Before my brothers were born, so I would be six or younger, my mother got me my very own library card in my own name. I don’t remember this first milestone, but I am sure I loved whatever library we visited. I loved books even then. I loved them so much that I borrowed many books. That’s what the records said anyway. We hadn’t returned the books before we moved, the records said. It had been so long since we borrowed the books, the library said we had to just come out and pay for the books. Valued at a few hundred dollars. Even if we found the books, and even if we found them and they hadn’t been damaged, the late fees just capped off at a certain point. The library wanted their money. And until we forked over the full amount, no payment plans, I was on the library’s blacklist.
We moved again. And again. And again. New town, and two new siblings. While we sat in for a story time in progress, my mother filled out the forms for library cards. One was given to each of my siblings, in their own names. My name wasn’t among them. My name was flagged with an outstanding balance that my mother insisted was a mistake. We left the library in a huff and piled back into our van. There was whining and disappointment and above all, the desire to stay longer in that brightly painted, air-conditioned keeper of the stories. We were all surprised when we got our wish.
My mother had driven a few miles to the library in the next town over.
“Good thing I gave you four names then, isn’t it?” she pulled down her sunglasses and winked.
We piled out of the van again, single file, vibrating with excitement. The high from the first library mixed with the low of the quick exit only to again come back to excitement. There was never any telling where a day could take you, and on this one, it took us to two libraries in one afternoon.
We compared the lobby and the kid’s area in this new library, and my mother motioned my siblings free to explore.
“Come, Elizabeth,” she said, half her mouth in a smile, the other half bitten shut to keep from laughing.
So for a while, when I went to the library my name was Elizabeth, which is actually my middle name. Well. One of my middle names. My mother gave all of us kids two middle names because why have three names when you can have four?
Unfortunately for me, the gig didn’t last long enough. I had to write research papers and list sources for school but was rejected from the library again. The library knew that Casey and Elizabeth were the same person based on the required social security number. More than a decade later, again I was denied a library card until the outstanding fees, FROM BEFORE I WAS SIX, were paid in full. My mother didn’t have a spare social security number, so driving to the next town wouldn’t solve the problem this time.
It could be frustrating, but I mostly got around it. I had my siblings check out books for me, all the while sweating bullets. All it would take was one librarian to find it odd my seven-year-old brother was checking out Sweet Valley High’s “The New Jessica” and my privileges could be gone for good.
Luckily, the library at my school wasn’t connected with the library system haunting me no matter where I moved. I was free to check out books like any other kid there. I spent a lot of time in my school libraries.
I was in public school in eighth grade. When health class got to the sex education unit, my mother signed the form with a large NO circled. No, I could not watch poor quality VHS tapes that showed diagrams of the body and said penis sending adolescents into uncontrollable giggles.
If I had questions about sex I could ask her, she told me. We were Seventh Day Adventists, a strict and conservative religion. There was no need for me to learn about sex from my secular teachers. The same teachers waiting in the shadows to pluck kids like me off the straight and narrow path and join them on the road to damnation.
No, my mother said. The other option offered was independent study time in the school library.
“That’s perfect!” my mother decided. “When you were old enough I took you to the library myself and we looked at books about what goes on in your body, remember?” I did.
A week later I find I have the library to myself, being the only one not watching a condom put on a banana or whatever goes on in those things. The library did not have computers or many bells and whistles, but it did have Harry Potter.
Harry Potter was absolutely forbidden. By Seventh Day Adventists, by my mother, and all our godly congregation. A lot of things were forbidden growing up as a Seventh Day Adventist, but there was definitely a scale. Could you bring chicken to the potluck? Most of the church was vegetarian, but you could get away with being a Badventist, sure. But you would never ever ever see pork. That was REALLY forbidden. Sinful. Evil. Against. The. Rules.
And so was Harry Potter.
I had tried to read it before, in seventh grade. A dear friend loaned me the first book every day during geography. I was gifted at tuning out chaos and zoning into stories and plugged away one class period at a time. I didn’t get to finish before the year was over.
I was afraid keeping my sinful reading a secret would cause my family punishment of some kind. I also believed, as a Seventh Day Adventist, that there would be a period of ten thousand years after the end of the world where the holy could look at every single thing I ever did, thought or dreamt. They were going to find out I read the forbidden book eventually anyway, and the guilt was burning in my stomach. Or maybe that was acid reflux. I came clean about reading the witchcraft to my parents and church.
A year later, with a library free of peering Seventh Day Adventist eyes, I decided to sin again. In rebellion. For being the weird kid at school. Again. For all the restrictions and forbidden experiences off-limits to a good Adventist.
Anxiously I started at the beginning, reading cover to cover in two school days. I absorbed the second book and the rest of the series, all from my school library. The whole series binged in the time it took my classmates to learn what an ovary was. My fingernails were bitten to bleeding and still, I could not find the evil pagan witchcraft my church had warned us was the work of the devil. I had read carefully, examining plot lines closely and searching for double meanings, the whole time well aware future holy eternal beings would see my sin. A sin I already repented for once and here I was again, tearing through the gateway pages.
I was disappointed. It was well written but lacked satanic ceremony instructions. It didn’t seem so demonic to me. I wondered if this was reverse psychology. The build up and anticipation, the chapters read, one class at a time, each day wondering if today was the day I would read words from the devil. With all that to live up to, Snape’s whole arc was a bit anti-climactic.
It sucks when you’ve made this huge conscious decision to sin and try to earn some street cred by reading the devils books, and instead it’s all Hufflepuff and Quidditch and coming of age romance. If I wanted predictable, I would have picked up an Agatha Christie.
Twenty years later it is the secular world that hates J.K. Rowling rightfully so, for her transphobic hate. If she had shown the Seventh Day Adventists this side, they would have made reading the Harry Potter Series a Badge in our Pathfinders group (Seventh Day Adventist Girl Scouts).
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