THE LIBRARY IN THE WOODS

After crop failures force a family to relocate to town, a country boy is delighted to discover a whole library there for him and other members of the Black community.

The move to Roxboro, North Carolina—inspired by the author’s own experiences growing up in the 1950s—brings changes welcome and otherwise to young Junior’s life, but a wonderful one comes from a schoolmate’s revelation: “We have our own library.” A small building in a nearby clearing contains a dazzling world of books, and Junior runs home with a book about George Washington Carver for his father, a book of poetry by Phillis Wheatley for his mother, and “one on the three musketeers” for himself. Choosing a muted palette, Christie reflects the quiet dignity of Ramsey’s sparely worded narrative in views of slender, dark-skinned figures, usually seen from a distance, moving between small, widely spaced houses in verdant settings. He closes with a tender scene of Junior sitting on the porch reading to his father, who never learned how. (Momma explains that he worked the farm as a child so that his younger siblings could go to school.) The author adds a news clipping to his afterword with a photo of the log cabin library that led him to write this semi-autobiographical tale; reflecting on his own arrival in Roxboro in 1959, he writes of that library’s importance at “a time when the hopes and dreams of little Black children were easily dashed.”

A tribute to a community treasure, understated but rich in feeling.