I AM NOBODY'S SLAVE

The long road to achieving Black pride.

From start to finish, Hawkins’ autobiography is a harrowing and insightful overview of what child abuse looks like from the perspective of a scared Black boy who grows up to become a proud Black man. Making the persuasive claim that Black youths who are emotionally and physically abused by their parents are also victims of white oppression (what he calls a “bondage belief system”), Hawkins sees his scornful father and mother as products of their family histories, which were rife with whippings, hangings, rapes, and other forms of unspeakable violence at the hands of whites, who had Black people perpetuate these heinous acts on their own friends and family. Hawkins is honest in his descriptions of what his parents called his “spankings,” which once involved Hawkins’ father stepping on his son’s neck with his steel-toed boot. Relating these horrific incidents acts as a form of catharsis and a way to relay to readers that, on the basis of his research on his family in Alabama, his parents were victims of “Jim Crow apartheid” in the South, which led to their belligerence and their skewed belief that the injuries they inflicted were for their children’s protection. Hawkins does not bestow forgiveness in this work, but he does leave readers with a better understanding of unhealthy forms of love and the genealogies that produce them.

A profound work about the Black experience and white oppression.