Christopher Williams listens to them all.

When he was younger he would escape to his room, lock the door and let the soothing beats and warm harmonies wash over his curled form.

He wanted to be alone, and the music helped him. Holed up in the small bedroom in his south Durham home, Williams couldn’t get in anyone’s way.

But the anger and frustration would persist. Although a self-reliant and capable child, he knew that he was different. Something was holding him back.

He couldn’t read.

A torn diploma

Williams, now 56, has a lot in common with his younger self. He listens to the same groups – albeit these days on his Smartphone – loves to draw and enjoys being alone from time to time.

But one thing has changed; the Palo Alto, Calif., native is no longer illiterate.

Williams’ parents split up when he was young and he moved to Durham, enrolling at W.G. Pearson Elementary school. He made it all the way through high school, where he was enrolled in the special education program, and received his diploma.

But while many high school graduates frame the celebratory slip of paper, Williams ripped his to pieces. He still hadn’t learned how to read.

“I looked at [it] and I was so disgusted,” he said. “I was getting a foul deal in life for what I hadn’t learned. I said, ‘This was just gave to you, you didn’t earn it.’”

Williams doesn’t blame the schools. He says there may be several reasons he managed to graduate without learning to read. He often hid his illiteracy, and when he couldn’t, teachers, overwhelmed with students, didn’t have the time to help him.

Whatever the reason, he came out the other side unable to read.

Williams went to work for the city of Durham, where he has had various sanitation jobs for 24 years.

If anyone asked him to read something, he would brush it off.

“I’m busy,” he would say, “I don’t have time.”

For years Williams kept to himself. The frustration overwhelmed him. He contemplated suicide.

“I never wanted folks to know I couldn’t read because people respected me,” he said. “I always blamed myself; I looked at me as the problem.”

In 2008 Williams visited the city’s human resources department, which advised him to call the Durham Literacy Center. The center set him up with a personal tutor to help him learn how to read.

The center

For 27 years the Durham Literacy Center has operated out of rented libraries, church basements and community centers, with the goal of educating the city’s estimated 25,000 illiterate adults.

Executive director Reginald Hodges says illiteracy problem is embedded in the city’s culture.

“I remember the old Durham when the cigarettes were here and you didn’t have to know how to read and write to make a living,” Hodges said. “And I think a lot of that was passed down.”

The center teaches on a traditional two-semester schedule, with classes offered weekdays in the morning and at night. The classes are free and are taught by a staff of 120 qualified volunteer tutors, instructing students ages 16 to 88.

Sara Jane Bell, a self-described “lover of words” and tutor for four years, calls what illiterate students experience “a blindness.”

“Imagine if every sign, every visual were in hieroglyphics and you couldn’t decipher them,” she said. “That’s what it’s like.”

After years of constantly changing locations and compromising its schedule, the literacy center has found and purchased a new permanent home.

It announced the acquisition of the building, at 1905 Chapel Hill Road, on June 22, and has begun renovation, ripping up old carpet and gutting many of the rooms.

The center bought the $510,000 building with money it received from local individuals and businesses as part of a larger capital campaign.

The organization began raising money late last year after board member and Duke historian John Hope Franklin saw the building on his way to work and declared it the perfect site for the group to continue its mission. To date the campaign has raised over $850,000.

“When we started this, people told us we were crazy,” Hodges said. “But we got there.”

With a spacy 10,000 square feet and an abundance of small and large rooms, the new building, which previously housed the N.C. Department of Correction, is ideal for the center’s needs, he adds.

The building will allow the center to increase student enrollment, which currently stands at 500, by 50 percent. At any given time there are between 200 and 300 students on the waiting list to get into classes.

Currently the organization operates out of eight different sites, several of which, including operations at El Centro Hispano and the Emily Krzyzewski Center, will remain open.

The new facility, complete with computer labs, a library, and around 15 tutor rooms, will open for classes in September.

“Life is passed you by”

After a year with his tutor, Williams was reading at a sixth-grade level. He can now pick up a book or a newspaper and read it with relative ease.

But he still remembers what it was like before.

“You feel like you’re not important,” he said. “You feel left out of a lot of things, you feel like life is passed you by. Not picking up a book or knowing how to read, it seems like there’s so much you’ve lost out of life.”

Although he has since stopped taking classes, the father of five makes time to practice his reading. He is currently working his way through one of comedian Bill Cosby’s books.

In typical selfless style, he attributes much of his turnaround to the center.

“I can’t deny that the little time I’ve been with the [center], they have been a great group of people,” he said. “You can learn a lot from an awesome group of people.”

But Bell says the students deserve all of the credit.

“They are the most courageous people I’ve ever met,” she said. “I learned from [her student] Roxie about human spirit, success and overcoming humiliation. She has taught me more than I have ever taught her and I am deeply grateful.”

Although he considers his situation improved, Williams also says illiteracy is a constant struggle, and he finds himself occasionally dogged by his old feelings of frustration.

“Sometimes I have a tendency to look back at what should have happened, instead of looking at what I have accomplished,” he said.

But when the negative feelings resurface, he knows how to deal with them. He sits alone with his music, just as he would years ago, and allows himself to slip peacefully into the soulful world of Russell Thompkins Jr. and The Stylistics.

“That’s what makes the world go ’round, the ups and downs, the carousel, changing people they’ll go around, go underground, young man, people make the world go ’round.”