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vass brought back to my attention Alix E. Harrow's A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies, a short story about librarians who deal with both books and Books, and the ethical problems that show up when you clearly have the stuff to help someone achieve what they want but you're forbidden from using them. It is the kind of short story that makes me wonder how close someone was to actual librarians as it was being written, because there's a lot in there that resonates very heavily with the way that libraries of the current times are being run, and how much the past influences them, even in an era where the past has fairly conclusively been proven to be Not All That.
I'm going to quotevass's excellent objections to the story and expound further on them. Slightly out of the order in which they were presented, for subject organization purposes.
Even at the last surveys and compilations of data, librarianship is still over 80 percent women, and more specifically, if you focus down to children's librarianship (since it seems very unlikely that Ulysses County's governance would spring for a teen librarian in a branch where the "branch director is one of those pinch-lipped Baptists who thinks fantasy books teach kids about Devil worship" and "roughly 90% of my collection requests are mysteriously denied." (With a director like that, I'd actually be surprised that Harry Potter was still there to check out any amount of time after its popularity faded even for an iota. Of course, with the movies and the second movie series, it might manage to hang around for popularity reasons.)) you're going to crank up the percentage of women even more. For nearly all of my career in the Youth Services department for The Organization, which I note is, if not in, adjacent to the Dragon Conspiracy Territories of Pacific Liberalland, I've been the only employee who doesn't present as a woman, has a qualifying Master's degree, and holds the job title of Librarian. I think that changed from all of my career this year, when one of the people who works in one level underneath Librarian successfully graduated with a Master's and promoted up to a temporary position of Librarian. (We'll see whether or not he gets it permanently.) We definitely have other people in the library system who don't present as women at all levels, but in youth services, it's been me for a very long time. (One of the Teen Services librarians when I started was a man, and he eventually promoted up into management and then left The Organization entirely, and Teen Services is really its own distinct cohort, even if we have overlapping age range responsibilities.)
So, in a place that's painted consistently as strongly socially conservative, (any time Ulysses County is mentioned outside of the library, it's very clear that this is not anywhere near a Liberalland, much less the Dragon Conspiracy Territories) there would never have been a question as to whether the librarians would be women or not. And therefore, if the subset of witches is fully enclosed by the set of librarians, then it's obvious that the witches would be women as well. I agree withvass that neither witchery or librarianship should be exclusive to women, either in reality or in fiction (OSTERTAG, MOLLY KNOX—THE WITCH BOY—v.1-3—J FIC OST 2017) and I can point at historical resources that say the librarian stereotype used to be that of a fussy man who was insufficiently manly to take on a more appropriate profession for men, but even in doing so, I'm tacitly admitting that the library profession and the public perception of the librarian has always been womanish, it's mostly just been a question of whether or not there's a woman there to be stereotyped. (PAGOWSKY, NICOLE AND MIRIAM RIGBY—THE LIBRARIAN STEREOTYPE: DECONSTRUCTING PERCEPTIONS AND PRESENTATIONS OF INFORMATION WORK—020.922 PAG 2014)
For the record, I have yet to be accused of being a minor-attracted person or a danger to thesociety's children who come into the library, but I also don't correct people when they misgender me or use the wrong honorific, figuring that it's a better use of my limited effort to be an example of a non woman-presenting person doing youth services work and to break stereotype that way than to give someone a reason to consciously reject me as too Other for their worldview. The children who hear me introduce myself properly and know are paying attention.
As for the other side of the premise, I would say the scholars of religion, magic, and folk practice generally agree that in the strands of religion that have become the civic and political practice of the United States, there's a definite insistence that women need to be controlled by men. Therefore, any woman who rejects the control of men is dangerous and likely influenced by evil supernatural forces (since the men and their religion and deity are, of course, the unquestioned Good in the civil religion) and any woman who makes a living independently of a man, or who might exercise some amount of authority over men, is exceptionally dangerous. (Even though, really, librarian salaries and hours make even people who have the degree have to be employed in multiple positions to be able to pay their rent money if they're going it alone. A lot of library workers aren't the essential and primary income in their families or households, but are instead the pocket money or the income for extras.) So, if you're looking for witches, who are always outside the boundaries of men and male control in the civic religion, you might just land on librarians. (Teachers, as well, but the civic religion generally believes all adults should be able to control any child, and so it gives some leeway to those who are expected to instruct children to learn the rules of the civic religion and practice it faithfully.) See PEARL, MICHAEL AND DEBI PEARL—TO TRAIN UP A CHILD—248.42 PEA 1994, PEARL, DEBI—CREATED TO BE HIS HELPMEET—248.41 PEA 2004, and THE PRESIDENT'S ADVISORY 1776 COMMISSION—THE 1776 REPORT—375.XX PRE 2021 for the kind of instruction manuals the civic religion bases itself and its principles on.
(vass is entirely correct that any librarian worth their budget would have weeded out the old, the outdated, and the incorrect, rather than checking them out occasionally and taking them home, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, rather than venerating them as objects of power and desire, the librarians keep them on their shelves because Ulysses County doesn't fund their library sufficiently for them to keep restocking correct and new materials. And so, sometimes books that have long since needed to be weeded stick around, because there's never enough money to buy their replacements, and people get upset if there's no books on a topic. Or they get upset that the book they learned on, even though it's now thirty years out of date, isn't there for their kid to learn the same thing on. They're referred to as hopeless cases, so the narrator knows they should be gone, but they're still there, probably because of those mysteriously denied collection requests. That rings all too true for me.)
As it is, there are limits imposed on how much the witches can do with the material they have. In this story, it's that Books, the ones with the real magic, are forbidden to be lent out or used by people who aren't already witches.
The construction here, especially the use of the word perfidy, evokes Vocational Awe, a term created by Black scholar Fobazi Ettarh, that indicates the degree to which a job becomes imbued with the idea of being a sacred calling. (In fact, calling it a profession invokes this idea, because one professes faith, rather than working a job,) Jobs with high vocational awe are assumed to be for people who love and are drawn to the work. Considerations of salary and being able to live on the wage, when raised, are usually shouted down about how the objector doesn't have sufficient commitment to the work, and if they really cared, they wouldn't be concerned with things like wage. (And, the line of rebuttal goes, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly, the man you are attached to is the one who really provides for the necessities of your life, right, so why do you need to care about how much money you're making?)
In the case of this story, there's literal magic in the Books, the kind of thing that could really make someone's life a lot easier, and the witches know this, but they're not supposed to do anything about it. Actually being witches, sharing the magic and the power, would be against the civic religion and those who use what was entrusted to them to uphold the society to subvert it will be punished. And here's where I find the most telling spot of the story, and where you could construct a message of hope, or read into the idea that the narrator-librarian has, at long last, finally become radicalized, or at the very least, become someone recognizing the need for institutional change. The two major characters that the witch could help are an unmarried pregnant teenager and a young black man in the foster care system. In the conservative Ulysses County, the one where the "lone public pool had been filled with cement in the sixties rather than desegregate", the two people that are the examples of what you do with the Books are two people who are sitting on the lowest rung of the social ladder, and at least in the case of the Black foster child, through no conscious action of their own.
Here I should note that while the narrator says that she's not a natural rule follower, the justification she gives for it is weaksauce at best. A list of truly petty sins, of which rolling through the stop signs is the one that might bring the biggest penalties, before pointing out that she's a good librarian, and good librarians follow the rules, even when they don't want to. The individual actions described are nowhere near the scale of the systemic harms she's capable of inflicting or upholding, and by following the rules, the witch-librarian inflicts systemic harms on the pregnant one,
So, in the first case, the girl, who's "wearing one of those knee-length denim skirts that scream 'mandatory virginity pledge' " is getting fed a steady diet of subversion from the narrator, then when it's clear the girl is pregnant, gets more information thrown at her, including Planned Parenthood pamphlets, but the narrator stops short of slinging one of the magic Books that could fix the problem. Even though the information-giving part is going to be useless ("the nearest clinic is six hours away and only open twice a week"), the narrator is still thinking of herself over the needs of the girl.
So, armed with the memory of that failure, the narrator is confronted once again with the need to assist someone who is clearly not getting what he needs, so much so that it's painfully obvious. There will be a cost associated with using the Books, of course, but in this case, there would probably be an even greater cost associated with providing anything like material assistance to a young Black man in Ulysses County, even more so because he's in the foster system. (And likely already very well entrenched in the school-to-prison pipeline because of both of those marginalizations) The narrator has tried to offer escapism in fiction, and hope in fiction, but the escapism in fiction is a fleeting hope, and the hope in the fiction is a false one. The foster care worker is trying to make the young Black man admit that he's the problem (all the books recommended by the social worker are about depression and individual issues, not about systemic change, after all) and that the only way he can get out is by conforming as much as possible to society around him, shedding as much of his identity and his dreams as necessary so that he can fit in. Y'know, deauthentication, swallowing all of the microaggressions and the macroaggressions without retaliation, and burying his Blackness so deeply that to everyone that meets him, he's "articulate" and extremely well-schooled in proper white behavior. (And it still might not save him when he runs into the racist cops of Ulysses County.) It's clear to the narrator that it's not going to work, that it's not working, because the Black teenager is not at school, and tries to get himself locked in the library past closing. And, of course, there's Agnes, who will absolutely rat out the narrator to the witches if she breaks the rules. That's the pressure to conform, to not act, to not use your power, to declare that there are just some people who can't be helped, or that you can't help.
Eventually, though, the narrator does decide to act, and use the power she has available to her to leave the book that the young Black man most desperately needs to escape his situation, knowing full well what the consequences of truly stepping into the role of being a witch (and a librarian) will be.
Also, look again in the text about "the vows of our order" and see the vocational awe present in being both librarian and witch. The construction of giving people the books they need still suggests that the librarians and witches are ultimately the people who determine what those needs are, which is…not the greatest, because the history of librarianship is full of spaces where the librarians made the decisions about what the people needed and chose poorly, repeatedly, and sometimes even in the face of their community telling them what they needed.
It took until 02021 for the American Library Association to add a principle to their Code of Ethics about social justice and dismantling biases. Here's Principle 9, the one added in 02021:
So, yeah. I thinkvass's criticisms of the gender-exclusionary nature of the librarians and witches in the story and the criticism of librarians as object fetishists are well-founded. The story absolutely trades on librarian and witch stereotypes, to the point where if it is supposed to be satire, it invokes Poe's Law. The story sets up the idea that taking the pathway of social justice and sharing your power is breaking out of those stereotypes and becoming something altogether rogue and not really a librarian or witch. Which isn't great if you want to turn the system and the institution in a new direction, because institutions tend not to listen to Others and Outsiders when it comes to changing what the institution's focuses and directions are. (Unless the Outsider's being paid to make recommendations to them.) The story doesn't end hopefully, because we don't know what consequences are leveled at the narrator for the use of the Book. The story sets it up so that we should assume she will be dismissed from being both a librarian and a witch and nothing will change inside the institution, but it's possible she might be at the vanguard of a movement to get more involved with the books. Or that her witch supervisor is sympathetic and recommends being a little less obvious about it next time. Or she does become a rogue and does significant amounts of helpful work with what powers she does have access to. We don't know what happens. I think we're supposed to decide to take the leap anyway and use our own Books to help our communities, in contravention of unjust rules. For the white women who make up the great majority of the library profession, this story could be the way they can safely consider their own big decisions and decide to act on Principle 9 as their primary principle and subordinate the others, without immediately having to deal with the public feelings of shame and guilt that come from being accused of complicity in systemic injustice. (Or recognizing that you've been complicit in systemic injustice.) Maybe that's why the story goes in so hard on the stereotypes.
So, ultimately, I can see this work as a call to action directed at the most populous segment of librarianship that uses a lot of things familiar to those who work in libraries to make the point, possibly even using those things to sneak the true message past the library worker who feels superior to the stereotypical librarians that are presented here. (Literary analysis! Yet another thing that I could have learned in library school, had I been given more coursework on evaluation and selection of materials.)
vass brought back to my attention Alix E. Harrow's A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies, a short story about librarians who deal with both books and Books, and the ethical problems that show up when you clearly have the stuff to help someone achieve what they want but you're forbidden from using them. It is the kind of short story that makes me wonder how close someone was to actual librarians as it was being written, because there's a lot in there that resonates very heavily with the way that libraries of the current times are being run, and how much the past influences them, even in an era where the past has fairly conclusively been proven to be Not All That.I'm going to quote
vass's excellent objections to the story and expound further on them. Slightly out of the order in which they were presented, for subject organization purposes. Your mileage may vary. Some people will be able to accept Harrow's librarians as a fictional profession in a fantasy world, and therefore unconnected to real librarians in our world. My problems with that are that this did seem to be set in our world, and the fictional librarians owed a great deal to popular stereotypes about real librarians. Misogynistic stereotypes at that.The story is absolutely about librarian stereotypes, including that the librarians are witches with reality-warping powers and the like. The premise of finding a book in a library that gets you the powers to rewrite reality isn't new, (DUANE, DIANE—SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD—J FIC DUA 1983, v.1 — which is, for the story's environment, squarely in the target time period of fiction that would be available in, and isn't mentioned at all in the story. (Perhaps Harrow never read it, even though it would fit really well in the progression of the story, since, y'know, the Speech and the power it has and all that.)) and neither is the idea of the small-town librarian actually being someone who helps in the care and feeding of magic and magical creatures. (COVILLE, BRUCE—JEREMY THATCHER, DRAGON HATCHER—J FIC COV 1991, among others.)
I was also unhappy with the gendered aspects of the story, how it identifies librarianship and witchcraft as exclusively female professions—closed sisterhoods, in fact. That made me really uncomfortable, since the story seemed to be set in our world, in which I am a nonbinary person who has dabbled with both witchcraft and wanting to be a librarian, and those are not Just For Women here, although they are majority-female occupations.
Even at the last surveys and compilations of data, librarianship is still over 80 percent women, and more specifically, if you focus down to children's librarianship (since it seems very unlikely that Ulysses County's governance would spring for a teen librarian in a branch where the "branch director is one of those pinch-lipped Baptists who thinks fantasy books teach kids about Devil worship" and "roughly 90% of my collection requests are mysteriously denied." (With a director like that, I'd actually be surprised that Harry Potter was still there to check out any amount of time after its popularity faded even for an iota. Of course, with the movies and the second movie series, it might manage to hang around for popularity reasons.)) you're going to crank up the percentage of women even more. For nearly all of my career in the Youth Services department for The Organization, which I note is, if not in, adjacent to the Dragon Conspiracy Territories of Pacific Liberalland, I've been the only employee who doesn't present as a woman, has a qualifying Master's degree, and holds the job title of Librarian. I think that changed from all of my career this year, when one of the people who works in one level underneath Librarian successfully graduated with a Master's and promoted up to a temporary position of Librarian. (We'll see whether or not he gets it permanently.) We definitely have other people in the library system who don't present as women at all levels, but in youth services, it's been me for a very long time. (One of the Teen Services librarians when I started was a man, and he eventually promoted up into management and then left The Organization entirely, and Teen Services is really its own distinct cohort, even if we have overlapping age range responsibilities.)
So, in a place that's painted consistently as strongly socially conservative, (any time Ulysses County is mentioned outside of the library, it's very clear that this is not anywhere near a Liberalland, much less the Dragon Conspiracy Territories) there would never have been a question as to whether the librarians would be women or not. And therefore, if the subset of witches is fully enclosed by the set of librarians, then it's obvious that the witches would be women as well. I agree with
vass that neither witchery or librarianship should be exclusive to women, either in reality or in fiction (OSTERTAG, MOLLY KNOX—THE WITCH BOY—v.1-3—J FIC OST 2017) and I can point at historical resources that say the librarian stereotype used to be that of a fussy man who was insufficiently manly to take on a more appropriate profession for men, but even in doing so, I'm tacitly admitting that the library profession and the public perception of the librarian has always been womanish, it's mostly just been a question of whether or not there's a woman there to be stereotyped. (PAGOWSKY, NICOLE AND MIRIAM RIGBY—THE LIBRARIAN STEREOTYPE: DECONSTRUCTING PERCEPTIONS AND PRESENTATIONS OF INFORMATION WORK—020.922 PAG 2014)For the record, I have yet to be accused of being a minor-attracted person or a danger to the
As for the other side of the premise, I would say the scholars of religion, magic, and folk practice generally agree that in the strands of religion that have become the civic and political practice of the United States, there's a definite insistence that women need to be controlled by men. Therefore, any woman who rejects the control of men is dangerous and likely influenced by evil supernatural forces (since the men and their religion and deity are, of course, the unquestioned Good in the civil religion) and any woman who makes a living independently of a man, or who might exercise some amount of authority over men, is exceptionally dangerous. (Even though, really, librarian salaries and hours make even people who have the degree have to be employed in multiple positions to be able to pay their rent money if they're going it alone. A lot of library workers aren't the essential and primary income in their families or households, but are instead the pocket money or the income for extras.) So, if you're looking for witches, who are always outside the boundaries of men and male control in the civic religion, you might just land on librarians. (Teachers, as well, but the civic religion generally believes all adults should be able to control any child, and so it gives some leeway to those who are expected to instruct children to learn the rules of the civic religion and practice it faithfully.) See PEARL, MICHAEL AND DEBI PEARL—TO TRAIN UP A CHILD—248.42 PEA 1994, PEARL, DEBI—CREATED TO BE HIS HELPMEET—248.41 PEA 2004, and THE PRESIDENT'S ADVISORY 1776 COMMISSION—THE 1776 REPORT—375.XX PRE 2021 for the kind of instruction manuals the civic religion bases itself and its principles on.
And thus, you get the dichotomy between those who believe it their duty to uphold the civic religion, its practices and prohibitions about women and power, and who feel they have been given custody over the materials in the library to distribute as they see fit according to the civic religion, (the prudes) and those who look to subvert at least some of those practices and prohibitions, or who believe the the information entrusted to them is best distributed according to the needs of the petitioner, even if that means giving information about something the civic religion forbids, restricts, or believes is improper to give to someone (the witches). (I say "needs" specifically because distribution according to the desires of the petitioner is expressly forbidden in some cases where fulfilling those desires would be ethically improper.)(There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches).The identification of librarians as obsessed with books as physical objects imbued with magical properties, with librarians checking out old, outdated books from time to time so they (the books) wouldn't feel bad, struck me as especially inaccurate.
(
vass is entirely correct that any librarian worth their budget would have weeded out the old, the outdated, and the incorrect, rather than checking them out occasionally and taking them home, but I have a sneaking suspicion that, rather than venerating them as objects of power and desire, the librarians keep them on their shelves because Ulysses County doesn't fund their library sufficiently for them to keep restocking correct and new materials. And so, sometimes books that have long since needed to be weeded stick around, because there's never enough money to buy their replacements, and people get upset if there's no books on a topic. Or they get upset that the book they learned on, even though it's now thirty years out of date, isn't there for their kid to learn the same thing on. They're referred to as hopeless cases, so the narrator knows they should be gone, but they're still there, probably because of those mysteriously denied collection requests. That rings all too true for me.)As it is, there are limits imposed on how much the witches can do with the material they have. In this story, it's that Books, the ones with the real magic, are forbidden to be lent out or used by people who aren't already witches.
If I were caught handing out Books, I’d be renounced, reviled, stripped of my title. They’d burn my library card in the eternal mauve flames of our sisterhood and write my crimes in ash and blood in The Book of Perfidy. They’d ban me from every library for eternity, and what’s a librarian without her books?(I mean, there are a lot of librarians doing librarian work that don't have books as their primary responsibilities, but that's a digression left to the reader to explore.)
The construction here, especially the use of the word perfidy, evokes Vocational Awe, a term created by Black scholar Fobazi Ettarh, that indicates the degree to which a job becomes imbued with the idea of being a sacred calling. (In fact, calling it a profession invokes this idea, because one professes faith, rather than working a job,) Jobs with high vocational awe are assumed to be for people who love and are drawn to the work. Considerations of salary and being able to live on the wage, when raised, are usually shouted down about how the objector doesn't have sufficient commitment to the work, and if they really cared, they wouldn't be concerned with things like wage. (And, the line of rebuttal goes, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly, the man you are attached to is the one who really provides for the necessities of your life, right, so why do you need to care about how much money you're making?)
In the case of this story, there's literal magic in the Books, the kind of thing that could really make someone's life a lot easier, and the witches know this, but they're not supposed to do anything about it. Actually being witches, sharing the magic and the power, would be against the civic religion and those who use what was entrusted to them to uphold the society to subvert it will be punished. And here's where I find the most telling spot of the story, and where you could construct a message of hope, or read into the idea that the narrator-librarian has, at long last, finally become radicalized, or at the very least, become someone recognizing the need for institutional change. The two major characters that the witch could help are an unmarried pregnant teenager and a young black man in the foster care system. In the conservative Ulysses County, the one where the "lone public pool had been filled with cement in the sixties rather than desegregate", the two people that are the examples of what you do with the Books are two people who are sitting on the lowest rung of the social ladder, and at least in the case of the Black foster child, through no conscious action of their own.
Here I should note that while the narrator says that she's not a natural rule follower, the justification she gives for it is weaksauce at best. A list of truly petty sins, of which rolling through the stop signs is the one that might bring the biggest penalties, before pointing out that she's a good librarian, and good librarians follow the rules, even when they don't want to. The individual actions described are nowhere near the scale of the systemic harms she's capable of inflicting or upholding, and by following the rules, the witch-librarian inflicts systemic harms on the pregnant one,
So, in the first case, the girl, who's "wearing one of those knee-length denim skirts that scream 'mandatory virginity pledge' " is getting fed a steady diet of subversion from the narrator, then when it's clear the girl is pregnant, gets more information thrown at her, including Planned Parenthood pamphlets, but the narrator stops short of slinging one of the magic Books that could fix the problem. Even though the information-giving part is going to be useless ("the nearest clinic is six hours away and only open twice a week"), the narrator is still thinking of herself over the needs of the girl.
Look, there are good reasons we don’t lend out Books like that. Our mistresses used to scare us with stories of mortals run amok: people who used Books to steal or kill or break hearts; who performed miracles and founded religions; who hated us, afterward, and spent a tiresome few centuries burning us at stakes.What the pregnant person needs is someone to make an appointment for her at the clinic and drive her six hours to the clinic before it opens, pay for the procedure, and then drive her six hours back. That's an investment of time and money. This piece was written before things like Texas SB 8 and its copycats, designed specifically to make sure that nobody can give their assistance to someone seeking those kinds of services unless they want to take the risk of an unknown quantity of persons recognizing them and suing them on the presumption that they assisted, with $10,000 USD as a penalty for having assisted someone in getting the procedure done. For each person suing. Regardless of whether they're in the state. And the presumption that if you are so sued, you're guilty and have to pay the fine or prove your innocence. The witch has access to a Book that would allow the pregnant person to go back and fix what happened so they weren't pregnant, but she doesn't loan it out, because that's against the rules. The consequences of her inaction are swift ("Four days later, her picture was in the paper […]") and Agnes, the other witch-librarian, tries to reassure her that she had done all she could do. ("Agnes patted my hand and said, 'I know, honey, I know. Sometimes there's nothing you can do.' It was a kind lie.") The narrator knows there was more that could be done, since nobody else was stepping up to provide the necessary assistance, and neither her nor Agnes went to that level. And she keeps a record of her failure as a "memorial or reminder or warning."
If I were caught handing out Books, I’d be renounced, reviled, stripped of my title. They’d burn my library card in the eternal mauve flames of our sisterhood and write my crimes in ash and blood in The Book of Perfidy. They’d ban me from every library for eternity, and what’s a librarian without her books? What would I be, cut off from the orderly world of words and their readers, from the peaceful Ouroboran cycle of story-telling and story-eating? There were rumors of rogue librarians—madwomen who chose to live outside the library system in the howling chaos of unwritten words and untold stories—but none of us envied them.
So, armed with the memory of that failure, the narrator is confronted once again with the need to assist someone who is clearly not getting what he needs, so much so that it's painfully obvious. There will be a cost associated with using the Books, of course, but in this case, there would probably be an even greater cost associated with providing anything like material assistance to a young Black man in Ulysses County, even more so because he's in the foster system. (And likely already very well entrenched in the school-to-prison pipeline because of both of those marginalizations) The narrator has tried to offer escapism in fiction, and hope in fiction, but the escapism in fiction is a fleeting hope, and the hope in the fiction is a false one. The foster care worker is trying to make the young Black man admit that he's the problem (all the books recommended by the social worker are about depression and individual issues, not about systemic change, after all) and that the only way he can get out is by conforming as much as possible to society around him, shedding as much of his identity and his dreams as necessary so that he can fit in. Y'know, deauthentication, swallowing all of the microaggressions and the macroaggressions without retaliation, and burying his Blackness so deeply that to everyone that meets him, he's "articulate" and extremely well-schooled in proper white behavior. (And it still might not save him when he runs into the racist cops of Ulysses County.) It's clear to the narrator that it's not going to work, that it's not working, because the Black teenager is not at school, and tries to get himself locked in the library past closing. And, of course, there's Agnes, who will absolutely rat out the narrator to the witches if she breaks the rules. That's the pressure to conform, to not act, to not use your power, to declare that there are just some people who can't be helped, or that you can't help.
Eventually, though, the narrator does decide to act, and use the power she has available to her to leave the book that the young Black man most desperately needs to escape his situation, knowing full well what the consequences of truly stepping into the role of being a witch (and a librarian) will be.
When they drag me before the mistresses and burn my card and demand to know, in tones of mournful recrimination, how I could have abandoned the vows of our order, I’ll say: Hey, you abandoned them first, ladies. Somewhere along the line, you forgot our first and purest purpose: to give patrons the books they need most. And oh, how they need. How they will always need.So it's entirely possible the most unrealistic element of this story, written in 02018, was that the presumably white (because the librarian profession is also overwhelmingly white as well as overwhelmingly women) woman acted to help the young Black man achieve what he needed most, without deciding for him that what he needed most was to adjust to the profoundly sick society around him, and at the potential cost of her job as a librarian and her membership in the sisterhood of witches. That's not easy to do at all, and especially not for someone who has been comparatively privileged in her existence.
I wondered, with a kind of detached trepidation, how rogue librarians spent their time, and whether they had clubs or societies, and what it was like to encounter feral stories untamed by narrative and unbound by books. And then I wondered where our Books came from in the first place, and who wrote them.
Also, look again in the text about "the vows of our order" and see the vocational awe present in being both librarian and witch. The construction of giving people the books they need still suggests that the librarians and witches are ultimately the people who determine what those needs are, which is…not the greatest, because the history of librarianship is full of spaces where the librarians made the decisions about what the people needed and chose poorly, repeatedly, and sometimes even in the face of their community telling them what they needed.
It took until 02021 for the American Library Association to add a principle to their Code of Ethics about social justice and dismantling biases. Here's Principle 9, the one added in 02021:
We affirm the inherent dignity and rights of every person. We work to recognize and dismantle systemic and individual biases; to confront inequity and oppression; to enhance diversity and inclusion; and to advance racial and social justice in our libraries, communities, profession, and associations through awareness, advocacy, education, collaboration, services, and allocation of resources and spaces.Which, perhaps in fascinating ways that the library world hasn't fully worked out, might be in contradiction to more than half of the other eight principles, as upholding principle 9 might mean having to take sides and take action beyond the mere furnishing of access and resources, upsetting the "unbiased" part of principle 1, the "intellectual freedom" part of principle 2, the "respect, fairness, and good faith" part of principle 5, the "do not advance private interests" part of principle 6, and the "do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources" of principle 7.
So, yeah. I think
vass's criticisms of the gender-exclusionary nature of the librarians and witches in the story and the criticism of librarians as object fetishists are well-founded. The story absolutely trades on librarian and witch stereotypes, to the point where if it is supposed to be satire, it invokes Poe's Law. The story sets up the idea that taking the pathway of social justice and sharing your power is breaking out of those stereotypes and becoming something altogether rogue and not really a librarian or witch. Which isn't great if you want to turn the system and the institution in a new direction, because institutions tend not to listen to Others and Outsiders when it comes to changing what the institution's focuses and directions are. (Unless the Outsider's being paid to make recommendations to them.) The story doesn't end hopefully, because we don't know what consequences are leveled at the narrator for the use of the Book. The story sets it up so that we should assume she will be dismissed from being both a librarian and a witch and nothing will change inside the institution, but it's possible she might be at the vanguard of a movement to get more involved with the books. Or that her witch supervisor is sympathetic and recommends being a little less obvious about it next time. Or she does become a rogue and does significant amounts of helpful work with what powers she does have access to. We don't know what happens. I think we're supposed to decide to take the leap anyway and use our own Books to help our communities, in contravention of unjust rules. For the white women who make up the great majority of the library profession, this story could be the way they can safely consider their own big decisions and decide to act on Principle 9 as their primary principle and subordinate the others, without immediately having to deal with the public feelings of shame and guilt that come from being accused of complicity in systemic injustice. (Or recognizing that you've been complicit in systemic injustice.) Maybe that's why the story goes in so hard on the stereotypes.So, ultimately, I can see this work as a call to action directed at the most populous segment of librarianship that uses a lot of things familiar to those who work in libraries to make the point, possibly even using those things to sneak the true message past the library worker who feels superior to the stereotypical librarians that are presented here. (Literary analysis! Yet another thing that I could have learned in library school, had I been given more coursework on evaluation and selection of materials.)
