The Bank of Books

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a piano, and a room slowly filling up)

[Verse 1]
Her father could not read. Robert Lee Parton, a good man and a hard worker,
and he could not read, and he was ashamed of it, and she knew he was.
She could not fix it. You cannot fix a grown man's shame from the outside.
So in 1995 she did the only thing available, which was everybody else's children.

[Chorus]
A book in the mail. Every month. Free. From birth until they start school.
It began in one county — HER county — and it did not stay there.
Five countries. A hundred and ninety million books. Two hundred million.
The number was still going up on the day she died and it is going up now.

[Verse 2]
And here is the detail that undoes me every time I read it:
the children called him the Book Man. Her father, who could not read,
walked around Sevier County being called the Book Man by children,
and she said watching that was the best thing she ever got out of any of it.

[Chorus]
A book in the mail. And she did not put a test on it, or a means test,
or a form, or a reading level, or a thing you had to prove.
You are born, you get a book. That was the whole system.
Ask anybody who has ever tried to give anything away how hard that is.

[Bridge]
She called herself the Book Lady and she meant it as her actual job.
Not the wigs. Not the Hall of Fame. Not the hundred and ten million records.
Ask her what she was and past a certain age she would say: I send children books.
And a man who never learned to read is the reason, and he knew he was.

[Outro]
(the choir comes in, full)
The Book Man.
A book in the mail, every month, until school.
He never could read one of them.