Language in Bone Black

I have been falling in love with writing vignettes. Especially for those of us who never learned the patience of our grandmothers and great grandmothers through quilting, vignettes become our own quilts, our own pieces that seem to span a great length of time in brevity. Those pieces somehow create a whole story of our lives and the universal themes of life. 

Like many readers, I see a lot of myself in hooks’ words and themes. I’m always adding onto a short story or onto my novel moments of dreams or nostalgias that are remembered like dreams. Right away, as I reread Bone Black, I want to focus on hooks use of language in those very moments. In

the first chapter, all of her words are lush and in poetic rhythms. As her mother nostalgically and painful falls back in time, hooks tells us “the secrets of her youth, the bittersweet memories, will come rushing out like a waterfall and push us back in time.” We are taken to a place in hooks’ childhood where “the scent of cedar fills the air… of abandoned trees, standing naked in the snow after the celebrations are over.” 

What I find awe-inducing with this chapter is not necessarily the chapter in and of itself, rather the way we are dropped into chapter two. We go from living in such a powerful and dreamy state that the next chapter creates the effect of the readers, too, being forced to wake up from dreams. Chapter two is full of short sentences. I almost found the language cold in comparison to where we once were. “We live in the country. We children do not understand that that means we are among the poor.” I asked myself, where was her individuality, her “I,” her sense of self? It is obvious that this intentional choice is to place the readers into a world where she is one of many children, she is “we” now, and that imaginative, vibrant young self is trapped in a reality that feels harsh to her. She does not have to say this, the readers feel it just in the mere transition into and reading of chapter two.  

I am not dreaming with her again until the fourth chapter. She details this moment of being carried home by an older stranger, who wishes to marry her when she gets older, through a fable-like story. In the nonfiction and fictionalized memoirs that switch to third person POV, I have noticed it being used as a distancing technique that both helps the writer illuminate something strange or speak on trauma and to force the readers to change their own perspective on the story. I wonder how many of us read this fable-like version of this story without feeling the immense sorrow over hyper sexualized black children or the fear of what all could have or might have occurred during this “rescue.” Some of the pain is lost, intentionally, in the landscapes of the fantastical story. A part of me will always wonder, deeply, on what this chapter fully means to her.

Chapter 29 has a similar effect as hooks stages another dream scene. Featuring her Daddy Gus, this dreamy language also works to undo some of the dangers we see from young girls and older men. Both literally and figuratively, those fears are stripped away as they undress in the cave to wash themselves. They create a spiritual and innocent relationship that transcends merely being one another’s grandfather and granddaughter. It is a dream on their ancestral connection, of being old wise souls. The language shifts specifically around dreams makes me re-conceptualize the male/female relationships that are otherwise highlighted as painful, traumatic or needing a distance or un-presence.

If one studies the shift in point of view, between the first person point of view (singular and sometimes plural) and the third person point of view, they will find that first person POV seems to be reserved for memories of happiness, of bonding, intellectual or spiritual stimulation, gaining deep insight, etc. Third person POV seems to be reserved for memories of deep pain from punishment, shame, awareness around enslavement and entrapment, lost of innocence, etc. It is one of the main reasons I have always questioned the purpose of the fourth chapter and the way in which it was told (as well as why it was the first chapter that used third person POV). This strange man wanted her in a way that would be confusing for such a young girl. 

It is also used when his father’s sister will inevitably punish her greatly for hiding in the car in chapter five; for her near-death experience and the terror it struck in her in chapter six; for her developing understanding of the restrictions on her body as a little girl in chapter seven; for her severe punishment for daring to enter the masculine space of her brother’s marbles in chapter ten; for her deep desire for punishment due to the lasting shame from kissing a white man for popcorn in chapter eleven; for feeling the connection to whipped enslaved ancestors and the lost of beauty that she sought in music in chapter twelve; all the way to her getting lashes from her mother that leads to her briefly standing up for herself in chapter fifty-one.

You get the picture. There is a lot to contemplate around why she uses first person to talk about Big Mama, doll babies, Saru, Rena, women in the community, the type of men in her community and life that inspire her about what men could be, etc. There are unpleasant moments that do occur in these chapters. She loses her cowgirl dreams, gets in a bloody fight and speaks on hard subjects of her family. But those moments are surrounded with deep contemplation on who she is and her growth. As for her use of third person, it becomes apparent that there is the need to distance oneself and the reader to create the type of space that shows not only pain but what limiting oneself does.

Importantly, third person is weaponized not solely for what is traumatic, what needs distance and space. I believe that this "limiting oneself" is specific to patriarchy. She limits herself in church while interacting with men. She limits herself in the moments that are the makings of womanhood in relation to manhood. She limits herself in these moments her parents teach or beat into her the duties and roles of a woman. It is the violent silencing in the presence of men who smell of sweet cologne and alcohol, in the presence of her father, and even with god. It is the violent silencing of being policed into a narrow form of womanhood and sense of self by society as a whole.

The memoir is deeply shaped by these shifts in and out of dreamy, otherworldly writings as well as in and out of first and third person point of view. The language we find as we drift in and out of these different tellings holds the complexities of struggling to escape, struggling to grow and define oneself, and struggling through the bone black darkness.