When I was a kid, my mother, like many stalwart Southern women of her generation, had her hair fixed once a week at the beauty shop. Fixed is not an accidental verb. Her beauty operator—they weren’t hairdressers or hair stylists, and believe me, this wasn’t a salon—washed and rolled her hair and then put my mother under an enormous clear plastic shell of a hairdryer, where she’d read while her hair dried. When she emerged, the beauty operator would remove the curlers and fix my mother’s hair into the basic helmet shape it would retain for the next week. My mother did not have hallelujah hair. These were not elaborate rolls piled high on her head. This was a helmet, with some teasing and a little bit of a flip, rendered immobile by a suffocating cloud of spray net, which was what beauty operators who fixed hair in beauty shops used.
My mother’s beauty shop, the Fountain, was in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town that has received some deservedly bad press in its day, but we lived in a tiny town called Union, about fifteen miles away. She was a high school librarian, and during the academic year, she kept her weekly appointment at the Fountain on her way home from school—but during the summer, I often accompanied her. Using the Fountain as base camp, I explored all the shops around the square: Ben Franklin, where a tiny bottle of Evening in Paris could be bought for 25 cents, and Mars Brothers department store (a member of the Mars family, Florence Mars, wrote the book Witness in Philadelphia about the murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, which led to people dismissing Florence as always being “kind of different”), and Yates Pharmacy, which had an old soda fountain, where I was sometimes sent on a mission to buy grilled cheese sandwiches for everyone at the beauty shop.
My desire to smell like a Parisian, browse the jewelry and accessories at Mars Brothers, and hang out at the soda fountain was eclipsed by my infatuation with a place that caught and held my attention over the years: the Neshoba County Public Library, ably staffed by the wonderful Mrs. Tingle.
At the time, the library was located upstairs in the old courthouse in the middle of the square. It was air-conditioned and blissfully cool in the oppressive midday heat of a Mississippi summer, and it smelled of lignin—the delicious smell of books. I didn’t need to present any form of ID in order to be issued a library card. I was eight when I started visiting Mrs. Tingle; what form of ID would I have had? She knew my name, and she knew my mother, and that was good enough.
I can’t say that Mrs. Tingle introduced me to books or a lifelong love of reading; my family had done that. I’d been reading on my own long before I started school. But because my mother was a librarian and I had inside information on libraries (I knew about card catalogues and the Dewey decimal system and the less popular—at least, in our household—Library of Congress system), I felt a kinship with Mrs. Tingle.
I was usually the only patron in the library. Mrs. Tingle and I would exchange greetings when I went in, I’d return the books I’d borrowed the week before, and I’d start browsing. Once I’d selected the books I wanted to check out—the business of lining up the week’s reading was paramount—Mrs. Tingle and I would visit. Since the library wasn’t busy, perhaps she didn’t have enough work to occupy her time. Or maybe, since she was the only librarian, she had more than enough work to do, but she made time to talk to a book-hungry, language-loving kid who already knew she was going to be a writer.
I don’t recall specific conversations. I do remember that we talked about anything and everything to do with books. Although I’m sure I took up way too much of her time, she didn’t seem to mind.
Eventually, I stopped accompanying my mother to her weekly appointments at the beauty shop, and I stopped visiting Mrs. Tingle. I was growing up, going to college, and leaving home. In 1976, the library was moved from the old courthouse in the heart of the square to a newly constructed building on the edge of the downtown area. The courthouse had long been inadequate for the library’s needs. The new library offered much-needed space; the size of the collection doubled within five years.
The Neshoba County courthouse is a structure that has seen its share of history—some of it horrific. But my personal history there centers on the old library, infused with knowledge and possibility. I never told Mrs. Tingle how much I loved my summertime visits with her. In that library, with its creaky, heavy oak chairs, surrounded by books, we were peers: readers, discussing a common love.