In honor of the Friends of the Library’s 30th anniversary – A remembrance

Submitted by Kathleen Hardee Arsenault
May 12, 2015 6:49 a.m.

Growing up in Fernandina in the 1950s and 1960s, I spent countless hours on in the public library, then located on 11th and Centre Streets in the Old Schoolhouse building. A short walk from our N. 15th St. house, the library’s big windows opened to the breezes during the warm months, dust motes shining in the sun.

On one unforgettable day, I saw a huge swarm of bees near the enormous oak tree by the library steps, being collected by a man in a big veiled hat. If I and my friends were feeling brave, we would sneak upstairs to the large room where the Masons held their meetings, mystified by the Masonic symbols on the walls and wondering what their rumored ceremonies were like. (I would have been surprised to learn that my grandfather, who died before I was born, was a dedicated Mason, a fact that I discovered when I was an adult.) For me, the library was a magical place.

“Cousin Edith” Flood, a distant relation, dressed like most women of her generation in flowery prints, black lace-up shoes with 2-inch heels, and ‘ear-bobs,’ presided as the library’s mistress and kept a careful eye out for misbehavior.

The children’s area in the northeast corner was crammed with the original Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, and Bobbsey Twins series, and, best of all, old wonderfully illustrated editions of Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books, including Ozma of Oz, The Scarecrow of Oz, and The Emerald City of Oz. Determinedly and delightedly, I read through them all, but for years, it never occurred to me that all of the characters—and all of the people visiting the library—were white. It shames me now that I never even wondered if enthusiastic readers among Fernandina’s black children were able to visit “my” library or if they had any library books to fill their summer hours.

As I approached junior high school age, I moved to the adult section, where tall bookshelves lined the walls and new arrivals and popular titles were arranged spine up under Cousin Edith’s careful eye. R. F. Delderfield, Elizabeth Gouge, James Michener, and especially Eugenia Price, author of a historical trilogy on our part of Florida, were particular favorites, and I read them all. I loved the older historical fiction of Francis Hackett and Kenneth Roberts, such as Anthony Adverse and Francis the First.

From the non-fiction section, like my grandmother, I lost myself in popular histories of Tudor and Stuart kings and queens of England, perhaps because we were fascinated by a time when women were taken seriously enough to have their heads chopped off. The adventures of Thor Heyerdahl and Richard Halliburton made me yearn for adventure, and C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves, and Scholars and Mary Renault’s historical fiction of the classical period gave me a lasting interest in ancient history.

What I didn’t read then were J.D. Salinger’s novels of teenage alienation and the brilliant African American novels of the 1950s and 1960s by Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, literature I discovered only when I went to college. I have no idea how books were chosen for the library collection, but I suspect that Cousin Edith would have considered titles like these “inappropriate”. She and her library ladies were raised like me in the bubble of Fernandina’s post-Civil War century of segregation when Gone with the Wind’s Melanie Wilkes was the model of southern womanhood, and racial and social challenges were unsought and unwelcome.

I continued my Fernandina-bred love of reading in my college libraries, and later in the various academic libraries where I spent a 40-year career and found that the world was a far more diverse, complicated, and fascinating place than I had the insight to realize in my days with Cousin Edith and my school librarians Hitabel Pope and Anna Sether.

The library world of my childhood has irrevocably changed, in ways that Cousin Edith, Mrs. Pope, and Mrs. Sether might have even applauded. Our public libraries have become far more welcoming, sensitive, and sophisticated institutions, arguably more so than the communities that surround them. The world of my childhood changed, and I have changed with it, but I treasure my Old Schoolhouse Library hours that left me with a passion for books that fill my mind and transport me to unknown worlds.

Editor’s Note: A native Floridian, Kathy Arsenault moved to St. Petersburg with her husband Ray in 1980. After 27 years at the Nelson Poynter Memorial Library at USF St. Petersburg, 10 as director and dean, she retired in 2009. She is a graduate of Wellesley College (BA) and Simmons College (MS in library science). Since retirement, she is an active volunteer at the Free Clinic, Northshore Elementary School, the League of Women Voters, and First Presbyterian Church of St. Petersburg. We thank Kathy for her contribution to the Fernandina Observer.