Dear Librarians,
When I was young and the summers long, my mother would sometimes find herself trying to figure out what to do with my sister and I when she needed to go to the nearby city of Wilmington for shopping or a doctor’s appointment. Dragging along two kids isn’t always the most convenient option, as any parent will testify. My father worked swing shift at the local paper mill so, with his work schedule varying the way it did, having us stay home with him wasn’t a reliable option. The problem was simple and the solution, elegant: what do you do with two bookworm kids when you live in a small town and have errands to run and can’t take those bookish kids along?
You drop them off at the local library, of course.
Now, I have to say here that I imagine that small town libraries work a little different than big city libraries. The library nearest me was in the town called Riegelwood. To me, it was the greatest library in the world. The children’s section was an actual rail car that the local papermill—where my father worked—had donated and helped attached to the back of the library. Imagine it: a children’s book section that is literally inside a trail rail car. When I was a kid, I couldn’t imagine anything more special than that.
So, during those long, muggy Carolina summers, when my mother had errands to run and doctors appointments to make, our old Ford Thunderbird came rumbling up in front of the library and my mother booted my sister and I out and told us “Behave until I get back!”
“Yes ma’am,” my sister and I said, racing towards the library.
The beauty of small towns is that everyone knows everyone. So we weren’t strangers to the librarian. She was a friend of the family that had known us from the day my sister and I were born. And every day when my mother dropped us off and we raced into that library, we found a personally curated stack of books waiting for us. “Here…read this,” she always said as she handed whatever she’d chosen for us.
You can imagine how the rest of the story goes from here. And if you somehow can’t, just try to picture a seven-year-old bookworm nestled into the deep embrace of a 1980s era beanbag, surrounded by books and, most importantly, he is happy.
Fast forward a few decades and that little bookworm boy has taken residence inside a middle-aged bookworm man. The man is a writer now and, more than anything, he’s fully aware that he wouldn’t be where he is today without that librarian and without libraries. Libraries are the soul of a civilization. They are paginated universes. And now, as an author, going to a library and seeing something I’ve written being held on those hallowed shelves, well, it’s the culmination of a lifelong dream.
People Like Us is a continuation of my last novel, Hell of a Book. And much like Hell of a Book, this new novel is my attempt to talk about certain social issues that have plagued me since I was that young boy sitting in that rail car, reading and dreaming page by page. I still read. I still dream. But now the responsibility is on me to say something of merit to the next generation of kids who have been dropped off at the library, who perhaps sit in that same old railcar where I once sat, maybe even reading some book hand-selected by a caring librarian. So that’s what this book is: yet another attempt to earn a place in the exalted collection of as many libraries and possible and, hopefully, to do right by that librarian all those years ago who cared enough to teach me to dream, simply by caring enough to say to a young bookish boy “Here…read this.”
To have an entire life guided by such a small action, such small words…well, it’s something wondrous, in my opinion.
Jason Mott
