Photo: https://jeannineacook.com/
Jeannine A. Cook said she honestly doesn’t know how she went from selling books as a second stream of income to buying her building for $700,000 in less than five years. She did attribute some of it to her curiosity, though, calling it a “gift.”
“I ask one thousand million questions — to the point where I’m sure it drives the people around me crazy,” Cook said, encouraging readers to do the same. “Ask a lot of questions, even if it feels like you might be driving somebody crazy.”
Cook is the owner and operator of Harriett’s Bookshop — a popular bookstore, community meeting space, and center for anti-racist activism located at E. Girard, Philadelphia, PA. On August 6, Cook purchased the four-story Fishtown building, which she had been renting for Harriett’s since 2019, ensuring a future for a shop that was once clinging on for survival.
Cook first arrived in Philadelphia when she was 17 to attend the now-closed University of the Arts.
Born in Brooklyn as the middle of three daughters, Cook was raised in Virginia, where she said she moved when she was about 5 years old.
When she was about 10, her mom went blind. Despite losing her vision, Cook’s mother enrolled in school to earn a master of theology degree. As a child, Cook would read to her mom to help her with her studies.
“That was just one of our chores,” Cook said. “We didn’t know that that was different than anybody else.”
While studying writing as an undergraduate student at the University of the Arts, Cook said she began writing short stories that would read as a conversation between her and Harriet Tubman. In 2020, Cook self-published a collection of the stories under the name “Conversations with Harriett.”
“I feel like I’ve been in a relationship with her for a really long time, probably since I was a little girl,” Cook said about Tubman. “It’s been an interesting journey to meet her actual family.”
Cook said she tries to keep Tubman alive through her relationship with Tubman’s living family members. She said Tubman’s great-great-great-grandniece Ernestine Wyatt was at Harriett’s a few weeks ago.
“It’s one thing to think about (Tubman) as a superhero when you’re little, but this was a real woman who walked the Earth,” Cook said. “She was just like me in that way.”
Cook said she’s always seen Tubman as someone to emulate, admiring her bravery and courage.
“If I feel like I can’t do something or something’s too big for me, I’ll often attribute (that accomplishment) to Harriet,” Cook said.
In 2019, Cook rented the storefront at 258 E Girard Ave to use as an office space for the consulting businesses she was working on at the time. To supplement her income, she sold books on the side.
The books were a hit. People loved them so much that Cook started thinking bigger.
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With her idol in mind, she opened Harriett’s Bookshop, named after Harriet Tubman, in February 2020. But when the COVID pandemic forced businesses to shut down the next month, Cook, like other business owners, worried about her shop’s future.
“How am I supposed to maintain this rent,” Cook asked. “I remember calling my landlord like, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to pay you because the world is shut down,’ and she was like, ‘Jeannine, you still owe rent.’”
Never one to shy away from a challenge, Cook, who was sleeping on the floor of Harriett’s at the time, confronted the obstacle head-on, just as Tubman would have. She set up a display outside, as many businesses were doing at the time, and customers flocked. With that, Harriett’s became a community staple.
But the rocky waters didn’t stop there. With the pandemic prevailing and the economy fluctuating, Cook struggled to pay rent during her first two years in business, making her feel like a “sharecropper.”
“I’m working on this land, and, at any point, this person could just tell me, ‘nope’ or increase rent,” Cook said.
Beset by her stress to afford rent and avoid being evicted, Cook said she realized owning her building would alleviate her apprehension. So, she started researching how many Black-owned businesses existed in Philadelphia and what resources were available for people just getting started.
“There were so many programs available for people who were owners,” Cook said she realized. “If we just owned something, we would be a little bit more secure.”
In 2022, Cook launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to buy her building. In all, she raised over $200,000, $75,000 during the first weekend alone.
“I just did what my gut said to do,” Cook said.
Shortly after, Cook received racial threats via email. She said this only reinforced her determination to buy her building. It also led her to start the Sisterhood Sit-In Trolley Tour, which shows riders businesses owned by Black women in Philadelphia.
After two years of raising money, Cook bought her building on August 6. She said she plans to renovate Harriett’s by opening a café and converting the space at the bottom into a children’s area.
Harriett’s isn’t the only bookshop Cook owns. She also runs Ida’s Bookshop in Collingswood, New Jersey, and Josephine’s Bookshop in Paris, France. She said the help of the people around her allows her to manage all three stores at once.
“No one asks the CEO of McDonald’s, ‘Is it really difficult to run all these McDonald’s?’” Cook said. “It’s the same thing (for me). Being a leader means you have great people around you who are able to execute the vision.”
For Cook, who prefers to run things hands-on, delegating isn’t always easy. As an artist, Cook said she often has a clear vision of how she wants things to look.
But, as always, Cook accepted the challenge. She said going to art school helped her build her problem-solving skills.
“They’re always presenting you with these challenges, (and) you don’t have enough resources,” Cook said. “You either meet the challenge or you fold.”
Nobody knows more about meeting challenges than Cook. She’s spent her whole confronting them head-on.
After police killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Cook traveled to Minneapolis and Louisville — the cities in which they were murdered — to donate books to community organizers.
During the pandemic, when everything was shut down, Cook delivered books to customers via horseback.
She tied the books customers purchased together with brown string like the book straps children carried in the early 1900s — a time when reading was far more of a luxury than it is today, especially for Black children. Cook hoped the string would remind customers that accessing books wasn’t always so easy.
Instagram | Harriett’s Bookshop
But she doesn’t just distribute books. Cook also produces her own.
She said she published a children’s book called “Harrietts” in the fall of 2022 and has a coloring book coming out next month in partnership with the Philadelphia International Airport called “Harriett’s Coloring Jawn.” Cook also partnered with the National Marian Anderson Museum & Historical Society to make Harriett’s the go-to bookstore for all Marian Anderson books.
In March 2023, Cook turned Princeton’s Wallace Theater into a bookshop for Sites of Memory: A Symposium on Toni Morrison and the Archive. She said she did something similar for Zora Neale Hurston in the University of the Arts Elaine C. Levitt Auditorium.
And, yet, she’s still going.
Cook said she recently signed a two-book deal to tell the story of her bookshops. She said one book will be a memoir called “Shut Up and Read,” and the other’s title is still a work in progress.
Between being a parent, running three bookstores, writing, publishing books, and traveling, Cook has quite a bit on her plate. She said she tries to live in the moment and “take things as they come” to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
“I had to be on the news (Monday) morning at 7:45, but yesterday was also the first day of school,” Cook said. “I knew I wasn’t going to be able to be there with them, so I got (the kids) up extra early and took them to Starbucks. It’s (about) figuring out how to adjust to the moment.”
Currently, Cook is fighting to get Harriet Tubman Day — March 10 — recognized as the twelfth national holiday. If she succeeds, it will be the first federal holiday named after a woman.
“I don’t know if it’ll ever happen,” Cook said. “I think now is a great moment while there’s a woman who’s running for president.”
A fan of magical realism, Cook said she’s currently reading Gabriel García Márquez’s posthumous novel “August.” She said she’s trying to incorporate magical realism into the two books she’s writing.
An advocate for diverse narratives, Cook has spoken with Gov. Josh Shapiro’s office about writing a policy to outlaw book bans in Pennsylvania. She said she used some of her time in France to research its policies and laws regarding books.
Instagram | Harriett’s Bookshop
While some people fear standing out, Cook has no problem being different. The ways she lives reflect the diverse narratives she reads.
“People kept telling me, ‘You can’t open a business in Fishtown. That’ll never work,’” Cook said. “When you have a really niche idea, a lot of times, people will tell you that (it) doesn’t work.”
Part of the reason for the doubt was Cook’s identity as a Black woman.
Although, according to the 2020 Census, 39%, — or 630,462 out of 1,603,797 — of Philadelphia residents are Black, only 5.4% of businesses in the city are owned by Black people, Drexel’s 2023 Minority Business Landscape found.
“Business requires capital,” Cook said. “You have to have some sort of capital investment. Where’s that capital going to come from? It takes three years before the bank will even have a conversation with you about commercial lending.”
She said teaching Black kids about entrepreneurship and financial literacy could be one solution to combat the limited number of Black-owned businesses in Philadelphia.
“You don’t want to wait until you’ve gone into debt before you start thinking, ‘Maybe I’m an entrepreneur,’” Cook said. “In the technology world, you can make a million mistakes. You can raise millions of dollars, and your idea could be junk. And then (you can) do it again. Politicians get to make you promises every four years, and, whether they make good on those promises or not, they still raise a bunch of money and run again. But people who look like me don’t get that opportunity to fail or experiment. (We get) one shot. Either you get it right, or you might never get a chance to do this again.”
Unfortunately, that one shot doesn’t always come at the perfect time. Cook got hers when her shop was locked down and she was receiving racist threats. Again, she said she turned to Tubman to deal with it all.
“Harriet would come home and find out that family members had been lynched, or people had gone missing or were sold,” Cook said. “When I think about my life in comparison, I’m often like, ‘Shut up.’ It’s gonna take a lot more than a threatening email to stop the work that needs to be done, at least from my perspective.”
These days, Cook is just enjoying her victory lap. She said she still writes “Conversations with Harriett.”
As for her bookshops, she encouraged readers to keep an eye out next time they stop in.
“Yes, they’re bookshops, but, in many ways, they’re also monuments to these women,” Cook said. “In other ways, they’re an art gallery where I get to express my creative vision.”
Harriett’s Bookshop, located at 258 E Girard Ave, is open daily from 12-6 p.m. You can find Harriett’s Bookshop online at https://bookshop.org/shop/harriettsbookshop.
