Belonging: A Culture of Place

Hooks devotes significant attention to her maternal grandparents, Baba (Sarah Hooks Oldham) and Daddy Gus, presenting them as formative figures in her live and as living embodiments of the values she associates with dignity, rootedness, creativity, and care. 

Baba, in particular, is a central presence across multiple chapters. A skilled quiltmaker who never learned to read or write, she represents the generational legacy of Black women’s artistry and spiritual resilience. Hooks describes her as a woman of profound power, both feared and respected in childhood, who taught through storytelling, ritual, and example. Baba’s quilts, made from salvaged scraps and worn clothing, function as symbols of cultural memory and creative survival—objects that offer beauty, history, and healing in equal measure.

Daddy Gus, though described more quietly, is also important. A calm, contemplative man, he influenced hooks through his gentle demeanor, his long walks, and his strong moral compass. It is from him that hooks learned to oppose war, and his practice of salvaging found objects taught her early lessons about value, sustainability, and imagination.

Together, Baba and Daddy Gus modeled a partnership not constrained by rigid gender norms but organized around mutual respect, affection, and shared purpose. Their home was a site of intergenerational learning and belonging—a space where hooks encountered alternative models of family, labor, and artistic expression. In honoring Baba and Daddy Gus, hooks underscores the argument that the most radical wisdom often comes from people whose lives have been overlooked by dominant history.

Hooks’s parents, Rosa and Veodis Watkins, appear in Belonging as complex, often ambivalent figures in her personal history. While her maternal grandparents embody the rural, agrarian values that deeply shaped her, Rosa and Veodis represented a trajectory marked by the rejection of country life in favor of modern urban living and consumerist aspirations. Hooks recalls her mother’s insistence on raising her as a “city girl,” a choice that alienated hooks from the hills and agrarian traditions she loved. This generational and ideological divide often created emotional distance between hooks and her parents, particularly when her outspoken political views caused them anxiety.

Rosa is portrayed as a strong-willed woman whose rejection of agrarian life reflects a belief in progress as defined by mainstream culture. However, in her later years, Rosa faces significant health challenges that erode her independence. Hooks tenderly reflects on the new intimacy that emerged during this time. These late-life encounters, stripped of earlier tensions, allow hooks to express gratitude for Rosa’s life and influence within the limits of their ideological differences.

Veodis is portrayed as a product and enforcer of patriarchal values. Hooks recalls his controlling nature and the ways he asserted ownership over the family home and the women within it. The most searing example is the porch incident, when, in a jealous rage, he violently assaulted Rosa in full view of their daughters, dragging her inside and shattering the porch’s role as a safe, feminine space. This moment, for hooks, symbolizes how male violence can strip women of spaces of fellowship and ease. Later in life, Veodis offers a surprising metaphor for aging—likening it to walking down a mountain—which stands in tension with the domineering behaviors of his earlier years. His trajectory reflects both the disconnection many Black men of his generation experienced after moving from rural, agrarian roots into urban, industrial settings and the difficulty of reconciling personal change with a past marked by domination.

Wendell Berry (b. 1934), a celebrated Kentucky writer, poet, essayist, and environmental activist, occupies a significant place in Belonging as both a personal influence on hooks and an intellectual companion in her thinking about place, race, and sustainability. Known for his extensive body of work addressing agrarianism (The Unsettling of America), environmental stewardship, and the moral responsibilities of community life, Berry offers a framework that resonates deeply with hooks’s own values. His vision of a “culture of place” (2)—rooted in respect for all life, sustainable land use, and local interdependence—provided hooks with both language and philosophical grounding for her reflections on belonging.

Hooks first encountered Berry’s work in her late teens and immediately recognized in his writing an “interior landscape” that mirrored her own lived experiences as a Black Kentuckian. Like hooks, Berry left Kentucky for a time before ultimately returning to live a self-sustaining, agrarian life. His memoir and critical work The Hidden Wound becomes a recurring reference point in Belonging, as it addresses both the personal and structural dimensions of racism while examining the intertwined histories of Black and white communities in the South. Hooks engages closely with Berry’s recollections of figures like Nick and Aunt Georgie, using them to explore themes of mutual emotional dependency across racial lines within the constraints of segregation.

Their shared commitment to honest dialogue is most vividly seen in the transcribed conversation of “Healing Talk,” where hooks and Berry confront the intersections of white supremacy, environmental destruction, and community repair. While their perspectives sometimes diverge—particularly on the balance between individual relationships and systemic critique—hooks values Berry’s willingness to cross the boundaries of race, class, and experience in pursuit of truth. His presence in Belonging underscores the book’s call for coalition-building that honors both historical truth and the possibility of shared futures rooted in the land.