Bridgeet Olugbala held her wooden bow firmly in her hand and pressed it against the strings of her cello, hoping the sound emanating from the instrument would shush the chatter of the rambunctious group of children gathered on the floor in front of her.
Although Mondays at the Margaret Walker Alexander Library in Jackson, Miss., are usually reserved for story time, these students were in for a special treat: a music lesson and performance by the longtime librarian and cellist.
On this December day, the librarian sat atop a wooden chair with her hair tucked away and wrapped in black cloth. She held her large string instrument upright by her side, and a book of sheet music sat fixed upon a black, tripod stand.
As the children’s murmuring faded, Olugbala’s lesson began.
“The instrument I have is called a cello. Can you say cello?” she asked the group of boys and girls looking up at her.
“Cello,” they repeated back in unison.
She then gave the students a quick lecture about the anatomy of the instrument, the four strings of the cello and the bow—typically made from horse hair.
Eyes now fixed on her sheet music, she held the bow taut and glided it across the strings of her cello, serenading the little ones.
As the librarian began to play, she hoped the experience would awaken in them the same appreciation for music, history and literature that her parents had sparked in her many years prior.
‘Reading Was Like Cool Water’
Many of Bridgeet Olugbala’s childhood memories were set in her family’s two-story, Cleveland, Ohio, home.
While her father Roosevelt Pendleton Jr. spent much of his time working as a journeyman electrician, her mother Nettie Wiley Pendleton worked as a paralegal. Her father had trained at Grambling State University and had dreams of becoming a music teacher. He took up several occupational trades to provide for his family, Olugbala explained.
“He wanted to employ himself. He didn’t want to work for anybody because of what that meant for him, as a Black man,” she said. “He dealt with it as best he could.”
In his spare time, her father moonlighted as a jazz musician. She still remembers the sounds that would fill their home and envelop her—the grounding of the bass, the vibrating brass of a trumpet or a trombone, and the harmonies her father created when his fingers struck the family’s piano.
“I would come down the stairs and sit on the steps and watch my daddy play,” she recalled. It was common to see other musicians like saxophonist and record producer Stanley Turretine at the home, she said.
Even though the pressures of her father’s work and life were sometimes evident, Olugbala has fond memories of his performances. “I remember he would come home from doing a set and bring me this smoked white fish, just for me,” she said.
While her father was primarily responsible for exposing her to music, Olugbala recalled that it was her mother who helped ignite her love of literature. “She liked to read. She is a very intelligent woman,” she shared.
When her siblings, then just three brothers, would run off and play amongst themselves, Olugbala got lost in books. “I was lonely. I had brothers, but I was the only girl. I had to find something to entertain myself with,” she told the Mississippi Free Press.
She started with perusing the rows of encyclopedias that her parents kept in the home. Then, she went on to her brothers’ comic books.
“For me, reading was like cool water,” she continued. “Books were always around.”
Eventually, violin lessons filled some of her idle time.
‘From Periodicals to Circulation’
After a fire destroyed their Cleveland home, Roosevelt Pendleton Jr. moved the family down south to Prichard, Ala., where he grew up and still had extended family. They would eventually settle down in nearby Mobile.
Although her childhood home was gone, that exposure to music and literature in her formative years in Cleveland, Ohio, laid the foundation for who she would become. As her family settled into their new life in Alabama, Olugbala’s mother insisted that she continue her music education. The cello eventually became her instrument of choice.
She went on to play as a student at Mobile’s Murphy High School and became the first Black female cellist to perform with the Alabama Allstate Orchestra.
After graduating from high school in 1983, she enrolled at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Miss., where she majored in music. “I was already playing cello professionally,” she said.
While music remained a constant in her life, so did her appreciation for literature. “All the while in college, I worked in a library,” she continued.
After obtaining her degree from USM, she started a full-time position in the school’s library and worked her way to a supervisory role. “I’ve gone from periodicals to circulation, which is mainly just checking out books,” she said.
About six years ago, she found her way to the Jackson-Hinds Library System. Every week, through story times, sewing classes or chess club, she pours into Jackson’s youth and hopes to spark their own love of music and literature. Libraries, she explained, are “an integral part of education and culture.”
“The library is a repository of the hopes, dreams and understandings of a people,” she added.
‘The Education We Give Ourselves’
While Bridgeet Olugbala believes those activities are important for community gathering, she said she would like to see more parents visiting public libraries and introducing a practice of reading to their children.
Despite the recent national conversation over book bans and censorship of certain text, Bridgeet Olugbala said she believes it is a parent’s responsibility to help their children develop a love of reading that is independent of their school’s curriculums.
“There is the education we are given and the education we give ourselves,” she explained. “How can we get our children to even want to be interested in checking out books if the adults around them do not? If I don’t see you reading, I’m not going to read.”
One of her favorite authors is Clarksdale, Miss., native Lerone Bennett Jr. Bennett, a graduate of Jackson’s Lanier High School and Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., served as a journalist at Jet Magazine and then as senior editor of Ebony Magazine before his death in 2018.
He authored several books including the historical text “Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1618–1962” and “Black Power U.S.A.: The Human Side of Reconstruction 1867–1877.”
Bennett also wrote “Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream,” which disrupted the narrative that referred to Lincoln as the “great emancipator” whose benevolence toward enslaved people is what led him to write the Emancipation Proclamation.
“People of African descent, we need that knowledge,” Olugbala told the Mississippi Free Press. “Key elements of our history and culture are missed because parents of today don’t have time for it or think it’s relevant.”
“But when history bites you in the butt, you’re going to wish that you had read that book and had the understanding,” she continued.
While the Margaret Walker Library is slated to host activities this year like chess club and opportunities to let visitors crochet and quilt, Olugbala ponders how she and other librarians can better serve the Jackson and larger Hinds County community.
She dreams of leading a West African drumming and dance class and teaching children how to read sheet music, something her father would have enjoyed. Ultimately, she hopes for a return to a time where people had respect for their community libraries and librarians.
“I love these patrons that get 10, 12 books to read for themselves,” she said of some parents and children who utilize her library’s services. “Now they’re not going to read all of that in two weeks, but the fact that they got it and had a thirst for it, I appreciate that.”
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