"Inspired Eccentricity," by bell hooks

In bell hook’s essay “Inspired Eccentricity,” we are introduced to Sarah (“Baba”) and Gus (“Daddy Gus”) Oldham, a couple whose eccentric world had a profound impact on the person hooks was to become. In terms of craft, I particularly enjoyed paragraph three; here, hooks describes both of her grandparents and sets up a comparison between the two in relation to color. On the surface, hooks is simply describing straight facts about her grandparents’ skin tones; Baba had “skin so white…she could have easily “passed” denying all traces of blackness” while Daddy Gus’ skin “looked like the color of soot from burning coal.” When I was reading this passage, however, my mind instantly jumped to the idea of a yin-yang; two opposites that complement each other perfectly so that one does not operate to its full potential without the other (demonstrated later in the text by Daddy Gus’ death). Throughout the essay, hooks does not necessarily follow through with this metaphor; however, I liked how she began her essay by setting it up so that we as readers had a framework in which we could negotiate all of the additional information about Baba and Daddy Gus she later divulged.

Another part that stuck out to me in this essay were paragraphs 22 and 23. The process that hooks describes here—how families “chart psychic genealogies that often overlook what is right before our eyes”—was extremely familiar to me. It struck me that this familiarity and the hinting at a universality of experience are what make certain personal essays so successful. Yes—we as readers are intrigued by how different other people’s stories are from our own. However, we are also searching for similarities and looking to make connections between our personal experiences and the experiences of the writer. It was particularly neat to feel connected to hooks, someone of a different race, who had a very different relationship with her parents than I do with mine, and someone who grew up in a different time period and geographical region than I did.