Jacqueline Elaine Scott
One long-ago summer smelt of old books when my vacation in LeRoy, New York coincided with my aunt’s unfinished spring attic cleanup project. An earthy, papery scent clung to my nostrils and fingertips, beckoning me to dive into the sea of books, each time I passed by this not-at-all secret, not-the-least-bit-hidden cache of near waist-high stacks of hardcovers from my mother’s childhood. This tsunami of books I vowed to wade through over that summer spanned the length of the narrow upstairs hallway leading to my back bedroom in the eaves of the old house where my mother grew up.
As I periodically raided the windfall of books throughout that summer, I couldn’t believe my good fortune in having arrived at 15 East Avenue just when removing this sea of books had lost interest for my aunt apparently or she’d likely gotten distracted by more pressing household chores. I will never know whether it had been left out intentionally by her for me, as irresistible as a tin of tuna to a tabby, but its musty scent lured me. The enormity of the stacks piqued my curiosity: Which was my mother’s favorite? Did she have a beloved author? Did my mother have to be coaxed into or out of reading when this was her trove of books? Her mother, my grandmother, Ruth Steverson Brooks, as a divorced mother of four, somehow managed to buy all these books for her children on a cook’s wage. Why had mine, a Howard alum, never purchased a single book for me, her eager reader?
Ruth’s mother, my great grandmother, Kate Lee Steverson, a former slave, could neither read nor write, yet recognized the importance of doing so upon becoming the mother of the first Colored student–her eldest daughter– to graduate the same upstate New York village high school my mother had a generation later.
An ancient, upholstered settee with ornately carved dark wood armrests, legs and ornamentation below the seat cushion occupied the width of the wall outside the bathroom at the opposite end of the upstairs hallway from my summer bedroom. It always wore a clean white protective sheet to discourage lingering though it was seldom a place anyone did. Beside it stood a solid, dark wood bookcase. Along the top and on both its shelves laden with old books I never looked at, lived a menagerie of colorful, porcelain figurines that fascinated me when I was young. They were of the look-but-don’t-touch variety, so I did and I didn’t. It took every ounce of my childhood resolve not to play fetch with the delicate, cream-colored spaniel or pretend to sip tea with uplifted pinkie, poured from a miniature tea pot into an even tinier cup and saucer at an imagined tete-a-tete with the queen.
One day, years after my favorite summer when all those books vanished as if washed out to sea, waiting for the lone bathroom, I finally stooped to read the faded spines of the books along those shelves to discover several by Langston Hughes. I learned from my aunt, the Harlem poet/author had been a favorite of her mother. These were my grandmother’s books. I was a toddler when she died so we never got to know one another or to share our mutual love of reading. Although an adult now, it took until the end of the summer to screw up the courage to ask my aunt’s permission to take one home to Boston. The others I read over my remaining days in LeRoy, sensing my grandmother over my shoulder and her approval as I did.
Jacqueline Elaine Scott is (so far) a lifelong, avid reader, grateful for the first tiny Beatrix Potter book received from Marie Walker Scott (her paternal grandmother) that sparked her interest in art and books, for all the handwritten letters from her beloved aunt, Elaine Brooks Booten, her mother, Oma Brooks Scott, read aloud at the family dinner table that piqued her curiosity about writing, the deep love of reading she inherited from Ruth Steverson Brooks (her maternal grandmother) and for being taught by Mrs. Anderson in second grade how to proudly and with confidence manage cursive with her left hand. She shares her love for books with her two adult children and three young grandsons. Being a prison library clerk and driving her John Deere on the outside work crew were dream jobs.
Today she goes nowhere without a book, has amassed a tsundoku of her own and is belatedly finding her voice through drawing, singing and scribbling furiously daily before she forgets. She has always wanted a pony (in theory) but currently lives alone in a tiny basement unit where one wouldn’t fit anyway. Having a drawing in the Fall 2022 MFA Portraits of Leadership exhibit, the moxie to tell a story on The Moth July 2023 are now accomplished bucket list items.
Stone Quarterly 