Raina Leon on Marcus Books
My experience was going into this wonderland. All of these authors are our Black authors. They’re talking about my community. To know I was in the bookstore with the longest history for supporting AfricanAmerican writing and letters was really incredible. Walking in, there was a cash register on the right, where Karen and her daughter were running the sales. The bookshelves were filled all along the side to the back. There was this large tree that was plaster. The poetry section was called I’m A Poet. I remember going through: “I know that person, I know that person... Oh my gosh, this book is so hard to find!” Lenard D. Moore—one of this really, really small chapbooks was actually there. He had done a reading at Marcus Books years before. I sent him a picture—his book was still on the shelves.
I met Karen Johnson, who’s one of the founders, and she just seemed to know everything. Karen was talking about the history of Marcus Books and how, before it was Marcus Books, it had been this place for jazz musicians in the Fillmore to go after gigs. I could almost imagine in that space underneath plaster and underneath carpet, there was this reverberation of music and spirit of people doing the spirit work and innovating in music and how that must persist. Then when I saw, a few weeks later, how the folks at Marcus Books had come back to a dumpster filled with all of these sacred items— books and things that they had gathered around Black history and tradition for 50 years. In a dumpster. That was heartbreaking.
To think about our history in a dumpster was deeply, deeply troubling. San Francisco—many people think of this place as a haven, this welcoming place. Troubling, very troubling to have that veneer revealed for something else.
