Remembered Rapture

by bell hooks

  The responses of family to my work vary. Not surprisingly, among my seven siblings those who have attended college and taken courses in writing are more supportive. Since I often draw on the lives of my six sisters and my brother Kenneth, if I am saying anything about them that might be in the slightest bit harmful I talk about it with them first, of course hoping that they will affirm the writing. This was especially crucial when I began to make references to my sister Valeria’s lesbianism. Before publishing any work that identified her, I needed her permission. Just as it has not been a simple manner for me to write publicly about our private family life, I do not believe it was a simple choice for her to affirm and encourage what I chose about her reality, especially as neither of us can control the manner in which this information is received. Of all my siblings, Valeria is the most understanding about the process of writing. Even when she does not agree with my interpretations of our family reality, she supports my freedom to tell my story as I perceive. Neither of us believes there is any absolute “true” account of one’s life, since when talking together about the past we may remember the same experience in radically different ways. In one of my books I shared an incident that involved one of my married sisters and her family. While I mentioned to her that I was telling this story, neither of us saw any need to ask permission of her husband. And even though he was not a usual reader of my work, somehow he found this passage and it caused conflict. Again, I am describing situations faced by individuals from poor and working-class backgrounds who have never had to think about whether a relative would write something about their lives.

  As my writing became increasingly autobiographical I felt even more fear that my parents might stop speaking to me because of their disapproval of what I say. After a particularly bitter disagreement with my mother about my public sharing of an experience that disclosed information about the family, I wrote them a letter to explain my writing process. In the opening paragraph I stated: “I am writing you both to say that I am sorry that my public sharing of experiences that have deeply affected me hurts you. It is not my intention or desire to cause you pain. And if my actions are hurting please be forgiving. All my life I have worked to be an open honest person who has nothing to hide, who does not feel shame about anything that has happened in my life. And while I have chosen to talk about painful memories in my work, I also speak about joyful memories. There is nothing about the pain of the past that I have not forgiven, but forgiveness does not mean that one forgets. It is my deep belief than in talking about the past, in understanding the things that have happened to us we can heal and go forward.” Throughout the letter I expressed my gratitude to my parents for doing the best job of raising us that they could do given the circumstances, sharing the ways I feel appreciation can coexist with critical awareness.

  Initially, I had wanted to tell them that writers always draw on their lives but I realized this would have been dishonest. Not all writers draw on their lives. And certainly most black women do not choose to reveal intimate details of their personal lives. Instead I wrote: “As a writer who has chosen to do autobiographical writing I realize that I share information publicly that you would not share. My hope is that you will respect my right to tell my story as I see it even though you do not always agree with what is being told or the decision to speak about it publicly.” After sending this letter I waited to see if there would be any discussion. My parents never said a word. Even when I asked them if they had received it they said nothing. I had no way to know if my efforts at explanation had made anything clearer. What I live with is the reality that writing about my life has created an emotional distance between me and my parents. An intimacy we once shared is gone.

  Oftentimes I have heard black women writers suggest that they will share certain aspects of their lives when their parents are no longer living. Their confidence that they will outlive their parents surprises me. In part, the awareness that so many black women writers die young has compelled me to write openly and honestly about aspects of my life I would have once believed would be best shared in old age. Such a long list exists of black women writers who have not made it to old age. There is so much about the writing life of Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara that we will never know. They did not live long enough to become old.

  So much of what is written about the lives of working-class people in our culture, whether in fiction or nonfiction, comes to us from the perspective of those who either have not known such lives or imagine them only through a bourgeois perspective. As I moved into a realm of class privilege, further and further away from the working-class world of my origin, just as I began to see a shift in my language (more and more I was losing my southern accent—that long slow Kentucky drawl as if we are beating words with a broom) I could also see a shift in the nature of memories, so I began to write them. Long before I published my first memoir, a narrative of girlhood, I had begun to write those memories. I wanted them on paper before they became the stuff of romantic nostalgia.

  Frankly the world in which working-class girls of any race or ethnicity could begin to write in the spaces of their family of origin rarely exists. More than ever before it seems the idea of writing serious literature becomes the terrain of those who are privileged, who have the “right” education. Even though their feelings about my writing are mixed, it was in the heart of my working-class family that I chose to become a writer. My love of books and words was affirmed at times and at other times negated but was never destroyed by relentless assault. There are many other girls and boys from working-class backgrounds who had to hide their books and their words for fear of punishment. Writing about her working-class upbringing in the essay “Art and Life” Jeanette Winterson recalls hiding books under her mattress: “But as my collection grew, I began to worry that my mother might notice that her daughter’s bed was rising visibly. One day she did. She burned everything.”

  My family’s response was always much more ambiguous. There were those times when they threatened to take books away and even to burn them. Then there were the times when mama pleaded with daddy and saved to buy a book I longed for. Like many working-class parents, they were afraid that “too much book learning” would make me unfit for my station in life. Even though we lived in a culture that did not talk about class, they lived the reality of class boundaries. They had not shifted from the poor and working-class backgrounds of their families of origin and there was no precedent to strengthen hopes that any of their children would enter the ranks of the middle class. Their hope was that we would work hard in our jobs, create families, lead decent lives.

  Often when I am lecturing or reading from my work, individuals from privileged class backgrounds will come up to me wanting to know how I escaped my class of origin. Always, they say to me that my parents must be so proud. My parents are proud. And when they see all my books lined up on a bookstore shelf and when they see the prices readers pay for them they are impressed. Yet their pride is mingled with bitterness and regret. While they are pleased that I have not betrayed my class, become an uppity intellectual and writer who looks down on them and other poor and working-class women and men, they are saddened that family secrets have been told. No doubt they wish for me a different kind of writing, a different kind of success.

  While I have no regret, I am saddened that writers from poor and working-class backgrounds must still count the emotional costs should they dare to reveal that which the world would choose to leave unspoken, with no written account. We all know that there are times when counting the costs acts to silence and censor. Writers from working-class backgrounds, women and men of color who have only recently found our way to the printed page (in the last twenty years) who do not choose to leave behind these worlds or make of them fodder for the entertainment of a prurient privileged class are continuously struggling to find ways to bridge gaps and maintain ties. This work is as much a part of the writing process as putting words on paper. The way
we do what we do makes a cultural space, a gap in the system, so that there will always be an opening for the poor and working class to find their way to words, to writing, to print, a way that need not be marked by bitterness, betrayal, and regret.

  a life in the spirit

  faith, writing, and intellectual work

  Touched by the mystical dimensions of Christian faith when I was a girl, I felt the presence of the Beloved in my heart, the Oneness of all life. At that time, when I had not acquired knowledge of appropriate terminology, I only knew that despite the troubles of my world, the suffering I witnessed around and within me, there was always a spiritual force that lifted me higher and gave me moments of transcendent bliss wherein I could surrender all thought of the world and know profound peace. Religious ecstasy was real. I knew its rapture. My heart had been touched by its delight. Early on, I made a commitment to be a seeker on the Path, a seeker after Truth. I was determined to live a life in the spirit.

  Black religious experience as I knew and lived it growing up was a liberation theology. For generations, black churchgoers had used the gospel to re-vision our understandings of black experience, to make radical sense of our history, and to build communities of resistance that enabled us to protest and struggle for freedom. Long before I had ever read any Marxism, any works on liberation theology from Latin America, I knew that my destiny was inextricably linked to that of the poor. Each week I had the task of reading to the church from those passages in the book of Matthew that declare: “Come ye blessed of my father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me meat, I was thirsty and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in: Naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me: I was in prison and you came to me.” When the righteous respond by expressing surprise and wonder as to when they did these things, they were told: “Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me” (Matthew 25:34–40). In the church of my youth, I learned that our spiritual work was to meet the needs of the poor and the downtrodden. So it was as a young girl attending Virginia Baptist Church in Kentucky that I became politicized. I learned then that it was not enough to identify with the poor; one had to act to transform society and human lives so that we would all have access to paradise. Our mission was to make a beloved community in the world, where everyone would be free to live well.

  In my church, I learned to be contemplative yet to know the importance of realizing one’s faith in actions, in concrete gestures of community, in service. In Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, Jack Kornfield explains the path of service: “For many people service and open-hearted giving become the very vehicles for their liberation and are taken as their path or way of practice. A sense of interconnectedness leads to the realization that all our activity can be undertaken as service to the world around us.” An ethic of service was a fundamental aspect of the religious and secular black experience I knew in my childhood and I was taught how to serve. Those teachings were combined with an emphasis on dedication to truth. Reflecting on the way traditional black religious experience emphasizes the need for truth, black theologian James Cone in God of the Oppressed asserts: “Indeed our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived by the people. If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to appropriate it, for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.” My faith was stronger than that of the world around me. In living that faith I learned not only that grown folks did not always express Truth, but that sometimes they stood in the way, blocking the path. Consequently, it was necessary at times to rebel against their authority.

  In remembering my youth, I emphasize the mystical dimensions of Christian faith because it was that aspect of religious experience that I found to be truly liberatory. The more fundamental, rigid beliefs that were taught to me, urging blind obedience to authority and acceptance of oppressive hierarchies, did not move me. No, it was those mystical experiences that enabled me to recognize that the Beloved offers us a realm of being and spiritual experience that transcends the law, that is beyond the authority of man. In her essay “The Feminist Mystic,” Mary Giles clarifies the way females trained in traditional sexist thinking and behavior were often compelled by spiritual devotion to become disloyal to patriarchy and to men. Writing about Teresa of Avila, Giles comments: “Even though Teresa did not always have guidance in prayer from spiritually wise confessors, she continued to pray, for the light within was strong enough to withstand ignorance without.” Ultimately, according to Giles, Teresa felt her rebellion against male authority sanctioned by grace and urged her spiritual sisters to remember “the authority of the heart overrides that of the mind—even when the heart is a woman’s and the mind’s a man.” Growing up was a time of intense contemplation for me. It was during that time of my life that I learned to build an inner life that could sustain me. I felt even then that I was on a spiritual journey. In my church, we often sang the words “Is it well with your soul? Are you free and made whole?” As a seeker on the Path, I was searching for a way to be well in my soul.

  Although I considered myself living a life in the spirit, I went away to college knowing that I would no longer participate fully in the organized church, which over the years had come to seem full of folks who really did not believe what they taught or live those beliefs. During my undergraduate years, I began to look at other religious traditions in search of new and different spiritual paths. I was seeking to flee a fundamentalist religious tradition that was firmly rooted in the notion of punishment. I could no longer accept Western metaphysical dualism: the assumption that the world was divided into good and bad, white and black, superior and inferior. In Original Blessing, Matthew Fox best expresses the dilemma I felt as a young woman raised in the southern black Baptist tradition when he writes of the pitfalls of a model of spirituality exclusively structured around the drama of fall and redemption:

  It is a dualistic model and a patriarchal one; it begins its theology with sin and original sin, and it generally ends with redemption. Fall/redemption spirituality does not teach believers about the New Creation or creativity, about justice-making and social transformation, or about Eros, play, pleasure and the God of delight. It fails to teach love of the Earth or care for the cosmos, and it is so frightened of passion that it fails to listen to the impassioned pleas of the anawim, the little ones of human history.…

  As a young adult woman able to be critical of Christianity, I searched for a spiritual path that would offer an alternative to the fall/redemption model. That search led me to teachings and to spiritual leaders and guides who taught me about other paths. I learned about the mystical dimensions of Islam, studied about Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religious traditions. My current spiritual practice grows out of a combination of various traditions. Drawn to the teachings of Buddha, I practice yoga and meditation. That aspect of Christian faith I most cling to is the emphasis on prayer. And from the teachings of Sufi mystics, I learned how to understand Love as divine energy in the universe.

  During my twenties, as I searched for the “correct” path, one that would speak most intimately to me, I began to think of spiritual practice as a way of being that was private, that I did not need to share with others in words. Striving also to become a self-actualized intellectual, I stayed in college. The academic environments that were the primary sites of my educational experiences placed little value on spiritual life. Indeed, my peers and colleagues mostly thought of religion as a kind of joke. They ridiculed and mocked the idea that any smart person could sustain belief in God. So it may have been that this atmosphere also led me to take my spiritual beliefs inward. I never thought then that the university was overall a place hostile to religious practice, but in retrospect I can see that it was. Interviewed in The Other Side, Henri Nouwen, rem
embering his time at Harvard, reminds us of the way the deeply competitive nature of universities can disrupt spiritual practice. Commenting on his years there, Nouwen shares: “It’s not an intimate place. It’s a place of intellectual battle. On the one hand, I loved being there—I made some beautiful friends. But at the same time, I didn’t feel it was a safe place where I could deepen my spiritual life.” During my undergraduate years at Stanford, I would often seek refuge in the church that Leland Stanford built in memory of his son. There in the ornate quietness, I would struggle to remember the Beloved, to be still and know God. In those days, the church was more than just a place for tourists and fancy weddings; one could go there to regain a sense of the sacred. In my graduate years, there was no such place. I learned to look within.

  As certain as I was in my youth that I was on a spiritual journey, I worked to live in the spirit even as I also worked to strengthen my knowledge of and involvement in progressive politics. In my undergraduate years, I began to think deeply about feminism. Struggling to be self-actualized, I knew that the experience of being black and female had to be understood as similar to and yet different from white female reality. During those years, I began writing my first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. The writing of this book was for me a journey that was both spiritual and political. Remembering the teacher and mystic Howard Thurman’s love for the concert of journeying (he called one of his books The Inward Journey), Luther Smith explains: