Jeannine A. Cook is insistent.<\/p>\n
She is not the shopkeeper character in her debut novel It\u2019s Me They Follow, that HarperCollins released this week. <\/p>\n
Yes, the shopkeeper owns a Harriett\u2019s Bookshop<\/a> \u2014 named after abolitionist and emancipator Harriet Tubman but spelled with two t\u2019s \u2014 on Girard Avenue in Fishtown, just like Cook.<\/p>\n The shopkeeper also grew up in Virginia, like Cook. Yes, @itsmetheyfollow <\/a>is Cook\u2019s Instagram handle. And yes, the hot pink hardcover features an illustrated image of a woman who looks a lot like her, right down to the dramatic eye makeup, bangs, and colorful headband.<\/p>\n \u201cThe shopkeeper is not me,\u201d Cook said as she laughed, one recent Monday afternoon at the real, just renovated Harriett\u2019s Bookshop. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a novel. A romance. A fairytale. I play around with the idea of what is real and what is not.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s Me They Follow\u2019s protagonist, the mysterious shopkeeper Gee, will feel familiar to Cook\u2019s friends, acquaintances, and social media followers. It\u2019s a story about Gee\u2019s rush to get the fictional Harriett\u2019s up and running in the midst of a pandemic. Like Cook, Gee receives a misspelled sign in the days before the store\u2019s opening. And like Cook, Gee listens to Jill Scott while she\u2019s engrossed in a novel. \u201cThe Sound of Philadelphia\u201d is the soundtrack of both of their lives. <\/p>\n But, Gee\u2019s interior life, Cook explains, is a figment of her imagination. <\/p>\n \u201cHonestly,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In It\u2019s Me They Follow, Gee suffers from an unexplained illness that causes her to faint from the slightest touch. Cook may seem a little standoffish right at first, but she doesn\u2019t pass out from a hug or a handshake.<\/p>\n There are plenty of other made up parts of Gee\u2019s life: she is in love with Me, an enigmatic phantom of a man who saunters into the fictional Harriett\u2019s under an aromatic cloud of frankincense, deer hide, wet soil, and Egyptian musk. She is also part of a writing group filled of eccentric Philadelphians. Gee is an unintentional matchmaker. Cook is none of those things.<\/p>\n \u201cYou think you know people,\u201d she said, \u201cYou see them on social media. You see them in the news, but you don\u2019t know what is fact and what is fiction. This is my way of talking about heavy things in a playful way.\u201d<\/p>\n There is a serious undertone running through the novel\u2019s 241 pages: the fear of an unknown illness resulting in death. Gee is stressed out, trying to open a business in Fishtown, a neighborhood that hasn\u2019t historically been friendly to Black people and Black owned businesses. And there is a seemingly impossible love story bubbling up: Me is a monk in training who has taken a vow of celibacy. Gee is knocked unconscious from a kiss. (There is also the possibility that Me is all in Gee\u2019s head.) <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s quirky and surreal,\u201d Cook said. \u201cBut at the end of the day, it\u2019s a story about community, how people help people in nuanced ways.\u201d <\/p>\n It\u2019s Me They Follow puts Cook in the elite class of bookstores owners who are also novelists, in the hallowed company of young adult author Judy Blume, who owns the Key West, Fla. nonprofit bookstore, The Studios; Pen Faulkner winner Ann Patchett who owns Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tenn.; and Game of Thrones\u2019 George R.R. Martin who owns Beastly Books in Santa Fe, NM.<\/p>\n Marc Lamont Hill, non-fiction writer and scholar, runs Uncle Bobbies Coffee and Books\u2019 is in Germantown. <\/p>\n It\u2019s Me They Follow is a culmination of Cook\u2019s hopes and dreams, a blend of new ideas \u2014 like the sustainability of a bookshop in a social media driven society \u2014 and old principles \u2014 the sanctity of the written word. <\/p>\n It\u2019s a similar vibe felt as soon as one walks into the almost six-year-old real life Harriett\u2019s. <\/p>\n The bookshop\u2019s floating bookshelves feature a mix of popular new hardcovers like MSNBC journalist Trymaine Lee\u2019s A Thousand Ways to Die<\/a>, Tre Johnson\u2019s Black Genius<\/a>, and Leila Mottley\u2019s The Girls Who Grew Big<\/a>. All stacked on top of vintage first-print treasures like James Baldwin\u2019s The Fire Next Time and Alice Walker\u2019s The Color Purple. <\/p>\n The vintage books are gifts from longtime Philadelphians who watched in the shadows as Cook turned bookselling into an art<\/a> with pop-up shops in Collingswood, N.J., Harlem, and Paris. <\/p>\n Underneath a painting of Afrofuturist author Octavia Butler, and nestled between Ann Petry\u2019s 1955 biography of Tubman, Harriet Tubman, Conductor on the Underground Railroad<\/a>, are copies of It\u2019s Me They Follow. Placed purposely to be in conversation with the ancestors. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s absurd to be living the full dream of my life in all of its fullness,\u201d Cook said. <\/p>\n Social media makes her success look easy but that\u2019s far from the truth. Rising rents, Cook said, are the death knell for book stores. It\u2019s why she closed Ida\u2019s in Collingswood in February, electing to move the shop \u2014 named in honor of 19th century journalist Ida B. Wells \u2014 to the Old West Collingswood train station. The new shop will be a traveling retail space and art exhibit<\/a>. <\/p>\n Rising rents are also what compelled Cook to buy the 258 East Girard<\/a> building last year so her livelihood doesn\u2019t remain at the mercy of the real estate market. She does, however, have to spend more time than she\u2019d like dealing with the basement that still periodically floods<\/a> like it did earlier in the summer. <\/p>\n She\u2019s added a cafe to the back of the 500-square foot space where she will sell specialty coffees and teas including jasmine and hibiscus \u2014 some of Gee\u2019s favorites. It will open in the coming weeks. <\/p>\n Cook is also debuting Harriett\u2019s sapphire blue interior, with cyanotypes on fabric wallpaper behind the new coffee bar and upholstered on tall-backed reading chairs. The blue cyanotype prints, by local artist Yannick Lowery<\/a>, feature two young women climbing a ladder to heaven and add to the bookshop\u2019s evolving vintage feel. <\/p>\n It\u2019s not lost on Cook, who had her walls painted earlier this year, that the royal blue hue is the Black woman color of the moment, as they discover its historical meaning. She points to Harvard University professor Imani Perry\u2019s non-fiction book Black and Blues: How the Color Tells the Story of My People<\/a> and local artist Andrea Walls current exhibit \u201cIndigo Road: Be\/holding Southern Landscapes\u201d in Germantown\u2019s <\/a>Umbutu Fine Art Gallery<\/a>. <\/p>\n The debut novel. The bookshop. The community. The connection to Harriet Tubman and the ancestors. Cook says it\u2019s all coming full circle for her. <\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what you call it,\u201d she said. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s magic, maybe it\u2019s healing. I know it\u2019s a tradition. I\u2019m a part of a literary tradition.\u201d <\/p>\n