This is my first book review of 2025! And when I tell you I've been planning to review these two books together nearly all year? Believe it! The first book in this review is also the first book I finished in 2025, and I previously teased it in my review of Zane's Blackgentleman.com last November. The second book came as a digital copy that an acquaintance gave me in February. But because it was a digital copy, not only did I have to take separate notes in my personal journal (whereas normally I make notes in the margins of physical copies), but also this digital copy had to compete with all the distractions on my phone. Hence why I didn't finish reading the second book until May, and I'm just now writing this review in June. But what matters is that I'm here and excited to finally share my thoughts! First up, a novel about two Black, 30-something lovers with abandonment issues in the year 2000, who messily learn to trust people again and reconcile with their respective families after meeting in Denver. And then, a 1990s self-help book and treatise on Black women's healing, written by a now-deceased preeminent academic from Kentucky who was based in New York at the time.
One Day I Saw a Black King by J. D. Mason
John's mother Mattie was impregnated by rape and died giving birth to him at age 14, so his grandmother Agnes raised him dutifully but not lovingly; she was too overwhelmed by grief to see John as anything other than a bitter reminder of her dead daughter and her long-deceased husband (Mattie's father Abe). Growing up in the fictional northeast Texas town of Bueller, John had friends, cousins, and a good-natured great-aunt named Dot (a former wild child and Agnes's younger sister) he could turn to, but he constantly weathered Agnes's coldness at home and was desperate for her to love him back. Then one day, after witnessing the death of a woman named Roberta who always demonized him (more on her later), 15-year-old John fled home and walked in on Agnes mid-coitus with their married neighbor. The shock and embarrassment of the moment prompted her to lash out in anger, violently kicking John out of the house. For 20 years since then he's been wandering the South. Along the way he's acquired both an El Dorado that carries him wherever work and women are available to the tune of soul music, in addition to a cavalier disregard for attaching himself to any one locale or sexual partner for too long. Until he decides to try Denver on for size at age 37, and while at a soul food restaurant he locks eyes with a beautiful woman, going to town on a rib, who later turns out to live on the same floor of the same apartment building he's just moved to. This is Connie.
Connie, similarly, learned too early that she couldn't trust anyone. Born and raised in a historically Black neighborhood of Denver called Five Points, she acted as a substitute parent for herself and her younger sister Reesy when they were living with their mother Charlotte, who resented being their mother and often butted heads with Connie. Subsequent events further cemented the idea that it was Connie against the world: Charlotte abandoned the girls to move to Memphis with her new boyfriend when Connie was 12, Connie was separated from Reesy when a couple adopted Reesy but not her, she was placed in a home where she was molested and raped by her foster father, and after running away she survived on the streets as a sex worker for a year. It wasn't until a soul food restaurant owner named Edwina caught 14-year-old Connie digging food out of Edwina's trash cans, that Connie finally found a safe place to land and a safe person to believe in. Recognizing Connie's need for love and structure, Edwina gave Connie somewhere to stay in exchange for working at the restaurant and abiding by a nightly curfew, and set Connie up to be able to live independently by the time she sold the restaurant and moved to Las Vegas when Connie was 17. Now at 36 and still in touch with Edwina, Connie makes a living as an independent jewelry designer (whose work is sold in an African art store owned by her business partner/best friend Yolanda), she's uninterested in dating after her first love cheated on her and gave her herpes two years prior, and for sentimental reasons she's living solo in the same apartment building she grew up in with her mom and sister. Connie and her new neighbor John (whom she mentally refers to as "Mr. Good-looking") cross paths more than once, but she doesn't start paying attention to him until he lets her into his apartment to relieve herself after she misplaces her keys one day.
As John and Connie slowly get to know each other, become sexually involved (after Connie explains that her status requires condom usage), and cautiously explore whether true love is possible for them, they each have their own familial reconciliations to make. Ever since Reesy sought Connie out when they were adults, she's eagerly tried to rebuild their sisterly relationship while folding Connie into her family. But Connie's guardedness extends to her sister too; she resists fully sharing her thoughts and emotions when conversing with Reesy, she can barely feign friendliness with Reesy's adoptive parents, and tensions later flare when Reesy disapproves of John and refuses to consider a revised arrangement for Connie to spend more time with her young "niece" Jade. (Connie gave birth to Jade when she was 30, and the sisters agreed that Reesy would raise Jade because Connie was ill-equipped to be a mother back then.) John, meanwhile, has been haunted by dreams and visions of his dead mother immortalized as a young girl, which he's always interpreted as his sign or excuse to breeze off to his next destination. When he sporadically calls Dot, she asks him to visit because Agnes's health is worsening, but John is resolute in his choice to never return to Bueller. Until his visions get stranger and scarier and... clearer. He realizes that his visions have been calling him home this entire time; rather than continuing to run away from the hurt of being rejected by his grandmother, and the guilt of being a child of rape who "killed" his mother by being born, he must return to Texas. What follows is a brief and awkward reunion with Agnes that warms into her showing him the affection he'd always craved from her: apologizing for how she treated him, telling him she loves him, calling him a blessing, caressing his face, kissing his forehead, and promising to have mustard greens (his childhood favorite) ready for dinner the next day. After a couple more events that I don't wish to spoil, the novel ends with the future of John and Connie's relationship up in the air, aside from John calling her to say he's on his way back to Denver (and back to her).
ODISABK's chapters alternate between John and Connie's perspectives, with most of the action
happening during their tween/teen years in the 1970s, and their late 30s in the year 2000. The novel starts with John, and what an opening chapter! His traumatic birth in 1963 reads like a movie scene: a terrible storm raging outside, Agnes desperately trying to calm her frightened daughter, Mattie screaming in pain and begging for relief before bleeding out, all amidst hysterical commentary from Roberta, the local midwife/abortion provider/religious zealot/"crazy" woman whose birthing room is the site of this tragedy. Roberta is convinced that John is a "demon" from birth and treats him as such until she dies, but we later learn that she was triggered by John's resemblance to his paternal grandfather. (Roberta was previously married to a man named Charles, who fathered two sons via an affair, and Mattie's rapist Adam is the second of those two sons.)
Even with losing his mother and keeping his distance from Roberta, John grows up in a world comprised mostly of women. As such, the Texas chapters of ODISABK put on full display something that I'd already sensed in the story J.D. Mason contributed to BG.com. Her writing reminds me so much of what I loved about Bernice McFadden's Nowhere Is a Place, in that they're both so genuinely invested in the grand and minute details of Black women's lives. Their mundane moments, their subtle expressions, their yearning and loneliness, their grief, their pain that is sometimes also rage but is still mostly pain, their social gatherings, their mental illnesses and PTSD, the advice they ignore from their mothers, their hushed yet open secrets. The scenes and dialogue that these two authors write for Black women make me visualize Mason and McFadden sitting in a corner of a room, intensely observing these characters in action, listening to them, empathizing with them, and taking notes. Case in point: although it's traumatic for young John to walk in on, that scene of Agnes riding her married neighbor is HOT! Mason thoroughly conveys Agnes's yearning to be touched and feel desired after being a sexless widow for over two decades, and how finally
yielding to her neighbor's years-long advances—scumbag though he may be, plotting on her since they were in elementary school and taking her money to only halfway fix things around her house as an excuse to keep coming around—gives her a profound sense of relief. As a 48-year-old religious Black
grandmother in the rural South of the
1970s, Agnes isn't supposed to let go and revel in illicit sex, to be on top of it (literally), to feel set free by it. But she does. Despite how guilt and shame are mixed in with the immense pleasure she feels, and how her reaction to getting caught causes further estrangement between herself and her grandson, that moment is
still so powerful. And Mason's ability to empathize with a woman like Agnes allows her to write that moment with so much care.
As much as I do enjoy the Texas chapters, I fear that ODISABK suffers from the same issue as the 2020 Black romantic drama The Photograph, where the plot set in the past (decades prior, in the South) is more interesting than the present ups and downs
of the film's lead couple. This novel starts off so strong and inventive, and then seems to cool off into something more typical and
seen-before. In other words, everything set in Texas is so well-written that Connie and John's relationship feels trite and typical by comparison. John's past is more fascinating than John in the present, who became more unlikeable to me the more his relationship developed with Connie. (Even though they both have commitment issues, as a supposedly "decent" dude for that time John is still somewhat insufferable as a boyfriend. Acting too smart or too cool to try, to be vulnerable and take a chance on their relationship to the same degree as Connie, to verbally respond when she confesses her love to him, or to admit to Dot that he's in love with Connie after he's already asked Connie to officially be his girlfriend.) And Connie's story is so raw and vast, but it ultimately takes a backseat to John's because the book is primarily about him. In a conversation where we were swapping romance novel
recommendations, I recall messaging a friend, "I'm currently LOVING a
novel from the 2000s
called One Day I Saw a Black King (J. D. Mason), which also may not be a
straightforward romance but does a lot to explore how trauma and
abandonment shape the two romantic leads, and I think the world-building
and character development are just great." I wish ODISABK could've made
that enthusiasm last.
Nonetheless, I still have a fondness for this book and for J.D. Mason's writing, and my mom's still not getting her copy of this book back. I've learned that this is actually the first
in a four-part saga that also includes Don't Want No Sugar, You Gotta Sin to Get
Saved, and Somebody Pick Up My Pieces. And while I'm not in a rush to read those, I would recommend One Day I Saw a Black King to anyone who remembers the Black Expressions subscription catalogue, who wants to read about wounded people finding love, or who's curious about how people rebound from being traumatized by mother figures.
Favorite quotes:
"Agnes knew Dot had given up the streets for her. Most of the time she was glad she had, but sometimes she saw sadness in her sister's eyes. Not the kind of sadness that came from losing a lover, but it reminded Agnes of the kind of heartbreak that can only come from giving up. Dot had chased after something her whole life and never seemed to be able to catch up with it. Whenever Agnes asked her about it, she'd just shrug her shoulders and say she was tired. Eventually, Agnes guessed that maybe the chase was all Dot had ever been after, anyway" (18)."Ain't no limits, less you make 'em, Little Bird. Trust me, this time. I know what I'm sayin'" (91)."He sensed it almost immediately. Denver, Colorado, lacked seasoning, and he'd grown accustomed to places with flavor, like New Orleans. Hot and spicy food, women, and music. Southern to a fault, dripping in molasses and cayenne pepper, burning and sweetening the tip of his tongue, reminding him that he was alive. Or Atlanta, Southern-fried, pecan-pied, funky soul thick enough for him to curl his toes into. Even Texas had a flair for understated, unmentionable drama. The kind of drama people openly wallowed in but turned a blind eye to, feigning indifference. Denver had none of that from what he could see, so he knew he wouldn't be here long" (103)."Agnes stared into his eyes. Dark, handsome eyes... She'd done everything in the world to keep from looking into those eyes when he was a child. Lord! How many more blessings had she let get away from her?" (291).
Sisters of the Yam: Black Women an Self-Recovery by bell hooks
Consisting of 13 chapters, a 10th anniversary retrospective interview from 2004, and altogether less than 200 pages, the 2015 edition of Sisters of the Yam isn't too lengthy of a read. (pay no mind to the fact that it took me three months to finish), and I'm not very attuned to writing about nonfiction, even less so about self-help. So rather than attempting to break the book down as a whole, let me just touch on what I enjoyed most before explaining what I take issue with. First of all, while not a surprise given the Black American literary canon she's enshrined it, each time bell hooks quoted or referenced a
Black woman writer's work to substantiate her point was especially delightful to me. Toni
Morrison and Alice Walker were extremely familiar to me, but hooks' frequent
name-dropping of her peers reminded me that there are so many greats whose work I still have yet to throughout dive into for myself. These include Audre Lorde, Toni Cade
Bambara, Ntozake Shange, and Paule Marshall. In fact, the title Sisters of the Yam
derives from "Sisters of the Yam," a support
group that hooks started for her Black female students in conjunction
with teaching them Bambara's work (specifically the novel The Salt Eaters, which originates the phrase "daughters of the yam").
Naturally, I do have a few favorite chapters. I love that hooks acknowledges how doing work you hate makes emotional well-being nearly impossible in chapter 3 ("Work Makes Life Sweet"). I personally wasn't expecting a Black woman from Kentucky, born into poverty in the 1950s, who seems to idealize country life and acknowledges the inevitability of Black women having to work (because historically Black women have always worked), to also write so sympathetically about Black women having their spirits broken in workplaces that both exploit and stifle their talent. But that she does! She further advocates for a concept called "right livelihood"; rather than simply feeling luck to have any old job, people should feel empowered and deserving enough to consciously choose work that they feel called to and that they find meaningful. Relatedly, in chapter 4 ("Knowing Peace: An End to Stress") hooks encourages Black women to be and act more entitled to living well, and to redefine what makes them valuable instead of overworking themselves as the mules or "little worker bees" that society expects them to be. (And as someone who has work-related PTSD and who previously thought she'd be content being a good little worker bee, that part spoke to my soul!) Additonally, while I am among the contingent of people for whom positive thinking feels naive and scary, I can agree with hooks that worry, cynicism, and imagining the worst don't give us control or ward off disappointment like we believe they do.
I related to chapter 7 ("Facing and Feeling Loss") for obvious reasons, but I was also surprised to derive a sense of pride from hooks' description of Black people being culturally predisposed to having a healthier approach to death than mainstream society. Historically, Black people haven't had the luxury of keeping tragedy and death at a distance, and our traditions instill in us an imperative to respect, care for, sit with, show love for, and surrender to our grief for the dead even after a person's body has passed. She regards mourning as a "growth experience" that reminds us how to live. I relate to chapter 8 ("Moved by Passion: Eros and Responsibility") for reasons that are nobody's business, but I will say that in addition to sex and sexuality (and eradicating homophobia!), hooks connects eroticism and healing pleasure to the ability to explore the world with all of our available senses. Feeling discouraged or disempowered from exploring in that way causes people to be touch-starved, and uncomfortable with expressing their their need for physical contact and care. And that feeds right into chapter 9 ("Living to Love"), where hooks argues that love is neither a waste of time, nor a luxury limited to the contexts of religion or romance, nor a distraction from our material survival. She also gently drags people like me (and admittedly herself) who are chronically critical and unloving toward their own image, and urges Black women to nurture our inner lives and get more comfortable with asking for help as "a loving practice of surrender."
Now. To a certain extent I feel compelled to give bell hooks the benefit of the doubt, not because her work is precious to me—because it's not (yet); this is only the second book of hers that I've read, and unlike many millennials and Gen Z-ers I have neither read nor am I an evangelist for All About Love—but because she's from Kentucky like my folks are. And for the most part I greatly appreciate the reverence she has for "traditional southern black folk life," the ways that Southern Black people found to build community, sustain themselves, express themselves, heal each other, love each other, be spiritually empowered, care for the earth, and stay rooted in their Blackness amidst all the forms of lack that they were forced into (especially before the 1960s). Such reverence reminds me of In Love & Trouble, where Alice Walker similarly emphasizes the significance of various Black American traditions and survival methods (rootwork, home remedies, handicrafts, country ways of living, etc.). With that being said, bell hooks is clearly homesick in Sisters of the Yam (she repeatedly mentions feeling stressed by and dissatisfied with facets of her career as a professor in New York City), and I believe that her homesickness prompts her to write too idyllically about life in the South. This is most evident in chapter 12 ("Touching the Earth") where she asserts that The Great Migration wounded the Black psyche and caused us to partially lose our sense of identity. This assertion is more successful when she ties our disconnection from nature to our disconnection from our own bodies, and the waning ability (or the shear lack of time) for us to be still and behold our own beauty. She includes a stunning poem by William Waring Cuney ("No Images") to illustrate this point in a way that's incredibly resonant and effective.
But then hooks claims that industrial urban life in the North turned us into tools or machines, consumed by work and reduced to our productivity... to which I'd rebut, is that really so different from people in the South who were relegated to working as sharecroppers, maids, wet nurses, and other subservient roles for white people during this same period? There were trade-offs for those who stayed and for those who migrated, and according to hooks, Black people in the South had more downtime "for silence and contemplation" outdoors and a stronger sense of community. But were they altogether better off than those who left? Thanks to watching Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS docuseries 'Great Migrations: A People on the Move' earlier this year, I'm aware that many Black people did indeed conclude that the sacrifices they'd made to relocate north or west weren't worth it in the long run, and during the 1980s and 1990s there was a wave of us moving back to the South seeking career viability and ancestral/familial/cultural reconnection. So bell hooks' pining for "down home" life is timely. But the vision of "down home" she pines for seems so steeped in nostalgia that it almost downplays the severity of white racist terrorism and lack of economic opportunity that pushed Black people northward in the first place.
Speaking of downplayed severities, while I can make allowances for bell hooks' nostalgia for the South, I cannot abide by her argument that Black people's reconciliation with ourselves must include forgiveness for white people in chapter 11 ("The Joys of Reconciliation"). That rather than being consumed by bitterness at those who've wronged us and supposedly allowing our self-reconciliation to be incomplete (by not also reconciling with others), we must include white people in that reconciliation and extend compassion toward them. I was so confused, aghast, and disgusted by what I read that I literally had to take a break and say out loud, "This is the author y'all have been hyping up all this time?! This is y'all's revolutionary theorist?!"
I understand that bell hooks was aware of what white people have put us through historically; whatever rose-colored glasses she may have had for the South, she writes copiously in other SOTY chapters about the insidious and enduring tendrils of white supremacy, and how Black people must be "educated for critical consciousness" so we can fight against it. I also understand that as someone raised Christian who's embracing Buddhism and also looking to Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War-era multiracial coalitions as a compass, in the '90s hooks regards blanket animosity toward white people as an extension of the nihilism and despair growing among young Black people that she wants to course correct. However, I would argue that Black people (especially Black women) not only have a right to whatever bitterness, rage, grudges, or resentment they may have, however "poisonous" those emotions may be, but they also have a right to not let any of that go. It's one thing for Black people to choose, on an individual basis, to have cordial or friendly or loving relations with the literal/figurative/historical/financial/spiritual descendants of our oppressors (a.k.a. white people). That's an option each of us has. But it's downright irresponsible and insulting to invoke Martin Luther King, Jr. and 1 John 4 ("He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love...") in order to browbeat Black readers, and imply that forgiving or uniting with white people is a requirement for Black people en masse to be fully whole and capable of showing compassion. In a book focused on Black women's healing? Seriously, how dare you?!
Having laid out my frustrations with it, and although it has caused me to side-eye bell hooks a bit (I side-eye Alice Walker sometimes too, it's okay), I would still recommend for any Black woman to read Sisters of the Yam once. Just do what my therapist advises me to do when taking in others' ideas, especially of the therapeutic or self-help variety: keep the meat, leave the bones.
Favorite quotes:
"And I thought we should call our support group 'Sisters of the Yam' to honor Bambara’s work and the wisdom she offered to us. I also felt the 'yam' was a life-sustaining symbol of black kinship and community. Everywhere black women live in the world, we eat yam. It is a symbol of our diasporic connections. Yams provide nourishment for the body as food yet they are also used medicinally—to heal the body" (6)."In a space before time and words, the world was covered in a thick blanket of darkness. It was a warm and loving covering. Since it was hard for the spirits who inhabited this space to see one another they learned to live by and through touch. So if you were running around lost you knew you were found when arms reached out in that loving darkness to hold you. And those arms that held the spirits in that beautiful dark space before time are holding us still... I made up this story because I wanted this little brown girl to grow up dreaming the dark and its powerful blackness as a magic space she need never fear or dread... I held her hand, just like my father’s father, Daddy Jerry, a man who worked the land, who knew the earth was his witness, had once held my hand in the darkest of summer nights and taught me that the blanket of night I was scared of was really longing to be my friend, to tell me all its secrets. And I reminded her, as he reminded me way back then, that those arms that first held us in that dark space before words and time hold us still" (59-60)."Where is the love when a black woman looks at herself and says: 'I see inside me somebody who is ugly, too dark, too fat, too afraid—somebody nobody would love, ’cause I don’t even like what I see;' or maybe: 'I see inside me somebody who is so hurt, who is just like a ball of pain and I don’t want to look at her ’cause I can’t do nothing about that pain.' The love is absent. To make it present, the individual has to first choose to see herself, to just look at that inner self without blame or censure." (108).
