Like many first-time parents, when my husband and I left the hospital with our newborn son, we were launched into the unfamiliar. Those weeks in November 2021 were a blur of all the cliches that come with having a first child. I remember not feeling confident walking up our uncarpeted stairs with such a tiny human in my arms, so we set up camp in our living room, my son’s bassinet flush against our couch.
I also remember things just arriving at our D.C. home. First, bagels and coffee. Next, boxes filled with onesies, booties, blankets and diapers, followed by an absurd amount of food. And then my son’s first piece of mail: a book from Dolly Parton.
As he grew, doubling in size and developing not one but two dimples, the food deliveries tapered, and the flurry of visitors and phone calls became less frequent. Our specialness wore off to the world; we were just another couple who were madly in love with our child. But those books from Dolly Parton kept arriving, bringing a new story into our home every month.
By now you’ve read the accolades and remembrances about her remarkable life. Singer. Songwriter. Entrepreneur. Philanthropist. Plenty of articles also recounted her role as “The Book Lady,” a title she said in numerous interviews that she preferred over “The Queen of Country Music.”
Parton started her book-gifting program, Imagination Library, to honor her father, who couldn’t read or write. It has delivered nearly 300 million books to children age 5 and under, expanding across the United States as well as to other countries and specific populations, including refugee children living in London.
It’s a remarkable philanthropic enterprise. But it is also something radical in today’s political landscape: an act of universal education. Living in D.C., where many schools have specialized curriculums, you don’t get a sense that kids are growing up with a shared story. Some are immersed in dual-language programs; others in play-based Montessori. All kids in the District, however, can receive a gift in the mail every month from The Book Lady. It may be the only thing our children have in common.
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My husband, a Black kid from South Philly, and I, born in India and raised in the suburbs of San Francisco, grew up in the early 1980s thousands of miles apart, but we can recall similar elementary-school memories — pizza Fridays, the daily Pledge of Allegiance, cursive worksheets and that squeaky TV cart wheeled in on days when a teacher needed a break. It was after middle school that our paths diverged. He tested into a magnet high school. I attended the zoned school assigned to our mailing address.
Here in D.C., and increasingly much of the U.S., there is little that is universal about how and what our kids learn. This has been the case for decades across major cities in the U.S., but what’s different today is that the sorting starts as early as pre-K, at the age of 3. This is when parents can first enter the D.C. school lottery. People rank their top five choices and pray to whatever god or gods they believe in for their preferred school.
The city boasts a myriad of choices. You have language immersion elementary schools — Chinese, Spanish, French, Hebrew. You have Socratic, STEM, experimental and Montessori-focused learning. And you have your neighborhood public schools — which reflect the segregation of the city writ large and, frankly, the machinations of white parents to shape schools into a racial ratio that suits them, even in a city that is nearly half Black. (And that’s just the public options. There is every variety of private school, too, including religious ones that focus on the Catholic, Episcopal, Quaker, Muslim or Jewish traditions.)
When we enrolled my son in the lottery, we asked for our neighborhood public school. In his first year he had units in gardening, outer space and forest animals. In a school assembly, he and his comrades dressed as members of the Black Panther Party and marched on stage in honor of civil rights heroes. He knows Harriet Tubman as the railroad lady and one day emphatically demanded we compost “to save the planet.” I’ve wondered if any of these experiences are shared across our small city, let alone across the country. I suspect they are not.
But D.C. Library’s Books from Birth program — part of Parton’s Imagination Library — is very much a universal experience. Ward 6 council member Charles Allen championed legislation to create the program after seeing his young niece receive books at her home in East Tennessee. “My brother and sister-in-law were like, ‘Well, this is kind of what we do in Tennessee. We get this book from Dolly Parton,’” he recalled to The 51st.
Since the D.C. program’s launch in 2016, more than 4 million books have been delivered to almost 100,000 children across the District — about 77% of kids under age 5, my colleague Martin Austermuhle reported.
Because we all get the same books, there is at least the potential for collective early-childhood experiences across our city. I wonder: Was every parent forced to read “Green Tractor” to their toddler three or four times in a row, only to be met with “More, more, pleeeease”? Did all kids relate to the disappointment the boy in “Ice Cream Face” felt when his scoop rolled off his cone and onto the pavement? Does everyone know the characteristics of “Solitary Animals” versus social ones? Did all dads and moms delight in the rhythm of “Llama Llama Red Pajama” as much as my husband and I did? (The internet says the answer to that last question might be yes.)
Something that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently said to Jon Stewart on “The Weekly Show” podcast has stuck with me: “If today you and I were to introduce the idea of a building that lends out books for free, we would be slandered,” he said. “And yet that’s the library.”
It rings true that public goods fundamental to our society would be met with aggressive division if proposed today. It was Dolly Parton’s gift to make the public good she provided — helping families across the country read books in common — seem not radical at all, but rather conventional, even obvious. We shouldn’t have needed her to offer kids this universal experience. But thank goodness she did.
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The night of Auntie Dolly’s death, I gathered up my son’s books from Imagination Library. I saw books about friendships, shapes, feeling big feelings, tractors, overcoming fears, using your imagination and how different cultures say “I love you.” The pile slowly arched to one side as I found more and more.
“Can we read six books tonight?” he asked, his standard attempt to postpone sleep as long as possible.
“How about two?” I responded.
“Hmmm, OK, let’s do five!” he said, smirking, a skilled negotiator at the age of 4.
We cuddled up in his bed, slid under the blankets and began to read — the same books that I’m guessing parents across D.C. and farther afield were reading to their kids that night, all thanks to The Book Lady.
Kainaz Amaria is senior editor of visual storytelling at NOTUS.
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