An intellectual life often forms in the strangest, most infertile of conditions. The deep forests of those isolated [army] bases became the kingdom that I took ownership of as a child. I followed the minnow-laced streams as they made their cutting way toward the Trent River. Each time in the woods I brought my nature-obsessed mother a series of captured animals, from snapping turtles to copperheads. Mom would study their scales or fur or plumage as I brought home everything from baby herons to squirrels for her patient inspection. After she looked over the day’s catch, she would shower me with praise, then send me back into the woods to return my captives where I’d discovered them. She told me she thought I could become a world-class naturalist, or even director of the San Diego Zoo.
At the library she began to check out books that gave me a working knowledge of those creatures … By the time I had finished fifth grade, I knew the name of almost every mammal in Africa … [from] trips to the library, where I found a whole section labeled “Africa,” the books oversized and swimming with photographs of creatures with their claws extended and their fangs bared. … Books permitted me to embark on dangerous voyages to a world of painted faces of mandrills and leopards scanning the veldt from the high branches of a baobab tree. There was nothing my mother could not bring me from a library. When I met a young marine in the woods one day hunting butterflies with a net and a killing jar, my mother checked out a book that took me far into the world of lepidoptera, with hairstreaks, sulphurs, and fritillaries placed in solemn rows.
Whatever prize I brought out of the woods, my mother could match with a book from the library. She read so many books she was famous among the librarians in every town she entered. Since she did not attend college, she looked to librarians as her magic carpet into a serious intellectual life. … Whenever she opened a new book, she could escape the exhausting life of a mother of seven and enter into cloistered realms forbidden to a woman born among the mean fields of Georgia.
Transcribed by me from pages 3–6 of my first edition hardcover of My Reading Life, © 2010, Doubleday.
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