Jeffers and Betts talk writing and Black history at virtual Mardi Gras.
Before Honorée Fanonne Jeffers was a celebrated novelist, before she was a poet and a professor and a chronicler of Black history, before she was a high-school dropout hustling to get a college degree, she was a shy little girl in Durham, N.C., who found freedom in the public library.
Jeffers offered that paean to libraries and the energizing, emancipating power of books Tuesday night during a conversation with local poet and criminal justice reform advocate Reginald Dwayne Betts.
The 40-minute chat took place via a YouTube live video stream as part of the New Haven Free Public Library’s 25th annual Mardi Gras celebration and fundraiser. The event was held online for the second year in a row due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
The roughly 75 people who tuned in to watch Betts and Jeffers talk happened upon a casual, intimate, funny, probing, deeply personal, and historically conscious discussion between two friends who have known each other for decades.
Fittingly for the venue, those friends also happen to be two leading figures of contemporary American literature.
The conversation wove its way from a dive into Jeffers’ debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois (“That’s the cat with the stingy brim!” Betts said about one of his favorite characters in the book) to the throughline from slavery to mass incarceration and the war on drugs (“I think about how great spiritual power in Black communities in the 80s was sort of, not destroyed, but driven underground,” Jeffers said. “We saw this driving underground of all of this power that I think now we’re reclaiming.”) to the deceptive charm and culinary talents of Black “Hebrew Israelites” (Betts: “Have you ever had their food in D.C.?” Jeffers: “Oh man, that vegan food is off the chain!”)
Most fittingly for the virtual venue, the discussion circled back time and again to the magic of libraries and the transformative power of books.
“I love librarians. I love libraries,” Jeffers said at the top of the talk. “When I was a little girl, librarians were my best friend. I don’t think I’ve ever met a librarian I didn’t love.”
You know, Betts said with a smile, a lot of people say they love libraries. A lot of people say they love librarians. But not everyone who says that truly means it. Or, at least, “they don’t find a way to show that love through their creative work.”
However, he continued, Love Songs is anchored by a character, Ailey, clearly committed to research, a “broad, expansive definition of research” that encompasses academia and oral traditions. How did that love of libraries make its way into the book?
“I’ve always been socially awkward,” Jeffers replied. “The library was a place, when I was a little girl, where I just felt special.”
Durham was still de facto segregated when she was growing up, she said. “Our library was the Black library. When I would go into the library, the librarians would call my name … they would call my name, and they would make me feel special and like a superstar.” The librarians would save her books. They would introduce her to new works she might like. “Being smart was just so important in the library.”
That sense of comfort and discovery continued when she moved to Atlanta and her mom would take her to the library as she worked on getting her graduate degree.
Did that feel a bit like having a “cheat code?” Betts asked. That is: With your mom going through graduate school and taking you along with her to the library, did that feel like you had easy access to a world of books and ideas that is not a given for so many people?
Yes and no, Jeffers replied. “I hid from people up until two or three years ago that we lived in Section 8 housing. While I do have this rich intellectual background, I also have a very deep connection to poverty. Not just seeing it from afar. We lived in Section 8 housing. We ate what they call ‘commodity foods’ out here in Oklahoma. We ate government food, government cheese, and all that.”
That’s why there’s always “this high brow intellectual and this folk experience” that pop up in all of her written works, Jefferson said. “That’s always the line that I tread.”
City Librarian John Jessen, NHFPL Board President Lauren Anderson, and NHFPL Foundation President Michael Morand at Tuesday's virtual event.
Over the course of the conversation, Jeffers and Betts reached back — sometimes decades, sometimes over a century — to Black artists and intellectuals who captured some part of what it means to be Black in this country.
About the mid-20th century poet Lucille Clifton: “She showed a spiritual history, a soul history of Black people in her poetry in ways that I don’t think anybody had done before,” Jeffers said. “Spirituality is very important to me. There’s something in the spirit that remembers everything that we have gone through as a people here in in this place we call America.”
About the early ’90s rapper The Notorious B.I.G.: “When Biggie’s out here saying: ‘I’m just out here trying to feed my family,’ ” Betts said, before speaking about a group call he was on just a few hours before the library talk with a dozen men, most of whom were serving life sentences in prison. “It broke my heart,” he said. “The kind of healing and forgiveness we don’t have access to, not being as eloquent and vulnerable as we need to be when talking about the ways we’ve committed harm.”
About the 19th century abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass: “It was when I learned to read that I knew I must be free,” Jeffers said, paraphrasing Douglass.
“Coming from the belly of the beast in many ways, reading saved me,” she continued. “It gave me a sense of control when I didn’t have control.” She said she often returns to slavery in her writing.
Why? Because “there’s something about people who are making a way out of nowhere and they have a complete loss of control, and there’s something inside of them that you cannot warp. … This book is a monument to them.”
Scenes from library Mardi Gras parties past.
And even though the dozens of attendees couldn’t express their admiration for the conversation and the two writers in person… many did so in the YouTube online chat.
A small sample.
Markeshia Ricks: “Yay for libraries being safe spaces for all including those of us who identify as awkward!”
Shelley Quiala: “I’m loving this conversational flow! Books bring us together.”
Love Babz: “Yo, this is how the talk goes at our cookouts and family gatherings!”
Amy Joy: “Mmmmmm. Thank you from another someone saved by reading.”
2022 Noah Webster Awardee Karen Pritzker.
Click here to read more about the Mardi Gras event, including the library’s honoring local editor, writer, film producer, and philanthropist Karen Pritzker with its 2022 Noah Webster Award. And click on the video above to watch the full virtual event.