Tell Me Who You're Loyal To

“All we ask is trust.

All we got is us.”

Six percent of indie bookstores are Black-owned. Almost 90 percent of fiction published in 2018 was by white authors. Most of the publishing industry is ran by straight, white people.

Then, there is Black and Queer bookseller and my friend, Hannah Oliver Depp, owner of Loyalty Bookstore.

June 2015. I left the trenches of Barnes & Noble for the indie bookseller life. My first stop on that train was Politics and Prose Bookstore, also in Washington, DC where I lived. I met Hannah. On my first day, the trainer introduced her as somebody who does everything. They were right. She does. Though we worked for the same company for nearly 10 months, we didn’t often work side by side. We knew of each other’s work ethic, though. I also assumed her dog, Buster, hated me. She left in March 2016, moved to Jersey City and started running things at WORD Bookstore. After years balancing my careers as an actor and bookseller, I moved to Jersey City in June 2018 and worked for none other than WORD Bookstore and became her housemate at the same time.

Hannah knew where most of the books were in the store even if they had just arrived that day, probably because she was responsible for ordering them. More than likely, she input them into the store’s inventory, shelved some of them, arranged the displays where they would be featured, pulled reports for books that were taking up space, counted store tills at the end of the night, organized a major event with George R.R. Martin or Jersey City Public Library and still had time to read half the new releases before the publication date and cuddle with Buster, who was warming up to me by the minute. Not to mention, she's an artist, a writer, even a theatre geek. She does it all.

While juggling juggernaut responsibilities, Hannah was delving into her own business ventures. I count myself blessed to have been one of the first (maybe 10th in line) people to see the sketches for her store’s logo as well as the tome she compiled for her new baby, Loyalty.

Since late 2018, while tossing herself between Jersey City and Washington, DC on the Amtrak or in a car, Hannah was moving back to the place she called home, the nation’s capitol, and establishing a bookstore that is one of the staples in the Mid-Atlantic bookselling scene and is always featured on the list of Black-owned indie bookstores that you should be aware of.

Because 2020 into 2021 has been a whirlwind that none of us expected to get thrown into, it's worth mentioning some of Loyalty/Hannah's highlight reel in the past year alone. By committing to working from home, meaning shipping customer orders from her apartment at the beginning of the pandemic, Loyalty Books committed to saving USPS. They seamlessly transitioned into online events featuring authors like romance novelist Alyssa Cole and actor Nicole Byer for her memoir to conversations with heavy hitter authors Akwaeke Emezi and Jason Reynolds, a DC favorite. Hannah shamelessly employed her dog Buster by throwing him into a mailman costume to promote USPS support and overall cuteness. Loyalty has been vocal about health safety during the pandemic, about the movement for Black lives and about any other issue that any indie bookstore can speak to, mainly corporate greed.

Hannah and Loyalty are constantly on the frontline of bookselling, which is unfortunately always in competition with greedy conglomerates, mainly Amazon. As convenient as it is, the bookselling world bears the brunt of hive mind Amazon shopping. Let’s be real: Jeff Bezos does not care about us, he doesn’t care about Black people. He wants to continue underpaying workers and making obscene amounts of money. Do you know who does care about Black people? Black women like Hannah Oliver Depp.

Most importantly, with all of her wonderful attributes, she is creating a lane for Black people that uplifts literacy, the thirst for knowledge and the communal empowerment that is sure to follow.

“Loyalty, Loyalty, Loyalty!”