he helped write the Declaration of Independence — established the first public library in Philadelphia. I’m sure Franklin understood that democracy is based on an informed and educated citizenry, and that books were essential to a person’s education and the ongoing progress of the country.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about those early colonial censors, as book bannings have surged in America, to the highest levels since the American Library Association started to track book challenges decades ago.

The books are often about Black culture, or the gay community, or the Holocaust, and citizens crowding into high school board meetings or complaining at their local public libraries in Tennessee or Texas or Florida, intent on getting certain books off the shelves and out of the curriculum, have become ubiquitous news topics.

When I was having a conversation with a close friend recently about this, he dismissed these acts of censorship by saying, “But it’s Texas, what do you expect?”

“What about ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’?” I replied.

“What about it?” he said. “That’s one of my favorite books.”

He didn’t answer when I mentioned that just last year California’s Burbank School District removed the novel from its required reading list.

Here’s my quandary: It doesn’t matter whether it’s in Texas or Wyoming or New York, any more than in Burlingame, if a book is censored, a book is censored.

If there’s a crack in the foundation of our house, even if it’s beneath a room that’s seldom visited, over time that crack might certainly spread and suddenly, to our amazement, appear beneath the place where we sleep.

The freedom this country affords us means very little if a reader of books cannot pursue those ideas other people might find disturbing. Of course, many find such freedoms — the freedom to read, the freedom to choose, the freedom to share their ideas — dangerous, and that’s why autocrats so often quash them.

But as the writer Barbara Kingsolver has said: “If there’s a fatal notion on this earth, it’s the notion that wider horizons will be fatal.”

When I was in the seventh grade my mother gave me a book to read that she thought I’d like, “The Catcher in the Rye,” which, for years, was the most censored book in American high schools and libraries.

I don’t think I’ve read it again in 50 years, but at the time, I believed it was the first book that I’d ever read. Of course, I’d read other books, but this was the first one that read me, rather than the other way around. The words on the page — in a teenage boy’s irreverent language, who thought he had things pegged, who spoke with a sharp-eyed attitude deeply attuned to all he considered false in the adult world he was attempting to cope with — were vividly alive and talked to me. I got lost in that book, and getting lost, found myself.

Page by page, the novel nested in my imagination, until it took wing, like a bird in flight.

And when you’re hesitantly growing into yourself, when you might feel marginalized in one way or another and alone, discovering a book that speaks to the way you feel can be a life-affirming moment. It sets us upon the path of independence, of self-reliance.

I’m not the only reader who’s had an experience like this.

When I finished the book I gave it to my best friend to read. He dropped it into my hands the next day, because after showing it to his mother, she said, “You’re not reading that!” and told him that if he didn’t return it, she would.

I can still recall walking home from school that day, book in hand, and, for the first time, a knowledge about something formed in my mind. Censorship was not a word I had ever used in my life, but as I held tightly onto my book — this companion that introduced me to myself — I knew that this particular lesson of my own freedom would certainly be worth remembering.

Mike Nagler is a member of the Burlingame Library Board of Trustees.