Guest post by Marguerite M. (Maggie) Culp in response to “Banned Books” post (10/12/2023).
You got in trouble for reading Gone With The Wind in a physics class? Gone with the Wind?!? Although that is the last book I would expect you to be surreptitiously reading in school, the fact that the story intrigued you—and you were willing to take some risks in order to finish reading it—was a great way to make your point.
Children, young adults, and hopefully a significant number of adults are naturally curious. A good love story set against the background of a war captures everyone’s imagination, even if the story is an attempt to rehabilitate the image of the Confederacy and reframe the Civil War and Reconstruction. Your mother, by the way, showed admirable restraint in the way she handled the situation.
As you know, I was born, grew up, and attended college in the Boston area, so banned books were part of my life from the day I was born. The church to which my family belonged and various civic groups periodically published lists of banned books. When I was old enough, I was asked to raise my right hand in church and swear never to read a banned book. Naturally, the first thing I did was try to locate some banned books, but they were kept in the back room of the local library and unavailable to the general public.
At 14 years of age, I was hired to work part-time at one of the branch libraries in my hometown. After I worked there for a year or so, I decided to slip into the back room and explore a few banned books. I quickly discovered their quality and content varied. Some seemed an absolute waste of paper, others simply did not interest me, and a few were absolutely disgusting. For the life of me, though, I could not figure out why some people considered these books so dangerous that they had to be locked away and people forbidden to read them.
Yes, Catcher in the Rye was disappointing because it had nothing to do with baseball, but it did motivate me to ask my dad a lot of questions about how boys viewed girls and why a writer who presumably had a good vocabulary used so many swear words.
I flat out loved To Kill a Mockingbird and could not understand why anyone would want to stop me from reading it.
Although The Prince by Machiavelli was troubling on many levels, its content did not keep me awake at night the way the headlines in the evening newspaper did.
It was only when I stumbled on a banned summary of the works of Martin Luther during my senior year in high school that I realized there probably were four reasons that governments, churches, or community groups tried to control what other people read: the banned books contained ideas that threatened their world view, their power, their financial security, and/or their sense of self and place in the universe.
I cannot imagine today’s young people are any less resourceful or less curious than we were, which means I share your optimism that they will find their way to the truths contained in many a banned book. It may take them a bit longer, and I think the road will be a bit more complicated than it was for us, but enough will get there in the end to make a positive impact on this country and its future.
Marguerite M. (Maggie) Culp is a higher education consultant and former faculty member, counselor, dean, and senior student affairs officer. She is co-editor of six books including “Student Success in the Community College: What Really Works?“
Gwen Dungy 