#librarymemories

The LIBRARIES THAT RAISED ME - Beside the Savannah

Not long after graduating from Abraham Clark High School, I found myself uncertain about what exactly came next.

Some people around me already seemed to possess direction.

College.

Careers.

Plans.

I did not.

What I did know was that I needed movement.

So in 1996, I left New Jersey and eventually made my way to Augusta, Georgia to stay with family members while I tried to figure things out.

Everything felt different there.

The rhythm.

The heat.

The pace of conversation.

Even the streets moved differently than the Northeast cities I had grown accustomed to growing up.

Back home, movement often felt compressed and hurried. In Augusta, things seemed stretched wider beneath the Georgia sun.

I began riding the city buses simply to learn the city itself.

At the time, I had no real destination most days.

I would ride looking out the windows trying to understand what Augusta felt like. Different neighborhoods. Downtown storefronts. People sitting outside barber shops and restaurants. Churches. Parks. Old buildings carrying Southern history I was too young at the time to fully understand.

Eventually, during one of those rides through historic downtown Augusta, I passed a museum connected to James Brown.

That caught my attention immediately.

There was something about seeing history attached visibly to physical places that always stayed with me. James Brown was not just music there. Augusta carried him like memory.

And not long afterward, while wandering through downtown, I noticed another building that instantly drew me in for an entirely different reason.

The Augusta-Richmond County Public Library on Greene Street.

No matter what city I found myself in, libraries still pulled at me instinctively.

Even far from New Jersey, they still felt familiar.

I did not have my own library card there, so I used one belonging to my younger cousins to check out books. Looking back now, I realize libraries had become part of how I stabilized myself emotionally in unfamiliar places.

Books helped me settle into cities.

The Savannah River became part of that routine too.

I would carry books down toward the River Walk, lay my sajada (prayer rug) beneath shaded trees, pray, read Qur’an, read fiction, and sometimes fall asleep listening to the movement of the water nearby.

Those afternoons remain frozen in my memory differently than almost anything else from that period of my life.

I was young.

Uncertain.

Trying to understand adulthood.

Trying to understand direction.

But somehow those quiet hours beside the river felt peaceful in a way difficult to explain now.

And then one afternoon inside the library, I noticed a flyer discussing Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and its connection to rural Georgia during the early 1900s.

That immediately caught my attention.

I was already in Georgia.

Walking Georgia streets.

Riding Georgia buses.

Listening to Georgia voices around me daily.

So the idea of reading a story deeply connected to the land surrounding me felt strangely personal even before I opened the book itself.

I checked it out and carried it with me down toward the River Walk.

What happened afterward is still difficult for me to fully describe all these years later.

The book completely consumed me.

Not casually interested me.

Consumed me.

I kept reading beneath the trees for hours unable to put it down. Time slowly disappeared around me. By the time I finally looked up, evening had already started settling over Augusta.

Eventually, I realized how late it had become and began walking back toward my aunt and uncle’s home on Laney-Walker Boulevard.

But even then, I still could not stop reading.

I remember trying to read portions of the book beneath streetlights while walking carefully along the route home, attempting not to trip while still staying inside the story.

That was how deeply the book had pulled me in.

When I finally made it back to the house, I grabbed a piece of fruit, sat down, and continued reading.

Hours passed without me noticing.

The house became quiet.

The insects outside became calm.

And somewhere deep into the night, I finally looked at the clock and realized it was nearly four o’clock in the morning.

I had finished the entire book.

Looking back now, I cannot say with absolute certainty that night in Augusta was the exact moment I became a writer.

But I know something changed in me there.

Until then, books had fascinated me.

That night, I realized stories could completely overtake a person internally.

They could transport someone emotionally so deeply that the physical world itself temporarily faded into the background.

After that summer, I no longer looked at storytelling the same way again.

The LIBRARIES THAT RAISED ME - Before I Had the Words

By the summer of 1989, the world already felt different to me.

Not completely different.

Not suddenly transformed overnight.

But different enough that I could feel myself slowly changing even if I did not yet fully understand into what.

That summer came just before my freshman year at Roselle Catholic High School. Childhood was beginning to loosen its grip. My interests changed. My routines changed. Even the way I observed people and neighborhoods began changing.

I was no longer simply wandering through libraries and streets because they felt interesting.

I had started searching for something.

At the time, I could not yet fully explain what that something was.

What made the feeling even stranger was that Islam itself was not unfamiliar to me growing up.

Long before the major changes eventually came to East Orange, we already knew Muslims. I had family members who were Muslim. We saw Muslims regularly throughout parts of Newark and East Orange. Muslim names, kufis, conversations about Islam, and Muslim families were already part of the broader world surrounding me long before I officially became Muslim myself.

And somewhere deep inside, even before I understood what it fully meant, I already felt that one day I would become Muslim too.

I did not quite know what being Muslim was at the time.

But I knew I would be one.

Looking back now, that certainty still feels difficult to explain properly.

It was not rebellion.

It was not performance.

It was not teenage experimentation.

It felt quieter than that.

Almost like recognition arriving before language.

One of the earliest outward changes came through food.

Not long after moving to Roselle years earlier, I gradually stopped eating pork. Over time, I also began distancing myself from certain holidays and traditions, including eventually my own birthday.

At the time, I could not have explained Islamic dietary laws or detailed religious rulings to anyone. I did not possess that kind of knowledge yet. I simply knew that I no longer wanted to eat it or interact with certain traditions.

People occasionally questioned me about it.

Some probably thought it was a phase.

Others may have found it unusual considering I was not yet Muslim.

But even then, the decision felt strangely settled inside me.

Like something I had already accepted internally long before I fully understood why.

Around that same period, my curiosity about the world deepened in ways I could feel but not yet properly organize.

The libraries still remained part of my life.

Books still surrounded me.

But now I paid attention differently.

I noticed people more carefully.

Conversations more carefully.

Identity more carefully.

The same curiosity that once pushed me toward animal books, nature books, and random stories now began moving toward bigger questions about people, purpose, belief, and direction.

Without realizing it, libraries had already trained my mind to search.

To wander intellectually.

To follow curiosity without fear.

To sit quietly with questions for long periods of time.

Even before Islam formally entered my life, the habits of searching had already been growing inside me for years.

Roselle itself remained full of movement during those years.

Cars rolled steadily down Chestnut Street.

Buses carried people toward Linden, Elizabeth, Newark and NYC.

Storefront radios still played music loudly enough to spill into sidewalks during the summer months.

Kids still gathered outside after dark beneath streetlights while parents occasionally yelled names from windows when it was finally time to come inside.

And somewhere within all of that ordinary late-1980s life, my internal world was slowly shifting.

The truth is, I did not become Muslim because of one dramatic moment.

There was no lightning strike.

No cinematic revelation.

No instant transformation that suddenly separated my life into perfect categories of before and after.

Instead, it felt like slowly walking toward something familiar that had already been standing somewhere in the distance for years.

And during that summer before freshman year at Roselle Catholic, I finally took my shahada.

Ash-hadu an la ilaha illa Allaah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasulu Allaah.

I bear witness that there is no deity worthy of worship except Allaah, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allaah.

Even then, I did not yet fully understand where life would eventually carry me afterward.

I could not have imagined:

* future Islamic bookstores,

* personal libraries filled with Islamic texts,

* educational projects,

* radio programs,

* publishing,

* storytelling,

* or writing books centered around Muslim family life and literacy.

None of that existed clearly before me yet.

But something inside me felt settled for the first time.

Not complete.

Not finished.

But aligned.

And looking back now, I realize that long before I had the theological vocabulary, long before I understood the deeper intellectual dimensions of Islam, and long before I ever held the pen as a writer myself…

The LIBRARIES THAT RAISED ME - The Neighborhood

Some of my earliest memories of East Orange are not attached to single events at all, but to movement.

The sound of trains arriving and departing from the Ampere train station across from my second-floor front window on North 16th Street.

Even as a child, I used to sit near that window and watch people board and leave throughout the day. Men carrying briefcases. Women holding shopping bags. Teenagers laughing too loudly. Conductors leaning slightly from doors before trains pulled away again.

At that age, I could not have explained why I found it all so interesting.

I simply liked watching people go somewhere.

Back then, my world felt enormous even though most of it existed within only a few blocks.

Nearly my entire family seemed to live within walking distance of one another. My parents and grandparents were on North 16th Street. Some of my mother’s siblings lived farther down on the 200 block. My great-grandmother and uncle lived on N 18th Street. Other relatives stayed closer to the Newark side near 4th Avenue by the old bakery factory and the Westinghouse factory. Sometimes additional relatives arrived temporarily while trying to establish themselves somewhere nearby.

As children, we moved through all of it naturally.

One apartment led to another.

One relative’s kitchen led to another conversation.

One block became another adventure.

The neighborhood itself felt alive.

Children rode bicycles up and down sidewalks while older boys played football in the street, stopping only long enough to yell “Car!” before the game scattered temporarily and resumed again seconds later. Girls played double Dutch with such seriousness that bike riders often had to wait patiently for an opening to pass through the spinning ropes.

Every part of the neighborhood seemed to carry its own soundtrack.

Radios played from open windows.

Buses hissed at corners.

Store doors slammed shut behind customers.

The train station rumbled constantly.

Arcade sounds spilled outside whenever someone opened the doors to Sinbad’s.

And somewhere inside all of that movement was the Ampere Branch Library quietly existing like a calm pause between breaths.

But the neighborhood itself was just as much a teacher as the library.

Perhaps my fondest memories from those years involve the ordinary people who became neighborhood legends in the minds of children.

There was the Icey Man, an old Puerto Rican man who scraped blocks of ice down into paper cones before pouring brightly colored syrup over the top. Every child seemed to have a favorite flavor. On hot summer days, simply hearing his approach could send kids running down sidewalks searching their pockets for enough change.

Then there was Old Man Freeman.

To this day, I still think about him whenever I see modern grocery delivery services.

Old Man Freeman had converted an old school bus into a traveling fresh fruit and vegetable market. The seats had been removed and replaced with shelves filled with produce. People literally walked through the bus selecting fruits and vegetables the same way shoppers move through grocery aisles now only placing their items on a scale to render payment to Old Man Freeman.

At the time, none of us thought of it as unusual.

It was simply Old Man Freeman’s bus.

And then there were the police officers who occasionally brought retired police horses through the neighborhood. For one dollar, children could ride them.

A dollar felt enormous to us then.

Kids saved for those rides.

You could feel the anticipation building long before the horses even arrived.

Looking back now, I realize those neighborhoods contained entire ecosystems of small human interactions that many people no longer experience in quite the same way.

And mixed directly into all of that life were places that quietly expanded my imagination.

Story time at the library.

Walks through the Branch Brook Park orchards.

Taking the Newark City Subway toward Bloomfield to watch movies on Bloomfield Avenue.

Passing Upsala College, which looked absolutely enormous to me as a child. Not simply large, but almost mythical. Like one of those places from movies where important things happened and serious people existed.

At that age, I did not yet dream about becoming a writer.

I was becoming something else first.

A watcher.

Someone who noticed things.

Someone who listened carefully.

Someone who paid attention to people, sounds, storefronts, conversations, movement, and atmosphere without realizing those observations were quietly teaching him storytelling already.

I understand now that storytelling does not begin with writing.

It begins with noticing.

The library helped shape that in me.

But so did the trains outside my window.

So did the arcade noise.

So did Uncle Smokey’s barbershop beside the Post Office on 4th Avenue.

So did the Icey Man, Old Man Freeman, double Dutch ropes slapping sidewalks, and the boys yelling “Car!” in the middle of football games.

All of it mattered.

All of it was teaching me how people move through the world.

Ampere Parkway

I recently came across information online that the Ampere Branch Library in East Orange was temporarily closed.

It was not the kind of news that stops the world or sends anyone into dramatic grief, but it caused a quiet pause in me. The kind that arrives without warning. One moment I was simply researching online, and the next I was staring at the screen while an entire neighborhood from my childhood came rushing back all at once.

The annual carnival that used to set up on Ampere Parkway near the train station.

The electronic store near 16th Street and 4th Avenue where the televisions and stereos on display were often the very same ones people purchased because there were no untouched boxes waiting in the back. The record store nearby. The pharmacy. The grocery store with the butcher in the rear. The Post Office. Sinbad’s Arcade. The dry cleaners. The bank. The storefront windows. The rhythm of East Orange during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

And sitting quietly among all those memories was the Ampere Branch Library.

I grew up at 191 North 16th Street in East Orange. Back then, the neighborhood felt enormous to me. Every block carried its own personality. As children, we measured geography differently than adults. A few streets could feel like an entire world.

The library was one of the places in that world that felt different from everything around it.

Outside, there was movement. Buses exhaled at corners. Store doors opened and shut. Radios played from windows. Kids ran through the neighborhood. Arcade sounds leaked onto sidewalks whenever someone pushed open the door at Sinbad’s.

But inside the library, everything slowed down.

The air felt cooler.

People lowered their voices.

Books sat in neat rows like they had been patiently waiting there forever.

At that age, I did not yet understand libraries intellectually. I did not think of literacy programs, public institutions, or educational access. I simply knew I liked being there. I liked the calmness. I liked the order. I liked walking between shelves and pulling books out simply because something about the cover caught my attention.

Sometimes children are drawn toward places long before they understand why.

What makes those memories even more meaningful to me now is that the nearby Masjid was once the very same bank where I had a childhood bank account. At the time, it was simply another ordinary building in the neighborhood. Just part of daily life. I could never have imagined that years later the building would become a Masjid, nor that I myself would eventually become a Muslim author writing stories centered around faith, literacy, family life, and community.

Looking back now, the symbolism almost feels too perfect to have been planned.

But neighborhoods change.

Buildings change.

People change too.

And sometimes the places that quietly shape us reveal their importance only decades later.

As a child, I did not walk into Ampere Branch Library dreaming of becoming a writer one day. I was simply curious. Curious about books. Curious about stories. Curious about places that felt larger on the inside than they appeared from the street outside.

That curiosity mattered more than I realized.

Libraries teach children things quietly.

Not only reading.

They teach patience.

Observation.

Stillness.

Imagination.

How to sit alone with thoughts.

How to wander mentally without physically moving very far at all.

A child may enter a library looking only for something to do after school or on a weekend afternoon, while something much deeper is happening invisibly beneath the surface.

I understand that now.

When I think back to East Orange, I do not only remember buildings or businesses. I remember the feeling of movement through the neighborhood itself. Walking past storefronts. Looking into windows. Hearing conversations. Smelling food from small groceries and restaurants. Passing the arcade. Watching people carry shopping bags down the street.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that ordinary life stood a public library quietly offering imagination to anyone willing to walk through its doors.

There is something deeply humbling about realizing that parts of your intellectual and creative life began forming before you even had language to describe what was happening.

Before publishing.

Before Trade Winds Books.

Before stories.

Before manuscripts.

Before Richmond.

Before any of the roads my life would eventually travel.

There was simply a young boy from East Orange wandering into the Ampere Branch Library while the world outside moved noisily on without him.