Augusta Gough was a storyteller. Her mother, an enslaved woman whose name is lost to history, had been a storyteller, too, regaling the girl with folktales on the Maryland plantation where she was born in the mid-nineteenth century. The adventures of the crafty Brer Rabbit, the roots of which scholars trace back to West Africa, were Augusta’s favorite as a child, and she continued to tell those tales throughout her life.

“She told them to me with love and affection as she sat in her favorite rocking chair in the middle of a large, old-fashioned kitchen,” Augusta Baker, Gough’s namesake and granddaughter, recalled years later in an early draft of an essay about her relationship with storytelling. As an elementary school child in 1917, “I would rush home to be there by ‘pot-watching’ time,” Baker wrote. “‘Grandma,’ I’d ask, ‘tell me about how Brer Rabbit tricked Brer Fox.’”

Augusta Baker—as it’s surely clear in those few lines from an undated essay draft—continued her family’s tradition of storytelling. Baker told the story of Brer Rabbit and so many others that reflected the Black cultural experience to countless thousands of children during her thirty-seven-year tenure with the New York Public Library and inspired new generations after her retirement as the storyteller-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. The university is now home to Baker’s books and papers, including a collection of writings, photographs, and children’s drawings, shared via JSTOR, that she collected during her path-breaking career.

Born in the Black community of Old West Baltimore in 1911 to schoolteachers Winfort J. and Mabel Gough Braxston, Baker (who used her first husband’s last name) was part of what a short biography by an anonymous writer called “a book family,” even though the only library she was allowed to use as a Black child was Baltimore’s oldest branch, which she remembered as a dark and unattractive place, according to Miriam Braverman’s Youth, Society, and the Public Library. Baker trained to be a teacher, a path open to some Black women, but after completing her degree, she would often tell people, she discovered she did not like teaching, “but [she] did like books.”

Baker returned to school in the depths of the Great Depression to earn a library science degree and began to hunt for a job in 1934, an effort hampered, Regina Sierra Carter writes in her dissertation on Baker, by her race, gender, marital status, and the economy. She eventually found work in New York in 1937. “My career really began the day I was sent to the 135th Street Branch to work with the children of Harlem,” Baker told the unnamed author of the above-mentioned biography.

As a children’s librarian in the predominantly Black neighborhood, Baker set herself to the task already underway at the library: collecting books that reflected the Black experience and eschewed harmful stereotypes. It would become a lifetime project for Baker, who published several books including an extensive and oft-revised bibliography today titled The Black Experience in Children’s Books. Over time, the library branch—now known as the Countee Cullen Library—became a cultural center for the community. In Baker’s archives are countless images of the library, rendered on construction paper in pencil and crayon. “This is the city library,” announces one in a rainbow of colors; it looked so different from Baker’s own experience as a child. In another sketch, a woman who may be Baker herself stands in the middle of a room filled with books, handing an eager young girl—perhaps the artist, one Jeanette Harris— a volume with the title Book of Famous Women.

Baker, who died in 1998, made an indelible mark on librarianship, but she became famous first among the children of Harlem as a storyteller. “All children’s librarians were expected to tell stories and tell them well,” Regina Sierra Carter notes. Baker feared she was not naturally good at storytelling. It was a skill she worked hard at until, she would later write, it became “the great love in my life.” For her, it was a way to introduce children and those less familiar with books to the joys she had discovered in story.

“The best reward for it all,” Baker said to her anonymous biographer, “is to have children settle in their seats, fix their eyes on the story teller and wait for her to say ‘Once upon a time…’”

“Once upon a time” begins an essay that Baker saved for forty-five years. The words were handwritten in pencil by a junior high school student named Katie Hawkins in 1953. The story was about “a little girl called Katie. Katie never took interest in anything,” until one day Katie passed by the neighborhood library and “said to herself, ‘I think I will go in.’” There she found a history book.

“Katie read the whole book. When she got up, she decided to join the library. They were very glad to have her,” Hawkins wrote. “Ever since that time, Katie goes to the library, and reads books, because she enjoys reading them very much.”

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