A Visit to the Library

    After reading this personal essay, we felt sympathy for the narrator and wondered what it felt like to be in his position. This essay taught us what it was like in the segregated south for African Americans and how they were treated differently. They were looked down upon and treated as inferior people, but many African American still fought for their rights despite all the hate they recieved and found ways to gain the rights they deserved.

                Richard used his personal experience to express his extreme feeling of hatred between South and North while he visited the library as Negro who was living in south in order to archive his dream of being a writer. This makes audience feel worried for the narrator. It also gives the sentiment of anxiety to display. Richard uses his experience, knowledge and resources to make the whole story clear. This is shown when he was reading an article denouncing Mencken and surprised: “I wonder what on earth this Mencken had done to call down upon him the scorn of the south. The only people I heard ever heard denounced in the south were Negroes, and this man was not a Negro” (126). Richard shows the courage to read by borrowing the library card from an Irish catholic to enter the library as a Negro when he told him:” I want to read. I can’t get books from library. I wonder if you’d let me use your card” (127)? He succeeded to get the book, but he always read the book under circumstances. Once white men find the book in question into his packages, to put him down and show him the incapability of reading, they questioned him and told him this :”you’ll addle your brains if you don’t watch out”(130). He was courageous and strong to bear all kind of white mockers around him and finally that book made him thinking again about writing. The reading had created a vast sense of vast distance between him and the world in which he lived and try to make a living as Negro in South.