by bell hooks
The longer it took me to begin the process of writing autobiography, the further removed from those memories I was becoming. Each year, a memory seemed less and less clear. I wanted not to lose the vividness, the recall and felt an urgent need to begin the work and complete it. Yet I could not begin even though I had begun to confront some of the reasons I was blocked, as I am blocked just now in writing this piece because I am afraid to express in writing the experience that served as a catalyst for that block to move.
I had met a young black man. We were having an affair. It is important that he was black. He was in some mysterious way a link to this past that I had been struggling to grapple with, to name in writing. With him I remembered incidents, moments of the past that I had completely suppressed. It was as though there was something about the passion of contact that was hypnotic, that enabled me to drop barriers and thus enter fully, rather reenter those past experiences. A key aspect seemed to be the way he smelled, the combined odors of cigarettes, occasionally alcohol, and his body smells. I thought often of the phrase “scent of memory,” for it was those smells that carried me back. And there were specific occasions when it was very evident that the experience of being in his company was the catalyst for this remembering.
Two specific incidents come to mind. One day in the middle of the afternoon we met at his place. We were drinking cognac and dancing to music from the radio. He was smoking cigarettes (not only do I not smoke, but I usually make an effort to avoid smoke). As we held each other dancing those mingled odors of alcohol, sweat, and cigarettes led me to say, quite without thinking about it, “Uncle Pete.” It was not that I had forgotten Uncle Pete. It was more that I had forgotten the childhood experience of meeting him. He drank often, smoked cigarettes, and always on the few occasions that we met him, he held us children in tight embraces. It was the memory of those embraces—of the way I hated and longed to resist them—that I recalled.
Another day we went to a favorite park to feed ducks and parked the car in front of tall bushes. As we were sitting there, we suddenly heard the sound of an oncoming train—a sound that startled me so that it evoked another long-suppressed memory: that of crossing the train tracks in my father’s car. I recalled an incident where the car stopped on the tracks and my father left us sitting there while he raised the hood of the car and worked to repair it. This is an incident that I am not certain actually happened. As a child, I had been terrified of just such an incident occurring, perhaps so terrified that it played itself out in my mind as though it had happened. These are just two ways this encounter acted as a catalyst, breaking down barriers, enabling me to finally write this long-desired autobiography of my childhood.
Each day I sat at the typewriter and different memories were written about in short vignettes. They came in a rush, as though they were a sudden thunderstorm. They came in a surreal, dreamlike style that made me cease to think of them as strictly autobiographical because it seemed that myth, dream, and reality had merged. There were many incidents that I would talk about with my siblings to see if they recalled them. Often we remembered together a general outline of an incident but the details were different for us. This fact was a constant reminder of the limitations of autobiography, of the extent to which autobiography is a very personal storytelling—a unique recounting of events not so much as they have happened but as we remember and invent them. One memory that I would have sworn was “the truth and nothing but the truth” concerned a wagon that my brother and I shared as children. I remembered that we played with this toy only at my grandfather’s house, that we shared it, that I would ride it and my brother would push me. Yet one facet of the memory was puzzling—I remembered always returning home with bruises or scratches from this toy. When I called my mother, she said there had never been any wagon, that we had shared a red wheelbarrow, that it had always been at my grandfather’s house because there were sidewalks on that part of town. We lived in the hills where there were no sidewalks. Again I was compelled to face the fiction that is a part of all retelling, remembering. I began to think of the work I was doing as both fiction and autobiography. It seemed to fall in the category of writing that Audre Lorde, in her autobiographically based work Zami, calls bio-mythography. As I wrote, I felt that I was not as concerned with accuracy of detail as I was with evoking in writing the state of mind, the spirit of a particular moment.
The longing to tell one’s story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release. It was the longing for release that compelled the writing but concurrently it was the joy of reunion that enabled me to see that the act of writing one’s autobiography is a way to find again that aspect of self and experience that may no longer be an actual part of one’s life but is a living memory shaping and informing the present. Autobiographical writing was a way for me to evoke the particular experience of growing up southern and black in segregated communities. It was a way to recapture the richness of southern black culture. The need to remember and hold to the legacy of that experience and what it taught me has been all the more important since I have since lived in predominately white communities and taught at predominately white colleges. Black southern folk experience was the foundation of the life around me when I was a child; that experience no longer exists in many places where it was once all of life that we knew. Capitalism, upward mobility, assimilation of other values have all led to rapid disintegration of black folk experience or in some cases the gradual wearing away of that experience.
Within the world of my childhood, we held on to the legacy of a distinct black culture by listening to the elders tell their stories. Autobiography was experienced most actively in the art of telling one’s story. I can recall sitting at Baba’s (my grandmother on my mother’s side) at 1200 Broad Street—listening to people come and recount their life experience. In those days, whenever I brought a playmate to my grandmother’s house, Baba would want a brief outline of their autobiography before we would begin playing. She wanted not only to know who their people were but what their values were. It was sometimes an awesome and terrifying experience to stand answering these questions or witness another playmate being subjected to the process and yet this was the way we would come to know our own and one another’s family histories. It is the absence of such a tradition in my adult life that makes the written narrative of my girlhood all the more important. As the years pass and these glorious memories grow much more vague, there will remain the clarity contained within the written words.
Conceptually, the autobiography was framed in the manner of a hope chest. I remembered my mother’s hope chest, with its wonderful odor of cedar, and thought about her taking the most precious items and placing them there for safekeeping. Certain memories were for me a similar treasure. I wanted to place them somewhere for safekeeping. An autobiographical narrative seemed an appropriate place. Each particular incident, encounter, experience had its own story, sometimes told from the first person, sometimes told from the third person. Often I felt as though I was in a trance at my typewriter, that the shape of a particular memory was decided not by my conscious mind but by all that is dark and deep within me, unconscious but present. It was the act of making it present, bringing it into the open, so to speak, that was liberating.
From the perspective of trying to understand my psyche, it was also interesting to read the narrative in its entirety after I had completed the work. It had not occurred to me that bringing one’s past, one’s memories together in a complete narrative would allow one to view them from a different perspective, not as singular isolated events but as part of a continuum. Reading the completed manuscript, I felt as though I had an overview not so much of my childhood but of those experiences that were deeply imprinted in my consciousness. Significantly, that which was absent, left out, not included also was important. I was shocked to find at the end of my narrative that there were few incidents I recalled that
involved my five sisters. Most of the incidents with siblings were with me and my brother. There was a sense of alienation from my sisters present in childhood, a sense of estrangement. This was reflected in the narrative. Another aspect of the completed manuscript that is interesting to me is the way in which the incidents describing adult men suggest that I feared them intensely, with the exception of my grandfather and a few old men. Writing the autobiographical narrative enabled me to look at my past from a different perspective and to use this knowledge as a means of self-growth and change in a practical way.
In the end I did not feel as though I had killed the Gloria of my childhood. Instead I had rescued her. She was no longer the enemy within, the little girl who had to be annihilated for the woman to come into being. In writing about her, I reclaimed that part of myself I had long ago rejected, left uncared for, just as she had often felt alone and uncared for as a child. Remembering was part of a cycle of reunion, a joining of fragments, “the bits and pieces of my heart” that the narrative made whole again.
from public to private
writing bone black
When I first told everybody around me that I was writing a memoir, the initial response was usually “Aren’t you rather young to be doing that?” A great many people still think that memoirs should be written late in life, in a moment of reflection and response when one is old and retired. Such thinking seems oddly old-fashioned given that we are living at a time when it is clearly evident that a great many of us will never live to a ripe old age. As never in my life before the young are dying around me or preparing for the possibility of early death. And like many folks in their mid-forties I am stunned by the number of friends, comrades, and/or peers who have passed away just when life was becoming most sweet. Among this mounting dead are well-known writers and artists who leave few if any autobiographical traces. Already there is an aura of unreconcilable loss that is assuredly a response to knowing that we will never hear them tell their stories.
Frankly, I begin to write Bone Black, the memoir of my girlhood, almost twenty years ago. In my late twenties still grappling psychoanalytically with emotional disturbances that were directly related to childhood I turned to autobiography to have a more condensed yet complete picture. I wrote about significant memories, the little incidents and stories I had heard myself tell again and again to explain something about myself. These memories flowed from me in a lyrical poetic prose that fascinated me. My usual writing style was clear and direct. These mysterious, dreamlike visions of the past appeared in an uncalculated manner. The style intrigued me; I felt it was the closest I had ever come to divinely inspired writing.
When I first began writing Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood I did not have a plan. My assumption was just that I would write the story of my life and that it would unfold on the page in a conventional documentary fashion. Yet when I began to write, having made no conscious decisions about style or content, the writing that emerged was not the conventional autobiographical format. The style was lyrical, poetic, and abstract. It was not the straightforward linear narrative that characterized my previous nonfiction work. The writing was different from anything I had imagined, but I liked it. For what appeared on the page were words that evoked the spirit of the world I grew up in and that spirit unfolding in its own manner and fashion moved me. A gentle, tender intimacy was evoked in the words, I felt it. I felt the reader would feel it as well, and so I let the style of the work inspire and claim me.
Any writer who strives to be true to artistic integrity surrenders to the shape the work takes of its own accord. Work comes to a writer differently depending on our circumstances at the time of writing. The politics of experience and location shape our vision. My first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, was written shortly after I left the racial apartheid of my growing up. As a black female coming from a southern, working-class, fundamentalist Christian background, it was incredibly difficult for me to speak with a radical voice, to let go my fear and find the right words. Initially, I wanted to address and appease so many different audiences that the book in its early stages was this wordy, overly pedantic work—full of the academic styles I had learned were appropriate in my undergraduate English classes. I rewrote this book again and again until I found my style, a voice that sounded real to me and not a mere imitation of the fake academic neutral sound I had learned to cultivate in academic settings. The first version of this work was finished when I was nineteen but the book was not published until years later. By then my style was distinct and clear. I worked on refining it for future works. So it was a tremendous surprise to me when Bone Black developed in a direction that was more akin to the style I had as a poet.
Admittedly, I began writing Bone Black as part of a psychoanalytic effort to understand the past. When I sent proposals of the work with sample chapters to publishers, I was told again and again that the work was not interesting in its lyrical poetic prose style but if I would just “tell the story,” i.e., convert it all to linear narratives, it would be acceptable. While we like to imagine ours is not a publishing world that promotes and encourages censorship, it became clear to me that there was a style of African-American writing, particularly work by women, that was acceptable; anything outside the mold was ignored or rejected.
When I began this work more than ten years ago memoirs were not as compelling to readers as they are today. When I sent samples of this work to editors they were not the slightest bit interested. Editors seemed to think the story of my girlhood would be more compelling in the marketplace if it was sensational. They wanted me to tell my story in the good old-fashioned manner of tabloid-like confession or straightforward autobiography. I wanted to tell this story on its own terms, respecting the integrity of artistic vision. Recently, there has been a shift in literary attitudes concerning confessional writing. Memoirs are now regarded more highly. Currently, they have value because there have been many stories that were best-sellers. Of course memoirs that make the most money are most often those that have sensational appeal. Yet this fact of the current marketplace does not make the memoir an inferior or less than literary genre. As a reader who enjoys well-crafted autobiographical writing, I have been thrilled by new and stylistically innovative memoirs. I was excited by the more recent celebration of the memoir. It made it possible for me to return to my earlier memoir writing and complete it.
In the preface to Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood I stated my reasons for writing and publishing this book at this time, calling attention to the growing body of psychological and sociological feminist writings on girlhood and the paucity of information about black girlhood. I emphasized the fact that when black girlhood is talked about novels are the text evoked. Without in any way diminishing the importance of novels about black girlhood, I stressed that fiction cannot be used by critical thinkers as a base for accurate ethnographic comprehension of this experience, that nonfiction accounts are needed. Documenting my own experience was an act of critical intervention. A growing body of fictional accounts of girlhood exist that graphically tell narratives of rape, incest, and overall abuse in black girlhood. These accounts are often drawn from true stories and embellished. Bone Black tells the story of my attempt to construct self and identity in a troubled home environment. Most specifically it paints a portrait of an artistic, gifted child in a working-class southern religious household whose yearning to read, think, and write are at odds with family expectations. There is much psychological conflict, torture, and physical pain, which when I was an adolescent led me to feel suicidal. The girlhood decision of whether or not I should kill myself is consistently juxtaposed with the struggle to find my place as thinker, dreamer, and emerging writer. In many ways it is a common story of adolescent alienation—an account of the feelings of a misunderstood outsider who cannot find a place to belong.
Much to my surprise none of the reviews I read mentioned suicide. This was the case even when reviews overwhelmingly praised the work. Indeed, a numbe
r of reviews (largely by white women), though written with positive intent, implied that though full of “marvelous” lyrical prose there was nothing really significant happening in the book—no story. Black woman writer Thulani Davis took the book to task for its lack of graphic revelation. Based on her understanding of my previous work she concludes, “One might expect a memoir of utter clarity, rendered without sentiment.” She concludes her piece with the statement that these “memories of girlhood may seem no more than moments safely told of the ordinary days of an extraordinary person.” Since she does not refer to the suicidal longings expressed in the memoir, readers cannot know if she thinks such longings are safe and ordinary. Like many reviewers, Davis seemed unable to let go her desire to hear a particular kind of gutsy down-to-earth account of a gifted black girl growing up in a troubled family long enough to appreciate the significance of my chosen narrative content and style.
There is nothing sensational in Bone Black, no rape, no prolonged graphically violent beatings, no incest. It is not a “safe” book, as it resists contempt for the ordinary, reminding readers that we are as marked by small, seemingly trivial moments in life as we are by dramatic incidents. The suicidal longings of an adolescent girl are not the stuff of great intrigue, nor did I want them to be. I wanted to show how one can be terribly isolated and desperate while calmly embracing the mundane. From the onset I was concerned that it would be difficult to interest a reading public so inclined toward the sensational that I was not confident that a more lyrical imaginative account of black female experience could find a place. So many stories of black girlhood are filled with lurid tales of all manner of sexual abuse, incest, rape by strangers, and unrelenting violence that this has almost come to represent in the popular imagination what black girlhood is. To deviate from this “norm,” whether by describing similar situations without sensationalism or offering a completely different account, in many readers’ minds would be tantamount to a betrayal of conventional stereotypical assumptions about black girlhood. For the most part mainstream reviewers did not know what to make of this book. It simply did not fit their expectations.