On Naming and Lessons Learned

I have been thinking a lot about grief and love, having recently lost three of my most beloved and influential Black women elders, beginning with bell in December of 2021 and then my paternal grandmother, Gloria Evadne Atherton on March 18, 2022, and four days later, my paternal aunt, my Auntie Karen Marie Mason.

I have been thinking about how difficult and inspiring it has been to really come to grips with how someone you love deeply can be loved as deeply by anyone other than yourself and that this person might have loved others just as deeply, in ways and moments that you will never experience, but in ways that have felt as much like a communion as yours. This has been one of the most surprising aspects of the grief experience I'm having now: to come to terms with the breadth of my loved ones' love with others.

I first came to knowledge of bell hooks as a student at Spelman College. I read All About Love and attended a talk she gave there in 2004, where she mentioned something offhanded and shocking about anal sex and I, prude that I was at the time, decided I was good on that, lady.

I later relied on her heavily in my dissertation work on Simone de Beauvoir, Black feminism, and the erotic, but can't say that I had any strong desire to know her. I respected the fact that she was a Black woman philosopher who took the subject of love seriously and was courageous enough to write about it directly.

When I applied to the job at Berea, bell's connection to the college was unclear to me, so I was embarrassed and underprepared when she turned up on my computer screen during my Skype job interview, asking me the meaning of the phrase "feminism is for everybody."

I must have responded well enough somehow because I got the job and she invited me and my mother–who she always insisted on referring to as "cute mom"–to the opening of The bell hooks Institute in 2015, and she introduced me to people as if she already knew me well and we got to sing songs in the dark with Laverne Cox when the lights went out at the reception at the dean's house, who had llamas. I think she took a shine to me because of our shared love and respect for Simone de Beauvoir, who I knew she looked up to and read as a young woman. It might have been for that reason that she insisted, every time she introduced me to someone, on calling me a philosopher, even though I was teaching at Berea in what was then the Women's and Gender Studies Program and is now The bell hooks Center.

When I moved my partner at the time from Philadelphia, where we had bars and he had a growing and bright future as a blues-rock musician, to Berea, Kentucky, I honestly didn't know what I was doing and why.

I told myself there must be some grand lesson I was supposed to learn directly from bell herself. At the time, I convinced myself that it was a spiritual lesson, as I knew her work had been heading in that direction for a while.

Once in Berea, I eagerly accepted any invite to bell's house, hoping time after time to sit at the feet of a wise feminist sage and soak up her wisdom and brilliance. What I found, largely, to my shock and spiritual chagrin, was a slight, sly, childlike-voiced Black lady sitting on a black leather couch, talking shit. Talking shit about every thing and every body. I quickly came to learn that most anything said to bell might then be repeated to anyone else, including but not limited to the man who cut her yard and the woman who sold mushrooms at the farmer's market.

After a year or so, she finally told me to come by at a specific time to become a part of "Group...