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My Mother’s Grave Is Yellow
- University of Wisconsin Press
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44 Dale Peck Ifirst dis cov ered Shir ley Jackson’s We Have Al ways Lived in the Cas tle in my high school li brary. “Dis cov ered” seems a grand word for the ex pe ri ence: the li brary in Buh ler High School was hardly a place where one “dis cov ered” any thing. It was a sin gle, brightly lit, dropceilinged room lined with walnut-stained particle-board shelves scaled down to the size of pre– growth spurt fresh man arms. De void of mys tery or charm or what ever it is that peo ple who work with chil dren like to call “won der,” the BHS li brary was lit tle more than a room with books in it, in stark op po si tion to the grand li brar ies that haunted the books on its shelves, the dark dusty mag i cal rooms found in the nov els of C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien (or, often, Shir ley Jack son), but it was, none the less, what I had to work with, and I like to im a gine I fer reted out what few se crets it ac tu ally pos sessed. I looked for books the way my step mother shopped for veg e ta bles: by pick ing them up one at a time and check ing them for de sir abil ity. I went wall by wall, shelf by shelf, book by book, my search con ducted under the watch ful eyes of the high school li brar ian, a tall thin young woman whose name I can’t quite re mem ber— Sybil? Sy bert? Sei bert?—who could see vir tu ally every book from her post at the check-out coun ter. The books were, of course, in dexed by the Dewey Deci mal System, but, in a ges ture that both ac knowl edged My Mother’s Grave Is Yel low My Mother’s Grave Is Yellow 45 and re in forced the mun dan ity of my school’s low stan dards, hand writ ten trans la tions had been added to the la bels, viz., 900–999: ref er ence. Buh ler High School was it self a sim plifi ca tion of a more com plex code: Buh ler, Kan sas, was a tiny town of con ser va tive Men non ites— 888 as of the 1980 cen sus and shrink ing all the time—lo cated a dozen or so miles north east of the small city of Hutch in son, where most of its stu dents ac tu ally lived. The only rea son a high school had been built in Buh ler at all was so that Hutch’s more af flu ent res i dents, who lived on the north ern and east ern sides of town, could bus their sons and daugh ters to a school free of the poorer—read: non white—ele ment that made up a large part of Hutch High. Only two black stu dents ac tu ally en rolled dur ing my time there, al though there was a brief ap pear ance by a Chi lean ex change stu dent who, after three or four sol i tary weeks, dis ap peared from our hall ways. I re mem ber being aware of this ger ry man der ing even then. I sup pose I was so con scious of it be cause I had moved to Kan sas from Long Is land when I was seven; most of my peers re garded our school’s vir tual white ness as a nat u rally oc cur ring circum stance but to me it al ways seemed odd, es pe cially given the num ber of blacks and Lat i nos that were vis ible just ten miles to the south. Not sur pris ingly, the school board that pro duced such a seg re gated in sti tu tion was sol idly re li gious and con ser va tive, and, also not sur pris ingly, this school board banned books as a mat ter of course. I don’t re mem ber being able to find The Color Pur ple when the movie came out, nor was The Catcher in the Rye avail able in our li brary; every year, I re mem ber, the pro tests of that year’s re bel...