Public library

The public library stands at the very center of Mary Antin's account of her Americanization, the institution that most completely answers the hunger for learning that defines her. It is the place where her immigrant experience of deprivation and her American experience of abundance meet and are reconciled. In her telling, the library is not merely a building full of books but a "palace"—a treasure house of learning that she claims as her own, not as a charity or a privilege, but as a right of citizenship. It is the concrete embodiment of the democratic promise that drew her family across the ocean, and the place where she most fully becomes an American.

The Discovery of the Library

The library enters Mary's life at a moment of potential emptiness. The stretch of weeks from June to September, when the schools were closed, would have been hard to fill had it not been for the public library. At first she made herself a calendar of the vacation months, tearing off a day each morning and comforting herself with the decreasing number of vacation days. But after she discovered the public library, she was no longer impatient for the reopening of school. The library did not open until one o'clock in the afternoon, and each reader was allowed to take out only one book at a time. Long before one o'clock she was to be seen on the library steps, waiting for the door of paradise to open. She spent hours in the reading-room, pleased with the atmosphere of books, with the order and quiet of the place, so unlike anything on Arlington Street. The sense of these things permeated her consciousness even when she was absorbed in a book, just as the rustle of pages turned and the tiptoe tread of the librarian reached her ear without distracting her attention. Anything so wonderful as a library had never been in her life. It was even better than school in some ways: one could read and read, and learn and learn, as fast as one knew how, without being obliged to stop for stupid little girls and inattentive little boys to catch up with the lesson. When she went home from the library she had a book under her arm, and she would finish it before the library opened next day, no matter till what hours of the night she burned her little lamp.

The Palace on Copley Square

The library that Mary comes to love most deeply is the Boston Public Library, a low, wide-spreading building with a dignified granite front, flanked on all sides by noble old churches, museums, and school-houses, harmoniously disposed around a spacious triangle called Copley Square. Two thoroughfares that came straight from the green suburbs swept by her palace, one on either side, converged at the apex of the triangle, and pointed off, past the Public Garden, across the historic Common, to the domed State House sitting on a height. It was her habit to go very slowly up the low, broad steps to the palace entrance, pleasing her eyes with the majestic lines of the building, and lingering to read again the carved inscriptions: "Public Library—Built by the People—Free to All." These words are the key to her experience of the place. She declares it her palace—hers because she was a citizen, hers though she was born an alien, hers though she lived on Dover Street. The repetition of the claim is a kind of incantation, a ritual of belonging that she performs each time she approaches the building.

A Citizen in the Reading Room

Inside the library, Mary's sense of ownership and belonging deepens. She loved to lean against a pillar in the entrance hall, watching the people go in and out. Groups of children hushed their chatter at the entrance, and skipped, whispering and giggling in their fists, up the grand stairway, patting the great stone lions at the top, with an eye on the aged policemen down below. Spectacled scholars came slowly down the stairs, loaded with books, heedless of the lofty arches that echoed their steps. Visitors from out of town lingered long in the entrance hall, studying the inscriptions and symbols on the marble floor. And she loved to stand in the midst of all this, and remind herself that she was there, that she had a right to be there, that she was at home there. All these eager children, all these fine-browed women, all these scholars going home to write learned books—she and they had this glorious thing in common, this noble treasure house of learning. It was wonderful to say, "This is mine"; it was thrilling to say, "This is ours." The shift from "mine" to "ours" marks the completion of her Americanization: she has moved from claiming the library as an individual possession to recognizing herself as part of the collective that owns it.

The Library as a World of Books

Mary's reading in the library is voracious and indiscriminate. She read pretty nearly everything that came to her hand. She dare say the librarian helped her select her books, but, curiously enough, she does not remember. Something must have directed her, for she read a great many of the books that are written for children. Of these she remembers with the greatest delight Louisa Alcott's stories. A less attractive series of books was of the Sunday School type, in which a very naughty little girl by the name of Lulu was always going into tempers, that her father might have opportunity to lecture her and point to her angelic little sister, Gracie, as an example of what she should be; after which they all felt better and prayed. Next to Louisa Alcott's books in her esteem were boys' books of adventure, many of them by Horatio Alger; and she read all, she supposes, of the Rollo books, by Jacob Abbott. This reading is not mere entertainment; it is the raw material of her American identity, the stories and values that she absorbs as she absorbs the language itself.

The Library and the Artist's Studio

The library's influence extends even into Mary's encounters with art and beauty. She visited every part of the building that was open to the public. She spent rapt hours studying the Abbey pictures. She repeated to herself lines from Tennyson's poem before the glowing scenes of the Holy Grail. Before the "Prophets" in the gallery above she was mute, but echoes of the Hebrew Psalms she had long forgotten throbbed somewhere in the depths of her consciousness. The Chavannes series around the main staircase she did not enjoy for years; she thought the pictures looked faded, and their symbolism somehow failed to move her at first. This experience of the library's art prepares her for her later sittings with Miss Hale, the artist who paints her portrait. When Mary wonders why Miss Hale wants to paint her, she reasons that if she could write an interesting composition about a broom, why should not an artist be able to make an interesting picture of her. It was not what a thing was that made it interesting, but what she was able to draw out of it. This is the lesson of the library: the world is full of material, and the mind that has learned to read can draw meaning from anything.