Free The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff Page B

a
person
who’s being tried. For his ideas, his feelings, his memories, his fantasies, his yearnings, his language, which is his very self. To tell you the truth, I don’t care
what
the book is. I hate to see words on trial. I get the willies. We’re stuck with this trial, Barney, but we should not celebrate it, even if we win. Because putting a book on trial is wrong. It always has been, it always will be, and I am dreadfully afraid it will never stop.”
    Having never heard Nora Baines speak in quite thisway, Barney wasn’t quite sure how to answer when a shout was heard, followed by Deirdre Fitzgerald’s excited voice. “I’ve got it! I’ve got the list!”
    Deirdre sat down at her desk and spread out a Xerox copy of the school board’s appointments to the review committee in the case of
Huckleberry Finn
.
    “You’re on the list, of course?” Nora Baines said. “The librarian has to be on it.”
    “Well”—Deirdre smiled—“Mr. Moore said he was thinking seriously of recommending that the board disqualify me because I had already made up my mind. But I reminded him that our discussion had only been about his wanting to take the book off the library shelves
before
the poor thing had even heard the charges against it. I asked him if he was going to do the same thing to me.” She laughed. “He backed down. With a very sour smile, I’ll tell you.”
    “But you already have made up your mind,” Barney said to the librarian.
    She looked at him soberly. “Why, you know, Barney, that judges cannot come to any conclusion until all the evidence is in.”
    “The list!” Nora Baines said impatiently. “Who else is on the list!”
    “I don’t know some of these names,” the librarian said. “Remember, I’m new here. Okay. From the staff, Helen Cook. Head of social studies department, right?”
    “Yup.” Baines nodded. “Very strong feminist. Thinks it essential that feminists make political alliances with blacks. One for the other side.”
    “Frank Sylvester. He’s—”
    “Chairman of the English department,” Nora Baines said. “A straight arrow. Never uses any book in his own classes that anyone would object to, but he doesn’t censor anybody else in the department. Says he’s not a policeman. A vote for us. Maybe.”
    “Why maybe?” Luke asked.
    “Because,” said Nora, “I don’t know how stiff a backbone Frank has when the heat gets put on him in public. Next.”
    “Two parents.” Deirdre looked at the list. “Evelyn Kantrow and Stanley Lomax.”
    “Kantrow,” Nora Baines said, “is a big wheel in the Republican party. Not only locally. She’s a state committeewoman. Can’t tell anything from that, though. In my experience, Democrats like to censor just as much as Republicans. Lomax is a professor of sociology at the college. And he’s black. That’s all I know about him. Except for his daughter. Eleanor Lomax is the most argumentative young woman I have ever had to teach. She drives me up the wall! But maybe that means they prize free speech at home. We’ll see. Still, he
is
black. Mark Professor Lomax as a very possible vote against Huck.”
    “Are you stereotyping, Nora?” Deirdre looked at the history teacher.
    “Move on” was Nora’s answer.
    “And two members from the community at large—Ben Maddox and Sandy Wicks.”
    “Maddox is an old party,” Nora Baines noted. “Alawyer. I don’t know what kind of law he practices. All kinds, I guess. We’re not a big enough town for specialists. Maddox has been around here forever. But I can’t remember his ever having had anything to do with the school. Mark his vote unknown.
    “On the other hand,” Baines went on, “Sandy Wicks should be on our side. She’s managing editor of the
Daily Tribune
. Good Lord, if journalists don’t understand the First Amendment, who will?”
    Deirdre looked up. “Sounds as if the committee could go either way. Oh, I found out something else. There’s a second formal complaint.