Curled Up by Love: Reading to Children

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H.L. Mencken?”—Note forged by Richard Wright

“Thanks to my books/for their incandescence/that saved me from/my adolescence.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—7/18/11—Judging from the pictures, I was about five when my grandfather said that his idol Rogers Hornsby had never read a book,and that was the main reason he hit .358 over 23 years in the majors. Apparently, my father didn’t think much of his father’s eye-strain argument because I have two photographs of him reading the Sunday comics to me on the porch of my grandfather’s home.

I was fortunate that my parents read to me before I could read for myself, so I have forwarded their gift into the foggy future by reading to our children and grandchildren. I’m happy to report that my efforts and the work of several others appear to be bearing fruit: three of our grandchildren are fine readers, and the fourth soon will be. I always expected that our daughter and daughter-in-law would read to their children, but our son and son-in-law also appreciate that there is no cheaper or wiser investment.

The male stereotype, judging mostly by New Yorker cartoons over the last 40 years, is for the father, if he reads at all to his children, to be a reluctant reader. In one cartoon, a father watching television tells his pajama-clad daughter holding a book, “A story? Honey, wouldn’t you rather a mild sedative?” Another child sitting in bed finds it necessary to remind his father that reading a story requires reading aloud. One rare patriarch actually shoulders his responsibility and reads “Billy Pig’s Picnic” to an unseen child. Standing in a corner of a book store, this father reads into his cell phone. Though it’s a novel form of piracy, I suppose that “distance-learning” beats no story at all.

The children of either gender in these bedtime cartoons are an alien breed. One budding gangster tells his grandmother, seated beside the bed with a book in her hand, “I’ll listen for a dollar.”

Another kid raises the ante, telling his father, “Mommy usually reads me a story, then slips me a twenty.” Often, the child is a confederate of the mother, as when one girl whispers past her father, whose book has slipped to the floor, “I think he’s finally asleep.” One thing is certain: children are more comfortable with the technology than their elders. In one panel, a child is happily listening to “Peter Pan” on her iPod while her grandfather reads the Times.

I realize that cartoons aren’t a blood-pressure cuff on the arm of civilization, but I also know how hard many have fought for the right to read whatever they wish. In my lifetime, it once was against South Carolina state law for the Pickens County Bookmobile to stop in Black neighborhoods. In the same county where John C. Calhoun once blustered, “Show me a [Negro] who can . . .  parse a Greek verb, and I’ll admit he’s a human being,” the Bookmobile wouldn’t even slow down.

Just a county away, Jesse Jackson was denied entrance to the Greenville County Public Library when he was a senior in high school working on a term paper. And a few counties to the east, future astronaut Ronald McNair was forbidden to use a library that his African-American family had helped to build with their tax dollars.

In 2008, the novelist Dave Eggers told a Clemson audience about orphans in Ethiopia being taught to read and write in a boys’ “school” without desks, books, paper, or pencils. The students, when they write at all, write in the dirt with an index finger. If their letters are not well formed, their teacher often pushes their “pen” into the clay so hard the nails crack. A few Clemson athletes were in the audience the night Eggers spoke, and I hope they understood his message. I mention them because many enjoy full scholarships, and yet they often resell their texts with the shrink-wrap unbroken.

But isn’t having books you never read like leaving all the lights on while you sleep?

A colleague of mine was in the USC-Sumter Registrar’s Office a few years ago, when a young Black man brought an application for graduate school to the counter. After a few questions, it was clear that the sheepish applicant could neither read nor write. The Sumter Registrar then called his counterpart at Morris College and asked if the applicant was one of their graduates as he‘d claimed.

“Oh, yes,” the Morris administrator assured him after checking the records. “He was one of our non-reading graduates.” I have several responses to this disturbing tale, but I shall leave it at this: it’s likely this poor fellow was a victim of a family that never read to him.

Unfortunately, not every child has a mother like the pediatric neurosurgeon, Dr. Benjamin Carson. Although Carson’s mother was illiterate, she insisted her son read to her every day because she understood the importance of what she’d been denied, namely that:

The sword’s in a book,

not buried in stone.

Until it is freed,

you can’t take the throne.

In another crotchet of mine called “The Shape of Love” (for Brook), I write:

A man with a small girl

Reading “one more story”

is a sunflower curled

by a morning glory.

A parent who cannot afford 15 minutes a day to be curled by the demands of his child is a man too busy to be a father. If parents spend any time at home, they have time to tell a story even if they cannot read one. There’s just no excuse.

Don’t have a story? Then borrow one of mine: Once upon a time, Mrs. Henny Penny went to a library and said to the librarian, “Buk!” After presenting her library card, the hen left with her book properly stamped. The next day, she returned and said, “Buk, buk!” Soon, Mrs. Penny checked out with two books and returned the following day, saying, “Buk, buk, buk!” Curious, the librarian followed the hen home. “Can she really read two books,” he wondered, “in a day?” Standing at the open window of the hen’s coop, he saw her place each of the books before a frog. To her adopted offspring, she said, “Read it, read it, read it!”

And that is how the frog came to speech.

Take it from Mrs. Penny; she knows a thing or two: the frog grew up to be a neurosurgeon.