Commentary: What the town kept and what it couldn’t lend

I was raised in Erin, Tennessee, by people who would drive forty minutes with a casserole to a family they had never liked, and I want that said before anything else, because everything I’m about to describe happened inside a place that loved me in the only currency it had on hand.

A small town gives a kid a kind of attention a city can’t afford. Everyone knew whose boy I was, so when I walked to church on a Wednesday there were six porches that would have noticed if I hadn’t arrived. I learned to sing in that building. I learned what it sounds like when a whole room agrees on something, and I learned that a casserole dish returned unwashed is a small insult while one returned clean with something in it is a conversation. Most of what I know about plot I took from the women at the folding table in the fellowship hall, passing the news down the line the way you pass a plate, with the worst part saved for whoever sat last.

I was also a Black gay boy in a place where the pulpit had already decided what I was, and nobody was cruel about it, which made it harder to argue with. Nobody had to be. The whole town was kind to a version of me that did not exist, and I spent my childhood learning to answer  to him, to fold my hands the way he would, to laugh at the right pause, to keep the other boy in the back room like a coat I wasn’t ready to be seen owning.

What I needed was proof that the coat could be worn, and proof lived in books. The books lived forty minutes away, or in a library that kept hours built for adults with cars. I remember the first book I took home that nobody at church would have approved of, and how I carried it against my stomach under my shirt, the way you carry something warm that might still be alive. I read it in the bathroom with the fan on. The fan was louder than I needed, and I think part of me wanted the house to hear that something was being kept in there.

It was a love story, and I didn’t know until I was grown that it had been a very ordinary one. What it gave me was the plain fact that a person like me had been written down, on purpose, by someone who stayed alive long enough to do it. Nobody in Erin could have given me that. They didn’t have it to give, and I have never held that against them.

Last week, Jefferson County Schools pulled 32 books from its libraries under Tennessee’s Age Appropriate Materials Act. The director of schools said that with 25,000 books and two librarians, nobody can know every word of every one, and I believe him, and I thought about the fan. I don’t know which 32 they were. I know there is a boy in that county tonight who is going to need something small and warm to carry home against his stomach, and that the shelf he would have reached for is a little emptier than the one I had, and mine was not full.

I don’t think the people deciding are villains, because I grew up among them and they brought me food when my grandmother died. That is what makes this hard to write. The same hands that held the dish are the hands that close the cabinet, and both are acts of love as they understand it, and neither one reaches the boy.

My family is still in Erin. When I call, they tell me who died, who got saved, and whose boy is home, and when they ask what I’m working on I say a book, and they say that’s nice, and we both let the pause do what it has always done. I love that town the way you love a house with one room painted shut. I don’t need it to stop being itself. I only wish someone had left one shelf low enough, and quiet enough, and nobody’s business, so that a boy could take what he needed home under his shirt and not have to wonder whether it would still be there the next time he was brave enough to go back.