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  • Artifacts
  • John Warner Smith (bio)

One lunch hour, I stroll into a temporary branchof a public library in downtown Baton Rouge.On this summer day, there are no children here.Except for the armed security guard,library employees quietly doing their work,and the sparse but neatly shelved stacks of books,periodicals, and DVDs, this room has the appearanceof a lounge in a shelter for homeless men and women,who browse, sleep in chairs, and stare into hope and time.

I am drawn to the enlarged black-and-white photographshanging on the walls—images of Jim Crow–eralibrary life: white patrons and employees,carts, stacks, and the first bookmobile—art, I suppose,to dress the otherwise bare, unattractive wallsof what was a long-ago vacated Kress department store,circa 1935 and the site of 1960 student sit-insthat sparked the civil rights movement in Louisiana.

In one of the photographs, twenty-one children,all white, sit classroom-style and stare into the camera.I gather the school year has ended; it is summer,because one of the four boys isn't wearing a shirt.The librarian, also white, is standing,facing the children with an open book in her hands.There are no black people in this photograph,although, today, the patrons seated at computerslining the wall where this image hangs are all black.

Gazing at these artifacts of years when America waseither white or black, I picture the jagged signature [End Page 382] of Richard Wright's "Dear Madam" noteand the vast, new world he found by forging itfor permission to check out a book at a Memphis library.

I see Mount Pilgrim's children, my 1957 kindergarten classof thirty-three black girls and boys, all poor,who wouldn't have learned numbers and the alphabetwithout a black Baptist preacher and his wife teaching them.

I see Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Ninewalking calmly through a sea of jeering shoutsto enter the jarring doors of Central High School,shielding fear with her round, dark sunglasseswhile armed National Guardsmen wait to turn her around.

I picture little Ruby Bridges, an army of one, steppinglike a soldier with a book sack in her handas she enters William Frantz Elementary Schoolin New Orleans in 1960, with U.S. Marshals at her side.

Seeing all the firestorms and protests of civil rightsflash in one blink of a camera's eye, I thinkof what I might say to my youngest grandchildrenabout this room, if I brought them here to colorand read books on this sunny June afternoonin Louisiana, nearly sixty years after desegregation.

For certain, I would say that the history of racismand inequality in Louisiana is embedded in these walls,but the power to build their own lives and a better worldis sown by what is read and learned of these books,speaking now, as loudly and clearlyas the framed images hanging hereand the voiceless poverty dwelling among us. [End Page 383]

John Warner Smith

john warner smith is the poet laureate of Louisiana and lives in Baton Rouge. He has published four collections of poetry, and his fifth is due out this year. He earned his MFA at the University of New Orleans, is a fellow of Cave Canem, and is the winner of the 2019 Linda Hodge Bromberg Poetry Award.

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