The LIBRARIES THAT RAISED ME part 1
Ampere Parkway
I recently came across information online that the Ampere Branch Library in East Orange was temporarily closed.
It was not the kind of news that stops the world or sends anyone into dramatic grief, but it caused a quiet pause in me. The kind that arrives without warning. One moment I was simply researching online, and the next I was staring at the screen while an entire neighborhood from my childhood came rushing back all at once.
The annual carnival that used to set up on Ampere Parkway near the train station.
The electronic store near 16th Street and 4th Avenue where the televisions and stereos on display were often the very same ones people purchased because there were no untouched boxes waiting in the back. The record store nearby. The pharmacy. The grocery store with the butcher in the rear. The Post Office. Sinbad’s Arcade. The dry cleaners. The bank. The storefront windows. The rhythm of East Orange during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
And sitting quietly among all those memories was the Ampere Branch Library.
I grew up at 191 North 16th Street in East Orange. Back then, the neighborhood felt enormous to me. Every block carried its own personality. As children, we measured geography differently than adults. A few streets could feel like an entire world.
The library was one of the places in that world that felt different from everything around it.
Outside, there was movement. Buses exhaled at corners. Store doors opened and shut. Radios played from windows. Kids ran through the neighborhood. Arcade sounds leaked onto sidewalks whenever someone pushed open the door at Sinbad’s.
But inside the library, everything slowed down.
The air felt cooler.
People lowered their voices.
Books sat in neat rows like they had been patiently waiting there forever.
At that age, I did not yet understand libraries intellectually. I did not think of literacy programs, public institutions, or educational access. I simply knew I liked being there. I liked the calmness. I liked the order. I liked walking between shelves and pulling books out simply because something about the cover caught my attention.
Sometimes children are drawn toward places long before they understand why.
What makes those memories even more meaningful to me now is that the nearby Masjid was once the very same bank where I had a childhood bank account. At the time, it was simply another ordinary building in the neighborhood. Just part of daily life. I could never have imagined that years later the building would become a Masjid, nor that I myself would eventually become a Muslim author writing stories centered around faith, literacy, family life, and community.
Looking back now, the symbolism almost feels too perfect to have been planned.
But neighborhoods change.
Buildings change.
People change too.
And sometimes the places that quietly shape us reveal their importance only decades later.
As a child, I did not walk into Ampere Branch Library dreaming of becoming a writer one day. I was simply curious. Curious about books. Curious about stories. Curious about places that felt larger on the inside than they appeared from the street outside.
That curiosity mattered more than I realized.
Libraries teach children things quietly.
Not only reading.
They teach patience.
Observation.
Stillness.
Imagination.
How to sit alone with thoughts.
How to wander mentally without physically moving very far at all.
A child may enter a library looking only for something to do after school or on a weekend afternoon, while something much deeper is happening invisibly beneath the surface.
I understand that now.
When I think back to East Orange, I do not only remember buildings or businesses. I remember the feeling of movement through the neighborhood itself. Walking past storefronts. Looking into windows. Hearing conversations. Smelling food from small groceries and restaurants. Passing the arcade. Watching people carry shopping bags down the street.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that ordinary life stood a public library quietly offering imagination to anyone willing to walk through its doors.
There is something deeply humbling about realizing that parts of your intellectual and creative life began forming before you even had language to describe what was happening.
Before publishing.
Before Trade Winds Books.
Before stories.
Before manuscripts.
Before Richmond.
Before any of the roads my life would eventually travel.
There was simply a young boy from East Orange wandering into the Ampere Branch Library while the world outside moved noisily on without him.
And decades later, all it took was seeing the words “temporarily closed” online for that entire world to come rushing back.