Belonging: A Culture of Place

Hooks reflects on the unique partnership between her grandparents, Baba and Daddy Gus, describing them as “two eccentrics who created their own world” (135). Through a series of personal recollections, she presents their unconventional partnership and the ways it shaped her early experiences of home, family, and belonging. Baba, a quiltmaker and powerful speaker who could not read or write, taught hooks about aesthetics, language, and care. Daddy Gus was quiet and contemplative, often walking long distances and visiting friends. Together, they maintained a household that reflected their individual rhythms rather than traditional roles.

Hooks recalls sensory elements of their home, such as the bright heat of coal-burning fireplaces, the scent of braided tobacco leaves, and her grandfather’s room full of “treasures.” These objects, along with family quilts and household rituals, are described as lasting ties to her past. She also credits her grandfather with shaping her early opposition to war, and she recounts her childhood perception of Baba as a woman of strength, unaware at the time of the limitations illiteracy would have imposed outside of their home.

The chapter highlights how Baba and Daddy Gus created a life centered on mutual respect and personal freedom. Their way of living taught hooks that a household could be arranged around the needs of the people within it rather than on social expectations. She concludes by describing the objects she has kept—braided tobacco, ink-stained quilts, a cigar box—as physical links to her grandparents’ world and as symbols of memory and protection.

Hooks describes how, in contrast to public, male-dominated spaces like street corners—which she notes remain “patriarchal territory”—the porch offered a kind of sanctuary where woman and girls could gather, rest, and be seen without being touched. This feminine-coded space, though technically part of her father’s house, was treated by him with suspicion and disdain. To him, the porch was a threat.

Hooks details the way her family’s porch became a site of daily life and bonding. However, this freedom was shattered one evening when her father, in a jealous rage, violently interrupted their peace, physically assaulting their mother and dragging her into the house. The traumatic event transformed the porch from a space of comfort to a reminder of patriarchal violence and loss. Hooks marks this moment as the end of her sense of ease in that space and the beginning of a deep grief. Despite the trauma, hooks still finds comfort and clarity on the porches in her life.

Hooks reflects on the aesthetic traditions passed down through generations of Black women. She writes in remembrance of her grandmother, Sarah Hooks Oldham (called Baba), and her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, both skilled quiltmakers whose artistic contributions were never formally recognized. 

Inspired by artist Faith Ringgold’s story quilts, hooks seeks to document and honor this legacy, resisting the historical erasure of Black women’s creative labor. Hooks explores quilt-making as a spiritual and meditative practice that offered stillness and emotional restoration for Black women whose lives were often marked by relentless labor. Baba, a self-taught quiltmaker, viewed the process as a way to “calm the heart and ‘ease the mind’” (156), echoing broader traditions in which creativity served both personal and community survival. Though Baba never identified herself as an artist, hooks describes her quilt-making as deeply imaginative, aesthetic, and intentional.

The chapter contrasts two homes from hooks’s childhood—one filled with a cultivated sense of beauty and care for space, the other barren and shaped by consumerist values. Hooks argues that despite material limitations, many Black families in the segregated South cultivated a vibrant aesthetic sensibility rooted in history, memory, and love. This sensibility often went undocumented and unacknowledged by dominant art institutions, which portrayed quilt-making as the domain of white women and referred to Black women artists as “anonymous.”

Hooks notes that many enslaved and impoverished Black women made quilts from scraps, developing unique styles such as the “crazy quilt.” She challenges conventional assumptions about quilting by suggesting that what was once dismissed as irregular or utilitarian in fact reflected innovation shaped by necessity and resourcefulness. Quilting also held intergenerational meaning: Hooks recalls choosing a humble star quilt made from her mother’s old dresses over fancier pieces, valuing the personal history embedded in the fabric. She argues that these quilts are not only artifacts, but living embodiments of cultural memory and aesthetic legacy.

The chapter concludes by calling for the reclamation of Black women’s artistic inheritance. Hooks emphasizes the need to name and document these contributions, to “state their particulars” (161), and to affirm that creative Black women are not rare exceptions but part of a continuous and powerful tradition.

Hooks reflects on her grandmother Baba, whose life exemplified creativity, resilience and self-determination. Hooks recounts how Baba took pride in her daily living. These practices—such as quilt-making—were not merely domestic routines but expressions of artistry and a form of survival rooted in imagination and self-reliance.

Hooks frame’s Baba’s creativity as a model for what she calls “transcendent survival”—a way of living that draws on imagination to overcome hardship and affirm life. She emphasizes that this imagination was about transformation, beauty, and meaning. Remembering her grandmother’s example, hooks calls attention to the sustaining force of Black female artistry and the importance of honoring such legacies as vital parts of cultural memory.