How My Love of Reading Started

Photo by: Glass Bottle Photo

I remember sitting in an office that even at seven years old I thought was tiny, more a closet. I didn’t have good memories of being in that space. I didn’t completely understand what the woman speaking to my Mom was saying, but I understood that it wasn’t good.

 The tone in my Mom’s voice was firm, and she grabbed my hand, and we left the room. In the car on the way home she told me that the woman was a reading specialist and they wanted to put me in special classes because I wasn’t reading at the level of the other kids in my grade. Now, let me stop right here and say that there’s nothing wrong with anyone who learns at a different pace than everyone else. Who “falls short” of an arbitrary guideline. We all learn differently.

In this case, however, we were dealing with some racial bias. I grew up in northern Virginia in the later 1980s/early 1990s, and my Mom had placed me in a school outside of my neighborhood where students are immersed in Japanese for half of the day because she thought it would be an advantage for her daughter to be able to speak another language from a young age. Racism was pervasive in this school. I was constantly terrorized by teachers, students, and the school administration. I’d come home nearly every day crying.. One particular memory I have is of being told to “take off my Black skin and put on my white skin because I’d be much cleaner.” Then when I would try to defend myself, I’d end up in the principal’s office and told that I was overreacting. My Mom offered many times to take me out of that school, but I didn’t want to quit so she let me stay.

So, another tactic to hold me back was to try to put me in a system that would be impossible for me to get out of, and put me at an even greater disadvantage in my education. My reading specialist told me that some kids, like me, just weren’t smart. My Mom believed in my intelligence though and committed to working on reading with me. She told me that I couldn’t be put into a category at seven years old because they’d never let me out of it. We went to the library and got an armful of books. Her and my dad sat with me with me every day reading for hours even though my little brother, who was two at the time, was constantly running around. They subscribe to the I Can Read Book Series, so I constantly had new books coming in.

The cover of the first version of Jane Eyre I read

 I remember the first book that I ever read by myself. It was called What Time Is It? What started as my Mom’s effort to ensure that my future wasn’t written from the age of seven turned into a full love. A whole new world opened up. After I got a handle on reading, you would regularly find me with my nose in a book. I learned how to walk down the hall in school and read at the same time. The first really big book I read was Little Women, and I read Jane Eyre in when I was 11 and was then obsessed with reading the classics.

Soon, I’d started consuming books so quickly that my Mom would make me get more than one book when we’d go to the library or bookstore because she didn’t want to be right back there the next day. This led to the only time in my life I got detention in school. I would always speed through the assigned reading in English class, and in eighth grade, I hit my teacher’s very last nerve and was reading a book other than the assigned reading, so she gave me lunch detention…where I sat and read my book. I’m not sure if that was really a punishment. I was so scared to tell my Mom that I got detention but she just laughed and laughed. I’m sure she was thinking back to that little girl who was almost held back a year because she “couldn’t read.”

 So, like finding tea, my love of reading came from a place of darkness but soon added a richness to my life that I couldn’t have anticipated.

UP NEXT: I’ll tell you about my trip to the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England.