Roy Webb Junior High School, in 1964, sat out there swaddled in cotton bolls like a ship that had run aground and decided to stay put. It was the only place I ever saw where the flagpole rose higher than any tree in sight. We, the children who passed through its doors, believed it was the center of the known universe. You could look out the window and see nothing but white cotton stretching nearly to the horizon. Row upon row, like someone had planted clouds for the harvest.
That was where Mrs Agnes Studdard found me.
I was sittin’ in her fourth-grade classroom, halfway hid behind a dog-eared copy of a Louis L’Amour paperback I had no business readin’ during a geography pop quiz. I knew every outlaw and cattle trail from El Paso to the Pecos, and considered myself something of a frontier scholar. Mrs Agnes walked by, quiet as a ghost on fresh snow, and plucked that book up without so much as clearing her throat.
She didn’t scold me. Nor did she give me that look teachers give when they know you have chosen literature over map skills and land forms. She just held the book gently, turned it over, and said in her calm voice, “You like stories, Jim. But you’re readin’ the same kind of story over and over. That’s like eatin’ cornbread for every meal. Tasty, but it’ll make your soul lopsided.”
It was the first time I had ever heard learning described in terms of digestive consequences.
I waited for punishment.
I waited for the principal’s paddle.
I waited for a call sent home to she who must be obeyed.
Instead, she gave the book back to me.
“Finish your test,” she said. “Then meet me in the library during recess.”
I had no idea that Mrs. Agnes had just nudged open a door that would change the whole course of my life.
A Library With More Silence Than Space
Roy Webb’s library was small. A single room tucked in the center of the U-shaped school. It had once functioned as the lunchroom. It smelled of books and chalk, and that faint oil scent of Mr Bonds’ dust-mop. The card catalogue sat like a treasure chest along one wall. Grooved wooden drawers with shiny brass handles were filled with secrets and treasures.
Mrs. Agnes stood beside the counter with a stack of books taller than a good-sized watermelon.
She said, “I want you to meet some new friends. You already know cowboys. It’s time for you to meet the detectives, historians, poets, philosophers, and humorists.”
She laid out the first one.
Sherlock Holmes.
Then Mark Twain.
Then Agatha Christie.
Then a thick history of Alabama that looked as if it might cause back trouble in adults.
I stared at the titles with the kind of awe usually reserved for ghosts and famous baseball players.
“Pick one,” she told me.
“How do I know which one is good?” I asked.
“They’re all good in one way or another,” she said. “But you have to choose. Choice is the first freedom a reader earns.”
That woman had a way of turning a library into a kingdom.
I chose Sherlock Holmes. I clutched it with trembling hands as Mrs Agnes stamped the due date on the fly-leaf and card. I read it that night with a flashlight under the covers until my eyes felt like hot biscuits fresh out of the oven.
The next morning, I returned the book, bleary-eyed and grinnin’. Mrs Agnes didn’t comment. She simply handed me the next one in the stack.
A Keeper of Curiosity
Mrs. Agnes didn’t teach reading as much as she taught hunger. She showed me the Dewey Decimal System like she was lettin’ me in on a secret. She taught me how to read the spine labels, how to chase one subject through three different drawers of the card catalogue, and how a biography could lead you to a history book that led you to a humor book that led you back around to a novel.
She taught me that every book talked to another book, and that I could listen in if I learned how to ask the right questions.
Sometimes we would sit in the library long after the dismissal bell had rung. Kids would run out to their buses and holler across the playground while she and I sipped the cheap instant coffee the school kept in a metal tin. It tasted like burnt cardboard, but she drank it as if it came straight from heaven’s own percolator.
She would ask what I was reading that week, and I’d tell her everything in wide, breathless detail. She never yawned. Never glanced at the clock. Never hurried me along. She made me believe that stories mattered, and because of that, I came to believe I mattered too.
As I grew older, she moved from the classroom to the library full-time. I didn’t know it then, but she had found her true calling. Some folks tend gardens or churches. Mrs Agnes tended curious minds.
Outside the school, she became a friend. Not the syrupy kind who pinches cheeks and asks about grades. She was the kind you could talk to like an equal. We drank coffee together, real coffee by then, and she would ask what I was writin’, what I was thinkin’ about, and whether I had found a new author I couldn’t put down.
She never stopped encouragin’ me. She never stopped challengin’ me. She never once let me shrink my world down to somethin’ smaller than it could be.
The Legacy of a Librarian
There are teachers who go through the motions, teachers who mean well, and teachers who quietly change the entire course of your life without ever demanding credit.
Mrs Agnes Studdard was the latter.
She took a boy sittin’ in a cotton-field schoolhouse, and gave him a universe.
She took a reader of cowboy paperbacks and gave him mysteries, poets, explorers, and humorists. She taught him that knowledge had pathways, and that if he learned to follow them, there would be no locked doors in the world.
And when the years passed, and I found myself writin’ stories of my own, drinkin’ coffee on porches, and buildin’ whole towns out of my imagination, I knew exactly who had planted that seed.
It was the woman who said books were friends and libraries were kingdoms.
It was the woman who opened catalogue drawers and doors of the imagination.
It was the woman who taught a country boy that he could walk into a library and walk out changed.
Mrs Agnes Studdard shaped my life in ways no report card could measure.
I like to think she knew.
And if she didn’t, well, I reckon she knows it now.
New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.
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