Toni Morrison’s Library

A Trip Back in Time to a Building Full of Mana

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Returning to one’s hometown can propagate all sorts of emotions. Excitement. Anxiety. Dread. I have visited my old stomping grounds dozens of times since moving away and find myself reminiscing about the good old days more than I can verify even having them. I still feel an interconnectedness to the International City of Lorain Ohio in a way that seems peculiar given my long absence. My memory has officially failed me on many street names and most high school teachers but when I return an inkling of recall comes to the front. Pieces of Rachel the kid, Rachel the teenager, Rachel the troublemaker, Rachel the troubled. It is in those bursts of history that I am reunited with my younger self.

Atlantic’s Faith Hill wrote about this affection we have for returning home in her piece Your Childhood Home Might Never Stop Haunting You. In it she described how we can yearn to return to our roots even when the experiences there were painful, sad or even traumatic. It’s the longing to be connected to a former version of oneself that makes reunions like these bittersweet. To be reconnected with the physical environment of decades past can bring those memories and our old selves back in sync.

“Going home can be a much more effective way to time travel. Our past isn’t just preserved in knickknacks and memorabilia; it lingers in the spaces we once occupied. When we talk about our experiences, we often focus, understandably, on the people who’ve shaped us, and we “treat the physical environment like a backdrop,” Lynne Manzo, a landscape-architecture professor at the University of Washington, told me. But setting can be its own character; it colors our day-to-day, and we endow it with agency and meaning. If social interactions and relationships are the bricks constructing our identities, our surroundings are the scaffolding.”

I hadn’t realized how intertwined I remained to the library of my youth until I was standing inside of it three decades after I left home. My relationship to it has ebbed and flowed through time, but will remain a constant now given my current status as a writer of words commonly found in libraries. With every step further in the door, my inventory of experience in that space further unfurled.

Loitering and Other Indignities

The main library branch in my city was just a few blocks away from my high school. I wish I could tell you I was captivated by the latest mystery or involved in some sort of intellectual enrichment while there but I can’t. The library was the place my friends and I hung out. We occupied the second floor of the building, the back left corner pocket of the library, with an abundance of energy and minimal supervision. The lone table and chairs on the whole floor were there and on many occasions, so was I.

Needless to say I hadn’t fully developed my library voice by then so the “hush” of the frustrated librarian was on repeat. We laughed. We talked. We were obnoxious disrespectful turds in the literary punchbowl for sure. Getting kicked out of the library was a common occurrence for me in those days, which I am not proud of. To all the librarians who have to endure this sort of workplace hostility, I apologize. On behalf of every belligerent one of us, we don’t deserve you or your patience. We deserve your wrath.

In Search of My Roots

Decades after my regular evictions from the second floor, and well into adulthood, I needed to enlist the help of that very library as I embarked on a mission to build out my family tree. I had done fairly well collecting birth, death and marriage certificates for a lot of the Sicilians in my family who immigrated to Lorain in the late 1800’s. Thanks to Family Search, the Termini-Imerese Reunion Group and an internet connection I knew who all of them were going back four generations. Still, I didn’t really know any of them.

The absence of social media in the early twentieth century prevented me from seeing my great grandmother’s “all business” persona on full display in her Instagram reels. Not a single selfie has been preserved of my great grandfather at his Broadway Avenue fruit stand flashing a peace sign with his loyal customers. I wanted to find an inkling of the kind of people they were in a time when that sort of detail was relegated to the local rags. An obituary could contain some personal tidbits about them that I couldn’t get from a rigid death certificate. Guess who had access to those hard to find print publications? Yep, my local library.

In addition to doing my research during the Covid-19 Pandemic, I was working from Hawai’i island and unable to just simply show up at the main branch and search through the microfiche myself. Using the “Ask a Librarian” function I hoped a skilled treasure hunter in the building could find obituaries easily. Weeks later Donald, the friendly librarian, emailed me the kindest message. The Morning Journal didn’t have an obituary section back then as we know it to look today. And since it was so long ago, none of those issues were in the electronically archived system anyway. When someone died in the early to mid 1900’s, the notice was inserted into the paper anywhere it would fit, which meant one had to look at every page of every newspaper in the days following a person’s death in order to find the announcement, if it existed at all.

After spending a week in the basement rummaging through old newspapers, Donald found obituaries for both of my great grandparents. I had a glimpse into who they were by the details our family chose to include at the time. My great grandfather was proud of how long he had lived in the United States leading up to his death, nearly sixty-one years, the obituary declared. A new detail in my great grandmother’s story unfolded as I learned she died in a sanitorium. All thanks to a librarian who cared enough to dig.

My Teacher and Her Friend

No matter where I was in the world, I had maintained a lifelong connection with my first grade teacher, Ms DeFilippo. She worked overtime to keep me occupied and out of trouble as an elementary school kid. I appreciated her investment in me and would pay her a visit anytime I made it into town as an adult. We had become so close her family knew to call me when she died. Decades beyond my days of cleaning the chalkboard after school, they understood how important we had become to each other.

My Beloved First Grade Teacher, Ms DeFilippo

“Ms D” would often tell me about her friendship with Toni Morrison. In those early days, I understood Morrison to be a local author who was a good friend to my first grade teacher. That was it. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how far off the mark that subtle description of Morrison really was.

Toni Morrison is one of the most celebrated authors in the world. With dozens of literary contributions, some of which were inspiration for major motion pictures, I’d say she is the most influential person to come out of our hometown. Her novel The Bluest Eye was set in Lorain. She spent a great deal of time at the main library branch as a voracious reader in her youth and worked for that same library system for years. She occupied the same library branch as me, but I’m sure she never got kicked out…

In 1993 she won a Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman to do so. Leadership in the city wanted to honor her in all the ways you’d expect. Upon consultation with Morrison on how best to recognize her achievement, she nixed renaming our high school, renaming our park or renaming our library after herself. Instead, she requested a reading room be installed in that same library branch with soft chairs and a comfortable atmosphere for learning and engagement.

In 1995 the Toni Morrison Reading Room was opened to the public, with Morrison herself cutting the ribbon. She died in 2019 but her legacy remains in her work and her Reading Room for the rest of us to appreciate and reflect upon.

A Friendship Built to Last

Shonda Thompson and I have known each other for nearly four decades, since our time living in Lorain. An accomplished author, poet and businesswoman in her Montgomery community, she is the epitome of hard work and perseverance. As Shonda and I recently returned to Lorain to share our memoirs with the community we once called home, memories of my time here have rushed in. My complicated relationship with the main library branch, which I can’t help but refer to as “Toni Morrison’s library,” is one of those formative trains of thought that refuses to leave the station. As we walked up the steps to the second floor I could see myself running through the aisles without a care for anyone else around.

I think it’s possible to feel the energy of someone long after they’ve gone. In spaces like libraries, overflowing with the wisdom and creativity of authors long departed, it’s easy to feel what’s percolating in the quiet void around us. The spiritual energy or life force, or mana, as it is understood in Hawai’ian culture, remains within Lorain’s main library branch. To see our memoirs on its shelves left me with a feeling of comradery with all of the local writers who came before us, including Morrison.

In Toni Morrison’s absence, the entire world is having a 365-day birthday celebration in honor of her incredible contributions to humanity. As a project by Literary Cleveland with Ohio Humanities, Ohioana Library Association, and the Toni Morrison Society, the year-long celebration will conclude on February 17, 2027 in our hometown. Will it be at our library? Stay tuned for details or ways you can participate https://ohiocelebratestonimorrison.org/

About the Author:

The Real Rachel BS is a perpetual wanderer specializing in communications for non-profits and supports disaster response efforts nationwide. She is a former trade unionist with the United Steelworkers and a member of SOAR, the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees. She belongs to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City and is a member of the Authors Guild, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, the International Women’s Writing Guild and the Italian American Writers Association. Learn more about Rachel’s work including her memoir Losing My Kidney and Finding My Voice: Confessions of a Living Donor at bennettsteury.com