From each wall, sharecroppers survey tables of slouching students.

SHIELDS GOTHIC They stare at you when you return your books to Shields Library. Not the librarians. The long-dead farmers. In an enlarged Depression-era photograph mounted above the book return slot, the family stands outside a barn and impassively regards the library patrons. It's not a picturesque red barn emblazoned with a tobacco advertisement, and they are not stereotypical healthy farmers clad in straw hats, denim and calico. The barn is gray and heavily weathered; it looks like it's barely held together. It may not be a barn at all, but some other sort of shack. It's hard to tell because there are no tools or machines. The family members, who are gray and heavily weathered as well, own little. Each time I slide books into the chute under them, I wonder who put this particular photo here and why. Are they the guardians of the book drop? Are they supposed to be a cautionary tale: "Educate yourself or end up like these people"? Similar images of bleak farms, crop dusters and families on the thin line of existence are scattered throughout the entire library. The more I notice them, the stranger their placement seems. From each wall, sharecroppers survey tables of slouching students. Many of the pictures are harshly beautiful, but I wonder who selected them. Are they supposed to implicitly inspire? Looking at how hard the people had to work and the difficulty of their lives, who can complain about spending a few hours in the library? I often return my books with my eyes averted. I look down, embarrassed. It makes me uncomfortable to meet the stares of the farming family who stand above the slot. Am I embarrassed for myself? For everything I have? That's too simplistic. Am I embarrassed for them? For the fact that they have to look at us every day from outside their sparse barn? Perhaps that's a bit closer, but still not right. I sometimes criticize Davis for having little history and for being artificial. What I'm really criticizing is the absence of, for lack of a better word, soul. Yet perhaps what I've thought has been missing has always been there in the deep eyes of the farmers who watch from the library walls. Perhaps whoever hung these photographs recognized that Davis' soul is, if anywhere, in the piercing intensity of these images. -- Joseph Mills, Ph.D. '98