Williams: Common App Personal Statement (the only required essay)

Every Tuesday after school, I push a metal cart down the stacks of the Linwood Public Library and put books back where they belong. The cart squeaks. I have oiled the left wheel four times. It still squeaks.¹I took the job because I needed twelve dollars an hour and a reason to leave a loud house. I kept it because of the call numbers. Reshelving sounds mindless, and for a week it was, until I noticed that the 974s, New England history, sat three feet from the 811s, American poetry, and that almost nobody ever crossed the gap between them. The history shelf was busy. The poetry shelf gathered the kind of dust that means a book has not moved since before I was born. I started reading the poems on my break, standing up, in the cold corner by the radiator that does not work.Here is the thing I did not expect: the poems were full of the same towns as the history books. The same drowned valleys, the same mills, the same rivers that the dams turned into reservoirs. The history shelf told me a town named Enfield was flooded in 1938 to make a reservoir for Boston. The poetry shelf told me what it felt like to be the last family to leave.²I am not going to pretend I had a grand epiphany about the unity of knowledge. What actually happened is smaller and, I think, truer. I started keeping a notebook of pairs. A flood, and a poem about the flood. A patent for a loom, and a song the loom-workers sang. I did not always understand the connection. Sometimes I just wrote both call numbers and a question mark.³The question marks turned out to be the point. My favorite one is still unanswered. In the 974s there is a dry ledger from a hat factory in my town that closed in 1961. In the 811s there is a poem by a local woman, published the same year, about her father coming home smelling of mercury and going quiet. Mercury was used to make felt. It poisoned the nervous system. Mad as a hatter is not a metaphor.I cannot prove the woman's father worked at that factory. The ledger does not list him. But standing in the cold corner, holding both books, I felt the gap between the shelves close for a second, and I understood that history is the ledger and poetry is the smell of mercury, and that you need both to know what actually happened to a person.⁴I have shelved about four thousand books now. I am slow, because I read too many spines. My supervisor, Donna, pretends to be annoyed and then leaves the local-history reprints on my cart on purpose. Last month she handed me a key to the closed-stacks room without saying anything, which from Donna is roughly a parade.⁵I want to study where the shelves meet. I do not have a tidy name for the field yet, history, or literature, or something that does not have a call number. What I know is that I am happiest in the gap, with one book in each hand, trying to make a town that no longer exists tell me the truth twice.⁶