E. GALE GREENLEE

A BLUEPRINT FOR BLACK GIRLHOOD: BELL HOOKS’S HOMEMADE LOVE

E. GALE GREENLEE

In Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Black feminist writer, theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks proclaims, “one of my favorite novels in the whole world is Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” Praising the Nobel Prize winner’s debut novel about a young Black girl who yearns for blue eyes and the social acceptance they ostensibly represent, hooks underscores Morrison’s identification with her protagonist as well as her desire as a novelist “to write about ‘the people who in all literature were always peripheral—little Black girls who were props, background; those people were never center stage, and those people were me’” (1996, xii). hooks does not unpack the semantics of Morrison’s personal directive, but the word choice is telling. Morrison’s use of spatial metaphors such as “peripheral,” “props,” and “background” parallels the social location of Black girls in American society and the literary world: often invisible and marginalized. That Black girls are “never center stage” in books clarifies hooks’s glee upon discovering stories that spotlight girls (like Pecola Breedlove and the McTeer sisters) forced to navigate worlds marked by race, class, and gender oppression.

Morrison’s insistence that “those people were me” (emphasis added) points to the importance of Black girl representation in literature. For Black communities, finding accurate representation

COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 49.3 Summer 2022 Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286 © Johns Hopkins University Press and West Chester University 2022

has been difficult. Violet J. Harris’s “African American Children’s Literature: The First 100 Years” traces representations of Blackness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s literature, citing a troubling history of “stereotyped, pejorative and unauthentic” depictions (1990, 540). Donnarae MacCann’s White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900 (2001) points to racist ideologies embedded in early children’s texts as reflective of the racial politics of adult literature and adult culture writ large. Michelle H. Martin’s Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 (2004) provides another account, starting with books like A Coon Alphabet (1898) and The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899) that circulated widely among white readers and perpetuated blatantly racist caricatures of Black people.1

In addition to W.E.B. Du Bois and Augustus Dill who launched The Brownie’s Book—a magazine for Black children published from 1920 to 1921—Black women also rallied to counter racist portrayals in children’s literature. Effie Lee Newsome, an editor for the NAACP’s Crisis and children’s poet during the Harlem Renaissance, worked tirelessly to craft nuanced and joyous portrayals of Black childhood through her whimsical verse and nature poetry. Augusta Baker, a popular storyteller and children’s librarian with the New York Public Library, advocated for positive stories to challenge the warped images of Black life portrayed by white authors. She also authored Books about Negro Life for Children (1946), the first comprehensive reference of children’s books with “unbiased, accurate, well-rounded picture[s] of Negro life” (General Research Division, New York Public Library 1957, 6). Charlemae Hill Rollins, storyteller and children’s librarian at the Chicago Public Library, also pushed for more authentic representations and compiled We Build Together: A Reader’s Guide to Negro Life and Literature for Elementary and High School Use (1941), an annotated bibliography of Black children’s books. Their advocacy laid the groundwork for literature that presents affirming and expansive views of Black life.

Despite these efforts to put Black children center stage, progress has been painfully slow. In 1965, Nancy Larrick wrote “The AllWhite World of Children’s Books,” calling out the whiteness of the children’s book industry. Larrick reported that out of more than 5,200 children’s books published in the early 1960s, only 349 (or 6.7 percent) featured Black characters (1965, 63). Fifty years later, in 2014, The New York Times featured op-eds by father-son duo Walter Dean Myers and Christopher Myers. The elder Myers asked,

“Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?,” and his son chided “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature.” Six years later, and the literary landscape is not that different. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which tracks books by writers and illustrators of color, found that out of 3,115 children’s books published in the United States in 2020, 392 books (roughly 12 percent) were about Black people or people of African descent, and less than 8 percent were written or illustrated by someone Black. The numbers are abysmal.

For Black readers, the numbers reflect the difficulty of creating a healthy sense of self and mitigating the emotional and physical harm—the “spirit murder” (Love 2016)—perpetrated against Black children by an anti-Black culture and the institutions entrusted with their safety and care. Some scholars see the persistent exclusion of Black stories in children’s literature as further marginalizing Black life, pushing it to “the periphery of normal behavior and perspectives’’ (Jackson and Boutte 2009, 108). Desiree Cueto and Wanda M. Brooks assert “Black children are, at once, invisible in the literature and hyper-visible in the broader society,” and they warn us that the implications of this exclusion and imbalance are “devastating” (2019, 41). We see the consequences in The African American Policy Forum’s Black Girls Matter report (Crenshaw, Ocen, and Nanda 2015), which details the harsh disciplinary policies inflicted upon Black girls in US schools. And all too often, news stories circulate about Black girls as victims of state violence, such as the nine-yearold girl handcuffed by police (Mallory 2021), or the sixteen-yearold girl body slammed by police—both in South Carolina schools (Aarthun and Yan 2015). Without stories that present the fullness of Black life and “challenge society norms that promulgate anti-Blackness through portrayal of Black children in unseen lights” (Cueto and Brooks 2019, 41), Black children will remain “dehumanized and criminalized” (Love 2016), and they learn they do not matter.

Morrison’s attention to Black girls and hooks’s investment in girlhood narratives counter this invisibility and affirm Black girls’ humanity. Their work also reveals literary engagement in what has been a longstanding concern of Black women writers: the relationship between Black females and space. How Black girls navigate the spaces that inform their relationships and social possibilities permeates the Black women’s literary tradition. Early texts, such as Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In A Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall

Even There (1859), Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) center Black girlhood or young womanhood and—in some cases given their titular references to space—gesture to the spatial realities that constrict Black girls’ lives. Each text portrays nineteenth-century Black girlhood unfolding within the confines of domestic-cum-work spaces made oppressive by the patriarchal and racist ideologies undergirding the slave system. By interrogating Black girls’ social positions as female children—indentured or enslaved, and subject to sexual and physical violence as well as economic exploitation—each writer underscores the relationship among Black girlhood and the geographic and social realities that structure their oppression. These texts critique Black girls’ status as de facto noncitizens and effectively establish a literary precedent of examining Black girlhood as regulated in a legal or social sense, as well as a fundamentally spatial one.

This literary mapping continues in contemporary narratives of Black girlhood.2 Whether a young adult novel or adult literary fiction, whether situated in a disintegrating future social world, in the rural South, or in urban environments besieged by surveillance and police brutality, contemporary writers boldly center the experiences of Black girls in literature and real life. They explore what Tamara T. Butler calls “Black Girl Cartography,” which refers to “Black girls’ geopolitical and social locations” or how they are “physically and sociopolitically mapped” (2018, 29). Though Butler’s research concerns real-life Black girls in educational spaces, fictional accounts can also illuminate how Black girls dwell at the intersection of race, class, sex, gender, power, and space. In this article, I consider one of hooks’s children’s books to examine how she maps Black girlhood and how her female character’s story reflects spatial possibilities for all Black girls.

INTRODUCING HOMEMADE LOVE

Homemade Love is a bedtime story crafted with Black children in mind. The book features a young protagonist, affectionately nicknamed “Girlpie,”3 and the story follows Girlpie through a normal day at home. We do not see her attending school or spending time with friends, and other than the opening images of sunshine and the closing image of a night sky, there is no clear marker of time. Given the quotidian nature of the characters’ activities and the lack

of a clearly defined plot, some may question the book’s narrative arc. Others may see hooks’s foray into children’s literature as curiously off-brand; after all, she is known for her incisive political gaze. Yet, this picture book is decidedly on point with hooks’s politics and her longstanding commitment to healthy and just communities. Girlpie is a valued member of her family. Even when she makes mistakes, her parents shower her with tenderness and love. Through hooks’s words and Shane W. Evans’s illustrations, Homemade Love conveys the importance of Black families and responds to the need for Black girls to see images of themselves and models of a loving, egalitarian home.

Written for young children and their parents, Homemade Love establishes a geography of Black girlhood seldom highlighted in media and popular culture: a young Black girl raised within an affirming and unapologetically Black home. hooks contests pejorative and limited depictions of Black girlhood and Black family life by imagining a cis-gendered, hetero-normative family. The book thus engages in “restorying,” a process that “reframe[s] the dominant narratives about Black lives,” while making Black girls’ “humanity legible” for all readers (Thomas and Stornaiuolo 2019, 1). It does not focus on a young girl coming-of-age during a perilous voyage or within a treacherous social environment. Girlpie’s story is not one of police brutality as illustrated in Something Happened in Our Town: A Child’s Story of Racial Injustice (2019), written by three Emory University psychologists seeking to help children understand systemic racism and the spate of Black deaths at the hands of police. It does not paint a picture of the “geographies of domination” that have marked Black peoples’ lives due to the transatlantic slave trade and experiences of colonization and Jim Crow (McKittrick 2006, x). References to purported adult matters (such as sexual violence and racial discrimination) and what hooks often lambastes as “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (2004, 52) are absent. Picture books, after all, are geared toward young children, whom adults—including authors—often romanticize as innocent, vulnerable, and in need of protection from adult concerns. Even so, reading this children’s text along with hooks’s memoir and her theorizations of “homeplace,” “marginalization,” and “oppositional blackness” reveals that hooks creates a narrative terrain rooted in her radical Black feminist politics of liberation and intimately connected to her childhood home. hooks creates a quasi-imagined geography that merges her conceptualization of a homeplace with reflections of her own childhood

negotiations of space, powerlessness, and agency unfolding in the Kentucky backwoods of the American South.4 Understanding how hooks’s theorization of homeplace converges with her own girlhood geography is key to analyzing the imaginative terrain she fashions in her picture book. My work dances, then, between two narrative perspectives—that of the Black girl at the center of the story and that of hooks, whose representations of girlhood are rooted in her Black feminist standpoint and her memories of growing up in the “rich magical world of southern [B]lack culture that was sometimes paradisical and at other times terrifying” (hooks 1996, xi). Through her creative non-fiction as well as this picture book, hooks envisions a world where Black girls can express their subjectivity. In Homemade Love, hooks’s conceptualization of homeplace is made manifest and becomes central to a self-actualized Black girlhood. Read through this lens, Homemade Love resists Black girlhood invisibility while countering the racialized gender bias (or misogynoir)5 hurled at Black girls.

THE SPACES OF BLACK GIRLHOOD

As a theoretical concept or metaphor, space is nimble, and in different disciplinary contexts, its meaning can shift. My analysis and decision to use the language of “space” (as opposed to “place”) is informed primarily by critical geography, children’s literary scholarship, and Black feminist thought. Human geographer Tim Cresswell distinguishes between space and place, defining the latter as “spaces which people have made meaningful” or “spaces people are attached to in one way or another” (2015, 12). He borrows a framework from political geographer John Agnew that outlines three aspects of place: location (the coordinates on a map), locale (the “material setting for social relations” or concrete form), and the nebulous sense of place that represents the “subjective and emotional attachment people have to a place” (13–14). I keep this framework in mind and lean toward considerations of the spatial as intimately connected to our social world, a recognition that the two are not only constructed but also mutually constitutive and reinforcing. This conceptualization of the social and spatial walking hand in hand is notably theorized by Edward W. Soja, who distinguishes between “space per se, space as a contextual given, and socially-based spatiality, the created space of social organization and production.” While space as a realm for human interaction may seem obvious, spaces are laden with the

meanings that we assign to them over time. Soja recognizes the physical or material reality—which we may refer to as place and that “may be primordially given”—but he also stresses the importance of human agency and social interaction (1989, 79).

Children’s geographies, as a discipline, often takes up the question of how children move through space. The field recognizes that young people are embedded within social spaces and that children can function as social actors (Holloway and Valentine 2000, 6), shaping the spaces in which they move and live, even if those spaces operate under adult control. Relationships between children and adults don’t exist simply ideologically; they are also organized spatially, particularly in places where children and adults interact (like homes and schools). Sarah L. Holloway and Gill Valentine note “the importance of the different sites of everyday life and the spatial imagery in [our] ideologies of childhood” (2001, 1). Research in children’s geographies typically concentrates on places such as the home, the school, and the city to consider “how each is dedicated to the control and regulation of the child’s body and mind” (James et al. cited in Holloway and Valentine 11). Adults, no matter how well-intentioned, regulate children’s activities and discipline their bodies, especially in the home. Childhood studies scholars recognize the home as the quintessential site or material “locus for family relations” (Christensen, James, and Jenks 2000, 145), and we take it for granted that home is “where children should spend their time” (Holloway and Valentine 2000, 15). But Soja reminds us to “be insistently aware of how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology” (1989, 6). So, when I use the term “children’s geographies” (or think of Black girlhood geographies), I do so not only to signal the everyday sites that we readily associate with children (such as schools, playgrounds, and homes), but also to explore the hierarchical relations that unfold in those spaces and social-spatial ideologies of Black girlhood embedded in the text. How are Black girls positioned? This question guides my attention to the home as a space of control and regulation for Girlpie, but also one where hooks invests Girlpie with a burgeoning sense of “spatial freedom” (Holloway and Valentine 2000, 13). The unassuming spatiality of Homemade Love warrants taking a closer look at Black girlhood as a space not simply of restriction, but one of movement, possibility, and freedom.

CREATING HOMEPLACE

Just as Morrison’s novels center Black life outside the realm of “the white gaze” (Greenfield-Sanders 2019, 00:08:18), hooks also values autonomous Black spaces. In Salvation: Black People and Love, hooks asserts that in order for “[B]lack girls to have a chance to build healthy self-esteem in an integrated colonizing environment, there must be oppositional strategies and places that promote decolonization” (2001b, 108), and she aligns those strategies and spatial interventions with Black women and the US South. Growing up in segregated Kentucky, hooks acknowledges that “much of the sweetness of life came from the tenderness of [B]lack women, often poor and working class” (111). She honors Black women whose homemaking and affective practices create a sense of community to counter even the most repressive racial environments. As a result, hooks reframes the home or domestic environment as encompassing a “radical political dimension” whereby Black women create safe spaces, private spaces of refuge from the physical and psychological violence of the outside, white world (1990c, 42). She utilizes “homeplace,” a “Southern colloquial term” (Davis 2011, 380) to name this space, describing it as:

the one site where one could freely confront the issue of humanization, where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all [B]lack people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world. (hooks 1990c, 42) hooks comments on the association of women with domestic spaces by acknowledging that “sexism delegates to females the task of creating and sustaining a home environment” (42). Yet, she intentionally frames the domestic realm and intimate familial relationships in a way that politicizes women’s family-rooted labor as an act of resistance that shields Black people from white supremacy.

Homemade Love extends hooks’s conceptualization of homeplace by creating a similar “space of care and nurturance” (hooks 1990c, 42) on the page. By considering the book’s textual geographies and the ways in which hooks offers an alternative to the oppressive geopolitical realities located outside the text, we can see that her picture book theorizes, perhaps unexpectedly, about the social location and power of Black girls. The fictional space of Homemade

Love, characterized by an ethic of love, is hooks’s articulation of a Black feminist geography, one that “signal[s] alternative patterns that work alongside and across traditional geographies” (McKittrick 2006, xiv). Homemade Love depicts a homeplace for Black girls and offers “a new location from which [they can] articulate [their] sense of the world” (hooks 1990b, 153). As such, this unassuming children’s books builds upon Kimberlé W. Crenshaw’s (1991) concept of intersectionality, extending it to articulate the distinct social location and general marginalization of Black girls, who are situated in structures of oppression that include race, class, gender, as well as age and geopolitical location. Of course, children of all genders, races, and ethnicities inhabit a marginal position in American society until age eighteen, when they are deemed old enough to exercise some rights of citizenship. Until then, parents, guardians, and teachers act on their behalf in educational, political, and social realms. This fact, coupled with the racial and gender oppression produced within an “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” forces girls of color to occupy a social location that we can rightly position at “the margins” (hooks 2004, 52).

While popular conceptions of the margins, or “the marginalized,” are often pejorative, focusing on dire material conditions or the disenfranchisement of communities that occupy such social space, hooks usefully redefines the margin in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) and later in her essay, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness” (1990b). She distinguishes between the marginality “imposed by oppressive structures” and the “marginality one chooses as a site of resistance” (1990b, 153), and she actively claims that location—a move Soja tags as a “simultaneously political and geographical act” (1996, 97). While she highlights the discriminatory and oppressive practices that give rise to marginal spaces, she also views this location as “much more than a site of deprivation. . . . it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” (hooks 1990b, 149; emphasis added). For hooks, it is a creative locus. hooks’s conceptualization of homeplace and marginalization parallels Soja’s conceptualization of “thirdspace” and Thadious Davis’s “southscape.” Soja defines “thirdspace” as “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality” (1996, 10; emphasis added). Similarly, in her study of Black writers, Davis uses “southscape” “to call

attention to the South as a social, political, cultural and economic construct” (2011, 2), as well as a geographic region. She explores “how Black writers from the Deep South use their spatial location to imagine, create, and define new and unproscribed subjectivities’’ (4). In particular, Davis views modern iterations of Black identity as “rooted in the South as a grounded manifestation of the ever-desired formative homeplace,” and she argues that many Black writers embrace this homeplace, “claim[ing] the very space that would negate their humanity and devalue their worth” (19). Soja, who interprets hooks’s homeplace as a kind of thirdspace, notes that “hooks’s consciousness is rooted in the everyday life experiences of youth, home and family” (1989, 99). Indeed, hooks consistently grapples with her Southern roots, writing that as “[B]lack Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality” (1984, preface). Interestingly, she arrives at this empowered vision of marginality by recounting her efforts as a young Black girl in Hopkinsville, Kentucky “to emerge as a critical thinker, artist, and writer, in a context of repression” (hooks 1990b, 147). While Kentucky does not explicitly appear in the picture book, her theorization of marginality and the birth of her liberatory vision depend on the refashioned southscape of her youth. We cannot fully appreciate Homemade Love as a radical political project without acknowledging the Black rural, southern context that undergirds the book’s creation.

What we further gain from hooks’s theorization of homeplace and marginality is that individuals who stand on the periphery develop “a particular way of seeing reality. . . . an oppositional world view—a mode of seeing unknown” to the dominant society (hooks, preface). Embracing an oppositional consciousness does not erase the violence facing marginalized communities. But her essay purposely links social space to knowledge and action, which can lead to social change. She writes: “Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and untold histories. Spaces can [also] be interrupted, appropriated and transformed through artistic and literary practice” (hooks 1990b, 152). Her picture book represents her artistic and political practice. As an unexpected political terrain, her picture book transforms and disrupts damaging discourses about Black girlhood, “subvert[ing] narrowed ideas about who a Black girl is, where a Black girl can live, and who a Black girl can become” (Toliver 2018). In the imagined space of Homemade Love, hooks cultivates oppositional consciousness by challenging anti-Blackness

and designing a blueprint “for liberation, offering generations [of Black girls] the gift of choice, freedom, wholeness of mind, body and being” (hooks 2015, xii).

TOWARDS A GEOGRAPHY OF HOME Geography seems to take a back seat in Homemade Love. There are no maps etched on the inside covers. No cars, boats, or other modes of transportation grace the pages. Still, hooks constructs this domestic space as an affective realm based upon an ethic of care that she regards as central to activating a radical love of Blackness and a sense of liberation. Linking love, oppositional consciousness, and liberation to space, hooks’s work finds resonance in critical geography. Katherine McKittrick argues that dominant ideologies of geography obscure the ways in which Black women throughout the African diaspora have responded to and navigated geographic terrains and spatial relationships marked by violence and tyranny. McKittrick reminds us that we do not live exclusively within safe spaces, pointing to the space of the slave ship as an “oppositional geography” or a site of resistance (2006, xi). She highlights Black women’s literary geographies (such as Harriet Jacobs’s garret in Edenton, North Carolina) and restricted spaces like the slave ship to argue that Black women have been central to geographic contestations. Homemade Love offers such a contestation, creating a literary space that roots Girlpie in a stable, autonomous, Black-identified home. By placing her character in this home, hooks embeds Girlpie in an affective geography that contests the race and gender-based marginalization that circumscribes Black girls’ lives. hooks disputes discourses of Black familial dysfunction and undertakes her own Black feminist space-making practice by creating a literary homeplace that celebrates Black families and affirms Black girls’ subjectivity. The story space is not a miniature barometer of “real-world” injustice as we see with popular young adult novels such as The Hate U Give (2017) or middle grade novels like Lisa Moore Ramée’s A Good Kind of Trouble (2019). It does not catalogue the traumas inflicted upon Black communities. But it certainly works against lingering perceptions of Black inferiority, particularly those that gained traction following the publication of Senator David Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 The State of Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Dubbed “The Moynihan Report,” the publication railed against Black motherhood, attributing the feminization

of Black families and the accompanying poverty to an inherent cultural pathology, and in large part to what he regarded as the matriarchal structure of Black families. In Homemade Love, hooks launches a creative counterargument, dreaming of Black girlhood in a thriving Black home.6

By constructing a home rooted in love, hooks gifts Girlpie with permission simply to be. She is afforded room to move and to live freely—in mind, body, and spirit. This vision of a free Black girlhood, rendered in clear but subtle geographic form, writes Black girls back into normative childhood spaces. This story world nourishes the minds and spirits of Black children, and it provides a foundation to cultivate independent and self-actualized Black girls. With Girlpie existing in such a spatial realm, Homemade Love challenges white supremacist images of Black life, while putting forth a radical re-visioning of Black girlhood for the public eye.

REMAPPING BLACK GIRLHOOD (A BOOK WALK) To understand how the book maps a new spatial terrain in children’s literature, we have to consider that space operates on multiple registers in the text. We can attend to the imaginary spaces, as rendered by Evans’s vibrant artwork. We can also consider how the book charts its own narrative geography, creating a sense of place. The book’s textual geography is expressed visually and narratively, and like most children’s picture books, Homemade Love follows genre conventions by spreading the story across thirty-two pages. Since illustrations constitute the “meat” of most picture books, hooks tells Girlpie’s story in sparse language, often utilizing simple sentences or short phrases. Meanwhile, vivid, semi-cartoonish, semi-realistic images dominate each page to capture young readers’ attention. The illustrations and their placement on the page create a visual-spatial narrative that establishes the setting to frame the protagonist’s story, whereas the text brings to life a social space or an imagined geography that exemplifies hooks’s conceptualization of a Southern-rooted, intimate Black homeplace.

The book downplays its adult presence from the first page, which opens with five short words: “My mama calls me GIRLPIE.”7 In this simple declarative statement, Girlpie’s mother functions as the grammatical subject, but Girlpie occupies the stress position, which ends the sentence and lends greater weight to her identity. Structurally, her name follows the first mention of her mother, but “GIRLPIE”

appears capitalized. This typography not only signals that this is the character’s name, but it also conveys that she is important, and readers should pay attention. The accompanying image depicts a smiling, milk chocolate-y girl who holds the brown hand of an adult who wears an apron—presumably, her mother. Their clasped hands and physical proximity suggest a level of intimacy. Spatially, Girlpie takes up the entire first page. Her face—the only one on the page— is privileged due to its singularity and sheer dimensions. By honing in on her face, emergent readers8—who depend upon visual cues (and verbal translations from adult mediators who read the text)— see a Black girl occupying center stage.

Girlpie’s position on the page is more complex than we might assume. Adult readers may be nonplussed by this visual placement and dismiss her centering as mere common sense. In “Decoding the Images: How Picture Books Work,”9 children’s literature scholar Perry Nodelman points out that while picture books appear easy to interpret, they are deceptively so. He reminds us of the interpretative work that images require of readers and underscores that young readers must make a series of sophisticated cognitive moves to decipher these codes. According to Nodelman, even the most representational picture—where the image directly represents an object in reality—demands attention from an astute reader who is conversant in a set of pictorial conventions (2005, 128). Children, then, must approach the act of “reading” with a certain visual and intellectual acuity to connect language to images, even if an adult reads to them, simultaneously drawing attention to the illustrations. Picture-word correspondence is an acquired skill, so Homemade Love presents a visual and spatial challenge for young children who are just learning the alphabet, letter-sound relationships, and grasping their own place in the world.

For young readers, identifying the human character as central to the story is critical in recognizing who is valued. Children must learn to locate who stands at the center of the story. Nodelman calls this the “species-centricity” of the text—the idea that “what matters most about the picture” (and thus, the story) “is the human being in it” (2005, 132). But again, he approaches children’s books as a skilled reader. He explains that:

young children tend to scan a picture with equal attention to all parts; that the ability to pick out and focus on the human at the center is therefore a learned activity; and that reading reinforces

important cultural assumptions, not just about the value of particular objects but also about the general assumption that the objects do have different values and do therefore require different degrees of attention. (Nodelman 2005, 132)

Reading, then, entails deciphering language and decoding visual content—skills that young children develop over time. Most importantly, if the images and texts in Homemade Love reinforce—and I would add, challenge—cultural assumptions, then hooks’s young readers walk away seeing a “human at the center” who is young, Black, and female. Girlpie is the M.V.P.

Scholars of Black girlhood literacies, though often focusing on tween and teenage girls, assert that representations of Black girls in literature and media are essential to identity development as “Black girls are in a constant battle of defining their lives in the midst of falsehood and dominant narratives that depict their lives in inaccurate or incomplete ways” (Muhammad and Haddix 2016, 318). Gholnescar E. Muhammad and Sherell A. McArthur’s work investigates how Black girls use writing to critique and protest negative media portrayals of Black women and girls and to gain a deeper understanding of their own identities as racialized and gendered individuals (2015, 134). As for younger children, Roberta Price Gardner explains that visual representations of Blackness in children’s picture books constitute “a significant form of visual culture that shapes the racial subjectivities of all children” (2016, 129). Case in point: Gardner shared picture books about Sojourner Truth with Black children and noticed their visceral and overwhelmingly negative responses to one of the representations (120–21). Clearly, images of Blackness circulating as pop culture or on the printed page impact the self-identity and self-esteem of Black children. In centering Girlpie’s story and seeing her as a human who holds value, children learn that this Black girl—and by extension, Black girlhood—matters.

As we turn the pages, Girlpie commands attention, the pictorial arrangement solidifying her star power by repeatedly emphasizing her presence as opposed to the adults in her world. Like the illustrations with her mother, early scenes with her father curiously leave him mostly off the page. When the text metaphorically describes Girlpie as “Daddy’s honey bun chocolate dew drop,” she clings joyfully to an unidentified character’s pant leg. We can assume that she is hugging her father, given the stated reference to him on the page, but his face remains outside the frame. Then, in the centerfold, all

signs of adult characters disappear. Only Girlpie remains. She lies down, arms spread wide, her face and entire body facing readers. She sports a bright red dress adorned with white hearts. Two words mirror the book’s title: “Homemade Love.” What’s the message? Girlpie is the personification, as well as the product, of her parents’ homemade love.

The inner space of the story (not to be confused with the space of the page as a material object) offers interior views of Girlpie’s home. Apart from a few pictures depicting Girlpie in a limited natural landscape, the story unfolds indoors. Household items (like kitchen tools, a vase, a dresser, or a bed) mark the space. The actual location is unknown. There seems to be no real-word reference or “real frame” for Girlpie’s home (Hunt 2015, 31). Or is there? Readers may not see a physical structure or evidence of the locale. But the key is the affective reality (or sense of place) depicted on the pages. For Pauline Dewan, homes in children’s literature often represent a safety net, a place of emotional warmth or an environment characterized by a romanticized sense of affection.10 By juxtaposing the children’s book with hooks’s memoir and other autobiographical writings, we can detect shades of her own girlhood geography in Girlpie’s home. The inner space of Homemade Love mimics the intimate familial spaces that hooks experienced not necessarily in her own house, but in her grandparents’ homes. Those spaces, situated within a distinctly rural Black context, constitute critical sites in her personal Black girlhood geographies. They produce an invisible yet ever-present foundation for the text and contribute to an oppositional worldview that nurtures and respects Girlpie’s subjectivity.

“LEARNING TO BELONG IN SPACE”

Carme Manuel, one of the few scholars to critically engage hooks’s children’s books, describes them as “blueprints for a happy life in blackness” (2009, 95). The blueprint metaphor is apt because it suggests that Black families and communities can construct spaces that nurture Black children. hooks’s ideological and political project (to fashion a world with a healthy regard for Black children) holds a real connection to our material world and the racial politics of the American South. In Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, the specter of hooks’s girlhood home, where she lives with her parents and siblings, stands in stark contrast to the feel-good nature of Girlpie’s home. The memoir presents hooks’s girlhood home as one marked by

physical and emotional violence, and in Belonging: A Culture of Place, she describes feeling out of place and “alien” in the home where she experienced “soul murdering assault” (2009a, 217). Still, in the dedication of Homemade Love, she thanks her mother, Rosa Bell, for “creat[ing] a world of taste and flavors/good food, good time/sustained pleasure.” Elsewhere, she credits her mother for providing “practical blueprints for liberation” (2015, xii), and hooks continues this legacy by creating her own blueprint for Black girls.

Her memoir speaks most lovingly of two homes, that of her paternal great grandmother, Big Mama, and that of her maternal grandparents, Baba and Daddy Gus. She describes Big Mama as a “short and fat” woman who “does not read or write” (hooks 1996, 25). She “wears aprons over her clothes with big pockets”—like Girlpie’s mother—and she cooks, particularly sweets for hooks and her siblings. In one instance, hooks recalls wanting to bake her father a cake but not being allowed in the kitchen. At Big Mama’s, however, “the kitchen is our home” (26). Big Mama’s house exemplifies the welcoming spirit of homeplace as it offers room to play and a sense of belonging. In addition to Big Mama’s house of delights, Baba and Daddy Gus offer a liberatory space in their home. She describes their home in “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional,” writing that, “Our grandmother, Baba, made this house a living space. She was certain that the way we lived was shaped by objects, the way we looked at them, the way they were placed around us. She was certain that we were shaped by space . . . Her house is a place where I am learning to look at things, where I am learning how to belong in space” (1990a, 103). Even though Daddy Gus lives there, hooks deems this a feminine space, and this designation acknowledges the pivotal role Black women play as community builders, curating spaces of refuge and resistance. Curiously, hooks would later describe Baba as a cantankerous woman, “not an ally” of children, a woman who “advocated harsh punishment” and “had no use for children who would not obey” (2009a, 141). Yet Baba is also the one to whom hooks credits her aesthetic sensibility: “Baba taught me to listen to my heart—to follow it” (139). She continues, “I learned to be courageous by seeing [Baba] act without fear. I learned to risk because she was daring” (141). Learning to be courageous is a necessary life skill for a Black girl growing up in the segregated South. In “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” hooks references childhood fear as she describes her grandparents’ home “across town” beyond the spaces of “terrifying whiteness” (1990c, 41). The key details are not

the home’s physical structure or even its location, although relegating Black people to the other side of town speaks to spatialization practices (such as segregation) that reify race and power by creating boundaries of belonging and exclusion.

Most importantly, hooks refashions this southscape and pays tribute to the social space her grandparents provided for her and her siblings. Baba and Daddy Gus created a homeplace that is a haven from the racial terror that threatens Black lives on the white side of town. Their home also constitutes a social space with more egalitarian adult-child relationships, where children have some degree of agency. With this inspirational backdrop, Homemade Love presents a similar model for how Black girls can belong in and take up space. For example, various illustrations portray Girlpie occupying spaces independent of adults. On one page, we see her with her dog. On another, she plays in the yard with only flowers to keep her company. In both instances, her parents are out of view. Girlpie, as pictured, revels in her own world. She can move of her own accord without constant adult supervision. hooks and Evans give Girlpie mobility, an ability to move freely, of her own will.

This illustration of homeplace appears distinct from hooks’s childhood home, which she shared with her parents and siblings. In All about Love, hooks remarks that her “family of origin provided a dysfunctional setting”; even so, she asserts that the setting is also one in which “affection, delight and care are present” (2001a, 7), and she links this care to her mother, whose love she finds “sustained and deep” (1996, 139). So, while there’s no one-to-one correspondence between hooks’s childhood and Homemade Love, juxtaposing these texts suggests that a homeplace may exist apart from one’s immediate family, and even in multiple and complicated spaces. Young hooks finds such a homeplace in her grandparents’ homes, spaces that ground her in love and fortify her sense of self. As a creative reimagining of her homeplace, Homemade Love asserts that these spaces can exist within the pages of a picture book or even within readers’ homes.

MAPPING BLACK GIRL INNOCENCE

The depiction of home in Homemade Love reflects the spatialization of childhood and the glorification of this stage as an inherently innocent period of human life. The opening flap reads, “Always loved, Girlpie is the sweet, sweet center of her parents’ heart. In

the paradise of childhood, all wrongs are forgiven and all the world made peace again. All children should live in such a world.” This blurb, crafted by the publisher but partially lifted from hooks’s own writing, reinforces these childhood tropes. Susan Honeyman addresses this spatialization and its attendant power imbalance in Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction. She notes, “Writers often utilize childhood as a ludic space through which to criticize the adult world. In doing so, they mimic social constructions of childhood, exposing the very constructedness of such representations, decentering the adult discourse that creates them” (2005, 5) and, I would add, revealing Romantic-era assumptions about childhood innocence and vulnerability.

Homemade Love reproduces tropes of childhood innocence and conceptions of childhood as an unencumbered space by creating a protagonist who is carefree and who expresses a sense of wonder and curiosity. In one illustration, Girlpie kneels and hugs her dog. Opposite the spread, we see “All good GOOD” as if she’s rewarding her pet. And a newspaper sits, tossed to the side, as if the two just played fetch. In an earlier spread, her body hovers over the ground, with her blue shadow underneath; she seems to float in the air. As Girlpie bounces from room to room of the house, sometimes drifting among the stars, readers witness a Black girl who knows no bounds. Young hooks also knew no bounds. Writing in “Kentucky Is My Fate,” hooks reflects that “In those hills, there was nowhere I felt I couldn’t roam, no where I could not go” (2009b, 8). Girlpie embodies a similar sense of freedom, and readers bear witness to her movement and exploration across narrative time and space.

Girlpie’s depiction also oozes good vibes and levity, representing a radical departure from the public imagination which too often regards Black youth—and specifically Black girls—as unchildlike. In a New York Times op-ed, “Let Black Kids Just Be Kids,” Robin Bernstein (2017) responds to a study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty in which “a group of 325 adults viewed Black girls as needing less nurturing, support and protection than white girls, and as knowing more about sex and other adult topics.” Bernstein traces the development of innocence as a defining characteristic of childhood and one seen as inapplicable to Black youth. She pays particular attention to the work of “popular writers, playwrights, actors and visual artists” in crafting images of “innocent white children” compared to depictions of Black children “as unconstrained imps” who were essentially “defined as non-children.” These depictions, she

notes, “weaponized childhood innocence, transforming [innocence] into a tool of racial domination” that Black communities continue to fight. Arguing that “childhood innocence carries so much political force” and that these conceptions are “part of a 200-year-old history of white supremacy,” Bernstein’s commentary points to the need for art and literature that moves ideas of childhood innocence from the “whites-only club” (2017; emphasis added). hooks rejects the impossibility of Black girl innocence, and Evans’s illustrations portray Girlpie as decidedly childlike to counter the adultification and vitriol that Black girls face. Girlpie’s innocence is consistent with the depiction of Black girls in hooks’s earlier picture book, Happy to Be Nappy. Likely inspired by her own youth and her siblings who “had differently colored skin and various hair textures and each . . . its own unique style and beauty” (hooks 2001b, 35), the book is a Black girl’s self-love manual, an ode to the textures, colors, and styles of Black girls’ natural hair. That book begins with “Girlpie hair smells clean and sweet.” Girlpie, a nickname that hooks remembers her mother calling her daughters, stands for all little Black girls. Chris Raschka’s watercolor images show little Black girls, ranging from dark brown to peachy skin. Whether rocking braids, ponytails, short kinks, or flowy strands, Girlpie’s hair is praised for being “soft like cotton, flower petal billowy soft, full of frizz and fuzz.” Black mothers fix the little girls’ tresses in an intergenerational ritual that Wanda M. Brooks and Jonda C. McNair found in many children’s picture books about Black hair (2015, 303). We see the girls jump and sway. In some pictures, they sport quizzical expressions. Sometimes, they smile and pose. They play as their “short tight naps or plaited strands all let girls go running free.” In a culminating celebration of Black girlhood, fourteen girls hold hands and dance in a circle, each wearing her own distinctive hairstyle. The illustrations, which reflect hooks’s conception of loving Blackness as political resistance (2001b, 65–66), opposes white supremacist social messaging that denigrates Black beauty. The book teaches Black girls to love their natural hair, “while making a strong political statement of resistance intended to reach young, even preverbal children” (Martin 2004, 68). Importantly, Happy to Be Nappy crafts Black girlhood as joyous and fun. In an interview about this book, hooks noted that “in children’s books that are oriented toward [B]lack kids, a lot of playfulness is taken out” (quoted in West 1999). hooks and Raschka bring the fun back to Black girls’ worlds, and Homemade Love continues this embrace of Black girl innocence. Evans’s illustrations deliberately depict Girlpie

as young. She wears afro puffs and hair barrettes, and she stands not much taller than her pet dog. In fact, the final four illustrations depict a girl who is small and young enough for her parents to carry and tuck in; her mother cradles Girlpie as she carries the sleepy child to her bed. Even the “imaginary materiality” (Cresswell 2015, 14) of Girlpie’s bedroom reinforces her youthfulness: she shares her bed with a Black baby doll, a teddy bear, and three other stuffed animal friends. In short, the book, like its predecessor, positions Girlpie as an innocent child.

Homemade Love not only aligns Black girlhood with idyllic notions of childhood innocence and purity, it also re-spatializes Black girlhood by forging a connection between this Black girl and the outdoors. In this way, Girlpie’s depiction mimics that of classic children’s texts, like Winnie the Pooh and Pippi Longstocking, that often set children in natural or wild spaces. Like Christopher Robin or Pippi, Girlpie romps and plays, not just in her home, but outdoors. We see her joyously bounce around, mid-cartwheel outside. Holloway and Valentine posit that this kind of positioning solidifies a child character’s innocence “through their closeness with and to nature” (2000, 17). Thus, situating Girlpie in even limited natural spaces lifts Black girls from the stereotypical spatial narratives that relegate Black life to urban spaces and poverty-stricken communities.

In doing so, hooks enters a contentious conversation surrounding the nature of childhood. The idea of childhood innocence is already fraught, given the obvious exclusion of Black children within the discourse. Real world examples further demonstrate how Black girls are treated with anything but kids’ gloves. Like the Black Girls Matter report, a study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education points to the disproportionate impact of school suspensions and expulsions among Black students in thirteen states in the South; researchers note that Black girls were “severely and most disproportionately” impacted as they “comprised 56% of suspensions and 45% of expulsions” among girls (Smith and Harper 2015, 1). Instead of seeing Black girls as aggressive, deviant, or unruly, Black girlhood studies scholar Ruth Nicole Brown asks, “What is necessary to envision Black girlhood as a space of freedom?” and identifies “the creative potential of Black girlhood” (or their unique inner resources) as the answer (2013, 3). Aimee Meredith Cox’s ethnographic work with Black girls in a Detroit-area homeless shelter also highlights how Black girls’ creativity and embodied practices “shift the shape of social spaces that

restrict and punish them as well as those that offer care and support” (2015, 26). These scholars, and others documenting Black girls’ literacies (Muhammed and Haddix 2016; Sealey-Ruiz 2016), obliterate narratives of Black girl badness and critique systems that render childhood innocence a fractured lens that only distorts our understanding of Black girlhood. Given this problematic history of childhood innocence, seeing Black girls as inherently innocent may not be the goal. But as romantic as it may be, the desire to see portrayals of Black girl innocence reflects a need to protect Black girls and end the racial and gendered violence that threatens their lives. hooks and Evans create a blueprint for such a world.

FOCUS ON FAMILY

Assumptions of childhood innocence may offer a veil of protection for some children, but they do not mitigate the power that adults wield over young people. While Girlpie’s story may counter derogatory narratives of Black girlhood in America, hooks, like many of her literary foremothers, fashions Black girlhood in a decidedly domestic setting where Girlpie is still subject to adult guidance or rule. Even so, hooks’s sparse text and Evans’s vibrant illustrations converge to produce cheerful, if not outright saccharine, images of Girlpie and her family. hooks recognizes that American culture “holds the two-parent patriarchal family in higher esteem than any other arrangement,” which can inflict emotional harm “when their family does not measure up to the standard” (2000, 77). Yet, she crafts this story, insisting upon a loving Black male presence in order to disabuse readers of the notion that the nuclear family is only a white enterprise (2003, 119–20).

The book underscores the importance of a cohesive Black family before readers even open the cover. The brightly colored cover illustration gives readers a full view of Girlpie and gestures to her home. She smiles and looks directly at viewers, while standing between two adults who each hold one of her hands. One person (presumably her father) wears a blue shirt, jeans, and a watch, and the other (presumably her mother) dons a yellow dress and red apron. The cover visually conveys that Black families can embody the heteronormative, two-parent household norm. On the surface then, Homemade Love does not seem to be transgressive in its gender politics. In fact, prior to the picture book’s release, hooks acknowledged that in American culture, “the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized

sphere of power that can easily be autocratic and fascistic” (2001a, 20). Even so, hooks names the “feminist focus on children” as “a central component of contemporary radical feminist movement,” maintaining that “children need to be raised in loving environments” regardless of the configuration (2000, 71, 77). Love is the hook, and hooks and Evans infuse this home with symbols of love rather than evidence of Black familial dysfunction or patriarchal rule and abuse.

Although hooks’s book does not loosen the chain-like threads between girlhood and domestic space, it complicates this traditionally gendered space with an unapologetic embrace of egalitarian parenting. In the book, Girlpie’s father is an active and loving parent. When she reaches to glue the last piece of the broken vase, her father appears in the frame. He smiles above the words “Peace again,” as if he speaks them to ease her concerns. The next spread shows mother and father expressing their love for Girlpie with a kiss. At the end of the book, an illustration depicts father and daughter laughing and playing outside. Girlpie’s father is present and openly affectionate like hooks’s grandfather, Daddy Gus. The adult-child power dynamic remains firmly in place, but in crafting Girlpie’s domestic world as such an openly loving space, even one that reifies heteronormative conceptions of family, hooks concretizes a site where Black girl subjectivity can take root.

A GEOGRAPHY OF BLACK GIRLHOOD As tools for education and entertainment, books introduce children to social and cultural mores. They also play a geopolitical role, influencing children’s understanding of themselves and the larger world. Darren Purcell defines geopolitics as “the linkage of space, power, and political practice” (2006, 184). For my purposes, Klaus Dodds offers a slightly different definition applicable to picture books. He explains that “geopolitics provides ways of looking at the world,” and these “geographical representations help to inform people’s understandings of the world,” making us all “geopolitical theorists” whose visions of the world “may differ radically and for a host of reasons—religious, ethnic, political, and so on” (2007, 4, 11). Rudine Sims Bishop’s (1990) classic essay on mirrors and windows impressed upon children’s literature scholars, librarians, and educators that children’s books provide social and even global education: books help to shape children’s understanding of how to interact with others and how to navigate the world. Homemade Love performs this

kind of geopolitical work. It exemplifies a space in which Black girlhood can develop in spite of racial and gender oppression, and in doing so, it gives Black girls a new “consciousness of spatiality” or a “critical geographical imagination” from which they can move in the world (Soja 1996, 2). This conceptual-visual lens is necessary validation that Black girls, too, can exist in the US nation-state, despite persistent attacks against their bodies and spirits.

What, then, does Homemade Love tell us about the social location of Black girls and the operation of power? Power may be subtle in the book, but it is normalized in Girlpie’s family. Girlpie may be the protagonist and narrator, but she is still a minor. For example, when Girlpie breaks a vase, she bows her head almost in shame. Her mother, whose size towers over Girlpie, stands in a reproving posture as she crosses her arms and taps her foot. The moment passes quickly with a page turn, and the story world returns to hooks’s homeplace. We see an image of both parents as Girlpie reflects, “But all the time any hurt can be healed. All wrongs forgiven. And all the world made Peace again.” Her parents help her to put the vase back together again, and they lend their assistance and support, which they seal with a “kiss kiss.” The two-page spread shows Girlpie flanked by her mother and father, illustrating her warm and supportive home. Furthermore, her parents’ assistance and their role in helping Girlpie see the incident as an accident and nothing more points, metaphorically, to hooks’s conceptualization of spaces “where we begin the process of re-vision”—a reparative process that hooks locates in the margins (1990b, 145). The idea of marginality intrigues me because Girlpie is a dependent, and children’s literature, as a discipline, is often marginalized within the academy despite a long history of scholarship and an increasing number of academic conferences devoted to this body of literature. Just as hooks envisions the margin as a space of radical possibility, her children’s books offer a unique “radical creative space” (153) where hooks can reach a wide audience of adults and children with a story that provides “more accurate and humanizing representations of children of color” (Thomas 2016, 113). Homemade Love thus answers hooks’s call to re-vision. She speaks “from a place in the margins where I am different, where I see things differently” (1990b, 152). What she sees and what she creates in this story is a soft spot for Black girls. What readers ultimately experience is her intentional effort to “enter that [marginalized] space” (152) and look on Black girlhood lovingly.

hooks’s love letter to Black girls allows readers to see Black girls differently—as whole and human—and therefore, her story is a radical act. In “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional,” hooks discusses how the “traditional southern racially segregated Black community” of her youth saw art as “intrinsically serving a political function” (1990a, 105). Like the Black women before her who “were fashioning an aesthetic of being, struggling to create an oppositional world view for their children” (112), hooks creates a counter space to pass down the geopolitical lessons that she learned in her grandparents’ homes. It is Baba who teaches young bell, whom she calls “Glory,” about the integrity of one’s word and how she must learn “‘to stand up and speak up’ and not to give ‘a good goddamn’ what folk who ‘ain’t got a pot to pee in’ think” (2009a, 139). Baba teaches hooks how to relate to others, how to stand on her own in the world. Though abrasive and direct—which some might say of hooks’s own writerly voice—Baba is an adult who respects certain rights of children as thinking and independent beings. Inspired by her Black female kin, Homemade Love talks back to white supremacist and patriarchal logics to offer a necessary model of what a homeplace feels like: a geography of the heart.

This mapping carries important lessons, not only for parents, but especially for Black girls whose worldviews are shaped by the text. Catherine Renaud (2015)—in her discussion of Claude Ponti’s children’s texts—notes that the fictional worlds in children’s picture books work “beyond the book as a kind of carte de tendre, a map of imaginative possibilities for children.” This “spatial cohesion,” as she terms it, bridges the world of the text with children’s material reality, and she remarks that “spaces can take on symbolic dimensions, identifiable for instance in [the] association of trees with concepts of home and belonging” (194). Homemade Love teems with such associations; metaphors, for example, link sweetness to the emotional or psychological space of the home. Renaud also observes that Ponti’s use of trees “mirror[s] the mental space of his characters” (211), and we see a similar correspondence between depictions of Girlpie’s attire and her emotional state or immediate environment. Evans’s illustrations match Girlpie’s emotions; the pictures change based on her encounters with her parents or as she moves through a shifting landscape. For example, in the beginning of the book, when the protagonist says, “My mama calls me Girlpie,” readers see miniature pies on her clothing. When she breaks the vase, frowny faces

appear on her dress. When her parents help her repair the damage, the frowns switch to smiley faces. As her parents kiss her, puckered lips adorn her dress. Girlpie does cartwheels amidst flowers, and daisies dot her dress. As she plays with her puppy, we see paw prints and dog bones on her clothes. The dress designs repeatedly reinforce the overall depiction of a home rooted in love, and they also give readers a window into Girlpie’s state of mind and emotions.

Girlpie’s clothing forges a particularly powerful emotional connection toward the end of the book. We see idyllic images of her sleeping, “Lost in deep dreams.” She dreams of “Memories of arms that hold me,” and a picture of her father tossing her up in the air accompanies the text. As Girlpie’s body presses against the blue sky with arms outstretched, she wears a blue dress emblazoned with planes and white clouds. Girlpie physically and metaphorically takes flight. Her father’s presence and the planes on her dress suggest that with a solid family foundation beneath her, and a strong father-daughter bond, the sky’s the limit. As Girlpie coasts the air waves, readers feel a sense of possibility, and we have a glimpse of how she—and hooks—views her place in the world.

The last spread takes us into Girlpie’s bedroom, an intimate setting that merges her home with the larger world. The book closes with a picture of Girlpie curled up under her bed covers, fast asleep as her bed floats against a starry indigo sky. Her words assure her real-world peers that there’s “No need to fear the dark place. ’Cause everywhere is HOME.” This culminating statement extends the boundaries of her home beyond the confines of her bedroom to a wide, open space that appears peaceful and dreamy. The illustration and text exemplify Dewan’s contention that in story worlds and the real world, “Home is a place that provides roots for stability and provides wings for growth” (2004, 275). This final illustration, which functions as a meaningful paratext, depicts a young Black girl who is secure in her home. Those roots allow her to dream of the larger world as an equally secure space of possibility where she can soar. Homemade Love represents its own kind of homeplace, a culturally rooted and liberatory space devoted to nurturing this little Black girl’s life and her future.

In a country marked by virulent anti-Blackness and where Black girls are too often subjected to physical, emotional, and institutional harm, Homemade Love can be a balm and a necessary corrective against persistent media distortions about Black girls’ lives (Price-Dennis et al. 2017, 4). True, hooks’s narrative may be one tiny intervention.

Still, the story “[works] with space to make it livable” and sustaining for Black girls (hooks 1990a, 112). The book may not depict specific American towns or city streets, but Girlpie’s nondescript home is one that any child can enter. And what Black girls encounter when entering this story world is the very oppositional consciousness that hooks witnessed in the autonomous Black spaces of her Kentucky youth. As one of hooks’s “small echoes of protest,” Homemade Love is an unexpected “radical creative space which affirms and sustains [Black] subjectivity,” and “gives [Black girls] a new location from which to articulate [their] sense of the world” (1990b, 152, 153). Readers open the book and see a blueprint of Black girlhood printed with confidence, freedom, and love, one that dismantles disparaging cultural narratives about Black girls’ lives. Homemade Love puts forth a geopolitical vision that is subtle yet clear: there is no place or space where Black girls do not belong. The interplay of hooks’s text and Evans’s illustrations help Black girls picture a world where they can dream and explore, without fear of boundaries, limitations on their dreams, or assaults to their very beings. Idyllic? Absolutely. But as Brittany Cooper asserts, “[a] Black girl who moves through space on her own terms is a significant threat to white supremacy and patriarchy. She is someone refusing the state access to her emotions, her dignity, or her fear” (2015). Girlpie may not subvert the adult-child power dynamic embedded in her storyworld, but she joyfully takes up space in the narrative and in her dreams. Her story demonstrates that with a nurturing environment, Black girls can develop a geographic imagination and orientation to the world that makes space for their personal freedom, a healthy sense of self, and peace. By illustrating what homeplace looks and feels like, Homemade Love treats Girlpie and her real-world counterparts as budding geopolitical actors who can construct their own mental maps of a world where even (or especially) for Black girls, only the sky’s the limit, and “everywhere is home.”

NOTES 1 For example, Michelle H. Martin cites Ten Little Niggers as having a surprisingly long shelf life, with “multiple versions” published from the 1860s to the 1980s (2004, 20). 2 We see similar concerns in canonical works such as Alice Walker’s The

Color Purple (1983) and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), as well as award-winning middle grade novels including Rita Williams Garcia’s

One Crazy Summer (2010) and Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear

My Cry (1975), and critically acclaimed young adult novels like Ibi Zoboi’s

American Street (2017), Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017), Jacqueline

Woodson’s verse memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), and Elizabeth Acevedo’s novel-in-verse, The Poet X (2018). 3 Homemade Love was first released as a picture book in 2002 and reissued as a board book in 2017. The name “Girlpie” appears in hooks’s first picture book, Happy to Be Nappy (1999), which celebrates Black girls’ hair. 4 Kentucky, often framed as only Appalachian, also exists geographically and socio-culturally in the American South. In “Kentucky Is My Fate” (2009), bell hooks writes of returning to her home state, noting that while schools routinely taught that “Kentucky was a border state . . . that did not take an absolute position on the issue of white supremacy, slavery and the continued domination of [B]lack folks by powerful whites,” she and other Black folk “saw little difference between the ways Black folks were exploited and oppressed in Kentucky and the lives of Black folks in other parts of the South, places like Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia” (2009b, 9). 5 Moya Bailey (2010) coined the term to describe the unique experience of anti-Blackness, racism, and misogyny targeting Black women. 6 In a 2014 interview with Kevin Quinn, hooks shared that Girlpie literally came to her in a dream. 7 As is true of many picture books, Homemade Love lacks pagination. 8 Emergent readers (prekindergarten through first grade) are at the beginning stages of the reading process. They are often familiar with concepts of print: understanding punctuation, that print carries meaning, that we read from left to right and from the top of the page to the bottom, that stories have a beginning, middle, and end, etc. They may have some mastery of letter recognition and letter-sound correspondence. 9 An earlier version of this essay appears under the title “Decoding the

Images: Illustration and Picture Books.” 10 We know this is not always the case given the number of texts that depict physical, sexual, or emotional violence within the home. Toni Morrison’s

Bluest Eye readily comes to mind.

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E. GALE GREENLEE is an independent scholar of African American literature and the inaugural (2020–2021) ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. While a visiting professor at Berea College, she taught courses in young adult literature and Black girlhood geographies, and she co-curated an installation for the new bell hooks center. Her writing and curricula have appeared in American National Biography, Carolina K-12, the National Humanities

Center’s Humanities in the Class digital library, Partnerships: Journal of Service-Learning and Civic Engagement, Southern Changes, and Southern Cultures. She recently served as a fellow with the African American Policy Forum’s Black Girls Matter project and contributed to an upcoming project on Black librarians for Libraries: Culture, History and Society.