The Rev.Curtis Cofield is addicted to books. Cofield (pictured with his wife, Elsie, at left and Brad Gallant, right, president of the library board) is trying to break his addiction —” not by going cold turkey, but by donating many of his 20,000 volumes a little at a time to the Stetson branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.
The first 30 or so were accepted with great fanfare at a reception Friday night. It was part of Cofield’s 80th birthday weekend bash, which concluded Sunday afternoon when hundreds of well-wishers attended a party at the New Haven Field House, organized by daughter Bonnye (who organized an equally splendiferous gala for her mom, Elsie’s, 80th not too long ago).
The Rev. Cofield knows exactly when and why his addiction developed. When he was a young African-American child growing up in rural North Carolina, he said, “The racial tension and segregation meant that you were not allowed to be in a lot of areas. And so, in order to spend your time well, my mother and father put into my head, ‘You can go anywhere through books.’ So books became the way I overrode all those things to know the world. And that’s why books became so important to me. I’ve been collecting books since I was four years old. It was kind of like a fetish with me,” he admitted. “Out of my ten-cent allowance, I bought some five cent classics” by authors like Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others.
“We couldn’t buy any books,” said Elsie Watson Cofield, his wife of almost 60 years, laughing. She was one of 13 siblings who also grew up in rural North Carolina. She said occasionally her mother would bring home second-hand books from the white ladies she worked for. Elsie likes to tease her husband for being middle-class and an only child whose parents could afford to support their son’s healthy “fetish.”
Most of the first books Cofield donated were about black history and literature: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron; Black Boy by Richard Wright; books by Frederick Douglass and Myrlie Evers (Medgar’s widow).
“He has such a passion for literacy and reading,” said Bonnye, about her dad. “My grandson —” his great-grandson —” is just the same way. He’s four years old and he loves to read.”
As part of the library event, a painting of Cofield by his son, Curtis, was unveiled. It’s called “Benediction,” inspired by Curtis the elder as he is when preaching: “If you’ve seen him, you know nobody does it like he does it,” said his proud son. “There’s a certain kind of man in whom God trusts his vision. My dad is that kind of man. A man with a vision is dangerous to the world, but favored by God.”
Jim Welbourne (pictured), director of the New Haven Free Public Library, says it’s rare that someone would offer a whole book collection. “Usually it’s an academic library that gets those kind of resources, because public libraries usually don’t have the resources to property curate a collection. So we’ve worked with the family to let them know we’ll take a selection. And we’ll buy some cases to display them. And I think the fact that he’s chosen Stetson, a neighborhood branch, is a chance for the youth to begin to see someone who’s achieved and what he read. It fits with this community, so I’m very pleased with that. It’s quite an honor.”