Miss Ballenger's Library

    Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. The Witch of Blackbird Pond. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. A Wrinkle in Time. Johnny Tremain. Sounder. I, Juan de Pareja. The Bronze Bow. Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze. And Now Miguel. Island of the Blue Dolphins. The Secret of the Andes. I was introduced to—and read—all of these books in Miss Ballenger’s 5th grade classroom library in Portage Park School on the northwest side of Chicago in the 1971-72 school year. Miss Ballenger, in my memory 50 years later, is a stern, solid woman, always clothed in a dress like my grandma would wear, nylons, and shoes with sensible heels. I’d say she was toward the later end of middle-age, but I was 10. What did I know? She was an adult. She might actually have been 35. But what I do know is that underneath her often frowning exterior was a vital imagination. For how else could she have known what I needed to read? How else could she have picked the keys to broaden my world, opening my mind’s eye to varied periods and places in history, different cultures, as well as to the friendships I needed with fictional adolescent girls like myself? 

    I discovered all of these in the pages of books on the shelves of the three bookcases set up in the front corner of our classroom, right near the tall windows that overlooked the playground. The shelves formed walls around a bright, multi-colored carpet with large, poufy pillows strewn on it. We could sit there reading after we’d finished work; we were invited to choose a book for quiet reading time or to take home with us; and weekly—I think on Friday afternoons—Miss Ballenger would read to us from one of the novels on the Newberry Award list, and we would play Newberry bingo, placing dried peas on cardboard grids she’d made with the title of a different award-winning book in each square. 

    Immersing myself in the novels I named above, I learned about a boy living in the Jim Crow South in the late 1800s (Sounder), about a boy living in Revolutionary War-era Massachusetts (Johnny Tremain), about life in Peru, China, Spain, and first century Palestine (Secret of the Andes, Young Fu, Juan de Pareja, and The Bronze Bow, in which Jesus was a character). This might explain my continued love for historical fiction. I was introduced to fantasy—another genre I still pivot toward—with A Wrinkle in Time, and to girls my age who had similar worries and questions as I in Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. Oh, to get away from home, live in a history museum, and solve a mystery, like Claudia in Konigsburg’s novel! She and Margaret became my good friends. 

    Over the years, a number of these books have made the American Library Association’s list of challenged and banned books: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret for being “sexually offensive and immoral,” according to some parents in Alabama and Wisconsin in the early 1980s and in other places at other times; The Witch of Blackbird Pond for allegedly promoting witchcraft; Sounder for use of the n-word. A Wrinkle in Time has been challenged frequently over the years from different angles. According to Carnegie-Mellon University’s Banned Books Project, “These challenges focused mainly on the book’s blend of religion, the supernatural, and science, and has been criticized both for being too religious and for being not religious enough.” And I know that these classroom library books’ contribution to a multi-cultural education is part of what so many conservative parents and politicians want to shield children from now. 

    But I am still, to this day, grateful to Miss Ballenger for not bowing to any pressure there might have been out there in the early ‘70s and for allowing me to read them all. Exposure to her classroom library for 9 months during very formative years of my life had a strong influence on me, but did not magically transform me into the liberal/progressive person I am and have been for decades. I know from spending too much time on Facebook that many of my fellow students at Portage Park School, like me, developed liberal/progressive politics, but many have embraced Donald Trump’s new conservatism. Those who sat in Miss Ballenger’s classroom, with those books in the corner, during their fifth-grade year were apparently not stopped from adopting MAGA politics. I also know that this is just one of the many issues that divides Americans today, but just what are Ron DeSantis and the many legislators, school board members, and parents of Florida, who are making Florida teachers box up their classroom libraries, so worried about? Yes, Florida children might have their worlds and minds expanded into vistas of which their parents and governor don’t approve. And maybe they would like it. But, maybe they wouldn’t. I find it sad that these children—for a while at least—won’t have the freedom to find out by having a wonderful year like mine, back in 5th grade, sitting cross-legged on one of the big pillows in Miss Ballenger’s classroom library.