I always felt a little bit of a nerd and a little bit of an outsider. Little Women, for whatever reason, really resonated with me. because Jo was different, and I was different. When I was younger, I thought, well, maybe I could be a writer, too.
I feel like I’m drawn to historic novels where women were given or were pushing outside the boundaries. That’s why Jo resonated with me. She was friendly and outgoing, but she really was a solitary soul despite having sisters and having a really great, insular family. That’s how I saw myself. Jo was like her family, but was also different from them. She wants different things.
I still read Little Women as an adult. Every time, I read it differently. When I was a young mom, I was like, “Oh, I see you, Meg!” Before that, Meg was just Jo’s sister. Now, as an older woman and mom, I’m like, “Oh, see you, Marmee! That’s some tough stuff.”
I like literature with female protagonists. I’ve always been super drawn to them. I think I felt that that was more of my outsider-ness, where I felt identified with the feminine protagonist who was trying to buck society’s norms, like Jo. I think she wants to go to war with her dad because she wants to protect him.
I always felt that women are powerful too, but we still have that whole idea that women are only supposed to be domestic. I was one of the smartest kids in my grade school, and you know how you get superlatives from your classmates at the end of the year? As one of the smartest kids, I was told they saw Veronica as a secretary to some really powerful dude. I didn’t see myself that way, but, okay, I’ll take it.
There isn’t just one way for us to be drawn into literature. There isn’t just one way for us to be connected to libraries, not specifically based upon our ethnicity, race or gender. Sometimes it just works out that way. For some of us, it was a matter of being drawn in, and then one day, you realize that you are “reflected” too. For me, that was a life-affirming thing, but it doesn’t mean that that’s everybody else’s story.
My intro to black people was all my great elementary school teachers: My third-grade teacher, Miss Culpepper, my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Tribune, and my favorite of all time, Miss Kimbrough, who was the school librarian. I was always her little assistant. In fourth grade, I got to be a library aid when there were no other library aids. I don’t even know if Miss Kimbrough asked for a Library Aide. I don’t know if she was like, “I’ve got to get Veronica out of my hair!” So, I was the Library Aide in fifth grade and sixth grade, too. That was my favorite thing, to hang out with her and talk about books. I loved being a little kid in that school, and I had a great time. The whole school was my sanctuary. It was just a great place to be.
I remember having a collection of beautiful classic books, because every year we would get our physical and get all your shots, and it was a little bit traumatic. If we were good, we’d get to go to the toy store. My sister would always get a new Barbie, and I would always get a new book. So that was very identity-forming for me, so every time we’d go to the toy store, I’d go and check out their little library section of children’s books. I had Little Women. I had Little Men. I had Tom Sawyer. I had Huck Finn. I had Black Beauty. That was my little home library, and they were all in that same kind of binding, so it was like a collection.
Those are my formative literary memories. Do you remember that Scholastic didn’t have a book fair when we were younger, but we got that little leaflet called The Weekly Reader? You could pick stuff from there. You could get a chapter book. I remember finding a book, The Seven Wonders of the World.
My daughter and I live in a little rural town now. It’s far away from everything. It’s 45 minutes to the nearest city in Utah, and then it’s 90 minutes to Las Vegas, but in between, there’s only desert. It’s not like there’s suburbs. You’ve got to drive through the desert to get anywhere. The other day, we were driving to the supermarket or what, and we saw a Scholastic Book Fair truck. We both started squealing. We just nerded out!
Veronica Manthei is the former Manager of the George & Hettie Love Memorial Library.