On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading Laura E

134.1 ]

On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading laura e. helton

No library in the country has a classiication suitable for our purpose. Hence one must be created. —Howard University Record, 1916

N 1930, DOROTHY PORTER FOUND HERSELF TRACKING DOWN A I neglected, partially lost library (ig. 1). In Washington, DC, a city deeply suspicious of its black readers,1 she had been named inau- gural curator of Howard University’s Negro Collection, also known as the Moorland Foundation. But irst, the twenty- ive- year- old Por- ter had to ind the collection—both literally and intellectually. “I had to teach myself black history,” she recalled. “hen I went around the library and pulled out every relevant book I could ind—the history of slavery, black poets—for the collection” (qtd. in McCombs). To locate materials on black literature and history that had accrued to the university since its 1867 founding but that had never been as- sembled, Porter scoured the stacks, corners, and basement of the library. She produced a dizzying array of items. “I found a number of pamphlets and books tied together which you had sent here in LAURA E. HELTON is assistant professor in the Department of English at the Uni- 1919,” she wrote to Jesse E. Moorland, the famed Howard alumnus versity of Delaware, Newark, where she and bibliophile for whom the collection was named. “I also found teaches print and material culture, Afri- some specimens of brightly colored butterlies, beetles, along with can American history and literature, and some native objects which may have been sent to the university from archival studies. Her current book proj- Africa or which you may have given” (Letter to Moorland).2 ect, “Collecting and Collectivity: Black Ar- Poets, butterflies, pamphlets, “proud rarities”: such were the chival Publics, 1900–1950,” examines the making of African American archives and shards out of which Porter launched a forty-year campaign to “ob- libraries to show how historical recupera- tain everything concerning the Negro” (Letter to Tanner). Moorland tion shaped forms of racial imagination advised that such a mass of material would “require careful organi- in the early twentieth century. zation,” and, indeed, by 1932 Porter’s imperative was to bring order

134.1 ] Laura E. Helton 101 to this reclaimed library (Letter to Porter Foundation, annual report, 1947, 1). Her work [10 Sept. 1931]). She turned to the technolo- illustrates how the tools that beget access to gies of her profession—catalogs, call numbers, reading objects also organize the imperatives cross-references. Yet as librarians at Howard and imaginaries that beget reading subjects. had long understood, there was no extant It is tempting to look back on Porter’s information system “suitable” for a Negro work, which contravened the routine misil- collection (“J. E. Moorland Foundation” 12). ing of blackness in libraries, as forecasting the he “name authority” lists used by catalogers suspicion of taxonomy prevalent in critical included few black authors; subject headings discourse today. In scholarly and popular ac- and “universal” taxonomies often omitted counts alike, the library and its cognates—the black topics. And so, at a moment when the archive, gallery, and record oice—recur as resounding majority of African Americans sites of racial power that guard the boundaries had no legal access to public libraries—much of knowledge (see, most recently, the museum less to books specifically “by and about the scene in the 2018 Afrofuturistic blockbuster Negro” (“Negro Materials”)—Porter decided movie Black Panther).5 From Jorge Luis Bor- to dismantle the tools she learned in library ges’s short story “Library of Babel” to con- school and remake them to capaciously de- temporary art exhibitions, artists and writers lineate blackness.3 She began with a new card have challenged taxonomic regimes through catalog, a classiication of her own invention, fantasies of disorder that parody the underly- and a typewriter to compose bibliographies ing arbitrariness of any classiication system (Porter, “Tentative Plans”). Undertaking this (Pisciotta; Enwezor; Springer and Turpin). work, she asked questions that, writ large, ex- Porter seemed to anticipate such a critique, ceeded their seemingly technocratic origins: for she brazenly altered information regimes What was the logic of blackness that tied in the face of oicial prohibition. But while together these collected texts and artifacts? Porter well understood the politics of cul- What might people ask of these materials, tural authority, she was as orthodox as she and how might the collection reply? was heretic. She never doubted the ideals of Against an information landscape that standardization and order.6 She exhibited full exiled black readers and texts alike, Porter’s faith in classiication, a faith that begs Simon catalog was a site where radical taxonomy Gikandi’s provocation: “Could one be a revo- met readerly desire. his essay reconstructs lutionary and still love the library?” (11). the creation of that catalog to tell a story of Porter might have answered Gikandi by race, interface, and imagination. It follows pointing out that to love the library, as a black Porter’s decimal sequences, her cataloging woman taxonomist in the 1930s, was already FIG. 1 protocols, and her reference correspondence to be a revolutionary. Her work asks us to Mrs. Dorothy B. to reveal the seemingly nonliterary work apprehend technologies of order not only as Porter of Howard of building infrastructure as a high- stakes disciplining mechanisms, as recent scholar- University, photo- form of literary practice.4 As evidenced in ship has productively done, but also, in David graph by Carl Van the thousands of letters Porter received from Scott’s formulation, as “at once conserving Vechten (Carl Van across the African diaspora—from read- and a condition of criticism, revision, and Vechten Papers, ers who could not pose their questions else- change” (xiv). Such a tension resounds in Af- Yale Collection of American Litera- where—her efort to enlarge and enumerate rican American literature, where the library ture, Beinecke Rare the intricacies of blackness as a category of is a key setting of literacy’s contradictory Book and Manu- knowledge fueled a broader sense of what a promise. For every Langston Hughes—who script Library, Yale black archive, or what Porter once called a recalls the 135th Street branch of the New University; © Van “literary museum,” might aford (Moorland York Public Library as his exalted irst desti- Vechten Trust). 102 On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading [ PMLA

nation ater he arrived in Harlem (395)—there performed by women, that enlarged black is a Richard Wright, for whom the subterfuge print culture’s ield of vision in the twentieth necessary for a black boy to access the library century. If book historians have richly docu- lingers as a bitter and indelible memory of Jim mented the routes of textual transmission and Crow “ethics” (Black Boy 214–16 and “Ethics” prohibition that structure readers’ encounters xxvii). 7 Alongside a pervasive romance of the with particular texts in time, turning to the library there is a countervailing understand- catalog raises questions about how readers ing that “the beacons of the library conceal navigate an archive of texts, in print and out unpleasant foundations” (Gikandi 14). For of print, that accrues over time.10 A catalog is those readers who, unlike Hughes, could a site through which people come to the very not access a repository of black books, and idea of navigation, a sense of which “ques- who instead mailed their queries to “Negro tions merit investigation” (Collins 252). For Collection, Howard University, District of that reason, Porter understood it as an epis- Columbia,” Porter served as interface. Her re- temological battleground where one could imagined decimals and catalog entries opened remap knowledge structures that erased or a bibliographic poetics for reading blackness. flattened blackness. Her acts of redirection he card-tray cabinets that Porter used and relabeling led readers across the expanse are iconic symbols of twentieth-century li- of black writing wherever it might be found, braries, but they rarely command a central even if it was embedded in, but unmarked by, plot line in studies of reading. To be sure, the white libraries’ notion of the universal. Such history of information is of increasing inter- acts were not always credited to Porter, for if est to scholars of literacy, who have shown, for catalogs have no readers, they also have no example, that there is no story of early mod- authors. Nor have they been a frequent sub- ern knowledge production without its zeal for ject of critical analysis—an oversight perhaps inventories, or of American public libraries as gendered as it is generic. But, as this essay without Melvil Dewey’s decimals, or of con- argues, to understand reading’s conditions of temporary textuality without algorithms.8 In possibility, we must turn to literary workers, such accounts, catalogs come into focus as like Porter, who authored infrastructure. analog databases that backill the media history of our own “information age.”9 And yet, 325.26: The Negro Question and the true scenes of literary practice are usually Universal Classiﬁcation cast as encounters between readers and writings, not between readers and index cards. As Porter sought to order the thousands he search for evidence of reading moves past of items brought together in the Moorland the catalog to artifacts like commonplaces, Foundation, the most popular system of li- marginalia, and memoir—inscriptions that brary arrangement was the Dewey Decimal record the intimacies of what was read rather Classification, a late- nineteenth- century than how it was found. Understandably so: if schema in which “the ininity of the universe many people can cite a beloved or hated text, can be contained within the ininite combi- how many are similarly moved by a catalog nation of ten digits” (Manguel, Library 60).11 record? To wit: books have readers; catalogs On the left side of Dewey’s decimal point have users. were ten classes that described the branches Might we pause, however, at the catalog of knowledge—100 for philosophy, 200 for re- as a scene of reading? To do so brings into ligion, 300 for sociology, and so on—each of focus the bibliographic experiences of read- which was further divided into disciplinary ers, as well as the bibliographic labor, oten subcategories. On the right side of the deci- 134.1 ] Laura E. Helton 103 mal point, a trail of up to eight digits led more almost wholly to speciic nationalities . . . e.g. narrowly into an array of concepts. Books on 325.26 Negro question” (Decimal Clasifica- women’s intellect, for example, could be found tion and Relativ Index). Thus, nearly every at 376.4: 300 for the social sciences, 370 for object relating to African American life and education, 376 for education of women, and, history—aside from those on slavery, sufrage, inally, 376.4 for “Mental capacity of women.” minstrelsy, education, or domestic labor— Dewey deployed a cadre of specialists to or- landed in a section of the library reserved for ganize his system for each ield, freeing indi- works about people foreign to the nation.14 vidual librarians—at a moment when small If race is a “highly contested represen- public libraries were proliferating—from hav- tation of relations of power between social ing to independently classify books on topics categories” (Higginbotham 253), then clas- ranging from the branches of chemistry to sification is one of the technologies that the periodization of British literature. Dewey maintain such hierarchies. Porter recalled prized this eiciency, arguing, “No one person struggling with Dewey’s technology, which is learned enough to class wisely books on all rendered the Negro as a slave or, when not subjects and sciences; but botanists can as- a slave, an immigrant: “they had one num- sign all botanic subjects to the right number, ber—326—that meant slavery, and they had mathematicians all mathematical topics, and one other number—325, as I recall it—that thus the Index will in time become as accurate meant colonization. So [in] all the libraries— as the best scholarship of the day can make it” many of the white libraries, which I visited (Decimal Clasiication and Relativ Index 14).12 later—every book, [even] a book of poems by Dewey’s universe, however, was pecu- James Weldon Johnson, who everybody knew liarly—and predictably—proportioned. In was a black poet, went under 325” (qtd. in the Dewey classification, philology divided Madison and Wesley 25). Although Dewey’s the linguistic world into nine areas: com- system aspired to organize knowledge by dis- parative, English, German, French, Italian, cipline rather than theme, 325.26 was an ex- Spanish, Latin, Greek, and other. he religion ception to that principle. It became a catchall class similarly reserved one subdivision for where librarians shelved anything black: E. C. all non-Christian faiths.13 Not surprisingly, Adams’s Congaree Sketches (folklore), John- then, blackness occupied a marginalized place son’s Autobiography of an Ex- Colored Man in this system. Dewey’s 1927 index, which (iction), Benjamin Brawley’s he Negro in Lit- Porter consulted, listed these classes under erature and Art (criticism), and he Speeches “Negro”: “Vocal music—Negro minstrelsy of Booker T. Washington (oratory). he eclec- and plantation songs,” “Slavery,” “Educa- tic works of the polymath W. E. B. Du Bois, tion of special classes,” “Negro troops in the including Black Reconstruction, he Souls of U. S. Civil War,” “the 13th and 14th Amend- Black Folk, and Black Folk Then and Now, ments,” “Household personnel,” “Race ethnol- frequently crowded in here too.15 Each title ogy,” “Mental characteristics as inluenced by was thus made an unwitting answer to the race,” and “Sufrage” (Decimal Clasiication “Negro Question,” a term that shrouded with and Relativ Index). For any text that did not scholarly agnosticism its cognate, the “Negro attend to these subjects, the protocol was to Problem.” To Du Bois’s famous and poignant place it at 325.26, a number in political sci- query—“How does it feel to be a problem?” ence, 320, under “Colonies [and] Migration,” (2)—his books might have answered that it 325, for works on “Emigrants of a special felt like sitting on a shelf at 325.26. country or race,” 325.2. An editorial note ex- While Dewey’s system thus packed into plained that “in United States 325.2 will relate a single category any works on “the Negro” 104 On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading [ PMLA

that were not about slavery, it simultaneously suit their holdings, Dewey’s edict kept most gave little consideration to the subject of of these alternative systems out of circula- slavery itself. he class number 326, “Slavery tion—as Porter would soon learn. His pro- Serfdom Emancipation,” was cursorily subdi- hibitions relected the assumption that tools vided, limited to one digit ater the decimal of categorization were useful rather than point, such as 326.1 for “Slave trade” or 326.4 epistemological or, as the 1951 edition of his for “Antislavery documents.” For the ith of Decimal Classification asserted, that “book Howard’s Negro Collection that concerned classiication is essentially functional, a me- slavery, including sixteen hundred titles do- dium of location, not a philosophical system” nated by the abolitionist Lewis Tappan, the (xviii). Such a posture belies the fact that any lack of complexity at 326 left little space to enumeration orders the universe according diferentiate one volume from another (Moor- to underlying hierarchies; in a library, “a cer- land Foundation, annual report, 1935–36). At tain vision of the world is imposed upon the irst glance, there may seem to be a kinship— reader through its categories” (Manguel, Li- and indeed a tension—between Dewey’s con- brary 47). From the arrangement of Imperial striction of black subjects and Porter’s own Chinese libraries according to cosmic order efort to assemble all works “by and about the (46) to the separation of profane from sacred Negro” in one room of Howard’s library. But texts in medieval Islamic libraries (54) to the for Porter, this assembly was an occasion for display of “Books by Negro Authors” at the attentiveness: an opportunity to give to Afri- 1900 Paris Exposition (Smith 157–86), clas- can diasporic subjects—including slavery— siication relects authorized points of entry the “infinite combinations” of description into the known world. that decimal classiication enabled. Dewey’s Imagination, it would seem, requires no approach to 326, by contrast, was a brazen act such authorization. That is why, as Barbara of undervaluation in a system so otherwise Hochman has argued, histories of reading of- fastidious that it even assigned a six-digit ten toggle uneasily between the inluence of class number—022.921—to the placement authority igures (parents, librarians, teach- of hat racks in libraries. Such treatment was ers, critics) and the independence of the “idio- not necessarily meant to mark the category of syncratic or resisting reader” (848–49). Since slavery as small (for surely there existed more librarianship entails not only the embodied books on slavery than on library hat racks), exercise of authority but also the implemen- but in epistemological and practical terms it tation of “authorities” (standard forms of suggested that the subject required little anal- names, titles, and subjects), one could argue, ysis and carried little weight. as has Alberto Manguel, that “[w]hatever “Whenever you use our exact numbers,” classiications have been chosen, every library Dewey instructed librarians, “use also our tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces exact and universal meanings for them” the reader . . . to rescue the book from the (Decimal Clasiication and Relativ Index 35). category to which it has been condemned” Independent changes to Dewey’s system were (History 199). Reading may well rebuke clas- strictly prohibited. When librarians pointed siication. As Sharifa Rhodes- Pitts suggests, out deficiencies in the classification tables, readers can ind a mysterious “order within Dewey counseled passivity; the only course of the library” that is “unfathomable and inac- action was to await an oicial revision. Stan- cessible from any catalog system” (55). No sys- dardization, Dewey argued, was always more tem controls how a reader meanders through urgent than change. While many librarians a text. Still, a catalog can determine whether a nevertheless made ongoing adaptations to reader inds that text by delimiting the imag- 134.1 ] Laura E. Helton 105 ined queries that lead to it. That power to relocated books like Edwin Embree’s Brown frame the imagination compelled Porter, and America—a white liberal’s “Manifesto on the her colleagues at other black institutions, to Negro Question”—from 325.26, under “Emi- quietly dismantle Dewey’s decimals. grants,” to 323, the class for “Internal relations with groups and individuals” (Rushing, Tech- nical Organizing 50). By shiting one digit, they 323.1: Remaking a Catalog of argued that race was not about the boundaries Black Imaginaries of national belonging but was deeply entwined In 1940, there were two dozen “Negro col- with class, family relations, political struggle, lections” in American libraries, all located at notions of equality, rights of petition, and laws black colleges or in black neighborhoods and of citizenship within a state or society—all nearly all stafed by black women (Rushing, concepts available at 323 but not 325 (Dewey, “Summary”). A handful of these women re- Decimal Clasiication and Relativ Index). hey fused to use 325.26 for any book (Rushing, made clear that if blackness troubled the na- Technical Organizing 42). They understood tion—if it did, in fact, pose a question—it did blackness not as a subcategory of sociology so from the position of citizen or exile rather but as a constellation encompassing the en- than presumed foreigner.16 Admittedly, this tirety of the printed record “by and about maneuver disallowed the possibility of think- the Negro.” As a result, they made their col- ing productively about blackness alongside lections speak across taxonomy’s universe. questions of global migration or statelessness. Porter moved Booker T. Washington’s Se- But it also refused to view blackness as homo- lected Speeches, which some libraries placed geneous; by inding a niche for works on race at 325.26, to the Dewey class for American relations inside the United States, catalogers oratory. She moved Du Bois’s books to his- stressed the particularity of racial categories tory and literature (Catalogue 149). “I just outside it, forcing additional delineation of began to base everything about Black litera- works on the West Indies, South America, ture and history wherever it fell in the regular Africa, and Europe. Porter, for example, spent Dewey Decimal classiication,” she explained decades enumerating Afro-Braziliana. Dewey, (qtd. in Scarupa 8). “Why not take the whole a seller of library furniture as well as classi- Dewey Decimal System, and put a book by fications, had always been enamored by the James Weldon Johnson, the poet, underneath pigeonhole (Wiegand, Irrepressible Reformer the number for poetry?” (qtd. in Madison 192). Curators at black institutions refused and Wesley 25). Likewise, at the 135th Street to adopt such a convenience, conceptually or branch library, in Harlem, Catherine Latimer functionally, for “the Negro.” removed books on Africa from the class for Operating wholly outside approved cata- travel, where catalogers often placed them, loging protocol, Porter took a more radical and moved them to ethnology or history (Des step than her colleagues. She did not sim- Jardins 168). hese acts built on a tradition of ply move books within Dewey’s taxonomy; countercataloging at black institutions, from instead, she discarded entire sections and Du Bois’s turn- of- the- century bibliographies rewrote what the decimals signified. At at Atlanta University to the iling systems de- 326—“Slavery Serfdom Emancipation”— veloped at the Tuskegee and Hampton Insti- Porter turned Dewey’s ten categories into tutes to organize black newspaper data. a hundred. Borrowing some class divisions While refusing to collapse works under from the Library of Congress’s competing the “Negro Question,” Porter and her col- arrangement and inventing other categories leagues also reframed that question. They herself, she created locations in the taxonomy 106 On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading [ PMLA

for “Psychological aspects of slavery,” “Mo- Porter imagined that her reconceived hammadism and slavery,” “Fugitive slave Dewey decimals, which she titled a “Tentative laws,” “Colonization debates,” and “Insur- Supplementary Classiication Scheme,” could rections.”17 Porter expanded “Religion” to upend the treatment of black subjects across include detailed classiications for “Free Ma- American libraries. But as she oten did when sons” and the “A.M.E. Church.”18 And she trying to disseminate her work, Porter encoun- retitled Dewey’s chronological subsections tered resistance. he foremost publisher of bib- of “American History.” The category 973.7, liography, for example, once told her that there “War of Secession,” became “he Negro dur- was no audience for her proposed indexes of ing the Civil War”; 973.8, “Andrew Johnson,” black poetry and periodicals.22 his time, how- was replaced by “Emancipation”; 973.83, ever, issues of copyright and control, rather “Rutherford Birchard Hayes,” became “Ku than audience, thwarted her plans. When Klux Klan”; 973.84, “James Abram Garield,” Porter wrote to Dorcas Fellows, director of the yielded to “Education of freedmen”; and Dewey classification in the early 1930s, and 973.85, “Grover Cleveland,” turned to “Slav- asked permission to mimeograph her “Ten- ery pensions.”19 Scanning the 900s, a reader tative Supplementary Classiication Scheme” in the Moorland Foundation would ind visu- (Letter to Fellows), Fellows responded that alized, in numerals rather than prose, a his- “this would be entirely out of the question un- tory predicated on black subjectivity. less we had approved it in detail” because pub- This renumbering exposed and chal- lication of Porter’s work “would quickly result lenged the geographic constraints of Dew- in destroying all standardization.”23 Porter re- ey’s universalism.20 Porter reconstructed called that Fellows “couldn’t see why I wanted 323.1—“Movement and questions of na- to develop something else, why I didn’t want to tionalities, races and languages”—to make put a book of poetry by James Weldon Johnson it describe “he Negro and his own group” under ‘325’ or ‘326’” (qtd. in Scarupa 8). he exclusively in the United States, assigning American Library Association cautioned Por- numbers for subjects like intraracial class ter that the Dewey organization would likely distinctions (“problems within the group”) accuse her of copyright infringement if she and ideologies of “racial inferiority.” She thus shared her classiication with other curators transformed a hierarchy of comparative na- who requested it (E. Miller).24 That Porter’s tionalisms, the animating logic of Dewey’s emendation drew the threat of legal sanction worldview, into a singular, infranational ap- illustrated its stakes. Nevertheless, she par- erture on the conditions of blackness. While tially circumvented this threat with an act of Porter interiorized the geospatial lens at 323, subterfuge. When she published the Catalogue elsewhere she fractured it. She invented a of Books in the Moorland Foundation, in 1939, special class, M9—a nomenclature with no using funds from the Works Progress Admin- correspondence in Dewey—to classify works istration (WPA), she embedded her custom encompassing the history of blacks “in Africa Dewey numbers in it, “with the thought that and America and elsewhere,” such as Wil- it might aid libraries in the classiication of the liam Ferris’s he African Abroad (“Tentative same title[s] ” (Catalogue, preface). Supplementary Classiication Scheme”). hat form of diasporic sense-making ran afoul of M: The Moorland Foundation and an Dewey’s nationalist division of knowledge, Archive of Blackness but it fully inhabited the idea that the catalog is always a space of overlapping orders (Pi- Porter’s radical revision of standard classiica- sciotta 24n51).21 tion was possible because the Moorland Foun- 134.1 ] Laura E. Helton 107 dation existed apart from the university’s and wholly renumber it for “the Negro and general holdings, both physically and analyti- his own group” in the United States alone, cally. It occupied its own reading room, where for she had no books on Austria or many the call number for each book carried the pre- of the places that required space in a gen- ix “M,” and was accessible through a separate eral taxonomy. That autonomy allowed for card catalog (ig. 2).25 hat sequestration as a a meticulousness not previously applied to special collection was, in part, a legacy of ra- black materials. A small pamphlet that else- cial segregation: an indirect manifestation of where might be grouped with other ephem- spatial and epistemological rules in which the era broadly labeled “Negro” was individually exclusion of blackness was unmarked and its cataloged in Porter’s collection according to presence marked. Under Jim Crow, there were the subjects it discussed, from Babylon to the libraries and colored libraries; in the Library Baptist Church (Moorland Foundation, an- of Congress subject headings, inventors and nual report, 1945–46, 8–9). Negro inventors (MacNair). Equally impor- Porter’s independence also facilitated tant, however, the Moorland Foundation rep- experimentation with descriptive terminol- resented the nationalist ideal, articulated by ogy. While decimal classification governed the most famous of early-twentieth- century the physical arrangement of books, a diferent black bibliophiles, Arthur A. Schomburg, that system, subject headings, governed their ana- such collections would “ire the racial patrio- lytic organization in a catalog. Porter worked tism by the study of the Negro books” (5). with Frances Yocom, at Fisk, and Latimer, at Even as she fought the segregation of the 135th Street branch library (later called the black knowledge, Porter kindled the au- Schomburg Collection), to coin “unauthor- tonomous tradition of “racial patriotism” ized” vocabularies for their collections. hey FIG. 2 that Schomburg invoked. She was deeply en- inserted onto catalog cards new terms, such Card catalog at the sconced in national information protocols as “Passing,” “Pan- Africanism,” and “Blues,” Moorland-Spingarn at a moment of increasing federal interest in that were absent from Library of Congress Research Center, “Negro Studies.” She prepared for the De- subject headings, or LCSH (Battle 220; Yo- Howard Univer- partment of War a list of “Books on Negroes” com 6, 8). hey also elevated to the status of sity. Photograph by for soldiers’ camp libraries, for the author. example, and transmitted batches of black bibliographic records to the National Union Catalog.26 But inside the Moorland Founda- tion, such interventions gave way to invention—modes of enumeration that were commencing rather than corrective. Instead of inding tight passageways through an ill- fitting taxonomy, Porter mapped blackness as a capacious ield of inquiry in its own right. In this new matrix, she could take the class 323.1—which Dewey divided by country (“e.g. struggle of nationalities in Austria 323.1436” [Decimal Clasiication and Relativ Index])— 108 On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading [ PMLA

heading words like “Insurrections,” which in Congress card: “Sects—U.S.” To draw into LCSH represented subdivisions of other topics the corpus of black print such a book, which and were not directly retrievable in an alpha- a reader elsewhere would not ind in a search betical search (Yocom 12).27 But again, Porter on black religion, Porter cataloged “analyti- went further, not only correcting universal- cally,” in library parlance. Boring underneath ism’s omissions but also attacking its racial the search functions that facilitated access to logic. She removed the racial qualifier from stored print memory, Porter surfaced the sub- LCSH terms like “Negro authors” and “Negro plot of Braden’s book. She typed a new term, inventors” (MacNair), changing them to sim- “Father Divine,” in red ink at the top edge of ply “Authors” and “Inventors” (Porter, “Sub- the Library of Congress card. She then iled ject Headings”). hus, James Porter’s Modern it in the Moorland catalog under “F” (Moor- Negro Art, usually iled under “N” for “Negro land Foundation, Dictionary Catalog).29 art,” in Porter’s catalog was instead found Such filing strategies reflected Porter’s in the “A” drawer with “Artists” (Moorland keen grasp of the politics of access. She daily Foundation, Dictionary Catalog).28 Here, Por- navigated the convoluted Jim Crow landscape ter disrupted the “predicament of otherness, of reading spaces around Washington: federal that position in which particular experience institutions, including the Library of Con- is never permitted to signify the universal” gress, with no racial restrictions on admission; (Morris 36). Her catalog cards indexed a uni- a municipal library unsegregated in theory if verse that was a priori black, as well as more not always in practice; and white academic expansive than what would it the drawers of repositories that oten sent their students to any extant information system. When readers the Moorland Foundation but refused to re- entered the Moorland Foundation, they en- ciprocate for Howard students.30 Porter was countered a universalism reimagined so that also a careful observer of how categorization blackness was its author, not an exception to it. could hide a text—another way to deny access hat racial imaginary stretched the ter- even when the doors of a library were open. rain of black inquiry. hen as now, libraries She knew that the American Antiquarian So- depended on centralized bibliographic ser- ciety did not catalog material as “Negro” yet vices, especially the Library of Congress’s possessed a treasury of relevant documents, Catalog Division, which sold its cards for including the rare newspaper Rights of All use in other repositories. his system of co- (Porter, “Library Sources” 233).31 And she had operation replicated the national catalog on learned that Harvard University’s vast hold- a smaller scale, a thousand times over, in li- ings on slavery, as Arna Bontemps would later braries across the country. In an era predat- note, were stored in its business library (204). ing full- text searches, federal catalogers chose hese Porter called, fully leveraging the term’s headings—a maximum of three per record— freighted double meaning, “fugitive materi- that became the ubiquitous bibliographic als” (“Fity Years” xxv). pathways leading readers to books. While In short, Porter recognized the diference classiication theory mandated speciicity— between a black archive—which she built at “mountains,” not “landforms”; “poetry,” not Howard—and an archive of blackness, which “literature”—brevity necessitated naming oten resided outside black institutions and a book’s central plot rather than its minor was not denoted as part of black print cul- characters (Pettee). Charles Samuel Braden’s ture.32 While she rued the capacity of white These Also Believe, with a lone chapter on institutions to buy large swaths of the black the African American spiritual leader Father archival record, Porter nevertheless empha- Divine, carried one subject on its Library of sized epistemological over physical ownership 134.1 ] Laura E. Helton 109 and envisioned a portal for texts that would Cavalry (Moorland Foundation, annual re- never reside materially in one place. In the port, 1952–53.)34 Perhaps these correspon- late 1930s, she harnessed federal relief dollars dents were among the millions of African for an ambitious project called, in the bureau- Americans barred from southern libraries. cratic lexicon of the WPA, Project A: A Union Or, at a moment when the print life of even of Books by and about the Negro. Ten librar- the most famous black writings proved brief, ies across the country, each with a known perhaps their searches elsewhere proved fu- or hidden cache of “Negroana,” mailed Por- tile. Or maybe they turned to Porter because ter their catalog data on sheets of paper or their questions had too oten elicited a famil- in boxes of cards (Porter, “Description” and iar refrain: he Negro has no history.35 Letter to Van Deusen). Porter then supervised To serve these distant readers, Porter twenty- three WPA workers as they compared needed distant reading: methods of recall and collated some thirty thousand records, and retrieval scaled for eiciency.36 In earlier producing a composite ile known as a “union decades, before the rise of institutional Afri- catalog.” he result was unprecedented: “the can American collections, private bibliophiles largest card record of publications by and made their parlors quasi-public spaces, and about the Negro ever made available in one they, too, fielded epistolary inquiries from place” (“Negro Materials”).33 Much as she strangers. Schomburg replied to such queries had once reconvened Moorland’s fragmented by copying lengthy passages from his books, library, Porter now summoned an archive of which he ordered as he pleased—by color and blackness—difuse and oten unmarked—to spine height (Johnson-Cooper 32). His mode her catalog. An analog WorldCat for black of recall was sensory. “I saw the book in a materials, avant la lettre. dream,” he once wrote, “and it was resting on the third shelf near the right side” (qtd. in Sinnette 82). By contrast, Porter read her col- See Also: Cross- Referencing a Distant lection by proxy, by way of cards and alpha- Reading Network numeric codes that routinized the practice More than three thousand readers a year of expertise.37 To an ever-growing volume of came to the Moorland Foundation, and as reference requests, she responded not with they moved along the glass- encased book- the flowery phrasings that characterized shelves that lined its walls, they would see Schomburg’s prose but with crisp lists that Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction classed with purposely bore no mark of authorial style. works of history and James Weldon Johnson’s As she endeavored to keep pace with the work with poetry, thanks to Porter’s rear- expanding collection and its users, Porter rangements. But her tools were meant equally herself had little time for sustained reading. for a diferent set of readers—not those who Book dealers’ catalogs served as “bedtime perused the shelves in person but those who reading” (Porter, “Fity Years” xxiv); she “read sent questions from afar. Letters came to through osmosis” the texts she cataloged Porter’s office from “high school students (Barnes). he “absorption of print cannot be and Ph.D. candidates . . . from libraries, book considered reading,” she lamented (Moor- dealers, editors, housewives and writers,” land Foundation, annual report, 1935–36, posing every size and kind of question about 26). But if Porter forfeited her own status as the African diaspora: on nationalism and reader, it was to put the collection in a “state colonization, Haitian poetry and West Afri- of readiness” for those who queried it (Moor- can languages, police brutality and all- black land Foundation, annual report, 1939–40, towns, enslaved grandparents and the Tenth 20). Her replies to readers’ letters were brief: a 110 On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading [ PMLA

formal salutation, an acknowledgment of the titles readily found in local libraries, precisely question, and a list of citations drawn from the places where unalloyed use of Dewey deci- her catalog, all typed above a signature line mals and LCSH made black print culture hard that read, “(Mrs.) Dorothy Porter, Supervisor, to see.41 While Dewey’s editors kept Porter Moorland Foundation” (Letter to Murray). from sharing her taxonomy—thus prevent- She produced countless such lists. In 1936, ing her from revolutionizing classification for example, she compiled lists “of works of practices more generally—she nevertheless individual authors Dunbar, Miller, Chesnutt; managed, through correspondence and redi- of subjects like voodooism, drama, dentistry; rection, to change how distant readers read. of the history of a movement or event like in- Porter performed this role for four de- surrections, industry, art; of all the books . . . cades. When she irst arrived at Howard, an on a particular subject like slavery” (“Proj- NAACP oicial wrote, “Because we are get- ects”). While Porter was later known for ting so many requests for material about the singular, monumental reference tomes—like Negro, you can imagine how happy I am to her three- hundred- page Afro- Braziliana— know that at last I have a place to forward the true scale of her work emerged through these inquiries” (Murphy). As such inquiries multiplication, through these thousands of grew in number, they also grew in complex- very small bibliographies “produced upon re- ity, from questions about a handful of topics quest” (Moorland Foundation, annual report, in the 1930s—such as “interracial coopera- 1933–34, 4). However unromantic to a biblio- tion, poetry, soldiers, Douglass, Cullen, labor, phile like Schomburg, her systemic sensibility music, abolitionism, biography, education” facilitated a growing reading public—distant (Moorland Foundation, annual report, 1937– or near—for black letters.38 38, 2)—to requests on an astonishing range of hrough such correspondence, the Moor- subjects twenty years later. A fragment from land Foundation functioned as the national a single year of Porter’s 1955 log of reference library—notionally if not oicially—for black queries, a layer of what Scott calls the “archae- materials in the early twentieth century.39 ologies of black memory,” captures this array: Porter’s tools anchored what became, in efect, a relay network for bibliographic information. African administration; African agriculture; In this network, the Library of Congress, the West African Pilot; Impact of western civiliza- country’s default library of record, diverted tion on Nigeria; Bushmen paintings; Capital- inquiries about African American subjects ism and slavery; Carter G. Woodson; Impact of to Porter. It likely held the materials needed Europe on Africa; Integration in Washington, to answer these queries, but it had not de- D.C.; Ku Klux Klan; Gold Coast; Emancipation veloped descriptive mechanisms to retrieve and the Haitian Revolution; Martin R. Delany; them and thus reasoned that “since the books Educational programs of Freedmen’s Bureau on negroes are already brought together in in S.C.; Carmen Jones; Economic Problems of Africa; Ethiopia; Denmark Vesey; Eman- [Porter’s] collection it would be much simpler cipation; Haiti; History of Negro economics; for her to get the information than for this Freedmen; Faculty Contributions; Integration; Library to do so” (Caton).40 When research- Civil Rights; Negro College Graduates; Negro ers sent letters directly to Porter, across thou- medicine; Negro spirituals; Negro press; Negro sands of miles, she did not instruct them to poets; Negro progress; N.C. state conventions; come to Washington for a rare book. Instead, American Colonization Society; Negro in ic- she oten turned their attention back toward tion; Negro slavery; Negro in labor; Negro texts that had been close at hand, but unde- medical schools; Negro women; Racial and tected, all along. Her bibliographies identiied cultural conlicts; Sierra Leone; Leopold Sen- 134.1 ] Lau ra E. Helton 111

ghor; Slave resistance; Union League of Amer- from mimeographing a scheme for African ica; and West India n Politics. (Moorland and African American materials, a subse- Foundation, annual report, 1955–56, 14) quent editor wrote to ask not only if Porter had “worked out [her] own expansions for he enlargement of inquiry, both numerically speciic parts of the classiication system” but and conceptually, shows “a complication of also if she would “be willing to share these the possible pictures of the past available for with us, by git, by loan with permission to remembering” (Scott ix). Porter witnessed copy, or otherwise” (Custer). Porter’s reply is this expansion, one in which “curiosity about unknown, but she could not have missed the Negro life has turned urgently to profounder irony of this request to help manage a vast, interest in Negro cultural background and if belated, racial rewiring of the systems that history” (Moorland Foundation, annual re- ordered American print culture. port, 1939–40, 21). In short, the contours of what could and could not be known under- That it was Dorothy Porter who built went revision. Long before this revision was this national infrastructure for black bibli- formally named black studies, Porter readied ography would have surprised the founders the catalog. of Howard’s Negro Collection. In 1914, Jesse Such a shift owed much, of course, to Moorland donated his personal collection other changes in the public sphere, from a of Africana to the university at the behest of prospering black press and an uptick in book Kelly Miller, dean of arts and sciences. Miller publishing to postwar diasporic political net- envisioned Moorland’s books and pamphlets works. But, as Porter also knew, readers had as nuclei of the proposed National Negro Li- to imagine that the “new facts” they sought brary and Museum (“Pleads”). Situated on were lodged in contemporary information Howard’s campus overlooking the federal cap- structures—for the idea that one’s questions itol, this imagined institution “could not be, are answerable is a condition of possibility and need not be, rivalled anywhere,” Miller for continuing to ask (“Role”). Aiming to prophesied (Letter to Board of Trustees). It do more than just make Howard a central would, he argued, require oversight by a “re- reference bureau, then, Porter’s agenda was search scholar” with “a seasoned sense of cul- infrastructural: to multiply the sites of in- tural values” (Letter to Johnson). Miller spent quiry and retrieval. After the expiration of two decades unsuccessfully lobbying for the WPA funds shuttered Project A in the 1940s, funds to establish the National Negro Library she informally advised other repositories—a and Museum, and in those years his notion of role that carried no title or remuneration.42 “scholar” remained unchanged. It overlooked That work accelerated in the 1960s amid women like Otelia Cromwell and Eva B. what Porter described as a “Negro informa- Dykes, local educators who held doctorates tion explosion,” when libraries in the United and likely knew Miller through black elite cir- States and abroad sought, under pressure, to cles in Washington. But it also ignored the far redress their historical neglect of black ma- greater number of African American women terials (qtd. in Stevens).43 Porter advised the without access to advanced research degrees heritage presses that began reprinting long- who were, like Porter, joining the ranks of dormant texts (Porter, Letter to Franklin).44 professional librarianship (Dagbovie; Des Jar- She led workshops on how to catalog old dins 118–42).46 Miller dismissed the idea that collections anew, teaching other curators to library training could produce the expertise excavate unseen black holdings.45 And more required to manage Moorland’s collection, than two decades ater Fellows prohibited her quipping that a curator should not be “one 112 On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading [ PMLA

who merely knows how to arrange books on posite index of books held elsewhere, and by the shelves and keep them well dusted” (Letter pointing readers to unseen volumes in their to Newman). When the university’s trustees local libraries, Porter established conduits ultimately failed to build the museum, leav- between diferent sites of black textuality. She ing the collection under Porter’s jurisdiction, initiated a project of recovery and rewiring Miller used similarly diminishing language to that has continued to reverberate, from the lament that the Moorland Foundation would Library Company of Philadelphia’s retrospec- remain, in his estimation, “merely a library in- tive identiication of its black holdings in the cident” (Letter to Newman; see also Brawley). 1970s (an undertaking Porter encouraged) to Betokened by his use of the verbs arrange the American Antiquarian Society’s current and dust, Miller’s analogy between house- work to add the subject term “Blacks as au- work and librarianship hinged on a gendered thors” to its legacy catalog records (Library presumption that both were “merely” domes- Company; Hardy, “Practice”). Porter thus fa- tic. But such depreciation missed the under- cilitated a national Negro library in systemic lying, if understated, ambition of each chore: if not museological terms—a network rather to arrange is to make meaning of a group of than a monument. objects, and to dust is to maintain them in a The mechanics of networks are largely state of readiness for the eye or hand.47 hose invisible, as infrastructure is, by and large, practices, which black women professionals meant to be. he fact that infrastructural la- often had to perform at work and at home, bor was frequently performed by women who lacked the signposts of cultural authority produced lists and card iles, and not rhetoric Miller valued (Harley). Mundane as he might or verse, has subtended an additional layer of have thought it, however, the task of order- invisibility, in critical terms, for many schol- ing a library enacted critical claims about ars of print culture.49 To focus on this (sub) the place of blackness in systems of knowl- stratum of knowledge production is not sim- edge. To undertake an arrangement of black ply to mark the presence of igures like Doro- books—to give them coherence as a collection thy Porter in literary studies but also to reveal and refuse the clutter of 325.26 or 326—was how cultures of reading are made in and to insist on the capaciousness of blackness as through the contested handicrafts of stan- a set of histories and ideas warranting a map. dardization. Porter gave order to the desires And to keep them “well-dusted”—not merely of readers, routed through three- dimensional stored, as Moorland’s books once were, but databases and coding languages of the library ready for use—was to insist that a lineage of profession, circa 1930. Those operations, black thought had relevance for the present.48 which mapped black subjectivity as a system Ironically, it was the very aspect of the with hundreds of points of entry rather than library trade Miller disdained—its ethos of two—325 and 326—expanded the notion of access rather than argument—that made Por- what reading could yield. More than just a ter’s work national in scope. Even as she grew site of retrieval, the catalog produced a new Howard’s collection, Porter maintained a black imaginary. nonproprietary relation to the black intellectual tradition. She aimed to make Moorland’s collection “the big idea” not of Howard, as Miller wanted, but of inquiring black publics more broadly (K. Miller, Letter to Johnson). NOTES By circulating the Catalogue of Books in the I thank Krystal Appiah, Jeremy Braddock, hulani Davis, Moorland Foundation, by creating a com- John Ernest, Deborah E. McDowell, Michele Mitchell, 134.1 ] Lau ra E. Helton 113

Carla L. Peterson, Henry Pisciotta, Daniel Rosenberg, 9. “Card”; Krajewski; McGann 1591; B. Mitchell; Yates Barbara D. Savage, Nikhil Pal Singh, and Maurice Wal- 56–57. Discarded catalog cases, superseded by online sys- lace for commenting on early versions of this article; the tems, have become objects of nostalgic consumption. Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and 10. he ield of book history has long treated “political African Studies at the University of Virginia and Penn and legal sanctions” as central to relations between books State’s Center for Humanities and Information for sup- and readers (Darnton 68). On the speciic conditions shaping porting its development; and Cliford Muse and Joellen reading publics for African American texts, see, e.g., Foster; ElBashir at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center for McHenry; Rambsy; Hutchinson and Young; and Gardner. facilitating access to Dorothy Porter’s records. 11. On Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), see 1. Libraries were among the only public facilities in Miksa; Dain 455–56. In the early twentieth century, most the District of Columbia not oicially segregated by race, libraries used DDC to assign call numbers, while rely- but in 1922 a municipal proposal to locate unsegregated ing on the Library of Congress for subject headings. Al- branch libraries inside segregated schools was scuttled by though DDC remains popular worldwide, most academic white residents who feared black readers in their institu- libraries in the United States—including Howard’s— tions (Chestnut; “Cooperative System”). eventually switched to the competing Library of Congress 2. When he donated his library to Howard University Classification (LCC). On problems posed by DDC and in 1914, Moorland expected it to be “catalogued and placed LCC for special collections, see Walker and Copeland. in an appropriate alcove or room” (Letter to Newman). Li- 12. Dewey wrote in “Simpl Spelling,” an efort to reform brarians partially cataloged the books but kept them with written English. I have normalized his spellings for clarity. the general collection (“J. E. Moorland Foundation”). It 13. Although cast as “universal,” DDC was based on was not until Porter rehoused and recataloged Moorland’s North American library holdings of the late nineteenth library that his intent was realized (Moorland, Letter to century, a structural reason for its Euro- American tilt. Porter [5 Mar. 1930]; Barnes). At the time of research, hat initial constraint has had enduring repercussions Dorothy Porter Wesley’s papers at Yale University were (A. Wright 39–40). minimally processed and folder numbers were unavail- 14. Similarly, Dewey placed works on black servants able. (Ater her 1979 marriage to the historian Charles H. at 647.24, the class for “Foreign employees Races and na- Wesley, she used the name Dorothy Porter Wesley.) For an tionalities; orientals, negroes, etc.” (Decimal Clasiication overview of Porter’s career, see Simms- Woods. and Relativ Index). For a brief discussion of Dewey’s 325 3. In 1939, nine million African Americans in southern and 326 class numbers, see Rofman 71–73. states lacked access to public libraries (“Ickes”; Knott 41–46). 15. DDC eliminated 325.26 in the 1960s, but its efect 4. I draw on Augst’s idea of libraries as part of the lingers in libraries that, because of legacy cataloging, still “infrastructure of public culture” (182; see also Mat- shelve together books like William Ferris’s he African tern) and on Drucker’s deinition of interface as a “space Abroad, E. Franklin Frazier’s he Free Negro Family, J. A. that constitutes reading as an activity” (213) rather than Rogers’s One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro, a “window through which information passes” (216). and Harry Haywood’s Negro Liberation. Evidence of what If Drucker describes a world of words saturated by the was classed at 325.26 before the number was eliminated seeming transparency of screens, her argument is equally can be found in the Library of Congress’s he National true for the bulky card catalogs that doubled as the early- Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints; evidence of what is still twentieth-century library’s interface design and its inte- cataloged at this number can be found through OCLC’s rior architectural design (Van Slyck 47–54). Web site Classify (classify.oclc.org/classify2/). Because 5. his suspicion is a pivot of the archival turn, with libraries purchased printed cards from the Library of roots in Foucault’s he Order of hings (esp. xix–xx and Congress, its cataloging decisions informed shelving 53–54) and its descendant, Bowker and Star’s Sorting practices across the United States. Some smaller libraries hings Out. For early iterations of this turn, see Spivak; followed cataloging suggestions in the American Library Richards; Trouillot; Hamilton et al.; and Stoler. For stud- Association’s A. L. A. Catalog or A. L. A. Booklist, which ies of taxonomy in information studies, see Adler; Olson; in 1907 transformed 326 from “Slavery” to “Negroes.” and Drabinski. 16. his move echoed long- standing debates about col- 6. Porter’s drive to improve the practice of library onization among African Americans, who began with the classiication, rather than to critique the very idea of clas- premise that whether they chose to remain in or leave the siication, anticipated the critical cataloging movement United States, they did so as people entitled to citizenship that emerged in the 1970s. See Berman; Clack; Marshall; (Moses; Painter; M. Mitchell 16–50; and Power- Greene). and, more recently, Roberto. 17. Porter, “Tentative Supplementary Classiication 7. On Wright’s iconic encounter with Jim Crow lit- Scheme”; see also Library of Congress, Classification: eracy, see Battles 180–84 and Gikandi 17. Class H and Classiication: Class E–F. 8. Chartier 69–88; Blair; Wiegand, Part 75–105; Gitel- 18. Porter, “Free Masons” and “Classiication AME man; Noble. Church.” 114 On Decimals, Catalogs, and Racial Imaginaries of Reading [ PMLA

19. Dewey, Decimal Clasiication and Relativ Index; gustine’s College, Hampton Institute, Prairie View State Porter, “Tentative Supplementary Classiication Scheme.” Normal School, and Drew University (American Library 20. On universality as a core principle of library prac- Association, “Questionnaire”). Other historically black tice, see Olson. Porter’s work may be seen as an example institutions, such as Bennett College and Atlanta Univer- of what Palumbo-Liu calls “appropriat[ing] the ‘university, participated in regional union catalogs not specii- sal’ as an enabling iction.” cally organized around race (Downs). Project A was never 21. The overlay of Porter’s diasporic sensibility on published, but it anticipated successors like the African Dewey’s taxonomy illustrates Drucker’s argument that in- American Materials Project (Matthews; Quarles 168–69). terface is “a border zone between cultural systems” (216). 34. Porter’s reference correspondence and annual re- 22. Latimer; Phelps, Letter to Porter [11 July 1934], ports document the wide range of research queries she Letter to Porter [11 Dec. 1934], and Letter to Porter received. he examples of queries I provide in the text [20 Dec. 1937]; Porter, Letter to Phelps. are drawn from Richardson (on nationalism and colo- 23. Like Dewey, Fellows wrote with “Simpl Spelling.” nization); Watson (on Haitian poetry); Powell (on West I have normalized her spelling for clarity. Fellows’s pro- African languages); Porter, Letter to Gardner (on police hibition contradicts the fact that other special collections brutality); Porter, Letter to Shreeve (on all- black towns); shared their adaptations of Dewey (Towner). C. Davis (on enslaved grandparents); and hompson (on 24. Requests for the scheme came from Hampton the Tenth Calvary). Institute, the New York Public Library, Fisk University, 35. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative, for example, had Atlanta University, and North Carolina College for Ne- no new edition between the 1850s and 1960. he story groes, among others. (perhaps apocryphal) of why Schomburg collected Afri- 25. Porter placed duplicates of cards from the Moor- can diasporic books was that he vowed to prove wrong land Foundation in the main library catalog. By contrast, a teacher who told him that “the Negro has no history” most libraries with a “Negro Collection” integrated it (Bontemps 189). into their general holdings—if not on the shelves then in 36. I employ distant both in its literal sense, to invoke a single catalog (Rushing, Technical Organizing). readers located far away from Porter, and in Moretti’s 26. Moorland Foundation, annual report, 1940–41, sense, to denote mechanical reading methods. In using 12; Moorland Foundation, annual report, 1936–37, 13–14. Moretti’s term anachronistically, I am describing what 27. he important distinction between headings and Rosenberg has elsewhere called “index reading”: modes subdivisions has faded with full-text search, but in a of apprehending a distant textual object through biblio- physical catalog only “iling words” would be directly ac- graphic intermediaries that extract and sort (91). cessible to searchers. 37. On the routinization of memory through paper- 28. Updates to LCSH have long been controversial. work, see Robertson 959–61, 967. For a recent example, see Aguilera on the Library of 38. Augst charts the shit of libraries’ role from stor- Congress’s plan to change the heading “Illegal Alien” to ing knowledge, a “transcendent value,” to the “value- “Noncitizen.” Porter, Latimer, and Yocom collaborated neutral” distribution of information (173–74). Indeed, the to create a lexicon for African American books without bibliophile Henry Slaughter, whose private library Porter seeking Library of Congress approval. cataloged in Project A, felt her methods, which he called 29. On subject analytics, see Library of Congress, “schoolbook librarianship,” did not capture his collec- Handbook 16–17, 23–27. tion’s richness (qtd. in Bontemps 199). On sensuousness 30. Scarupa 16; Madison and Wesley 33; International versus functionality, see Benjamin; Gikandi 15. Research Associates 58; Hill 162–64. 39. On Porter as “African America’s national librar- 31. A later counterpoint to this unmarking was Carl ian,” see Williams 90. Van Vechten’s obsessive racial labeling of everything in 40. For a similar encounter, between James Aba- the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at Yale jian and the American Antiquarian Society, see Hardy, University as either “Negro” or “White” (Braddock 224). “‘Black Printers.’” 32. A 1942 survey by the Association for the Study 41. For a letter that contains a bibliography of easily of Negro Life and History found the largest holdings of accessible works, see Luedtke. black-themed manuscript material at the University of 42. See, e.g., Stewart; Watts; B. Davis; Porter, Letter to North Carolina, Duke University, the Historical Society Clement and “Negro.” of Pennsylvania, and the Library of Congress (Lindsay). 43. his information explosion relied on the repro- 33. Participating libraries were: Brookline Public (col- duction of earlier reference tools developed by black re- lection of slave laws), Houston Public (colored branch), positories. For example, G. K. Hall published facsimile Fisk University (Negro collection), Oberlin College (anti- reprints of the card catalogs of the Schomburg Collection slavery propaganda), Library of Congress (titles on the in 1962, of the Moorland Collection in 1970, and of Fisk Negro), Cleveland Public (African languages), St. Au- University’s Negro Collection in 1974. 134.1 ] Lau ra E. Helton 115

44. Porter advised Arno Press, Krause-Thompson, Augst, homas. “Faith in Reading: Public Libraries, Lib- and Beacon Press on their reprint series. eralism, and the Civil Religion.” Institutions of Read- 45. Porter participated in the Institute on Materials ing: he Social Life of Libraries in the United States, by and about the American Negro held at Atlanta Uni- edited by Augst and Kenneth Carpenter, U of Mas- versity in 1965 (Porter, “Librarian”); in the Conference sachusetts P, 2007, pp. 148–83. on Negro Bibliography in 1968 (Madison and Wesley 34); Barnes, Bart. “Librarian Dorothy Porter Wesley Dies: in the Institute for Training Librarians of Special Black Black History Curator at Howard.” he Washington Collections and Archives at Alabama State University Post, 19 Dec. 1995, p. E5. in 1973; and in the Conference on Evaluating Black Re- Battle, homas C. “Dorothy Porter Wesley.” Dictionary of search Studies at Jackson State University, also in 1973 American Library Biography, 2nd supplement, edited by (Moorland Foundation, annual report, 1972–73). Donald G. Davis, Libraries Unlimited, 2003, pp. 219–21. 46. In 1925, Anna Julia Cooper became only the Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W. W. fourth black woman from the United States to earn a Norton, 2003. doctorate, and she did so in France. Bay, Mia E., et al., editors. Toward an Intellectual History 47. I draw here on Alexander’s description of the do- of Black Women. U of North Carolina P, 2015. mestic interior as a site of material theorization, of an Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” Illumina- “aesthetic made collective” (4). See also Reser. tions, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry 48. Porter’s rearrangements relect a black feminist Zohn, Schocken Books, 1978, pp. 59–68. intellectual tradition challenging gendered and racial- Berman, Sanford. Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on ized mechanisms of knowledge production. See Bay et al.; the LC Subject Heads concerning People. Scarecrow Waters and Conoway; Cooper; Christian; Guy-Shetall; Press, 1971. and Collins. Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler, Marvel Stu- 49. On infrastructure’s invisibility, see Burrington; dios, 2018. Bowker et al. 98–99. Such invisibility is symptomatic of Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Infor- what Hayles describes as the posthuman disembodiment mation before the Modern Age. Yale UP, 2010. of information, exacerbated by the gendered forgetting of Bontemps, Arna. “Special Collections of Negroana.” Li- human computers, librarians, and other early knowledge brary Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 3, 1944, pp. 187–206. workers. 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