Caught at last. Hannah slumped against the pay phone, the receiver left dangling. Now the books would never be reshelved. Her entire mission was over— unfulfilled. She had failed the Overhead. She’d never work in this town again. Never in academia, never in any archive. Her mind raced for excuses— anything to avoid being arrested, having to call Isabel from jail.
“So— it’s you,” said the security guard, and a surprising corona of light appeared behind her head as her flashlight snapped off. “Finally! Well, we’d best get started, don’t you think?” She leaned over and grabbed one of Hannah’s bookbags.
“What— who are you?” Hannah gasped, and the guard, whose name tag had gone blank, expanded upward. She floated upward, in fact, one gracious extra length of height, so that she towered over Hannah, her sensible shoes no longer touching the floor. Floating ahead of Hannah, out of the bathroom, she tossed back over her broad shoulder, “Well, get a clue, girl! I’m your Crossing Guard. I work here for the Overhead. Like you.”
• • •
Whatever her power, the Crossing Guard lived up to her title, as they exited the bathroom absolutely unnoticed by two other night watchmen despite (in Hannah’s case) noisily ascending the stairs up to the Great North Hall. Once there, pausing at the display cases, the Crossing Guard snapped her fingers and suddenly they were on a different floor— a floor between floors, a floor that supposedly did not exist. It was part of no Library map Hannah had seen, and was perfectly clean and empty— but for the enormous hanging shelf that spun languidly in the midpoint of the space. They had crossed safely into this place.
Hannah felt a tiny and delicate tick at her wrist; her watch had stopped.
This was a shelf made of all the woods of the world: redwood, cedar, oak, cypress, mangrove, filling the air with magnificent scent. And all the wood that had ever been sacrificed for paper to make books stretched and reassembled into shelves that towered upward into skylight— impossible, thought Hannah, for were there not fixed Library of Congress floors, set above them? But in front of her were six floors’ worth of bookshelf, and neither sky nor ceiling at the top.
She tiptoed closer. The pegs holding the shelf together jutted out in odd, soft nails that seemed to have a pattern, and she recognized Morse code, the code she’d used to signal her first love to her best friend. When language failed and outright declaration seemed too dangerous or wrong, they had used code. Now the shelf pegs in front of her spelled out the names of titles, categories, themes. She had a guide for organizing.
This was a shelf that appeared only at a fixed time, the time arranged by She, and Hannah understood it was a shelf not necessarily in the Library, but a part of the grand archiving and cataloguing and sorting made possible by all who served Her as radical librarians protective of woman’s word, in every era where it met with scorn or burning, censorship or erasure, deplatforming or destruction. Hannah bowed low, and as she did so felt one tiny urgent tick at her wrist. She didn’t have all the time in the world.
Pulling out the rare books she’d saved, smuggled and stolen, and unpacking all of them from her different bags, Hannah swiftly organized two piles, alphabetizing them by author name until Jordan’s donation legacy was ready to reshelve. Find me. Love me, the books whispered as they settled in, each shaking their pages ever so slightly like the ruffling, preening feathers of proud exotic birds, preparing for flight— for a journey into time.
As she set them tenderly in order on the shelves, Hannah once again saw how influential these books had been in her own life— her own awakening. Each title carried a comet-trail of memories: here were the books that had been in her own bedroom when she was eighteen and reading voraciously anything she could find with the L word in its name.
The paper brushed over her. Ink touched her lips. She was standing still but stroked by pages. She had loved every one of these books; now, willing them to be loved by other women, other girls, she was sending them away. One familiar title popped out from the shelf as soon as she had placed it, begging, “Feel me up once more. . .” How that book had once seduced her, mentally, culturally, a lamp of light in years of wondering how. She had been . . . was being . . . here? Now? Oh! very gently fucked again by a book.
An intercom she could not see began to blare a teasing announcement: “Paging Dr. Stern. Paging Dr. Stern.” Yes, she was being paged, old pages on her skin, moving across her heart. They were all around her, touching, stroking. An orgy of gratitude, of intimacy, of bookworm love. Here! urged a small paperback she hadn’t touched yet. Me, me! The book cuddled against her hand, a feeling no less perfect than a lover’s Sunday morning backrub. A larger volume bustled over, thick leather binding strap unhinging in slow motion, as trousers might be unbuckled by a patient, love-struck butch. The opening of a chapter in that tome flexed like a bicep, and Hannah heard herself whisper, admiringly, “Show-off. How tough you are.” The book glowed, its spine straight with near-military bearing, its brass buckle shiny. “Oh, you were the book with a uniform fetish.” Hannah saluted, falling easily into old yet familiar tropes of flirtation from her earliest days.
Oh, was this delicious feeling an infidelity to Isabel, or the last lust of remembered adolescent bibliophilia? Bibliogyne, you are mine, the book spoke upward from between her hot breasts.
And then it said:
You will find the letter between pages 13 and 14 of your favorite book.
She shoved the book away in sudden alarm. Letter? What book? What pages?
Her letter, her letter, sighed the pages, ruffling, turning. The wind they stirred was just enough to lift Hannah’s damp bangs, which fell again against her forehead as the book in her hands closed firmly and was silent.
Hannah thought, But that’s not possible. Books open flat with even numbers on the left, odd numbers on the right. There’s no way to tuck a letter between a page 13 and a page 14!
Possible indeed where we bind our own stories, came the answer. And the book in her hands fell quiet.
What was her favorite book? How could she ever, ever decide? How could she find out what this letter meant for her was? Hannah sat down on the polished floor of a nonexistent room. Tick, went her Seiko wristwatch.
But pages 13/14 . . . of course that was the age when she first thought, perhaps I might be gay? That was the year she dared to write the question in her journal. What was the book that seemed to reassure, the character she turned to? But there had been almost nothing, at that time, about fourteen-year-olds. She had written her own story, chronicled her own journey, in a notebook, like Harriet the Spy. She—
Harriet.
Hannah launched upward from the floor, knees cracking, and grabbed for the last of Jordan’s books. There in the A through F pile was Louise Fitzhugh’s classic, and she picked it up. But its pages would not flutter; its covers were firmly closed. Shelve it. I have to shelve it first, thought Hannah. She approached the hanging giant shelf and started placing Jordan’s books in order.
When she had reached the end, with F, and filled one huge, long shelf, she gazed for one minute at the satisfying row of books and then reached up to take back Harriet the Spy for a moment. The book came off the shelf reluctantly, and Hannah sucked in her breath. There on the other side of the shelf was her own face: Hannah, at thirteen and a half, searching for a book about girls who might love girls.
For an instant, Hannah looked at Hannah. Both sets of eyes widened in stunned recognition. Then the volume of Harriet the Spy went puff!, and expelled a sheet of paper, and the book pulled itself back onto the shelf, sealing up the view into the past. Young Hannah’s face disappeared, and middle-aged Hannah was left holding a letter that seemed to have been written for young readers— those from the past, those yet to come. It was a letter, she realized, penned long ago by Jordan.
Dear young ones of the global past and future, and dear older women daring to come out at any age:
I am leaving you these books from my own time, a time when women like us had access
to stories about us. I am leaving you these books because I no longer need them, but what they did for me, in giving me such comfort, I hope they’ll do for you. By the time you read this I will be somewhere else, all grown up and moved on. Just know that I was like you, despite our differences.
Did you ever think you might be the only one like you? And if that special quality was hated, not only by society but in your very home, how hard did you pretend you were not you? How deeply did you hide, or lie, pretend, deny? I knew that bitter cup for years, although raised to be honest, to speak truth.
I was told that just one book could save me, but that book called me lost. Then I heard my family speak of banning other books, and so I wondered if they might hold answers. It took me years of hiding, lying, sneaking, trying, stealing, dealing, seeking, peeking, until I had the space to look for others just like me. I found them first in books.
Books! Long before we had an Internet for info by computer, I came out in a golden time of publishing, a golden era that may not be remarked on by others but was part of a great movement. I found that there were women who put the necessary readings in each other’s hands and hearts.
What I want you to know is that we had a golden era of lesbian literature— publishing, presses, readings, women’s studies classes, writing conferences, bookstore newsletters, even a Women’s Review of Books. We discovered anew the works by women like us whose words had been suppressed, and made those titles known. We had editors and scholars, and a network of librarians who dared to put these books in young girls’ hands. We determined how we would be understood, controlling the production of our memoirs and our politics.
You might have found your comfort in a bar. You didn’t have to, though the bars were great and vanishing. You could walk in many cities to a bookstore, and walk into a space where some woman in tie-dye or a blue work shirt greeted you: “Hi, sister.” You could go to any shelf and find your life there: Black women, Jewish women, Mormon lesbians too. You could walk out with a paperback that showed you how to love. Or even buy a blank book with encouraging quotes by women and start to write your own life by yourself.
I was in a daze for years. I walked to every bookshop selling books by lesbians. I listened to the authors who had moved me read their work. I stood behind a pillar once, too shy and overcome to say hello to Adrienne Rich, to Audre Lorde. I finally raised my head to see around me other hidden, frightened women emerging just like me, and in due time I met someone I felt that I could be with all my life. But even if you don’t, you’re still a thinking lesbian. I read through all the nights I didn’t have a partner, and now I read to her.
These books will take you to the magic circle where we stand as witnesses to our own lives. And if these books are banned again? If all this lesbian heritage is banished, and our identity reduced again to ashes like Sappho’s fragments, like Magnus Hirschfeld’s library? Even if all that might remain is one rusted pin declaring DYKE, lying propped on velvet in some history museum, you will know we tried to share what we had. We may soon all be les-bians under glass. The old safe places I found are indeed vanishing: bars, bookshops, women’s music festivals. That culture seems to be somehow unspeakable, as if standing in a woman-only space as an authority on your own dyke life means indifference to other lives. So does knowledge of the self disappear, and life once more becomes a ride with blacked-out windows. But I’ve saved, for you, this published women’s knowledge. And you must write your own.
Just remember these names. Call them in your dreamtime. Not the names of authors, though you should know those too. The names of women’s bookstores, where the banned books were shelved; the era of those spaces, 1971-2017; call them up as monuments to us. Amazon Books. Women and Children First. New Words. Crone’s Harvest. Old Wives’ Tales. Common Woman. Smedley’s. Lammas. Womanbooks. A Woman’s Place. Little Sister’s. Toronto Women’s Bookstore. BookWoman. Streelekha Feminist Book Place. A Woman’s Prerogative. Artemys. Wild Iris. Charis. Room of One’s Own. Xantippe. People Called Women. Herland. Labyris. Bluestockings.
Hannah felt shock spread over her breastbone. Was this why Jordan had left city life to retire “off the grid” in some remote cabin? Did she anticipate this backlash against lesbian culture coming again so soon, just around the corner? Had she thrown up her hands in despair as one women’s bookshop after another shuttered its doors?
“No time for that. Here come the patrons,” said the security guard, opening again the door Hannah had come through, and suddenly she could see over the guard’s tall shoulder the first eager face in a huge line of girls and women of every age from eight to eighty-eight. In an instant they had pushed through the door and were swarming toward the shelves, each floating, like the security guard, like the banned authors of the reception, ever so slightly above the floor.
Now Hannah saw again the figures from the way station Isabel had shown her, back at Halloween, girls from many nations reading forbidden literature at some safe place the Overhead patrolled; girls in head scarves, in Amish bonnets, in Hasidic school skirts, in the novice-wear that would become a nun’s habit; girls who took books off the hanging shelf only to have the title instantly wriggle snakelike into the alphabet of their own language and, in some cases, an author and title of their own culture, meant only for them. Sighs of “Oh!” and “Ah!” perfumed the room with sweet breath of discovery, of homecoming, of recognition, pride. Then, each girl and woman having found the perfect book for her own coming into lesbian awakening, they sat cross-legged, chin on fist, and all around Hannah were the floating yogic bodies of girls reading, women reading, hanging seated in the air.
There was one girl left, standing in the doorway: the little girl turned away from the white-only library in 1959.
The security guard picked her up in her own arms, and lifted her up to the highest shelf, and seated her upon that shelf, amid the collected works of Lorraine Hansberry and Audre Lorde.
• • •
Now the room grew warm with other visitors: many of the banned authors Hannah had seen at the Reception, plus certain radical librarians of the past. She thought she saw Rose Valland, who had hidden works of art from Nazi thieves, and coded stolen pieces.
The books that Jordan had left to the Library of Congress, which Hannah had rescued, now filled just one part of the ever-increasing and expanding grand bookshelf reaching upward to a topless height. Up, up against the night sky at the end of her vision Hannah spotted Amelia Earhart’s orbiting aeroplane, trailing a banner that said READ, and even beyond that she saw the white hair of the Overhead Herself sweeping books off Her desk with a huge arm, the books falling out of the sky into the outstretched hands of every young lesbian past and future. This is the book for you. This is what you were looking for. Silence, please; we’re reading. An unusually large book flew down and bounced past Hannah’s left shoulder to land gently on a special shelf: love poetry translated into Braille and raised type. Out of nowhere, the writer Karla Jay appeared with her dog Duchess and purred to Hannah, “There’s never enough erotica or history in Braille. When are you going to get busy and record it, darling?”
Books falling from the sky onto the shelf, women snuggling against one another in the air, taking notes with pens, and pencils, squealing with excitement. And the books themselves were moaning, sighing, home at last in some trusting bookworm’s hands. Everyone was paging, paging, each unto each. Up, up stretched the shelves, filling and refilling without end, the contents circulating to just the right reader, across time.
• • •
How much time had elapsed in the shelving itself was unaccountable, but it was 5 a.m. Saturday morning when Hannah dragged herself, shivering, from the Library exit (opened quickly and quietly for her by the security guard, who then disappeared into an elevator that simply signaled “UP.”)
The Metro wouldn’t start running the weekend schedule trains for at least two hours. She walked all the way home, her empty book-bags folded flat against her sides like drained bre
asts. She walked home through the city, beneath which flowed the magic dust of banned books and naiads.
Her neighborhood— her gay neighborhood, her temporary home, which she’d soon be leaving (back to what? To Isabel, to Sappho’s, but no teaching job?)— was on one of the earliest mail delivery routes in Washington, and by the time her key hit the front door-lock to her building she could see an envelope with her name on it in the lobby. The letter was from her university. Her ex-university.
She ripped apart the outer cream-smooth paper, and found this:
Please be advised that a special hearing will be convened on May 30th to review the upcoming conclusion of the women’s history major and to appreciate the contributions made by faculty in that program. As you have long served the university as faculty in the program scheduled for retirement, we invite your participation if possible, and would welcome your testimony at this important session. RSVP.
She stood motionless, her tired mind racing, the letter heavy in her tired hand.
What if the university changed its course and saw fit to restore the women’s history program? Could the faculty, alumni, and the final class of graduate students all come together at this hearing and save their program? If so, Hannah might be rehired, and even if it were just at half of her former salary, she was game. There were just as many young women who needed women’s history books placed into their outstretched hands right now as there were girls in the past and future aching for lesbian knowledge and storylines. Hannah had given a year to time travel with rescued books; at heart, she was still a teacher. She wanted to return, so badly, to her old classroom in Building B.
(Or did the Overhead have other plans for her?)
Sappho's Overhead Projector Page 14