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A simple plot
In Roxbury, Lloyd Hart rose from stealing books to
selling them.
By Ric Kahn, Globe Staff, 11/14/99
ROXBURY (Massachusetts)- Lloyd Hart started his international book business by selling
paperbacks and hardcovers door to door.
He offered customers at restaurants and barbershops in Boston and Cambridge major
discounts, yet he said he still made a 100 percent profit. Hart was able to accomplish
this because he was a devotee of the Light Fingers Law of economics. One of the major
tenets is if one steals a product and then sells it, one can sure make a big score!
Hart was a chronic criminal who stole books and clothes to support his drug habit. That
is but one chapter in a life story that Hart could sell along with the other 1,800 titles
he now offers, between his successful pushcart operation at Dudley Station and a Web site
that counts customers as far away as Australia.
A synopsis: Orchard Park man is introduced to heroin as a teenager. In the 1970s, he
does a seven-year bit in prison for manslaughter after his gun goes off and kills a man in
a struggle over a drug deal. In the can, the inmate's reading interests turn from smut to
serious literature. In the books of W. E. B. DuBois and Richard Wright, he discovers he
has company as an oppressed black man who'd been chased out of some neighborhoods because
of his color. He learns the criminal justice system is like a maze where he will lose his
manhood.
He wants to go straight, but his addiction runs him back into the mix. To survive, he
steals books and sells them on the street. At the big bookstores, he skims not only
bestsellers but advice from staffers about how such a business operates. From the desires
of his storefront clientele, he fathoms a thirst for African-American literature
unquenched by mainstream stores.
He returns to the clink in 1994 for receiving stolen property: the books. In jail, he
remains hooked on books but beats his drug habit. He gets out and longs to be a legitimate
book dealer. In 1995, he becomes a partner in a business started two years earlier by an
associate, Kevin Fisher. They run the firm out of Hart's Roxbury home, and call it the
Black Library Booksellers. In 1998, they expand the operation to include a $200-a-month
rented pushcart at Dudley Station.
Now, with a survey showing that residents desire a full bookstore in Dudley Square,
Hart says the business is doing so well he is on the brink of taking it to yet another
level: either a storefront or a second pushcart.
Today, the jacket of his autobiography might read like this: Lloyd Hart, a 46-year-old
Roxbury man, transforms himself from street hustler to Nuestra Comunidad's 1998
Entrepreneur of the Year, a turnaround as dramatic as the makeover of the dangerous
Orchard Park housing project, where Hart grew up, into the pastel-perky new Orchard
Gardens.
''That's what community development is all about,'' said Evelyn Friedman-Vargas,
executive director of Nuestra Comunidad, the nonprofit housing and economic development
organization that runs the Village Pushcarts program at Dudley Station. ''It's not just
houses, but how people develop.''
Though he spent his formative years in Catholic school, Hart says it was not until he
found the good books of black literary lords like James Baldwin that he could really
relate to the printed word. The books changed his life, he said, by showing him how the
world of crime had splintered his self-image and home life, by helping him channel his
despair into something worthwhile.
Even when he was on the street, Hart was known as perhaps the only junkie in town who
carried bags of both books and heroin.
One time, a law enforcement officer caught him with a syringe and a sack of black
literature in a hallway in Mission Hill. The officer offered him a deal, Hart says: The
officer would let him go if Hart could name all of the books written at the time by the
black female author, Terry McMillan. Hart scanned the card catalog in his mind of all the
books he'd read, and set himself free with his answer: ''Mama,'' ''Disappearing Acts,''
''Breaking Ice,'' and ''Waiting to Exhale.''
Even when he was a black marketeer, Hart subscribed to the bromide that a salesman must
know his product, so he read the texts he shoplifted. One book that steered his passage
from crook to bookman, he says, was ''Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in
America,'' Nathan McCall's story of how he went from stickup artist and prison inmate to
Washington Post reporter.
Hart made the book one of the first 25 he started peddling from his home, a fledgling
business backed by community fliers, word of mouth, and $500 of his savings.
Today, he proudly displays it along with the hundreds of other Afrocentric titles on
his pushcart: ''The Maintenance Man'' to ''Blues Dancing;'' ''What Brothers Think, What
Sistahs Know'' to ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X;'' ''The Pimp's Bible'' to ''Pulpit
Confessions.''
Hart says his life's work is more than selling books. It is, he says, meant to make
black folks more powerful by giving them information. (He makes it easier, he says, by
offering discounts to schools and community groups and making free deliveries to Boston
and Cambridge.) It is meant to carry on the tradition of storytelling by recommending
tales and passages. It is meant to pay community members back for the many occasions he
was in jail on their dime.
''I wanted a job where I could support myself and also support my community,'' he says.
''So many times, they've had to feed me and clothe me.''
Beyond that, he says, his presence all day at Dudley's Platform A is meant to serve as
a shining example.
''I am a beacon,'' he says. ''`If Lloyd can do it, I can do it.'''
Members of the community say Hart used to traffic in trouble, searching out heroin at
Dudley Square. Now, they say he stands out there as a respected figure in his own right,
selling books of black heroes and heroines.
Lynne Jackson, a community leader at Orchard Gardens, grew up with Hart and remembers
him as a scrawny, desperate character, caught up in the life of the streetcorner.
Today, she says, ''I look at him and see strength.''
Hart says his pillar remains Dudley Square. Even if he moves into a storefront, he
says, he intends to keep his pushcart there. That way, he says, he can still offer free
books to children who can guess the names on a poster he displays of black historical
figures. He can harangue the hooky players and students kicked out of school, as he did
one teenage girl last week: ''Don't do that. You know how concerned I am.''
He can also feed his need to be vital.
''I may expand, but I have to be out here,'' he says. ''There's too much riding on me.
I feel wanted. To find myself as a black man, I had to be wanted.''
As Hart mans his post, men and women of the community pass by, delivering hugs,
handshakes, and hot cups of coffee, along with their book orders.
One man who also used to run the streets stops to share a strong embrace. ''I love you,
man,'' he tells Hart, his community bookseller. ''Keep doing good.''
This story ran on page 01 of the Boston Globe's City
Weekly on 11/14/99.
©1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
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