Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. - book reviews

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Evelyn E. Shockley

As she negotiates adolescence, hooks is faced with the blunt injustice of racism, sexism, and classism, in her family and her community. She rages over her lack of privacy, the privacy she needs to explore her sexuality, to write poems about her feelings without worrying what her family will think when they find them. She is confronted with domestic violence between her parents, with interracial dating, with death. We see the importance of books in her life, both as a way of making sense of the world and as a training ground for the writer hooks will become. Religion - her relationships with God and with the community of believers she belongs to - also provides her with comfort and escape. She shares not only her pain, but also her dreams, and they symbolize her strength and foretell her survival.

We do not know, after reading Bone Black, her sisters' names or ages, her father's occupation, or what kind of grades she received in school. What we do know, however, is how it felt to her to grow up as a black girl in a traditional, Southern, working-class family - and that is what it is important for us to know. Both as a documentation of one black woman's girlhood and as a beautifully crafted narrative, Bone Black is a significant addition to the traditions of autobiography by women and African Americans.