Many shelves were just bare.
Melinsey Blue pushed her book cart down the juvenile non-fiction aisle. The bookcase was three shelves high and a display of books on top. The top shelf was half full, the middle a quarter, and there was nothing on the bottom shelf.
She picked a book from her cart. The True History of the Founders by Mike Huckabee. She noted the cover illustration - Jesus with his arms wrapped around George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Amazing, she thought. Jesus supporting two deists who were also slaveowners. Not what she would expect from WWJD (What Would Jesus Do).
Butt that's the way it was at Crowley Patriot Library. Everything had to be approved through the Patriot Board. It wasn't a public library anymore. Oh, sure, it was founded by government funds, but that's where it ended. That money was given to a private entity to run and manage the 'public library."
The Patriot Board has seven members. Three are selected from mega-churches - one from the two largest Baptist congregations and a third from a Pentecostal church. Two others were chosen from other Kingdom-approved churches. The Crowley City Council and the Dixon County Commission nominated the last two.
When the Kingdom emerged, every book was taken off the shelf. Once the new board was established, they would approve individual books brought back okayed by Kingdom censors.
She grabbed another book to reshelve, The Fight for Kingdom Island by Kirk Cameron, part of the Brave book series that dominated the shelves.
Melinsey was the last staff member left from the time before, when it was truly a public library. Her brother, Larry, had urged her to quit, but she was determined to stick it out. She had spent a lifetime hiding who she was and how she felt, so subjugating her feelings was nothing new to her.
She wasn't very tall, standing just a half-foot higher than the shelves she stacked. She had long, black hair (Kingdom culture seemed to prefer women to have long hair - she didn't care; it was an easy way to blend in), thin but wiry, thick-framed glasses, dark brown eyes that occasionally lit up with her intellectual curiosity but most often presented an impenetrable blank slate.
She picked another book from her cart, one of the most important, because she had put it there. It was a plain-looking hardback, the spine indicating it was The History of Salt by Roger Peters. But that's not what was inside. Inside, once you turned to page 44, was another book, I Am Rosa Parks, by Brad Meltzer.
She put this book on the second shelf, at the end, in slight defiance of Dewey Decimal (it didn't matter - she was the only one left at the library who had even a dim understanding of that filing system - one of the reasons that she was able to maintain her job).
It took some work. You had to pick an approved book, but you had to know it was never taken out. But many, many books were never taken out. Most other books were ignored once you got away from some of the big Kingdom-approved book lines, like Mike Huckabee's and Brave.
The truth is once the Christian Right took over the library, they seldom used it. They had little interest in reading anything of any type. Their primary goal was to ensure others couldn't access books that went against their own views.
A select few knew about the books within the books, and they came in and checked out the books she had rigged. The truth is still out there - if you knew where to look.
You would think one of the many pro-Kingdom employees would notice the books that were checked out and wonder why. But they never reflected that deep a level of curiosity. They were more interested in the food treats brought in (sometimes by Melinsey) and gossiping within themselves or the Christian right mons that would come in than they were in anything about their jobs.
Yes, Melinsey had been very fortunate, and it made her feel good that she could fight the power in her own way.
She looked up towards the desk and saw someone staring at her, a curious look on their face. It's the new hire, someone who had moved from Macon, someone Melinsey didn't know.
Melinsey's intuition was blaring alarms in her head. This may be someone who is not easily fooled. And there was no way of knowing - was she a Kingdom true believer? Was she a rebel like Melinsey?
There was no direct way to know. No clever way to interrogate and find the truth of where the new hire stood. If the new hire was like Melinsey, then whatever the true stance, that would be covered with allegiance to the Kingdom, real or not.
The new hire moved out from the desk, strolling towards the children's section, sliding ever closer to where Melinsey stood.
Is this the end? Is this where Melinsey would be caught, dismissed, and all the good she tried to do erased? Or would she find another ally?
Stay tuned to this blog!
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