DATE: Monday, June 16, 1997                 TAG: 9706160076

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JENNIFER LANGSTON, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: HARBINGER                         LENGTH:   92 lines

RESTORATION PROJECT, LONG UNTOUCHED, IS A VALUABLE RELIC FROM DAYS GONE BY

When Jessie Waters first laid eyes on the vintage truck that now sits behind his welding shop, he imagined transforming it into a hot rod. Or perhaps a hippie van.

As young men do, he got distracted and left the truck untouched for more than 20 years - until he realized he had a piece of history in his barn.

The 1938 Ford had the words ``Hertford County Colored Public Library'' painted in block white letters on the right side.

Waters had bought what old-timers say was the first bookmobile operated by a black library in a segregated nation.

A lover of old things - he still uses a rotary telephone - Waters has spent the past two years on weekends and evenings restoring the panel truck. He has filled dents, replaced the tires, worked on the engine and repainted the inside shelves once lined with books.

Waters, 50, who owns Kitty Hawk Iron and Steel Works, wears jeans, a flannel shirt and cowboy boots, and sports a bushy blond mustache and gold half-glasses. He smokes a Kools while he inspects his handiwork.

A bungee cord stretches across the hood of the black truck, and peach patches mark the dents he has filled. He now realizes it may be a blessing that he never souped it up or painted over the words that reveal its origins.

``I guess I just got old enough to realize what I had,'' Waters said.

``That's when I finally figured out this was a piece of history. It shouldn't be a hot rod.''

The truck once delivered books every Monday to rural outposts in Hertford County. It served, for the most part, black farm families who grew peanuts, tobacco and corn - and there was no other service like it in the country.

According to newspaper accounts and the remembrances of those like Alice Nickens, a 93-year-old resident of Winton, it was the first bookmobile in the South and the only one in the country owned by an independent black library.

``It was really God-sent to people who lived far out,'' Nickens said. ``At that time very few rural people had ways to get to the central library. As far as I know, it was the first of its time.''

Katie Marie Hart, who died in 1984, founded the Hertford County Black Library and started the bookmobile service in 1938. An advocate for the black community when schools and libraries were separate but unequal, she raised funds to buy the truck as the director of the ``colored'' county library at the time.

Hart was the first black to graduate from New York City's Columbia University, and for 16 years she supervised the Hertford area's black schools.

``In some of the homes in this county, there were no books, not even a Bible, a newspaper or a funny book. I felt I had to find a way to get books into the hands of the people,'' Hart told a newspaper reporter in 1958.

Most of the people who benefited from her work have long since died. But some residents of Winton and Colfield, towns that have no stoplights, still remember the joy it brought.

``You could see these women that were waiting for her. You couldn't get to the stores to buy books, you couldn't afford them,'' said Pauline Jones, 71, who lives outside Winton.

Her mother was one of the bookmobile's most devoted customers. People said that when she died, she looked unnatural without a book in her hand.

``My mother was a fiction reader,'' Jones said. ``She just doted on it, and our books would be there when we got home from school.''

Jones remembers reading ``Little Women'' and other books that have fascinated young girls for generations. The pages transported her beyond the one-horse town with unpainted frame houses, churches and a filling station.

``It just helped you,'' she said. ``You grew from reading. You could just be content with a book and find out what's going on in the world.''

It also helped even the odds.

``You remember how it was,'' said Marie Hart Manley, 61, named for the legendary woman whose picture now hangs amid white faces in the Hertford county library. ``She tried to give the blacks the same opportunities that the whites had.''

Although the truck Waters is restoring was replaced by a station wagon in 1956, the bookmobile program continued in the area until the 1990s when circulation dropped and the program was cut, Manley said.

Following in the footsteps of her namesake, Manley drove the bookmobile route after the black and white libraries were integrated in 1968. She made daily stops at community centers, nursing homes and houses of shut-ins.

``When they took the bookmobile off the road, a lot of our patrons cried,'' Manley said. ``They really loved it.''

Waters himself developed a strong affection for the old 1938 Ford that started it all. He bought it for $150.

When the restoration is complete - by the end of the summer, he hopes - he may see whether museums are interested in the bookmobile. Or he may just keep it.

``This one means a lot more to me. I've restored cars and driven them and sold them,'' he said. ``I wouldn't sell this one.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

DREW C. WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot

Jessie Waters bought the vintage bookmobile more than 20 years ago

with ideas of turning it into a hot rod. ``I guess I just got old

enough to realize what I had,'' he said. ``That's when I finally

figured out this was a piece of history.''

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu