Lincoln has always been my escape. I don’t want to imply that 3.5 acres on the edge of a small town 20 minutes south of the city is a prison, but 24 hours six days a week there, with four brothers as company, can sure make it feel like one. Getting groceries with Mom on Fridays was crucial to my sanity, such as it was — partly for the time away from home, and partly for the time at the library. I lived for those weekly trips.
When I was 8, 9, and 10, I’d get armfuls of books, limited only by Mom’s insistence that it wouldn’t be fair to other readers if I checked out all the Boxcar Children at once. We mostly visited the Walt Branch, and I would browse the YA section for anything that looked historical or horse-related, like The Little White Horse or the “Dear America” books. While my brothers logged on to play Neopets or Adventure Quest, I’d curl up in one of the big, red, overstuffed chairs with The Blue Sword or Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, and the world would go away until Mom started rounding us all up to leave.
When I was 11 or 12, time at the library became even more precious due to the loss of our library cards, when Dad found out I was still reading “trashy fiction” despite being “too old” to waste my time on such unproductive pursuits. This was a traumatic event, partly because it was so avoidable and partly because of the ramifications. My brothers and I had rented Monsters, Inc. while Mom was out of town. This secret was major enough that when Dad asked why I hadn’t been doing a chore I hadn’t realized I was supposed to be doing, I panicked and blurted out a forbidden novel’s title, instead of the child’s biography of Geronimo that sat at my bedside in the alibi role. Monsters, Inc. remained undiscovered, but I got spanked, my brothers were disgusted that I couldn’t keep a secret, and Dad was extra suspicious for a few months.
Having demonstrated that I was too much of a security risk to know that Mom still had one secret library card, I was no longer allowed to check out books, but I spent those precious hours every week devouring Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tamora Pierce, and the X-men comics. The back room at Bennett Martin Library with the view onto the little brick-paved garden became my weekly haven, and I tore through The Lioness Quartet on its low chairs, only slightly fazed by skipping the second book and going back to it when someone returned it after I’d read the other three.
This is probably about the same time I started rereading Lord of the Rings obsessively, as my oldest brother had hidden our battered ‘60s paperback editions instead of destroying when Dad first began purging the family library. While Frodo and Sam’s adventures challenged the paternal paradigm only insofar as they were purely fantasy, not even attaining C.S. Lewis’ allegorical heresy, I learned habits of defiance that later led to more radical reading material, as Mom slipped me Lois McMaster Bujold’s space operas, a showcase of conflicting worldviews in 16 books (so far). While Dad successfully instilled an aversion to Harry Potter so deep that I didn’t read the series until after graduating college, and still haven’t seen the movies, he was too late to nip my taste for fantasy and science fiction in the bud.
Charles de Lint and Mercedes Lackey primed me with tolerance and acceptance so that actual regular exposure to people outside my immediate family group could, once I started college, nudge me the rest of the way away from the claustrophobic fundamentalism of home.
My taste for the forbidden fruits of Lincoln City Libraries was the cause of my initial conviction that I was going to hell. If I was doomed already for defying my father’s commands to read theology and learn to make my own clothes instead of reading about women disguised as men becoming knights, then what difference did it make whether I lied about things like where I’d been until 4 a.m., as well as what I’d been reading lately? When I finally started openly wearing pants around Dad, it seemed like a natural progression from secretly reading Georgette Heyer’s Shakespearean romps about girls who chop off their hair and “borrow” their cousins’ trousers. And my chivalrous instincts around other girls finally made sense as more than just identifying with Ivanhoe and Aragorn when I realized, several years into my relationship with my now-husband that I was bisexual.
Without Lincoln City Libraries, I still might not have ever been the woman my father raised me to be: modest, obedient, housewifely, and married to one of the nice Christian boys who, somehow, all loved Lord of the Rings. But I don’t know if I would have turned into the woman my mother was slyly raising me to be: liberal, feminist, atheist, and hopefully of value to my community, not just my family.
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