Name: Bone Black
Rating: 4.666666666666667 (3 reviews)
ISBN: 9780805041453

bell hooks

A feminist thinker and author writes not a chronological narrative of her life but a series of impressions as the young girl that she was became aware of segregation, civil rights, family ties, spirituality, and her own sexuality. 30,000 first printing.

Memories of Girlhood

Bone Black

Stitching together girlhood memories with the finest threads of innocence, feminist intellectual bell hooks presents a powerfully intimate account of growing up in the South. A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Black shows the unfolding of female creativity and one strong-spirited child’s journey toward becoming a writer. She learns early on the roles women and men play in society, as well as the emotional vulnerability of children. She sheds new light on a society that beholds the joys of marriage for men and condemns anything more than silence for women. In this world, too, black is a woman’s color—worn when earned—daughters and daddies are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about. hooks finds good company in solitude, good company in books. She also discovers, in the motionless body of misunderstanding, that writing is her most vital breath.

In the introduction to this memoir bell hooks refers to it as "autobiography as truth and myth-as poetic witness" In short chapters bell hooks unpacks black girlhood from conflicts with parents, discovering her sexuality, race and class issues and the role of patriarchy in the socialization of little girls and boys. Books about little children can be radical and tell us a lot about the societies we live in.

Bone Black Memories of Girlhood

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