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TTE loved this street, not for the people or the shops but for the JJstone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter. He might, he knew, for he was a member of the branch in Harlem and was entitled to take books from any library in the city. But he had never gone in because the building was so big that it must be full of corridors and marble steps, in the maze of which he would be lost and never find the book he wanted. And then everyone, all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to many books, and they would look at him with pity. He would enter on day, when he had read all the books uptown, an achievement that would, he felt, lend him the poise to enter any building in the world. So slight is this incident from James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain that many readers will not even remember it, but the librarian finds himself pausing. For what is described here is a child denying himself freely offered access to literacy not because he rejects it, but because he feels it may reject him. Intimidated by the marble citadel, the youngster plays truant, waiting for another day to invade the alien culture on Fortysecond Street.
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