Day 12 Friday, February 23, 2024: Houston, Mississippi to Morrilton, Arkansas

Carnegie libraries visited: Clarksdale, Arkansas

Clarksdale, Mississippi

Clarksdale, Mississippi has the blues, bad. Its population has fallen almost a third since the year 2000. Per capita income was under $12,000 in 2020, just a third of the national average. Forty percent of the population lived in poverty. The Gopher Prairie of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street may have been ugly, but at least it was young. Clarksdale, if not dead, seems to be in hospice. Yet it sings. Sam Cooke, John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, and many other musicians call it home. The town’s Wikipedia page lists 55 persons – all male, and mainly athletes or musicians  – who were born there and were famous enough to have their own wikipedia pages. Another 20 persons of note (all male) include Morgan Freeman, Muddy Waters, and Tennessee Williams who lived or worked there. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who “revolutionized cavalry tactics” and who became first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and who owned 37 slaves in the county in which Clarksdale is located, is not listed. His role in the massacre of hundreds of black and white Union prisoners of war remains a matter of controversy.

The Delta Blues Museum, Clarksdale’s main tourist attraction, began inside the Carnegie Library, when its director Sid Graves put up a blues display in 1984. “Graves single-handedly nurtured the beginnings of the museum in the face of an indifferent community and an often recalcitrant Library Board, at times resorting to storing displays in the trunk of his car when denied space in the library.” In 2000, the Blues Museum was moved out and that space became the children’s department.

Clarksdale Public Library

Today the Carnegie library is quiet. I had a nice chat with the security guard – one passes through metal detectors to enter the building, giving it a “no, we don’t trust you” feel  – who said he’d rather be out riding his motorcycle on this crisp, sunny day. The library is spacious, as the original building was expanded considerably in 1970.

Courtney, the library’s director, is eager to help me. The handout (“Library Centennial Timeline”) Courtney provided contains barebones information – a list of dates – on the library’s history. The item that caught my eyes concerned Hoyland Lee Wilson, the  library’s first trained librarian. Hoyland – I love that rare name – was born in Tennessee in 1886, one of the eight children of Joseph and Annie Wilson. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, before earning her degree in library science from Columbia University. Prior to moving to Clarksdale, she had worked in the St. Louis Public Library. Hoyland served this library for 33 years before resigning in 1948. She died in 1979, at the age of 93, leaving no heirs.

In an undated picture (which I seem to have lost) but possibly soon after getting her library degree, Hoyland is wearing a high-necked white blouse with a cameo brooch at the neck. Her head is tilted slightly, leaving part of her face in the shadows. Her hair is short yet sassy and parted on the left side. She looks directly into the camera, with just a hint of a smile.

To me, she is beautiful. I have hesitated even to mention any of the physical features of the library women I have met. I wish I could be as direct in my descriptions as Rita Goldman is in her Tales of a Female Nomad. I hesitate in order to avoid the “male gaze.” The male gaze, as Laura Mulvey puts it in the New Yorker essay “The Invention of ‘The Male Gaze’,”by Lauren Michele Jackson, “projects its fantasy onto the female figure”. 

I can find no records of anyone else in the United States with Hoyland as a given name, although it is the surname of a rather small number of families here. The family name comes from parishes in Yorkshire, England. The 1940 census, collected while she was working at the Clarksdale library, reports that 100 percent of Hoyland females worked as teachers. I suspect that this Hoyland was the entire population of them.

It seems that Hoyland – Miss Wilson – attended the first library school (“School of Library Economy”) in the US, established by Melville Dewey at Columbia University in 1886. Dewey is best known for creating the Dewey Decimal System, a method for classifying books which is still used in many public libraries today, although he was also one of the founders of the American Library Association. He also tinkered with a simplified spelling system, changing his first name to Melvil and for a time spelling his last name “Dui”. Dewey’s simplified spelling system was not successful in gaining many adherents, but he did get a notable one: Andrew Carnegie. 

Despite Carnegie’s riches, he was not successful in persuading politicians or the public to follow him. He himself did not give it up, and he continued to use it for at least some words (enuf for enough, for instance) long enough that his friend Mark Twain roasted him in a speech given in 1907: 

You would think, looking at him [Carnegie], that he had never committed a crime in his life. But no--look at his pestiferous simplified spelling. You can't any of you imagine what a crime that has been.  Torquemada was nothing to Mr. Carnegie. That old fellow shed some blood in the Inquisition, but Mr. Carnegie has brought destruction to the entire race.  I know he didn't mean it to be a crime, but it was, just the same. He's got us all so we can't spell anything. 

In establishing Columbia’s library school, Dewey insisted that female students be admitted and so, in fact, 17 of the first 20 students were female. Women were not otherwise admitted to Columbia at that time, so Dewey might be seen as a champion of women’s rights. Learning this, I wanted to laud Dewey as a hero for having the wisdom to open a library school and for opening its educational opportunities to women when those opportunities were few. And, yet, Dewey’s “pattern of sexual harassment was so egregious that women like [Adelaide] Hasse dared to speak out against it, at a time when women were harshly judged for reporting sexual harassment. So many came forward that he was kicked out of the [American Library Association] profession’s most prestigious association.”

The state of Arkansas is bisected roughly from the northeast to the southwest. My youth was spent in the rugged northwest part of the state, home to the Ozark and Ouachita mountains. The southeast part of the state is delta country. I worked there on a research farm for a couple of summers when I was in high school. Each day was epitomized by two prayers. When the delta sun beat down, the prayer was “Please, let there be clouds.” When clouds came over, the mosquitos came out: “Please, let there be sun.”

Randall was my tennis doubles partner those summers. Randall was from Stuttgart, in the delta – the “Rice and Duck Capital of the World” – and he was the Duck Calling Champion of the World. For his age group. This meant he beat out two other contestants, also from Stuttgart.

We were either the state champions in tennis, or the runners-up, depending on how you look at it. At the state tournament that year, we made it to the finals, and were prepared to play for the championship. We were on the court at the scheduled time, and our opponents were not. After 15 minutes, and per the tournament rules, we claimed victory by default. The tournament’s director denied our claims, giving some excuse I don’t remember. We insisted. He refused, and stated that our match would be rescheduled for the following day. We were righteously pissed. The following day, both we and our opponents showed up at the appointed time. We asserted once more that we were the champions by default, and (as I recall) our opponents said, or taunted, something to the effect of “Oh, c’mon, let’s just play.” We refused, and the tournament director declared our opponents champion by default.

I doubt that at that  time I knew the term “class consciousness” although I remember the feeling. All the important tennis tournaments of that era in Arkansas were held at country clubs in Little Rock. The Little Rock players got the more favorable draws, the more favorable times, the more favorable courts. Those from the hinterlands – Stuttgart, Fayetteville – did not. Players from the country clubs had better coaches, better equipment, better courts. The rules would be bent to the advantage of those from the capital, not those from the provinces. The players from Little Rock were generally better than those from outside it, but I believed that was simply because they had all these other advantages. If only, I thought, we could hold tournaments in my town, on my courts, then the world would be different: I would be the champion, then. 

Even 50 years later I feel the sting of being a second-class citizen in the tennis community. How much greater must be the indignity of a person living an entire life of diminished status? 

Magnolia, Arkansas, in the southwestern corner of the state, was the home of one of my other memorable tennis adventures. In the semifinals of a tournament there, I had lost the first set and was losing the second. (The tournament’s matches were the best two of three sets.) I hit a ball that was sailing to the fence and would clearly fall outside the lines. Before the ball hit the ground, my opponent caught it, calling it “out.” I responded “No, it’s not. It didn’t hit the ground. A ball is not “out’ until it does so.” We argued for a bit (“Are you kidding me? That ball was out.” “No, it wasn’t; it never hit the ground.”) I stood my ground and he finally conceded. Clearly flustered, he spent the rest of the match trying to catch me on some rules violation. I won the match easily, and the finals, too. The lesson I learned was that it was possible to exploit the law to gain an advantage over an opponent. I am surprised that I did not become a lawyer. Maybe it was because using rules to take advantage of people nauseates me.