Introduction

The loss of bell hooks in the closing months of 2021 felt deeply personal for many. But for some of us, as Black Appalachian womxn academics, our lives would not be possible without her trailblazing work. She made our existence possible while simultaneously naming the structural barriers that kept this truth bound. The legacy of bell hooks represents the opportunity to move beyond a linear definition of what being Black, womxn, and scholars meant for those looking to be liberated. With our narratives we intend to engage in gratitude for what she taught us. We want to express our grief and thanksgiving while continuing her transformative work. We intend to do this by intimately sharing our memories and imagining. As Black womxn living in community, we respond to this loss by intimately sharing our memories. They, through the legacy of bell hooks, have transformed as well as empowered our imagination.

A Transformative Memory

The legacy of hooks is difficult to quantify, qualify, or even attend to meaningfully in this      brief offering. However, it is with great humility that I share her impact on my own life and work. My people are multi-racial Black Appalachians from West Virginia. Somehow, through the Great Migration by way of industrial northern Ohio, our nuclear unit ended up in suburban northern Kentucky. As a very insular little Black girl growing up in this place, my imagination and caring Black family nurtured me. My grandmother would stop on the side of the interstate highway to pick polk salad in the mid day summer heat, bring back the weeds, tenderly clean them, and thoroughly cook them so as not to poison her loved ones. It bewildered me why she would go through all this trouble when there were lots of green things in the many grocery stores within a ten-minute drive of our house.

Only as I grew older did her actions begin to make sense. When I began studying scholars who mirrored my experiences back to me, I grew in my understanding. As an undergraduate student, my first entry into a world outside of my mother and grandmother’s care, the only academic studies about Black women that I encountered were deficit based, exploitative, or baldly racist. I encountered hooks for the first time when she did a talk with Black trans actress Laverne Cox in 2014 (Mead 2014). Their conversation delighted me with its depth, beauty, and wit. The next encounter came through a personal grief journey after losing my mother. The grief led me towards contemplative practices and meditation, the cultivation of an inner life Black women are rarely encouraged to explore. On that journey I discovered a conversation between hooks and Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh about “building a community of love” (hooks and Nhat Hanh 2017). In it she writes:

At last I had found a world where spirituality and politics could meet, where there was no separation. Indeed, in this world all efforts to end domination, to bring peace and justice, were spiritual practice. I was no longer torn between political struggle and spiritual practice.

These words could have been my words, as they spoke so deeply to my experiences, desires, and my very being. It feels incredibly painful and beautiful that these two powerful figures would transition around the same time. My heart grieves the loss of these teachers, but their words continue to provide needed guidance. Without bell hooks, my precarious presence as a Black woman in academic spaces would be nearly impossible. Her teaching, writing, and speaking have buoyed me throughout my experience as a doctoral student. It seems a fitting bookend that her passing would prompt this offering of gratitude about how her life and work have impacted my own. Just as her words inspired me to go on this journey from the beginning. Maintaining this gratitude breathes life into the imaginary.

A Powerful Imagination

Choosing my own sovereignty in the interest of the things I love—my Blackness, my woman-ness, and my Kentuckian-ness—comes at the heels of living truthfully and authentically in sister bell hooks’s acts of self-recovery. In her book We Want to Do More Than Survive, scholar Bettina Love discusses the goal of an educator as necessary to create a place where we can choose our own sovereignty (2019, 156). This call to action, undoubtedly responding to the legacy of ancestor bell hooks, provided an opportunity for me to claim my sovereignty and truly allow my imagination and grief to co-exist. As difficult as it has been to qualify and quantify how hooks inspired my life with parallels to her own, choosing my sovereignty has helped me sustain an immeasurable mattering of self, wisdom, and zealous imagination which allow me to define—beyond the linear and limited—what it has meant to be a Black woman scholar working to teach—and learn—liberation.

Resisting the historical fallacies about who and what I am supposed to be as a Black woman scholar, hooks taught me that having an imagination can fuel a necessary wave of pedagogical and curricular needs within educational systems. As a self-identified and self-determined lifelong learner and educator, I realized that my teaching and learning must respond to the embodied opportunities to transgress as our ancestor bell hooks taught (hooks 1990). My imagination is the tool that allows me to transgress, to feel seen and most valued. The assessment of that, as often shown within schooling, is obsolete. Grounding my grief and imagination together, hooks and her legacy actualized what survival looks like for me as a scholar and professional. Led by her example, I am able to realize a safe space distant from everyday oppression.

The legacy of hooks’s work has inspired me to imagine, abolish, dismiss, and grow less bound to the “normal” constructs of a particular pedagogical ‘style’ the academy prescribes. Shaped by my Blackness, my womanness, and my Kentuckian-ness, my experiences are spiritual and integral to an educational process committed to liberation. Hooks’s example of abolitionist teaching has taught me not just to be thoughtful about the way I educate, but also to be mindful about the way I live my life—to see the world differently.

In Memoriam and Thanksgiving

Our offering of gratitude is this, dearest bell hooks:

We promise to inherit all that you intended. We promise to imagine, dream, and bask in the glory of our liminal occupations as Black womxn and Appalachians. We promise to look to our mothers, our grandmothers (even in death) and model how they educate consciously and sometimes unconsciously in the unfathomable and explicit. It is also from you, dearest bell hooks, that we learned to understand how being in unity with our own sovereignty and ourselves results in the greatest lessons we could learn and share with others.

This concludes our brief offering of gratitude.

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