Carla Hayden still remembers the day when, more than fifty years ago, she realized the importance of library due dates. After school, while her mother was at work, she would walk to her local storefront library in Queens. “Week after week after week,” Hayden told me recently, she would check out “Bright April,” her favorite book. Then she would go to a store across the street and get a hamburger. But, one day, Hayden failed to return a book on time, and she had to spend her pocket money on the late fee. “I had to miss a hamburger,” she said. “That’s when I learned about fines.”
In the decades since, Hayden, who is sixty-four, has both levied and forgiven fines over the course of her long career as a public librarian. In the nineteen-seventies, during her first library job, in Chicago, she led story time in a storefront library—an experience that, she joked, trained her as a manager. “If you can negotiate story time with three- and four-year-olds,” she said, “that’s a skill you can take all the way up.” Hayden did: in 1993, after working as a museum librarian in Chicago and an assistant professor of library science in Pittsburgh, she became director of the public-library system of Baltimore, Maryland. This month, she was appointed Librarian of Congress, making her the leader of what may be the largest library in the world.
Hayden’s upbringing was less literary than musical: her father came from a long line of musicians, and her mother began playing piano at only three years old. Both parents had perfect pitch, a skill that Hayden says she acquired, too. But she found that her keen ear was better suited to stories than songs. “They could look at notes and hear music,” Hayden said. “I could look at text, and words, and hear a voice.” Hayden liked books because they fed her imagination, but she came to cherish them because they gave her a sense of self-recognition. The main character of Marguerite de Angeli’s “Bright April” was, like Hayden, an African-American girl who joins the Brownie Girl Scouts. “It meant a lot to see a little brown, rather skinny girl, in a Brownie outfit, complete with the beanie—and that’s what I had on.” In one scene, April tells a Brownie leader that she wants to run a store one day, and in response she’s told not to dream too big: discrimination might hold her back. “You mean there are some places we can’t go?” April asks. “You mean they might not let me be the boss in a big store?”
When Hayden looks back on that time, she often switches into librarian mode, reciting snippets of bookish wisdom. “Books should be mirrors, and they should be windows,” she told me. They should transport us to faraway lands, but they should also help us make sense of our own dinner table, our own city block. The years of Hayden’s youth saw radical changes in the lives of African-Americans: she was born in 1952, the year that the Supreme Court started to consider Brown v. Board of Education; in 1955, while Hayden was learning to read, Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. After her arrest, Rosa Parks wrote, in an open letter to daily newspapers: “At the Public Library, located near the downtown shopping section, a colored person will not be permitted to come in and read a book.” She added that a group of African-American students had recently tried to check out schoolbooks from the main library. “They were told the books were there but they would be sent to the branch library to be issued.”
American public libraries, though founded to expand access to information, also inherit a history of exclusion—something that Hayden has seen firsthand. More than eighty per cent of American librarians are women, but for two hundred years the role of Librarian of Congress was filled exclusively by white men. Hayden is the first woman, and the first African-American, to hold the position. Parks’s letter, meanwhile, is now housed in the Library of Congress, in a yellowed folder marked with the neat handwriting of a librarian. Scans of the letter are available online, thanks to a digitization initiative that is set to expand in coming years. Hayden is quick to point out that even a simple online scan can make a library more inclusive. Readers across the country, she said, should “be able to touch history in that way—and do it while they’re in a storefront library.”
The Library of Congress, which was founded in 1800 to serve the research needs of lawmakers, is home to a hundred and sixty-two million items and hundreds of miles of bookshelves. In 1870, a new copyright law made it a national depository, and it soon became a key resource for scholars and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. But despite the name, few Librarians of Congress have been professional librarians—past Presidents tended to select lawyers, historians, and writers. Franklin D. Roosevelt was once counselled by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter that “only a scholarly man of letters can make a national library a general place of habitation for scholars.” (Roosevelt appointed a poet, Archibald MacLeish.) Hayden, who holds a doctorate in library science, wants the Library to do more than support legislators and scholars. “We want to grow more scholars,” she said.
Discussing the many roles of public libraries, Hayden often mentions the 2015 riots in Baltimore, which began after Freddie Gray’s arrest by city police resulted in his death. As Baltimore’s streets began to fill with demonstrators, Hayden got a phone call from a library branch. “In the epicenter was that Pennsylvania Avenue branch, right on the corner, right across from that drugstore that was burned,” she said. “The librarian at that site saw people coming down the street, and then some of the public outside running into the library for safety. That’s when she locked the doors.” To get away from the two-story glass windows, the branch librarian led everyone to the children’s section.
Violence in the city unsettled everyone, and ultimately left dozens of buildings burned or looted. But the next day, after a long discussion with her staff, Hayden gave the order to open the library. At the last minute, before she went to join her staff at the Pennsylvania Avenue branch, Hayden called her mother, half-expecting to be scolded. Her mother only offered a simple piece of advice: “Bring water and napkins.” In emergency situations, Hayden explained, libraries often become distribution points for basic services—hence the water. And the napkins? “Well, you always need napkins.” Hayden’s mother, a retired social worker who had once given free piano lessons at the Chicago Public Library, was eighty-three at the time. “By the time the week was over,” Hayden said, “my mom was there,” in the library, to help. As riots in the city subsided, she staffed the information desk.
Though that day was among the most dramatic Hayden has experienced, it was hardly the first time she had seen a library become a place of refuge. During her first job, as a children’s public librarian in Chicago, she met a boy named Leonard. He had a cleft lip, and “he was teased a lot,” she said. Leonard soon became a library regular, and Hayden gave him small tasks like organizing the card catalogue (which, as it happens, used the Library of Congress classification system). Each day, Leonard would wordlessly sit down and pick up where he’d left off. He seemed to take comfort in “the security and the safety of that library,” Hayden recalled. “He had a place.”
As Hayden rose through the ranks of the Chicago Public Library, her first patrons graduated from picture books to chapter books to novels; eventually, Leonard’s visits became less common. “By the time he was twelve,” Hayden said, “he would wave at me through the window, and not come in.” She considered this a small victory: Leonard had moved on from his sanctuary. “He didn’t need it as much,” she said. In moments of crisis, libraries help us look inward, and they help us look outward. But in moments of calm, they hold our stories, waiting for the next reader to come in.
