Belonging: A Culture of Place

Hooks reflects on the enduring influence of Kentucky writer Wendell Berry, particularly his emphasis on the importance of place, sustainability, and ethical living. Discovering Berry’s work in her late teens, hooks recalls feeling seen by his depictions of an “interior landscape” that matched her own.

Hooks focuses especially on Berry’s The Hidden Wound (1970), which she describes as both a memoir and a meditation on race. She highlights his honesty in recounting family stories—such as that of Nick, a Black man employed by Berry’s relatives, and Aunt Georgie, who held deeply racist views—as a model of critical reflection. Hooks values how Berry foregrounds the psychological and moral costs of white supremacy for white people themselves, acknowledging its dehumanizing effects across racial lines.

The essay examines the cultural disconnection that accompanied the Great Migration. As Black Americans moved from rural areas to urban centers, she argues, many lost touch with agrarian traditions that had once grounded their communities. Naming this “collective estrangement” is necessary for healing. Echoing Berry, hooks also argues for the interconnectedness between racism and environmental domination. The path to healing, she suggests, lies in cultivating communities rooted in love, respect, and care.

Hooks presents excerpts from a recorded conversation with fellow Kentuckian writer, Wendell Berry. The essay opens with hooks’s recollection of two visits to Berry’s home, with the first undocumented. She frames their exchanges as an intentional transgression of boundaries that often divide Black and white Americans, even when they share common values.

Their conversation centers on the interconnectedness of racism, environmental degradation, and economic injustice. Hooks asks Berry directly about his views on the relationship between white supremacy and the domination of nature, prompting Berry to reflect on how the abuse of people and the earth stem from similar ideologies of control and exploitation. They reference other thinkers, including Ernest Gaines and George Washington Carver, recognizing them as models of agrarian wisdom and humanistic ethics. Both Berry and hooks emphasize the moral responsibility to preserve human dignity and ecological balance in the face of capitalist excess.

Throughout the dialogue, they discuss shared experiences of returning to Kentucky to live rural lives, despite cultural norms that associate agrarianism with backwardness. Hooks reflects on how modern society, including many white and upwardly mobile Black individuals, has devalued rural life and manual labor. Berry underscores the importance of not asking others to perform work one would not do oneself.

The two writers also reflect on historical and contemporary examples of segregation and examine the complex emotional dependencies that exist across racial lines. Through personal anecdotes, they illustrate the deep contradictions and lingering discomforts that structure cross-racial relations in the South.

Hooks closes the conversation by rejecting simplistic narratives that portray Black agrarian workers solely as victims. She argues instead for recognition of the spiritual strength and redemptive power found in the hard labor of rural life.

Hooks reflects on her evolving relationship with home, recounting the emotional weight of past visits and long goodbyes with her parents, Rosa and Veodis. She draws on poets like Gary Snyder to express her shifting understanding of rootedness, describing a true home not as a fixed geographic location, but as any place that nurtures growth and offers constancy. Remembering her childhood joy in Kentucky’s natural world—symbolized by her youthful act of eating red clay dirt—she affirms that her adult self continues to find deep delight and spiritual nourishment in the land.

Hooks explores the tension between her own attraction to agrarian nonconformity and her parents’ rejection of such lifestyles. While her maternal grandparents modeled spiritual self-sufficiency and a rural ethic of living close to the land, her parents embraced materialism and distanced themselves from these values. Still, hooks expresses gratitude that she maintained ties to her home and family even during periods of personal disillusionment, resisting the urge to sever bonds when her expectations were unmet.

The chapter examines the cultural and psychological consequences of racial integration. Hooks argues that earlier generations of Black Americans, despite facing harsher systemic oppression under segregation, were often more spiritually grounded and emotionally resilient than those raised under the illusion of equality. The loss of distinct Black subcultures through forced assimilation into dominator culture, she contends, has eroded many of the sources of Black joy and communal strength. Nevertheless, she emphasizes the importance of cultivating joy in adversity and maintaining spiritual practice as acts of resistance.

Hooks critiques the role of television and mass media in perpetuating consumerist values and encouraging conformity. Drawing on Black women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor, she honors their portrayals of southern Black life while also warning against nostalgic representations that aestheticize the past without acknowledging its complexity. She also references the recent mainstream recognition of Black quilters, such as those from Gee’s Bend, as an example of this tension between visibility and erasure.

Toward the end of the chapter, hooks calls for a renewed commitment to simple living, spiritual grounding, and environmental harmony, particularly among Black communities. She notes that mainstream movements for sustainability and voluntary simplicity often overlook people of color, and she expresses hope that as more Black voices join these conversations, others will feel empowered to reimagine their relationships to land and place.

Hooks opens with a reflection on her lifelong search for a true sense of home—a place of safety, affirmation, and emotional grounding. As a child living in the Kentucky hills she experienced this belonging. Her early environment was rich with lessons about respect for the earth, taught to her by adults who modeled a reverent way of living. This formative connection laid the foundation for her lifelong values of belonging.

She recalls the influence of her grandfather Daddy Jerry, who survived Jim Crow segregation yet managed to live a dignified, self-sufficient life in harmony with nature. His example, along with teaching she later encountered, helped her articulate a value system rooted in simplicity, spirituality, and community. She contrasts this early grounding with the disorientation she experienced after moving to the city. Immersed in a culture of materialism and conformity, she found herself alienated from her previous values. Practices that once brought her pride—like wearing handmade clothes—were now seen as embarrassing. The loss of cultural belonging led to a sense of exile and fragmentation, and books became her “refuge.”

Hooks reflects on her 20th high school reunion, which was the first to be desegregated. Though she reconnected with white classmates who had once been her friends, she noted the ways in which many of them had gone on to live segregated lives. Hooks acknowledges feeling exiled from her hometown for many years, unable to imagine returning as an adult woman, especially given the cultural conservatism. Drawing on Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Heart, she frames exile as a condition that helped her clarify what is most important in life. Eventually, like Wendell Berry—whose The Hidden Wound she once again revisits—hooks returned to Kentucky.

The chapter closes with reflections on aging, death, and the transformative experiences that deepened her longing for rootedness. Moving to Berea, Kentucky, she found a community aligned with her values and a deeper sense of home. Listening to the sound of trains in the night, she feels a profound affirmation of place: “Here in my native place I embrace the circularity of the sacred, that where I begin is also where I will end. I belong here” (223).

In her concluding essay, hooks reflects on her aging parents and the evolving nature of their relationship. Her father, Veodis, compares aging to descending a mountain, a metaphor that surprises hooks given his long embrace of modern urban life and rejection of agrarian values. 

Hooks recalls how she felt alienated from her parents as a child. Though shaped by their values, hooks also resisted them, gravitating instead toward the hills, her grandparents’ rural ways, and a political consciousness that alarmed her parents, noting, “My talking made them afraid” (225). Despite these differences, hooks now recognizes her parents’ influence and the enduring bonds of love and care that connect them.

As her parents struggle with aging—her father with a loss of community, her mother with memory decline—hooks witnesses the gradual unraveling of their identities. Her mother’s memory loss is particularly painful, “a way of dying” (225) that severs communication and recognition. Still, Rosa often remembers hooks, even when other memories fade.

Hooks expresses appreciation for the institution of marriage, citing the lifelong partnership of her parents as an example of enduring commitment. Drawing on the work of P. Travis Krocker, she reflects on the concept of a community of care, sustained by shared rituals such as cooking and caregiving. With Rosa no longer able to cook, others step in to meet her needs, turning the acts of service into a ritual expression of love and connection. Hooks cherishes quiet, intimate moments with her mother, who once viewed such simple gestures as “silly.” Hooks ends with a meditation on gratitude, suggesting that giving thanks is not merely sentimental but transformative.