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Lisa Bubert | Longreads | February 27, 2024 | 3,584 words (13 minutes)
It’s my turn to wake up Carmen. (No, that’s not her real name.) Carmen has been living on the street longer than I’ve been a librarian, and her elderly head is currently resting on a study desk even though we’ve all already asked her to keep her head up. It’s our least popular and most enforced rule: we don’t allow people to sleep in the library. We know you’re tired, we know it’s warm, we know it feels safe. But someone who is dying also looks like someone who is sleeping, and we’ve all seen our share of overdoses. Also, if one person is allowed to do it, everyone will do it. So, no sleeping.
Carmen’s back and neck are perpetually bent at a right angle, her left shoulder humping up cockeyed thanks to years of untreated scoliosis. What she lacks in vitality, though, she makes up for in volatility; the last time we asked her not to sleep in the library, she called my coworker a “fat Jew.” I seem to set her off in particular. She accused me of being a Russian spy when we met, and if she sees my car driving down the street, she will throw a middle finger my way without hesitation.
Only one staff member has managed to break through Carmen’s shell after years of persistence, but they’re on lunch. I check the camera one more time. Carmen’s head is still down, arms wrapped around her ears like a kid in grade school. No time like the present.
I approach, our guard watching nearby. She’s already called him a pussy once; he’s not interested in hearing it again. I keep a table between myself and Carmen. I tap my fingers on the wood, near where she lays her head. I say her name.
She throws her head up. “What!” Just like that. No question, just exclamation.
“We’re just checking on you. You have to keep your head up while you’re in the library.”
“Why!”
“We need to know that you’re okay, that you’re not having a medical emergency.”
A flinty stare. “I need to keep my head up so you know I’m not having a medical emergency,” she repeats.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s the agreement of being in the library.”
She stares me down, crosses her arms. I back up.
“You won’t have to worry about that,” she says. “I won’t be back.” She says this like a rich woman who has been served the wrong meal at a fancy restaurant. Julia Roberts with all her shopping bags on Rodeo Drive. Big mistake. Huge.
“Okay,” I say.
She says something as I walk away, something meant to antagonize, to get me to come back and fight with her. I ignore it. I don’t give a shit what she says as long as she doesn’t give us a reason to kick her out. Summer is coming on, and it’s hot out. Back at my desk, I check the camera. Her head stays up.
She comes back the next day.
I am a public librarian. I currently work in an urban system, though I’ve done time in the ’burbs. We have a food bank to our left, court-ordered counseling clinics and shelters across the street, a fast-food chicken joint to the right, and a bus stop out front.
A good number of our regulars are either unhoused people waiting on shelter or people who have shelter but spend all day at the library because it’s safer. We know most of their names—if not their government names, their street names. Possum, Shorty Red, Baby Doll. If we don’t know those, we’ll come up with our own nicknames: Sparkle Boots, Hot Wheels, Orange Dreds. We’re not trying to be disrespectful; we’re trying to keep up with who is in the building. If we’ve learned anything about keeping the peace, we’ve learned that it’s imperative to know who’s here, who’s not, who has beef, who’s in hiding.
The best security is to look people in the eye when they come in, say hello, give a nod that says I see you. To find out their name and give your name in return. To give grace because that’s all some of our people have.
We do have a guard, but it’s dangerous to get too lazy about that guard. They’re there as a deterrent. A uniform, a badge, making rounds. The guard is unarmed, which is how we prefer it. The best security is to look people in the eye when they come in, say hello, give a nod that says I see you. To find out their name and give your name in return. To give grace because that’s all some of our people have.
When you don’t have money or a place to stay, but you do have an addiction, an abusive partner, or an exploitative job, you need to know where you can go. The church serves hot lunch on Mondays. The empty park behind the old Hardee’s is a good place to set up camp. The library will let you stay all day as long as you don’t sleep and you don’t have outbursts. Balance a book on your lap; if you’re gonna doze, make sure you doze sitting up. The librarians know who you are. The librarians see you.
I never wanted to be a librarian.
I was a kid who loved reading, but I liked writing even more. And while I liked helping people, I preferred when it came with an adrenaline rush—which didn’t square with my impression of libraries. I had fallen victim to the false, if enduring, tropes about librarianship: shushing people, valuing quiet contemplation, wearing combed hair in a tidy bun over a well-made dress, relishing the academic predictability of each civilized day.
As it turns out, though, graduating from college in the middle of a recession changes things: the public library offered me a slightly-higher-than-minimum-wage part-time job I immediately accepted. Turning that part-time job into a full-time job, would mean getting a master’s degree in Library Science; however, being a graduate student also let me place my already towering student loans into a deferment that wouldn’t collect interest. So, to library school I went. I got the degree. I got the full-time job. I also imagined a distant future in which I quit the library, my temporary placeholder career, for something much more fitting for me. Emergency services, social work, counseling, maybe vagabondry.
That I have been ambivalent about my librarianship career surprises most people. But you’re so good at what you do! You’ve always seemed like someone who has it figured out! It wasn’t until I started working at the library I’m at now—where I can have the nonemergency line on speed dial and Narcan in my backpack—that I felt like I found my place. There is no quiet here, no predictability to the days. There is instead a backdrop of low-grade chaos, funny in its Southern volatility. Telling a patron he can’t burn his trash behind the library building even if that’s how they do it in Mississippi. Telling another patron to lower their voice, only for them to apologize and deny in the same breath. Being accused of being a Russian spy, obviously. I mean, where else am I going to get stories like this?
I may never have wanted to be a librarian, but I love this job. This specific job. Not because of any kind of noble commitment to knowledge or love of books. I love it because every day requires me to meet humanity face to face. It reminds me that I am actually living in an actual society where I am responsible to other people. In one hour on the desk, I can help a child find every single book on frogs that we have and then turn around and give a tissue to a grown man sobbing over his deceased wife. I can give a tampon to a woman hiding in the restroom because she’s been living on the streets. I can listen to the HOA chair complain about being booted from our larger meeting room because we needed it to host FEMA after a tornado tore up another neighborhood a block over. Patrons recognize me everywhere I go in my neighborhood, like a minor celebrity. Library lady, library lady. They know I’m nice, that I try not to judge. They know I can be trusted. They know I’m good in an emergency. And these days, when you work as a librarian in America, there is no lack of emergencies.
Vulnerability doesn’t fit into America’s beloved bootstrapping ethos, and so Americans will try very hard not to see their vulnerable neighbors. When we walk down a street and see someone lying on a sewer grate to keep warm, the polite thing to do isn’t to check on the person—it’s to pretend we don’t see them and keep walking. If the person sits up and asks for help, we become momentarily deaf and walk faster. Anything to get away from the uncomfortable truth that our safety net is failing.
We love to remember the troops, never forget 9/11, be #BostonStrong, #ParklandStrong, #VegasStrong, #UvaldeStrong, etc., etc. Americans supporting Americans in their time of need surely proves that we are a nation of grace, a nation that takes care of its own, at least until the next hashtag comes along.
Some say we are a nation that cares for its “deserving” own and that deserving is defined by those who are in power, who are not vulnerable, who have wealth, privilege, status. I agree with this critique, but I’d posit another angle. We don’t choose who to help based on who deserves it; we choose who to help based on the amount of control we have over that help. We are, after all, a business-oriented nation. We love a deadline.
I am in a meeting with coworkers about programming when we hear a woman screaming at someone in the public restroom. I hustle out to the floor to see what’s going on. Our security officer is there, calling the police. A woman’s voice screams, at him, at everyone, at no one. The smell of burning. Two old ladies sit across from us, frozen at the computer.
“Are we in danger?” they ask.
“No,” I say, looking at the security officer. He doesn’t say anything.
The woman comes out with all her things. She has been caught bathing in the sink; the burning smell is from her curling iron burning synthetic hair as she restyled her wig. The security officer follows her out while the woman continues to scream. The old ladies remain frozen.
This scenario is small potatoes. An angry woman in the bathroom, embarrassed at being caught in a private moment. We’ve dealt with heavier issues by far. Still, my stomach hurts the rest of the afternoon, adrenaline running for no reason. The week thus far has been a bad one; one man threatened one of our regulars over money owed, saying he was going to put a pistol in his mouth the next time he saw him. The heat wave is waving, bad drugs are on the street. Everyone coming inside is passing out. So much nervous energy, too many people in one place, too many people we’ve never seen before, whose stories we don’t know. The week before, a man twice my size went from zero to 60 on me because the computers were full and he needed to fill out a job application. He called my coworker a bougie bitch with fake braids; he screamed at me about how he had a life and he didn’t give a shit what we said. Fuck you, you fucking bitch, I don’t give a fuck if you call the cops. We’d all been on high alert so long that it felt like we lived there.
So much nervous energy, too many people in one place, too many people we’ve never seen before, whose stories we don’t know.
After the woman from the bathroom leaves, I go work the reference desk. I tell my coworker (the one with the bougie braids) that the situation had made me nauseous and we laugh over it because yeah, way worse things have happened and we’ve dealt with them. I don’t know, I say. Just too much in general, I guess.
Thirty minutes later, I’m checking social media and I see a news report about a shooting at another branch. We’ll learn later that two teens in the restroom shot each other in the legs trying to settle a dispute, but in the moment, all that’s being reported is “shooting in progress.” We try to get in contact with the staff at that branch to get any word. I text the children’s librarian, the teen librarian; my coworker calls the circulation supervisor. Finally, an email comes from admin confirming that a shooting did happen and that no staff or other patrons were hurt. We are relieved and not relieved. When my coworker comes back from lunch, I tell her what happened and she shakes her head.
“Bullets don’t have eyes.”
I used to think a librarian’s most important job was to protect intellectual freedom. We must be militant against censorship in all its forms; that’s what was drilled into our heads in library school. It was always taught in a historical sense—the book-burning Nazis, the war propaganda, McCarthyism—something our professional forebears had battled before and firmly defeated. We protégés were to remain on guard for all the ways censorship could crop up in modern times: rating systems for children’s books, “restricted” sections, and insidious self-censorship where the librarian opts not to place material in a collection, anticipating backlash.
Books might be banned in some very rare and unfortunate circumstances, but more often they were “challenged,” where someone levels an accusation at a book and library leadership is compelled to reconsider its inclusion in the collection. Most times, library leadership would decide that, yes, the original collection decision had been correct. Or maybe it was correct but the book should be recatalogued into a different section, such as the usual case of young adult books that flirt with adult material. Only in extremely rare cases would library leadership actually pull a book from a collection.
That’s what we thought, at least. Never could we have imagined that state governments would send “approved” lists for librarians to purchase from. Or pursue criminal charges for a librarian who ignores the list. Where were those scenarios in library school? At the time, we’d almost pined for that kind of drama—the good old days, when someone would challenge a book and the community would rise up against the challenge and the library would remain victorious, respected. Are these the new good old days? Is this how the story ends? Most of us are fleeing the profession, seeking greener pastures where the pay is better and the shift ends at five o’clock.
My mind is constantly on a loop, evaluating incident reports, what could have gone worse, what could have gone better. I watch the camera, I make the rounds, I read body language. I can hear a fight before it starts. I wonder if today will be the day someone goes from desperate to violent. I stay vigilant.
I hate how much of my job is taken up by surveillance. It makes me feel like a warden. But if we’re not vigilant, we miss important things. Like two boys pushing another boy into the restroom before gunshots ring out from inside.
To be a public servant in America is to contend with a fair amount of trauma. The institutions are collapsing, and public librarians, especially, have a front row seat to the fallout. Every day, the collapse comes to our door and sets up camp. Because when the social safety net fails you—and it will fail you—you can still come to the library. As a result, we librarians are armored up for a job we didn’t expect.
Last night, I dreamed about escorting people out of the library. One woman suspended for a year for grabbing people and trying to hold them close to her chest; another man suspended for screaming in anger after receiving the help he requested. Dreams, but not too far from the truth. I wake up feeling rattled. I used to be able to shake off the unpleasant parts of the job—kicking people out for becoming unruly, talking someone down from anger, staying calm while a patron seizes on the floor, preparing to perform a sternal rub on a suspected overdose. But we have been short-staffed, the summer has been hot, and everyone feels pressure.
We are late to our desk shifts, hurrying over from the last thing we were doing, sighing deep as the long hour passes. Keep an eye on that man, he might be watching porn. This guy is filling out SNAP forms; I got him on the application but he says he doesn’t know how to use a computer well. This old woman needs to print coupons from her email once she figures out how to sign in to her email. I already told that guy to lower his voice. She says the dog is a service dog.
We shrug. We pick our battles. We’ll be back tomorrow.
Before libraries received over 600 book challenges from 11 people across the country, before librarians were doxed and our lives threatened online, before states passed laws to jail us if we did not comply, before patrons overdosed in the stacks, I thought the most important part of the job was to get children to read.
Did I mention I’m a children’s librarian? I am.
And the most important part of the job is getting children to read. But not just to read—to imagine, envision, and dream. We place just the right book in just the right child’s hands not just so they’ll grow intellectually, keep up in school, compete in the job market, etc. We want the child to read and comprehend what they’re reading because we need that child to grow into somebody who can imagine a better future. This child needs not only to be able to imagine all the things that haven’t yet been imagined before, but they need to be able to go out and build them. You can’t build what you can’t imagine. You can’t imagine if you’re never given the freedom to read and learn and dream.
If I cut through the noise of book challenges and legal censorship and failing safety nets, I can still remember that the most important part of my day is when a child brings me a stack of books to check out and we marvel at them together and I ask which one they are most excited to read and their answer is all of them. This scenario still happens—it happens every day.
The most important part of my job is to make the library a safe space. One where kids burst through the door and go running with glee to the children’s area so they can say hello to whoever is at the desk. One where a patron can have a full metal meltdown about the state of the world and still be given resources to find housing, a shower, a meal. One where someone can come in blasted high for years and then return the next day sober and clean, ensconcing themselves in the safety of the books to stay that way.
Libraries are on the frontlines of so many wars—the war against censorship, the war against the erosion of personal privacy, the war against illiteracy, the war against fascism and the crumbling of democracy. Put it all together and we’re fighting one big war—the war against despair.
People often ask me if I’m afraid to go to work. God no, I tell them. I’d be more terrified if I didn’t work here. Call it exposure therapy: the thing you fear becomes less scary when you face it every day. Every day, librarians face despair in all its forms. Every day we return to the job—and cut through that despair—is a win. No, we weren’t taught to do this in library school. But this is the duty that calls. Love and strength to those who answer.
I have a favorite patron. I know I shouldn’t have favorites, but I do. I tell him he’s my favorite but I don’t think he believes me. Perhaps he thinks I tell everyone that. I do not.
I love him because he reminds me of my uncle, ragged and worn but loving. He comes in every day, whether it’s a good day because he’s sober or a bad day because he’s not. We have a little game we play: if one of us sees the other from across the library, we will stop what we’re doing and wait until the other notices. When we do both finally see each other, we wave our arms high in the air like we’re trying to send the biggest hello, I love you across the expanse. Think Forrest Gump waving at Lieutenant Dan, that big goofy smile. That’s me when I see Derek. (Again, not his real name.) That’s Derek when I confirm the game is still on.
“How you doin’, darlin’?” He comes over and asks.
“I’m good. You?”
“I’m…” He pauses and thinks. And every time, he says the same thing:
“I’m blessed.”
Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
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