I write like I need air to breathe, water to drink, and the sun to make my deep brown skin glow—the same shade of melanin as so many Black women I know. Writing for me was never really a choice, it just was. It just is a part of me, of the women who came before me, my writing, our writing, just is—justice. I write to free my thoughts, to concretize my feels, experiences, my life, my breath. I write even as I struggle to do so (to write, to live) because it sustains me also. My written words may be only a whisper in the wind of the writing world, a mere sigh carried along the stream of my own consciousness, my individual and collective desires. Nevertheless, I write, and will continue also because bell hooks said “No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’ … No woman has ever written enough.” Where in our culture can there be too many words written by a Black woman      when so often our words, our breath, our lives are cut short by the same culture we carry on our backs? Bell hooks almost saw 70 years at 69, the same age as Zora Neale Hurston who Alice Walker discovered in an untended grave years later. Octavia Butler only knew 54. The late Valerie Boyd, author of the biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neal Hurston, only reached 58 this year. 

I write, Black women write like we’re running out of time—because we are. We stand up and Say Her Name—Rekia Boyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland—because if we don’t who will? We write to tell the world of our fathers, brothers, cousins, and sons—Trayvon Martin, Emmet Till, George Floyd—who are flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood, not your superhuman, super predator. They are ours. Yet how many Black women live to receive their flowers in this life? Thank this universe for Cicely Tyson, who reached 97 and had the chance to hold her flowers close. 

Bell hooks taught me to write through the struggle of living in a white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist patriarchy bent on our destruction even as it lays claim to our bodies, uses them, disposes of them, and buries them deep. Bell hooks—my mother’s mother, my father’s mother, my other-mothers, and more—taught me that there is power in my words. I was loquacious as a child, who watched the “stories ” and “soaps ” with her grandparents and who was read to by everyone, is likely to be. When I picked up my first pencil, I don’t think we were prepared for the kind of “good trouble” I was preparing to create. My words may not often land when they are taken up out of context, rearranged, read, and reread to fit an image that others have created of me—not always with the best of intentions, not often giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Nevertheless, I write and will write a Black woman’s words, thoughts, feelings, and realities as long as my body carries breath and I have the strength to lay pencil to paper or type words on keys. There will never be enough of my words in the world, nor were there too many of theirs: hooks, Hurston, Butler, or my grandmothers.

Those of us who still have the capacity as well as desire to write, whether we are heard by anyone other than ourselves, must write even if it is for just us.  It remains justice.

I never had the chance to meet bell hooks though I walked the greens of Berea College’s campus many times in my life. I read her work, her words, voraciously with a renewed fervor since her passing in December 2021. I write to remember; I write to remain. I write to fill a void; I write to give voice.

Black women writers like bell hooks have given me so much. If I can give even a little, that would be enough but never too much. We often don’t have the opportunity to live long enough to write too much, and even if we had the breath of eternity, I don’t believe we ever could. Writing has been, for me, something to love, to fear, to dread, to abhor even. Yet writing has remained something that I cling to when I feel everything else is out of balance. In my words, which are reflections of my lived experiences marred by the work, words, and lives of others, I find myself whole. Sometimes the poetry in me dries up, recedes into the deepest recesses of my mind, and becomes difficult, if nearly impossible, to coax out. Nevertheless, I write. I journal in a diary, I write essays, I write for my life as an academic and as a public sociologist. But mostly I write for myself. In words I find comfort, rare moments of peace, sometimes sorrow, and even fragments of joy. bell hooks’s work showed me that writing with purpose, with love, allows us to move through this world as Black women strengthening each other. Through her work we allow ourselves to be turned into words (that matter) on the page. I am not a perfect writer, nor do I ever believe I will be. I am, however, tenacious in my writing. I am alive in my writing. I am sustained.

When I first sat down to pen this essay on one of hooks’s quotes that has inspired me, I did not know the way the words would come or even if they would come. I’m glad they did. This is my love letter to bell hooks, and all Black women writers who have inspired and guided me. With love.

Your daughter in spirit, in word, and in thought,
Letisha Engracia Cardoso Brown.