The Day They Came to Arrest the Book (12 page)

Barney nodded. “We only need one more then.”

Deirdre Fitzgerald, frowning, walked by.

“Looks good, huh?” Barney smiled at her.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said in a low voice. “I’d feel a lot better if that Mr. Griswold had been somewhere else tonight. A lot better.”

The review committee was to take a vote two days later in the conference room adjoining the principal’s office; and that afternoon, waiting for the results in the library, were Barney, Luke, Nora Baines, and Maggie Crowley.

“It’d be great if we could win big,” Barney said. “Something like five to two. Then the school board wouldn’t dare turn it around.”

Deirdre Fitzgerald appeared in the doorway. “No one won big,” she said softly, “and
we
didn’t win at all.”

The vote had been four to three to adopt Matthew Griswold’s proposal.
Huckleberry Finn
would be allowed to stay in the school, but under heavy restrictions. No one would be required to read the book for classwork in any course; Huck, subject to the approval of a parent and teacher, could be on certain optional reading lists; and in the library, he would be kept on a restricted
shelf—available only with the written permission of a teacher and a parent.

Three members of the review committee—Deirdre, Professor Lomax, and Ben Maddox—had been in favor of letting Huck Finn roam freely throughout George Mason High School.

“You mean to tell me”—Nora Baines broke a pencil in two—“that if only one of our two faculty members on that committee had voted right, we would have won? What did those two creeps have to say for themselves?”

“Both Helen Cook and Frank Sylvester,” Deirdre said, “thought it very important not to offend the black students and their parents; and under what they call the Griswold Compromise, they don’t have to do that. Meanwhile, the book is not being censored because it’s still in the school. As for Evelyn Kantrow—you know, the other parent besides Professor Lomax—she was very nervous about that boy and that man together, stark naked, on that raft. She told us she didn’t remember all that nakedness being in the book, but she bought a copy yesterday and, by gum, there it was. Mr. Twain, she said, was a very sneaky, dirty-minded man, and she’s now going to go through all his other books in the school.”

“I know whose mind should be washed out with soap.” Nora Baines sniffed. “But, Deirdre, what about Sandy Wicks? I was sure a journalist would be against censorship or whatever the hell Griswold and his comrades choose to call it.”

Deirdre shook her head mournfully. “Wicks was with us until Griswold turned her around. He made it sound—to some folks, anyway—that if you didn’t think the way he did, you were insensitive and cruel and probably a racist. And Sandy Wicks, good liberal that she is, does not want to think of herself as any one of those things. But she did tell me when it was all over that she would never have agreed to just throw the book out of the school.”

“How noble of her,” Maggie Crowley said. “Putting Huck in shackles on a back shelf, that’s the liberal thing to do, right?”

“So what are
we
going to do?” Luke looked all around.

Deirdre Fitzgerald sat down on the edge of her desk. “The school board meeting at which this decision will be accepted or turned down is going to be two weeks from tonight. We’ve got to organize. We’ve got to spread the word so that a lot of
our
people—if we have a lot of people—will be at that meeting. Leaflets, letters to the editor of the
Daily Tribune
, and maybe we can scrape up enough money for an ad. And you”—Deirdre turned to Barney—“you’ll be doing a story for the
Standard
, right? So maybe that’ll get a lot more students to come.”

Barney nodded. “And there may be an exclusive in that story.”

Deirdre looked at him. “Like what?”

“Mrs. Salters said she’d see me,” Barney said, “if the review committee voted the wrong way.

   In Karen Salters’s small, neat living room the next afternoon, Barney took a seat on the sofa and placed his notebook on the table in front of it.

A small, rather nervous woman, her brown hair drawn tightly back, Mrs. Salters looked so intently at Barney that
he
was becoming rather nervous.

“It took me quite a while to find a new job,” she began. “I don’t start until January. It’s not in this state. And I certainly did not intend to get involved in a public controversy in the short time I have left in this town.” She started to sit down in a chair opposite Barney but stopped. “I’m sorry, would you like a Coca-Cola or something?”

Barney declined.

Sitting straight-backed in the chair, the former librarian at the high school went on. “It’s just that this is too much. Attacking
Huckleberry Finn!
Do you know what Lionel Trilling said about
Huckleberry Finn?”

Barney, wondering who Lionel Trilling was, said he did not.

“Wait a minute.” She left the living room, went upstairs, and returned with a paperback book. “Here it is. Here is what this extraordinarily perceptive literary critic, maybe the best we have ever had, says about this
terribly harmful book that they want to keep locked up.” Mrs. Salters opened the book.

“ ‘One can read it at ten and then annually ever after, and each year find that it is as fresh as the year before, that it has changed only in becoming somewhat larger. To read it young is like planting a tree young—each year adds a new growth ring of learning, and the book is as little likely as the tree to become dull. So we may imagine an Athenian boy grew up together with the
Odyssey
. There are few other books which we can know so young and love so long.’ ”

By the last sentence, Karen Salters’s voice had started to tremble, and Barney, seeing tears in her eyes, looked away.

“Imagine,” she said, closing the book, “depriving students of such a book. Well”—Mrs. Salters raised her head, her voice firm again—“I intend to do whatever I can to stop this nonsense. What is needed now, young man, is ridicule. The best weapon against fools is to make them look as foolish as they are. And the biggest fool—as well as the biggest coward in all of this—is Mr. Moore. He could have turned this all around if he had forcefully reminded people, especially the review committee, what a school is for. It’s for opening the minds of the young—not locking up books. But
he
doesn’t know what a school is for.”

She got up from her chair and stood against the wall, looking steadily at Barney. “All right, young man, it is time to begin. During the two years before I left George Mason, there had been a growing number of what I
shall call censorship incidents. A parent complaining about a book in the library, and the Emperor of Smooth—Mr. Moore—coming to me and telling me to take that book off the shelves. Well, I—I am not much of a fighter and, I am ashamed to tell you this, I went along. I like this town, I grew up in this town, I was graduated from George Mason, and I didn’t want to lose my job there.”

The church clock across the street was striking five. “A lovely, mournful sound,” Mrs. Salters said. “I shall miss those bells. However. As these incidents continued, it was getting harder and harder for me to just follow orders. I felt like such a—a collaborator. A collaborator in evil. What’s the difference between burning a book, like the Nazis did, and hiding it?

“Then one day, he came to me, that oleaginous man, and said that
Our Mutual Friend
would have to be taken off the open shelves. I must tell you, young man, that Charles Dickens is my oldest and most reliable friend. I have every one of his novels, and I keep coming back to them. It may be, it probably is, a deficiency in my character, but the people in Mr. Dickens’s books are more real to me, more dear to me, than most of the people I know in so-called real life. So Mr. Moore was telling me to lock up a book by my best friend—a book that was full of real people I had known for so many years.”

“What could there be in a Charles Dickens novel that would offend anyone?” Barney asked.

Karen Salters smiled thinly. “There are people who
are offended that everyone, in or out of books, is not exactly like them. But, to be specific, the parent who had complained about
Our Mutual Friend
objected, he said, to the violence in the book. There
is
murder, and attempted murder besides, although all the evildoers are ultimately punished. Quite dreadfully punished.

“The parent also complained,” she went on, “that there is lust in the book. And so there is; but the person who lusted after a marvelously brave young woman never fulfilled his intentions. And as a consequence of his lust, he died a terrible death. The parent had one more complaint. There is anti-Semitism in the book, he charged. True. A despicable character
is
anti-Semitic, and one of the ways Dickens makes him so despicable is by showing this character’s vicious bigotry. Oh, I can’t go on defending a book that needs no defense.”

Karen Salters left her place by the wall and seated herself opposite Barney. “Well, I told Mr. Moore—who, of course, had not read
Our Mutual Friend
but would have acted the same way if he had—I told him the very same things I have just told you. He would not be moved. A parent had complained, and
Our Mutual Friend
had to be put away. I brooded and brooded. I should have just quit, but, well, as I told you, I did so like being the librarian where I had gone to school. Are you sure you wouldn’t like a Coca-Cola?”

Barney was sure.

“I sent Mr. Moore a letter,” she continued. “I told him I had discovered an extremely troubling section in a book in the library, and I wanted his advice as to
whether we should remove that book from the shelves before there were complaints. Because surely there would be a great fuss once a parent found out about those passages.

“The story”—Karen Salters looked as if she were still shocked by the memory of it—“was about a man, a family man, who also lived with a concubine. Do you know what that is?”

“A woman who stays with a man but she’s not married to him,” Barney answered.

“Quite right. How did they ever let you learn that? Anyway, in a fit of anger, this concubine left the man she had been living with and went back to her father’s house many miles away. The man she had left went after her. He persuaded his concubine to return with him; and on the way back, as the sun was setting, they needed a place to stay for the night in a town that turned out to be unfriendly. But one person did take them in. While they were all having dinner, some awful, awful men in the neighborhood tried to break into the house because they wanted to have sex with the man who was traveling with his concubine.”

Barney frowned. “With the man?”

“With the man,” Karen Salters said firmly. “They wanted to rape the man. Well, he didn’t want to be raped. So he took his concubine and offered her to these men. They took her and sexually abused her all through the night. At dawn they let her go, and when the man came out of the house the next morning to continue his journey home, he found his concubine on
the threshold. She was dead. He put her body across his donkey, and when he got home, he took a knife and cut her into twelve pieces.”

Barney looked decidedly uncomfortable. “What a sick story.”

“He then sent those pieces of her body,” Karen Salters continued calmly, “to the heads of the towns and cities in the land in which he lived. He asked them for help in taking vengeance against the men who had abused her and killed her. And she was avenged.”

“Wow,” Barney said,
“that
is a disgusting story. What awful kind of book is it in?”

Karen Salters smiled. “The book containing that story, young man, is the Bible. To be specific, it’s in Chapter Nineteen of the Book of Judges.”

“But”—Barney was puzzled—“why did you call Mr. Moore’s attention to it then? You can’t throw the Bible out of the library.”

“Precisely my point,” she said triumphantly. “Here was my old, dear friend, Charles Dickens, being punished for something so much milder, so much less shocking, than this story from the Bible. I told Mr. Moore that if he went ahead and locked up
Our Mutual Friend
, I would write to the newspapers and to the television stations and I would compare the passages from Mr. Dickens that the parent complained about with the story I just told you. And I would point out that Mr. Dickens was being treated very unfairly.

“Mr. Moore came to see me as soon as he received my letter, and, I must say, he was extremely angry.
How dare I try to embarrass him? If I were to go public on this matter, he would fire me, he said. But I told him that if he fired me, I would reveal all the books he had sneakily censored, in one way or another, during the past couple of years—without going through the school’s review procedures. Why shouldn’t I tell? What would I have to lose if I were fired?”

Karen Salters stopped and listened. But there were no sounds outside.

“Well,” she went on, “Mr. Moore huffed and puffed for quite a while. Firing me had suddenly lost its attractiveness, but he also wanted to soothe the parent complaining about Mr. Dickens. Would you believe that at one point he was thinking about keeping both
Our Mutual Friend
and the Bible in a locked cabinet? That idea lasted about two seconds. Of course, he couldn’t lock up the Bible. But then he decided that he
could
remove the nineteenth chapter of Judges from all the Bibles in the library. Nobody ever read in that part of the Bible, so nobody would notice the difference.”

“He was going to tear pages out of the Bible?” Barney was incredulous.

“He did. He did vandalize one copy of the Bible. And it wasn’t the first time he’d torn pages out of a book,” Karen Salters said dryly. “I could name you several poetry anthologies in the library that are no longer quite whole. Anyway, I told Mr. Moore that even if he went on to tear those pages out of every Bible we had, he couldn’t stop there. ‘Read,’ I said, ‘the thirteenth chapter in the second Book of Samuel.’ ”

“What’s in there?” Barney asked.

“One of King David’s sons rapes his sister.”