“[Prudence Miller] wasn't willful about one thing: she
never used a partner, male or female. Women were more reliable than men; they
wouldn't steal your money and expect you to perform sexual feats with their
friends. But women thieves could be just as annoying. She'd had her fill of
them at the farm, where they read her diary and borrowed her books. Pru didn't
appreciate big fat fingers touching her personal library. Readers were like
pilgrims who had to go on their own pilgrimage. Pru was a pilgrim, or at least
that's what she imagined. She read from morning to night whenever she wasn't
out foraging for hard cash. One of her foster mothers had been a relentless
reader, and Prudence had gone right through her shelves, book after book:
biographies, Bibles, novels, a book on building terrariums, a history of
photography, a history of dance, and Leonard Maltin’s
Movie Guide, which
she liked the best, because she could read the little encapsulated portraits of
films without having to bother about the films themselves. But she lost her
library when she broke out of jail, and it bothered her to live without books.”—American
novelist-film critic Jerome Charyn, “White Trash,” in Bronx Noir,
edited by S. J. Rozan (2007)
The image accompanying this post, of Jerome Charyn at
the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival, was taken September 6,
2015, by fourandsixty.
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