On Tuesday evening, Michael J. Morand, president of the New Haven Free Public Library Foundation, stood in the almost empty main room of the Ives branch of the library. In years past, that space had been transformed into a raucous Mardi Gras party that functioned as the library’s annual blowout fundraiser. Not this year.
“Welcome to the first and hopefully last virtual celebration,” he said to his online audience — with firm hopes of reuniting again in 2022, and with plenty of festivities and good news regarding how the city library system adapted and continued to develop during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Morand explained that the library’s first Mardi Gras celebration was in 1997 to mark the institution’s 110th birthday. (Click here for a video of the proceedings.)
“It was such a great event that we decided to make it an annual tradition,” he said. This year, noting that New Orleans had itself transformed Mardi Gras in the face of the pandemic, “we’re not going to let Covid keep us down.”
After a brief explanation of Mardi Gras from Cajun music scholar Ryan Brasseaux, Morand and Shana N. Schneider, president of the library’s board of directors, laid out some facts. During the pandemic, the library served 700,000 visits, in person and online. Curbside service yielded 38,000 books circulated. And there had been over 500,000 logins through the library’s internet system. The library was now offering free wifi hotspots and lending Chromebooks to patrons with a library card. A fundraising effort focused on “digital equity and inclusion” proved particularly resonant as internet access has become a fundamental part of keeping up with pandemic information — and getting an appointment for a vaccine.
Building A Family
Morand and Schneider then yielded the virtual floor to poet and New Haven resident Reginald Dwayne Betts, who guided a conversation with Toi Derricote and Cornelius Eady, acclaimed poets and founders of Cave Canem, an institution that has fostered the talent of a generation of Black poets since 1996 through classes, workshops, and mentorships.
The spirit of camaraderie filled the air as Betts began by saying that “when I met the two of you, I didn’t have a beard.” After reading their own poetry, Derricote and Eady spoke about the roles libraries had played in their lives. Eady described the library in Rochester, N.Y., where he grew up, as nurturing his love of reading “when I was a baby poet.” It allowed him to “dream that one day I would have a book in the library.”
In Derricote’s youth in Detroit, she said, “libraries were your babysitter.” But entering the library was also opening “a room in myself,” she said. It was a place “that I recognized as for me.”
Eady even talked about “liberating” a book from his library, a book of poetry by Robert Bly. Years later, he met Bly and told him that he had stolen the book, thinking Bly would be impressed. Instead, Eady recounted with a laugh, Bly was appalled.
At the age of 16, Betts was sentenced to nine years in prison for a carjacking. He emerged from prison to end up going to Yale Law School and becoming an acclaimed writer. He became a voracious reader of poetry in prison, but credited Cave Canem with really giving him a chance to turn himself around. “You guys ushered my existence into life,” he said to Derricote and Eady. “I cried my second day locked up and didn’t cry in prison,” he continued. His first year at Cave Canem, “I was in a parking lot somewhere crying.” In year after year of workshops and mentoring young poets, the students and teachers at Cave Canem “have built a community in which all of us are in kinship in ways we wouldn’t be otherwise.”
Eady and Derricote were grateful and humble. “The great writers today — they were all there,” Derricote said. “Cornelius and I found a door in space, and opened the door, and all these great writers were waiting to explode out of that door.”
The poets also talked about the books they’d read that had helped them become poets in their own rights. Derricote spoke about Ariel by Sylia Plath, which helped her see that “that there was a place for anger…. In my childhood, you could be killed for being angry.” Ariel “was opening one of those doors. I could easily see how something so powerful could be made into something useful and beautiful.”
Eady cited The Dead Lecturer by Amiri Baraka — who was then still LeRoi Jones. ”We didn’t have any bookcases in my house,” he said, but “there was a Black poet in my neighborhood named Bobby Johnson,” a “Black beat poet” who published his own stuff. Johnson was a gateway to Baraka, not only for his talent with words, but for who he was. In Baraka, Eady saw a “young Black male” who looked like a “sophisticated New Yorker … being Black, and being Black his way.”
“Suddenly,” Eady added, “it’s OK to declare yourself as a Black person with a brain — a thinking kind of guy, a cool urban thing.” Just like when he read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, he thought to himself: “you can do that?”
Stetson Effort Exceeds Expectation
After that rich conversation, hearkening back to years past, Schneider said, “if you were here in the library right now, we’d get the dance party going.” The audience was then treated to a musical performance by Thabisa, backed by guitar and drums.
The event then moved to bestowing Elsie Chapman, past president of the library’s board of directors, with the Noah Webster award for being the “driving force behind the Stetson campaign,” in raising the funds to relocate the Dixwell Avenue branch library across the street and build a new home for it in the new Q House. Four years in the making, the campaign pushed beyond its goals to raise over $2 million.
Chapman was humble and forceful in receiving the award. She had moved to New Haven in 2003 after a successful career at IBM and threw herself into a number of volunteer projects, helping out as she could. “Volunteering is the rent you pay for taking up space on this earth,” she said. “My hopes have been fulfilled beyond my expectations.”
“Never take libraries for granted. Never take your library for granted,” she continued. It’s a “visible representation of democracy,” the “great equalizer in a community.” In this time of upheaval and “fiscal stresses” at all levels of government, “these are times when libraries matter more than ever as places for reading, learning, thinking, and growing.”
Diane Brown, Stetson’s branch manager, pointed out that Stetson possibly houses the largest collection of literature of the African diaspora in New England. Thanks to the library’s successful fundraising, the library would be able to continue and expand its current programming, especially in its new space. A lower level would be geared toward children, containing “thousands of books from the Black diaspora.” The floor above that level would be dedicated to teenagers, including a maker space and a community space — amplifying Stetson’s deep role as an anchor for the Dixwell and Newhallville neighborhoods.
The night ended on a note from historian David Blight, who said that “public libraries are where we go to save civilization.” Morand, in wishing everyone a good night, enjoined the audience to “keep saving civilization” — and get ready to reunite in person for Mardi Gras, in 2022.