Multiple choices

by David Benjamin 

“What I tell kids is, Don’t get mad, get even. Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest non-school library or to the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they’re trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.”

— Stephen King

MADISON, Wis.—Foremost mong the church ladies, crusaders and censors striving to keep children from reading naughty books about sex, gender, racism, slavery and other unsavory realities are elected officials, from the local school board to governors of states and U.S. senators. These self-appointed arbiters never get asked the question that comes first to my mind. 

“Did you read these books?”

After which I’m tempted, a little mischievously, to ask, “Do you read books?”

After this, a veritable interrogation would be hard to resist. “Which books? What are you reading now? How long since you read an entire book? How long since you set foot in a library? Or a book store? Or a classroom? With kids in it?”

All this untoward curiosity gets me thinking about tricks that states like Florida and Mississippi once used to keep black folks and white trash from voting—poll taxes, guessing the number of jelly beans in a jug, and literacy tests.

The tests that targeted black voters were deviously conceived and lengthy. One of the most infamous was a 30-question ordeal, in Louisiana, that includes this poser: “Divide a vertical line in two equal parts by bisecting it with a curved horizontal line that is only straight at its spot bisection of the vertical.”

Many of these tests disqualified prospective voters with a single wrong answer. Of course, no one ever passed the jelly-bean exam.

Now that politicians have rallied to the purging of books, banning Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem and threatening librarians with jail time, it seems appropriate to bring back literacy tests. We need to find out if our elected leaders can read, and at what grade level—not to mention comprehension and retention.

Nevertheless, it would be grossly unfair in 2023 apply to a Harvard grad like Ron DeSantis the same level of academic rigor demanded of a black sharecropper in Natchitoches County in 1907. But I’ve devised a pretty fair Literacy Test for Aspiring Censors, Bowdlers, Redacters and Upwardly Mobile Politicians (the LTACBRUMP). I kept it to ten questions. A passing grade, just like the quiz for U.S. citizenship, is six correct answers.

But, if you fail, you are—like the ignorant sharecroppers of yore—disqualified. You can’t run for office and you can’t make rules about what other people’s kids are allowed to read. But you do get to vote, for someone else.

To make the LTACBRUMP even easier, I went with a multiple-choice format. You could actually guess your way into the governor’s mansion. So, sharpen your No. 2s. Here it comes:

1. Huckleberry Finn went down the river with

a. Tonto

b. Tom Sawyer

c. His teddy bear, Snuggles

d. Jim

e. Samuel Clemens

2. F. Scott Fitzgerald is the author of The Great

a. Blackstone

b. Houdini

c. Gatsby

d. Santini

e. Pumpkin

3. William and Alexander McGuffey wrote

a. romantic novels

b. Western dime novels

c. gay porn

d. readers

e. limericks

4. Which of these is NOT a famous French author

a. Simone de Beauvoir

b. Blanche Du Bois

c. Albert Camus

d. Françoise Sagan

e. Gustave Flaubert

5. Which letter of the alphabet is associated with Hester Prynne

a. A

b. P

c. X

d. D

e. Q

6. In a classic novel, Harper Lee featured two birds. One was a mockingbird. what was the other?

a. a sparrow

b. a hawk

c. a nuthatch

d. a finch

e. a crane

7. Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis is

a. Watson

b. Mycroft

c. The Hound of the Baskervilles

d. cocaine

e. Moriarty

8. In Dickens’ novel, Oliver Twist asks for

a. immunity

b. his mom

c. a pony

d. seconds

e. forgiveness

9. Fill in the blank: “              hath a lean and hungry look.”

a. Yon Lucius

b. Yon Brutus

c. Yon Cassius

d. Yon Nauseus

e. Yon Flavius

10. Which American did NOT win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

a. Louise Gluck

b. John Steinbeck

c. Robert Frost

d. Bob Dylan

e. Sinclair Lewis

Here’s the catch. If you pass, you’re not done. You still have to list the last six books you’ve read, all within the last year. At least one must be fiction. You have to write a book report on two of them, and your grade has to be at least a C.

I know. This sounds tough. But what’s worse—and we all know how this feels—is having an illiterate in the White House.