PART TWO—
NEGOTIATING AUTHORITY: EDITED PERSONAL NARRATIVE

Chapter Three—
Is That What She Said?:
The Politics of Collaborative Autobiography

The Politics of Collaborative Autobiography

Sometimes the woman go to the doctor and ask them if they are pregnant. They are only one or two months. The doctor checks them and says, "No, I don't think so." So they come back to me, and they say, "Jesusita, I came to see you, I think I'm pregnant " So I check them, and I can tell them when they are one month. Two is easy. And I can tell them when it's a tumor. Sometimes they're going to the doctor  . . . and say, "I don't know what's the matter with me; I have a hard pain," but the doctor can't say. So they come to me, and I check them, and I call the doctor that is taking care of them, and I tell him, "Did you know what's the matter with this?" "No." I say, "I know, she's going back to you and give her some X-rays. She's got a tumor." And they take my word, the doctors .
[Jesusita Aragón as told to] Fran Leeper Buss, La Partera: Story of a Midwife

I found Jesusita Aragón's voice compelling from the start: here was someone who recounted her difficulties in order to emphasize her success in overcoming them. Her self-affirming narrative only made the introduction, appendices, notes, and glossary that framed this edited autobiography appear more jarring. Where, to point up the value of her own practice, Aragón criticized the intervention of the American Medical Association (AMA) into New Mex-

ican birthing techniques, editor Fran Leeper Buss commended this system's regulatory intercession.^[1] Flourishing statistics in her introductory comments and concluding remarks, Buss represented the doctor as a benevolent patriarch, kindly condescending to instruct the natives in the miracles of modern medicine. Buss's interpretive intercession was distressing, but such clear narrative conflict did force me to reappraise Aragón's position in an autobiography which omitted her name and to consider the relations between speakers and editors in collaborative texts more generally. To what extent could the speaker work against the interpretive rubric imposed—so firmly in the case of La Partera —by the editor?

If I found the directness of Aragón's voice recounting her work on behalf of others compelling, I had to question what might be motivating such an interest when; returning to the library to find other such voices, I encountered quite a number of edited personal narratives, seemingly made to order, on the shelves. Looking more closely at these life histories in order to consider not only the power of the speaker's words but also the power relations structuring such speaker-editor collaborations, I found a number of patterns.^[2] Typically, these books were published by university presses. Usually there was a clear class distinction between the editor, a professional woman with an interest in furthering feminist work, and the speaker, a working-class woman with a commitment to serving her community. Often these texts inscribed racial or ethnic difference as well, with a woman of color recounting the story of her life and work to a white woman who transcribed, edited, and published it, often with little or no discussion of the complicated process of turning oral history into text.

Jesusita Aragón's recollections in La Partera: Story of a Midwife and Onnie Lee Logan's autobiography Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story are cases in point.^[3] Published as part of the University of Michigan Press's Women and Culture Series, La Partera is clearly an outgrowth of recent feminist interest in working-class women and women of color, groups previously ignored by Anglo-American literary scholarship. Motherwit is less obviously the product of the academy's discovery of "other voices," but E. P. Dutton has marketed the book with an eye to the commercial confluence of gender and cultural studies, as the back-cover endorsements by James Mellon (editor of Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember ), Susan Tucker (author of Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South ), and Alice

Childress (author of Like One of the Family ) demonstrate. Prefatory and concluding material in both books directs readers to see the life histories as valuable insofar as they illustrate the "hard and useful lives" of rural, working-class women of color.^[4]

More specifically, both life histories focus on the relationship between gender and the practice of "alternative" medicine as defined by the medical establishment in the United States. Through the stories of Jesusita Aragón and Onnie Lee Logan, editors Fran Leeper Buss and Katherine Clark demonstrate how women committed to serving their communities maintain this commitment in the face of strong pressures denying the validity of their healing practices. Both Aragón's and Logan's life histories document such pressures at length, describing physicians as, at best, grudging partners; at worst, obstructive of their own work as midwives. But over and against the midwives' own pictures of a resistant and defensive AMA, their editors celebrate medical intervention in, regulation of, and control over rural midwifery. It is this triangulated relationship of medical conflict, editorial opposition, and the speakers' critiques of both that I wish to consider more closely here.

Obstructive Obstetrics: The AMA and Traditional Midwifery

Our midwives  . . . have a wholesome fear of the law and the "State Doctor." In the beginning some of them were disposed to criticize the doctors. I have tried to make them understand that they should attend only normal labors, and that the doctors were their best friends and their last court of appeal in time of trouble.  . . . I am also persuaded that the great body of midwives in the county have a more wholesome respect for the doctors than they had five years ago .
J. Clifton Edgar, "The Education, Licensing and Supervision of the Midwife," American Journal of Obstetrics

Even if Dr. J. Clifton Edgar's medical restaging of the taming of the shrew were exceptional—which it is not—I would not be venturing very far out on a critical limb to argue that the embattled history of midwifery provides a less than sustaining environment for autobiographical assertion. As both

Jesusita Aragón and Onnie Lee Logan attest, obstetric practice as developed under the administrative wing of the AMA has been hostile to the practitioners of traditional birth methods ever since its own accouchement before the turn of the century. Edgar's counsel may be framed particularly baldly, but it provides a clear statement of the AMA's political principles: scores of early twentieth-century medical records insist on the need for teaching midwives a "wholesome" fear of and respect for medical authority. The power struggle between doctors and midwives reflects both the efforts of federal and state agencies to exert tighter control over local practice through regulatory measures and the racial conflict underlying such surveillance.

Attempts to bring local practices under a national medical umbrella began at the turn of the century, when physicians concerned about the status of obstetrics began to find in the critique of midwifery a convenient means of raising esteem for their own profession. An influential study conducted by Dr. J. Whitridge Williams on behalf of obstetric medicine and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January 1912 was forced to acknowledge both that medical schools were "inadequately equipped for teaching obstetrics properly" and that the majority of medical professors believed that "general practitioners lose as many and possibly more women from puerperal infection than do midwives."^[5]

In addition to concerns about status, financial questions also preoccupied the doctors. According to Judy Barrett Litoff, who has chronicled the history of American midwifery in two studies: "A frequent complaint expressed by physicians was that they were poorly reimbursed for their obstetric services. Many doctors feared that this trend would continue as long as midwives persisted in attending fifty percent of all the births for less than one half the fee charged by medical practitioners."^[6] Because they presented an economic threat to American physicians, midwives became a chief target for the medical lobby, which succeeded in having the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act passed in 1921. That act provided for "instruction in the hygiene of maternity and infancy through public-health nurses, visiting nurses, consultation centers, childcare conferences and literary distribution."^[7] Not surprisingly, this and other forms of federal regulation, and particularly the intervention of state bureaus of child hygiene created in the wake of this federal "protection," led to a significant decline in midwife-attended births: in 1900 about 50

percent of births were directed by midwives; thirty years later, the percentage had dropped to about 15 percent.^[8] Contemporary regulations vary from state to state; in New Mexico, where Jesusita Aragón practices, once midwives have passed "stiff requirements for certification," they are legally authorized to practice home births; they are also "entitled to mandatory third-party reimbursement by health insurance plans." By contrast, Texas permits lay midwifery only provided the practitioner informs her client of the "limitations of her skills and practices."^[9] In other states, as editor Pat Ellis Taylor confirms in her Introduction to Jewel Babb's personal narrative Border Healing Woman, midwifery has been either phased out gradually or prohibited completely.^[10]

Anxiety over midwifery, articulated by the state as a threat to "public safety" and by doctors as endangering their own financial health, speaks to a number of larger political preoccupations as well. Quoting T. J. Hill, a New York physician, Litoff suggests that many physicians preferred midwives to women doctors; the midwife, after all, could be taught to "'listen eagerly'" to the male physician: "'She will sit at the feet of her Gamaliel . . . and hearken to his admonitions on things pertaining to the art of obstetrics.'"^[11] But the medical condescension exerted toward both Aragón and Logan is racist as well. "The midwife of Robeson County is rather typical of the midwife of the rural South," pronounced a North Carolina physician. "She is far below the European midwife in intelligence and no training under the sun could make her a competent obstetric attendant."^[12] Not to be outdone by his Carolina colleague, Dr. Felix J. Underwood, director of the Bureau of Child Hygiene for Mississippi during the early 1920s, lambasted the practice of midwifery with the rhetorical zeal of a latter-day Jonathan Edwards: "What could be a more pitiable picture than that of a prospective mother housed in an unsanitary home and attended in this most critical period by an accoucheur, filthy and ignorant, and not far removed from the jungles of Africa, laden with its atmosphere of weird superstition and voodooism?"^[13]

Such overwhelmingly hostile language remained a mainstay of medical discourse on midwifery through at least the first half of the century. In 1938, some eight years after Onnie Lee Logan began practicing midwifery in Alabama, the director of that state's Bureau of Hygiene and Nursing characterized midwives as "ignorant . . . many of them highly superstitious, some of them very slovenly in their personal habits."^[14] Concluding his

address in language that echoes Nazi propaganda on the "Master Race" with unnerving precision, Dr. Austin insisted, "We have a tremendous task on our hands to teach these midwives how to do the things that we want them to do. . . . They are required to get permits each year. Of course, it is needless to say that they are given a physical examination, including a Wassermann test, and in that way we attempt to eliminate the most unfit physically" (95).

Nor did midwives like Jesusita Aragón escape similar judgment working in New Mexico. Condemning "the poorer class of Mexican people" for "almost invariably employ[ing] a midwife at the time of confinement," Dr. H. Garst efficiently vilified midwives in general and working-class Hispanos in particular. The people who chose to rely on a midwife rather than a physician were labeled "primitive," but the full force of righteous vituperation was reserved for the midwife herself.^[15] A "Report on the Midwife Survey in Texas, January 2, 1925" represents rural midwives as "illiterate, usually dirty and in rags, gesticulating, oftentimes not able to talk or understand the English language, superstitious and suspicious." Hispanas are singled out as particularly resistant to the doctor's orders: "The Mexican midwife is more difficult [than the black midwife] to manage. Her ideas and traditions seem more fixed. She is more high-strung and more suspicious of the Americans." What underlies the hostility of the Texas report with its repeated jeers about "superstition" and Spanish speakers, I would argue, is anger over the reaffirmation of cultural practice: the refusal of Mexicanas to stop practicing birthing techniques "handed down to them by their mothers who usually had been midwives themselves," practices perceived as "inherited customs and beliefs . . . seldom, if ever in accord with modern science."^[16] It is precisely this lack of "accord" with Anglo-American medical dictates that most provokes physicians of the AMA.

The Ethnographic Subject of Collaborative Autobiography

If the narratives of Jesusita Aragón and Onnie Lee Logan provide readers with an alternative set of glosses on the medical establishment's "management" of midwives, they also indicate that editorial management of their words often undermines rather than confirms their own critical positions.

Titles and courtesies notwithstanding, editorial advocacy in both La Partera and Motherwit is directed toward the AMA rather than toward American midwives. The editorial exegesis Clark and Buss practice, that is, puts into the mouths of Logan and Aragón words the speakers themselves work to refute at every turn: that doctors save lives midwives put at risk.

This overriding—overwriting—demonstrates the pressure editorial ethnographic inquiry exerts on autobiographical voicing. Their authority eroded, Logan and Aragón serve merely as representatives of a contested practice. Significantly, the titles of these edited autobiographies omit the names of their subjects, introducing the speakers as illustrations of an occupational type.^[17] Occlusion of the name defines the subject as historical source rather than agent of history; for their editors, Aragón and Logan tell the same story of the relation between a "traditional" medical discipline and the "marginal" women who practice it.

This transmutation of the "I" into type is far from a recent phenomenon. Hamilton Holt's prefatory note to the 1906 publication of Undistinguished Americans speaks to editorial agenda in contemporary collaborations as well: "The aim of each autobiography was to typify the life of the average worker in some particular vocation, and to make each story the genuine experience of a real person."^[18] The equation (note the coordination of phrases with "and") between what is "average" (representative of a "they") and what is a "genuine experience" (spoken by an "I") demonstrates that editorial interest in constructing an "authentic" speaking voice works here not to enable a particular storyteller to discuss her views on what is important to her—family conflicts? political opinions? reflections on personal achievements, however defined?—but, rather, to authenticate a given statement as telling the historical "truth" about—again—a type of work ("some particular vocation").

Ethnic autobiography itself—not only the "lifelet" but any number of contemporary, more sustained collaborative narratives—labors in the service of sociology. The subtitles A Pioneer Korean Woman in America and An Indian Woman in Guatemala (the latter especially strikingly, given the title, I  . . .  Rigoberta, which dramatizes the individual, idiosyncratic voice) illustrate how this process works.^[19] To her credit, Lee's editor Sucheng Chan articulates her own agenda as an historian: "By trying to 'locate' Mrs. Lee's account in its proper historical context, and by discussing the research that went into validating it, I have sought to turn one woman's

memoir into a credible and representative historical record" (138). Still, the conflation of "I" with "we"/"they"—the fact that work by writers of color is more often than not shelved under "Sociology" or "Anthropology" or "Culture(s)" rather than "Literature" or "Fiction" or "Autobiography"—deprives these writers of attention as writers .^[20] Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography could just as well be filed under "Early American History," but the fact that it is considered by many critics as one of the first American autobiographies accords its author respect as a "Distinguished American" whose life in and of itself demands attention and whose work as a stylist and rhetorician merits scrutiny.

As Philippe Lejeune indicates in "The Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write," the relation between ethnography and autobiography suggests that we should pay closer attention not only to the dynamics of speaker-editor relations in particular texts but also to the context of the production of collaborative narratives more generally.^[21] And, clearly, the inequities of power implicit in the process of speaking, collecting, writing, editing, and publishing life histories implicate the consumers of this literary work as well.

Not to mention the critics. Granting that editorial prerogative often works counter to the narrative goals of the speaker herself, where am I to situate my own commentary on these texts? I argue that editorial agenda can mask but not obliterate the imperatives of the speakers; if we attend more closely to the discursive patterns in specific women's narratives, we can begin to pick up the necessarily oblique theorizing about race and gender politics—as well as about many other issues—that is encoded in them. Such listening demands attention to the complicated intersection of any number of factors operating simultaneously: racial exploitation, generational tensions, inequities between urban and rural populations, class differences, gender conflict, the shifting particulars of state politics and social relations at specific points in time.

Yet while I am interested in refocusing attention on what tends to be filtered out by the editorial lens, my own preoccupations impose patterns upon the narratives I discuss as firmly as does any other editorial gloss. Certainly my arguments here and in the following chapter are designed to demonstrate how speakers maintain interpretive authority over their own words. But the danger of taking the words right out of people's mouths—even if "well-meant," if "for their own good"—is painfully obvious. South-

western historian Joan Jensen argues that "our ultimate goal . . . in doing working class oral history . . . as with all work in Women's Studies, must be to help empower women."^[22] But from the point of view of our "research interests"—people, remember, here!—our own differences as scholars may be at times less significant than our shared position as academics. The affirmative and assertive histories recounted in these narratives are compelling for critics and readers who insist that the academy begin to listen to other voices. Nevertheless, working in the service of politically responsible criticism requires that we consider a number of issues. Among them is the fact that, in academia, the celebration of "empowerment" can easily slide into a kind of philanthropic activity with all the self-interest this implies.

Yet if an acknowledgment of what we—I—stand to gain can locate the writer and forewarn readers, it nonetheless should not, I think, discourage the critical work of appraising such narratives. Recognizing power differences is not the same as either wishing them away or apologizing for them, but instead means outlining what is sometimes made to appear invisible. Daphne Patai has argued convincingly that "the current emphasis on 'empowering' or 'dialogic' research" is incapable of resolving the "fundamental contradiction" between academic research and "social transformation." The academic equivalent of the Emperor Who Wore No Clothes, it often speciously promises what it does not expect to deliver. Nevertheless, I would not frame this relation between theory and practice as invariably tainted from the outset, as Patai suggests: "Our enjoyment of research and its rewards constantly compromises the ardor with which we promote social transformation. At the very least, it dilutes our energy; at the most, it negates our ability to work for change."^[23] If writing for an academic audience is writing for a relatively small audience, it is not always preaching to the converted (only the extreme right wing characterizes college students as an indistinguishable mass of "rabble-rousers"), nor is it always speaking for a uniformly privileged group; consider, for instance, those professors and students who are among the first in their families to have attended college.

It may be useful, too, to distinguish between professionalization and political acumen. The way our writing gets shaped for publication may have to be translated for people outside the academy, but once words like "subject position" get rewritten as "point of view" and words like "hege-

mony" get spoken as the "haves" united in opposition to the "have-nots," almost anyone who has been around for any length of time will no doubt have plenty to say about them. Furthermore, specifically political work may go hand in hand with its apparently more attenuated academic equivalent. Appraising published collaborative narratives and preparing legal appeals out of the personal narratives of people requesting asylum, for example, could be mutually informing.

To return to the question of collaboration with which I began: why is this particular textual formation currently so popular with scholarly presses and institutions? What functions do such books serve for readers and critics? Any scholar of Native American literature could respond that textual collaboration is not a recent phenomenon in the United States, nor is it limited to the production of personal narrative per se. As Dexter Fisher points out, Mourning Dove's novel Cogewea, the Half Blood (1927) is a different book for the intervention of its "mentor," Lucullus Virgil McWhorter: "Had McWhorter not passionately encouraged her to record the tales of her tribe," her fiction would not have been framed as a folkloristic narrative.^[24] F. H. Matthews accounts for this ethnographic interest in the 1920S by describing the "revulsion from Americanism" then current in Anglo intellectual circles. While some writers asserted "their identity with some minority" or "raised folk arts to self-conscious status," others "who lacked a vital region or ethnic minority with which to identiiy turned instead . . . to quarrying the national past in search of lost virtue."^[25] If we consider the history of immigration in this country and the social and legal responses to it over the years, this kind of identification begins to look less nostalgic and more anxiety-ridden. Hamilton Holt (himself "New England-descended and Yale educated") wrote a Foreword to The Life Stories of (Undistinguished) Americans that advances one rationale for the substitution of multiple brief lives in place of sustained autobiography: "The place of the full single life story that Louis Wirth, himself an immigrant from Germany, had contemplated as a source of insight, may then rightfully belong to a collection of short lifelets by undistinguished authors of diverse ethnic backgrounds" (xiii). If celebrated Americans earn life stories, the "poor huddled masses" can reasonably ("rightfully") demand only the "lifelet." Form here anticipates ideological function; the collective, amalgamated structure of Holt's compilation, together with his emphasis on ethnicity, suggests that this book of lifelets is designed to mimic the

melting pot in which those of "diverse ethnic backgrounds" are supposed to meld.

Recent collaborative compilations may, like Holt's autobiographical encyclopedia, provide one means of managing ethnicity. But the sustained life histories that jointly-authored texts provide for readers suggests that this more direct form of control is frequently exchanged for ostensibly less invasive mediums. In his study of Chicano literature, Ramón Saldívar argues that Shakespeare's Caliban "performs a positive function; he is a good example, in other words, of our own savage natures, which we must control."^[26] For that part of ethnic autobiography's readership who distinguish themselves as beyond ethnicity, the speakers of collaborative narrative may hold up a mirror to the reading self and the (editorial) writing self—a mirror, as Virginia Woolf comments wryly in A Room of One's Own, twice life-size.

Undoubtedly there are other reasons for the recent proliferation of mediated texts. The consistent emphasis on "hard and useful lives" advertised in such books points to their appeal for scholarly readers and writers who may frame their own work in opposition to "real" labor. Reading and writing about the "hard" work of women like Aragón and Logan may offer a voyeuristic connection to academics anxious about the class status of their own activity. But Philippe Lejeune's focus on "Those Who Do Not Write" directs us to still another service such books perform. "What one tries to capture in writing," he argues,

is the voice, the autobiographical discourse of those who do not write  . . . Their story takes its value, in the eyes of the reader, from the fact that they belong (that they are perceived as belonging) to a culture other than his own, a culture defined by the exclusion of writing. The bookstore exploits an ethnological type of curiosity. . . . The admission of collaboration  . . . becomes here an essential piece of the system: it is a matter of guaranteeing that the model has written nothing! (196)

If academic culture, in apparent contradistinction to working-class culture, is a culture that values writing, the world which frames the college campus does not. Just as television supplanted radio, video makes the printed word look as old-fashioned as the illuminated manuscript; the rapid shift and spin of images in recent novels like Jessica Hagedorn's The Dogeaters (1990) mimes the visual tease of MTV, while video stores begin to crowd

out McDonald's. Thus the repeated insistence on distinguishing between the literate and the nonliterate begins to look like the preoccupations of a professorate memorializing "orality" in order, paradoxically, to maintain the authority of script in a climate that no longer reveres the written word as a form of magic.

The Still Vanishing Subject: Some Cautions on Revising "Authority"

If questions of form are contingent upon format, as Arnold Krupat has concisely stated of Native American narrative, we cannot isolate either the content or the presentation of any life history from the methods used to obtain it.^[27] Consistently, however, literary, sociological, and anthropological studies position the subject of discourse—even when she is speaking in the first person—as a textualized object, malleable according to the researcher's interests and academic uses. And in the interests of more faithfully rendering quality of voice, such studies are inclined to ignore, even to conceal, the intersubjective context out of which such narratives are generated. In a discussion of the status of field work in anthropological research, Kevin Dwyer takes the work of Clifford Geertz as symptomatic of the way in which this professional blind spot has been sustained, arguing that while Geertz recognizes field work as "constructive activity," he denies the dialectical relation of speaker and editor at the moment it is in play, seeing it only at the level of "theoretical activity":

At the most basic level of the "small fact," of the informant's interpretation, Geertz systematically refuses to see the anthropologist in his or her human relation to the informant or to accept the inevitable interdependence of Self and Other at the very origin of the search for "information." . . . The dialectical confrontation, for Geertz, does not take place during the field encounter with the Other, but is restricted to the privacy of the anthropologist's study.^[28]

This inability to acknowledge how a participatory relationship governs the production of the anthropological text (and here we could substitute the term "literary" text, given the flexible discursive parameters any postmodern critical theory presumes) tends to objectify one of the participants in this process and to ignore the history of imperialism which informs such interracial "collaborations." Yet, as Dwyer very acutely points out, a recog-

nition of this history is crucial to any analysis of first-person narratives: "Mere participation . . . inevitably locates the Self culturally as the 'outsider' intruding on the Other's terrain, and historically as a representative of a society that has a prior history of intrusion" (274). Nor, as this chapter will suggest, should we assume that an intra racial collaboration will necessarily avoid the abuses of a coercive discursive and political history: differences of class, gender, and region (not to mention of political agenda) also inflect speaker-editor relations. The subject of an intraracial inquiry, then, is not necessarily immune from definition as ethnographic object.^[29]

I would like to focus for the moment, however, on mediated texts that inscribe racial difference. Even a quick glance at the following excerpts from La Partera: Story of a Midwife and Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story tends to confirm the way in which autobiographical voicing is contained and muted by the assumptions of ethnographic discourse:

I met Jesusita Aragón, the last of the traditional, Hispanic midwives in the area, through several women who had babies with her. . . . I knew immediately she had a story worth telling, and Jesusita was eager to tell it. (La Partera, vii)

She was the last granny midwife in Mobile and one of the last in Alabama.  . . . Caught in the flux of a changing culture, Onnie is an unusual victim of historical "progress." (Motherwit, xiii)

Brief as they are, such editorial comments indicate how narratives produced out of an interracial collaboration may reproduce in some measure the disabling history of race relations in the United States. Their commitment to representing Jesusita Aragón and Onnie Lee Logan as speaking subjects places the editors within social science methodological traditions in which, as Genaro Padilla argues of recent life histories of Mexican immigrants, the "I-speaking voice" is "simultaneously privileged and dismissed."^[30] Although both editors attempt to replicate their subjects' verbal presence, they work against autobiographical presentation by situating the speakers as a kind of cultural litmus paper. Aragón and Logan, that is, are introduced to us as "the last" of a kind of "traditional" practitioner. Their distinction—that singularity which should justify their autobiographical stature—is to be a type, the single survivor of a deteriorating culture. Buss's preface recalls the nineteenth-century literary iconography of the "noble savage" in that it positions Aragón as the last of a dying breed,

archetype of a "broken" culture (13). Similarly, Onnie Lee Logan's distinction is to be a "victim," "the last granny midwife in Mobile and one of the last in Alabama." It is only because she is a rare specimen, the editor's description implies, that Logan's story is valued at all.

This conflict between presencing and preservation suggests in microcosm the problematic relation between autobiographical and ethnographic impulses in life histories more generally. Echoed by editor Katherine Clark's elegy depicting Logan as having "faithfully and successfully served one world only to be told by the next that she was no longer needed" (xiii–xiv), such texts frame the complicated question of cultural identity within a system of binary absolutes where one means of signifying identity has been "vanquished" by its successor. In a politically oppressive environment urging homogenization to a cultural-political "mainstream," it is perhaps all too easy to envision the means of assigning cultural value as a process controlled by an ideological monopoly. But cultures are not created and recreated in accordance with a Darwinian teleology, imposing a new world's rituals over a now-anachronistic tradition. Produced from the historical context of imperialism, ethnographic discourse defines what is in fact a synchronic process between multiple, continually flexible cultural relations as a diachronic history, a story of cultural rise and fall.^[31] Ethnography often forgets, moreover, that this "history" is itself produced in response to anxiety about an inability to subdue the articulations of people who define themselves in contradistinction to dominating models.

Lejeune's definition of collaborative writing as a negotiation "between the model's supply and the public's demand" (189) very acutely situates the narrative as the product of a complicated and often conflicting series of intentions. This sophisticated political analysis, however, although it deconstructs the concept of authority as "a relative and conventional thing" (193) and the speaker as one who "is reduced to the state of source" (189), nevertheless positions that very speaker's authority as the museum piece Buss and Logan make it out to be. Here is where much of the "dialogic" discourse celebrated by postmodernism speaks to and for only those sitting in the box seats. According to anthropology scholar James Clifford, such "plural authorship" is "a form of authority . . . [that] must still be considered utopian," because the very notion of joint authorship "challenges a deep Western identification of any text's order with the intention of a single author."^[32] But in whose interests, finally, is this kind of "subversion?"

Proclaiming the death of the author at the very moment when writers of color are beginning to enjoy wider commercial success seems, as a number of scholars have pointed out, a little suspect.^[33] And if authority is so unappealing, why do most editors keep scrambling to emblazon their own names, not the speakers', on the spines and covers and title pages of collaborative book projects? Just so in Lejeune's critique of the way power relations objectify the subject does the subject serve as object lesson. His use of the word model is particularly curious: the product of a mixed metaphor, not to mention mixed media, it suggests the still silence of the painter's model, the subject who best fulfills her function when she is least an agent.^[34]

It seems to me that this is the danger of deconstructing the subject, an operation Lejeune carries out too well. To assert that the narrative of the mediated text "is not the writing of an identifiable and personal 'other,' but a kind of floating writing, an autobiographical form with no subject to ground it" (189) is to reproduce the coercive context in which such writing is produced, to ignore the material product of such literary effort (and specifically its title page, which assigns authority, however arbitrarily, to someone ), and to forget that the "other" may exercise the ability (even if it must be carried out in an oblique fashion) to speak against editorial appropriation. If, as Lejeune has stated, the collaborative text "blurs in a disturbing way the question of responsibility" (192), then just who should be assigned responsibility remains a question rather than a given. Similarly, the formulation "the one to whom the responsibility is given" assumes an agency (albeit one which is either acceding to or dispensing with authority) that we need to examine, not dismiss.^[35]

I would suggest that if we look closely at the narratives of mediated texts, we will find the traces—sometimes explicit in the interpretive conflicts and argumentative tensions between editorial preface and speaker's text, often articulated more obliquely in the speaker's preemption of or resistance to the process of textualizing her life history—of her insistence on maintaining her status as author. In spite of inequities of class, race, generation, and education, collaboration does not necessarily mean capitulation. Mary Paik Lee's resistance to full "disclosure" in the edited version of her autobiography, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America, demonstrates, as editor Sucheng Chan acknowledges, not so much modesty as a dogged, if "quiet," insistence on controlling the textual

boundaries of her story.^[36] Claudia Salazar cites the final sentence of I  . . . Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala as illustrating Menchú's refusal to satisfy anthropological desire to "know The Indian": "'I'm still keeping my Indian identity a secret. I'm still keeping secret what I think no-one should know. Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets.'"^[37]

Nor is withholding speech the only strategy autobiographers use to circumvent editorial management or provide readers with lessons in how to interpret their stories. As chapter 4 argues in greater detail, textual politics in La Partera and Motherwit do not, for instance, prevent either Aragón or Logan from critiquing practices they see as racist. Given the combined onslaught of medical hostility and editorial inattention or, often, resistance to the speakers' race-inflected critiques, however, it is not surprising that both women resort to rhetorical camouflage in order to make their points. To that end, they frequently employ modes that are not consistent with feminine self-affirmation. They may theorize race politics using an apparently conciliatory rhetoric that maintains a posture of humility and nonaggressiveness.^[38] A particularly telling criticism may be prefaced by a concession that makes it more palatable to an otherwise defensive listener. Often comments condemning racial oppression are developed circuitously, in a series of sentences that may seem contradictory.

Acknowledging how autobiographical desire and ethnographic necessity often set speaker and editor at odds should not lead us to assume that every editor is oblivious to the historical and literary pressures that position transcriber and subject in an unequal relationship, however. Close analysis of edited life histories suggests that "those who do not write" often do just that; editorial acknowledgment and prefatory comments frequently admit the extent to which the speaking subject is a writing subject, sharing the work of transmuting spoken word into print. Rather than assuming that the title-page division of responsibility between authority and life history represents the final word on the relation between speaker and editor, we need instead to consider the evidence of the edited text as a whole.

Editorial Agency in the Mediated Text

Just who is constituted as the author for any given collaborative text remains a complicated question. The literary authority vested in the signa-

ture provides one account of the relation between subject and editor, but, as Lejeune indicates,

authorial status has different aspects, which can be dissociated and possibly also shared: the juridical responsibility, the moral and intellectual right, literary ownership (with the financial rights related to it), and the signature, which, at the same time that it refers to the juridical problem, is part of a textual device (cover, title, preface, etc.) through which the reading contract is established. (193)

To acknowledge that authority is not a divine or natural right but, rather, a historical, legal, and textual privilege does not obliterate its power, however, nor does it mean that readers can simply forego their responsibility to question its relation to the narratives of mediated texts. Deconstructing "the 'life'" by indicating that it "belongs to both of them—but perhaps also, for the same reason, belongs neither to one nor to the other," as Lejeune asserts (192), is a potentially dangerous evasion of the practical ramifications of publishing a collaborative text, for it provides a justification for the very appropriation the critic condemns. Nor should we assume that it is the writer who "is entrusted with all the duties of structuring, of control, of communication with the outside. . . . Condensing, summarizing, eliminating the inferior parts, choosing the lines of relevance, establishing an order, a progression" (189).^[39] The absence of description about the textual process does not necessarily imply that this labor has not been a joint endeavor; it may, in fact, only point to an editor's desire to maintain interpretive control over the narrative.

Although such studied editorial inattention is not uncommon, some editors do acknowledge how their organizing and structuring techniques contribute to the form of the narrative and provide a rationale for glossing its contents. Bob Blauner's argument about sociology's use of first-person narrative, where "the editing process virtually is the analysis" (47) is confirmed by editor Pat Ellis Taylor's afterword to Border Healing Woman: The Story of Jewel Babb (1981): "I am afraid that my confessed interest in her ability to heal led her into certain emphases on the material that she might not have chosen herself. . . . The information she gave me on other facets of her life was at least as extensive as the information she gave me on healing" (104).

Nor is Taylor alone in acknowledging the extent to which the narrative

"present" is constructed by the editor, "coming to the healer with pad and pencil in hand" (104). In Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir, Karen Fields positions herself as "collaborating author" alongside her grandmother, Mamie Garvin Fields. The younger Fields does not offer her prefatory and concluding statements as interpretive index or "scientific" apparatus, framing devices which would inevitably situate her grandmother's narrative as a form of ethnographic data inaccessible to the reader without editorial assistance.^[40] Rather, she asserts that the text is the "outcome" of "an extended conversation" which "involves our two subjectivities, not hers alone" (xiii). By emphasizing her familial relation to the autobiographical subject, Fields runs the risk of justifying her editorial work as appropriate because it is in some way "natural." If this familial authorization avoids positioning the subject of the narrative as ethnographic other, then, it may unself-consciously affirm the relation between two collaborating but nonetheless distinct subjects and, in so doing, obscure the labor of textual production. Karen Fields's perception that the book works in part to reconstruct a genealogy between granddaughter and grandmother inclines in this direction: "We both came to feel that even if Lemon Swamp never saw the light of day, our enterprise would have justified itself. After all, how many grandmothers and granddaughters have the opportunity of befriending one another as adults?" (xii). Yet her acknowledgment of conflicts between the two reminds readers that the text is the product of a dialogue between people "who find their way through the disagreements that arise inevitably and who work to spell out for themselves the agreements that must be conveyed to others" (xii). Fields is quick to articulate the nature of these conflicts, as when she distinguishes between her own need "to relegate childhood shocks about Dixie to their proper place" and her grandmother's determination "to pass on a heritage" (xx). Even the recognition of difference can be useful, however, for it opens room for the speaker by acknowledging that there are two ways of reading any particular utterance or situation. Thus just as the insistence on compromise asserts the text as constructive activity, Karen Fields's admission of editorial fallibility reauthorizes her grandmother as speaker and prevents her from being objectified as textual evidence for an editorial thesis.

Karen Fields's acknowledgment of the narrative conflict generated by any collaborative project remains the exception rather than the rule, how-

ever. More often than not, editor-speaker entente is asserted so vigorously as to look more like a mask for editorial intent than an explanation of joint interpretive effort. Frequently, initiative for the collaborative project is not assigned jointly but is represented as wholeheartedly the speaker's impulse. I would like now to look more closely at a number of mediated life histories that demonstrate this pattern.

"The Initiative for the Project was Hers": Owning Up to Joint Textual Production

Jesusita was anxious to share her story with someone, and we eventually met together a number of times.  . . . The following, then, is the story of Jesusita Aragón. The story is told in her own words and contains glimpses into the lives of many others. Many of the names have been changed to protect people's privacy, but the facts of their hard, and useful, lives remain the same .
Fran Leeper Buss, Introduction to La Partera: Story of a Midwife

Onnie has always regarded midwifery as her real life's work, however, and the inspiration for this project came not from me, but from her overwhelming desire "not to die with it," as she said—not to die without sharing the "wisdom and knowledge" but especially the stories from her lifetime of experience. Onnie, a semiliterate woman with little formal education, told me she was "gonna write this book" if she "had to scratch it out" herself. "I got so much experience in here that I just want to explode," she told me
Onnie Lee Logan, Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story

Mentioning only that in producing La Partera she and Doña Aragón "shared countless long distance phone calls" (vii), Fran Leeper Buss refrains from describing the division of responsibility the transcription from spoken to written word entails, emphasizing instead the collaborative nature of the project: "We tape recorded our many conversations and from the tapes I have organized the story of her life and work" (8). The actual process of producing the text is left obscure. Did the two meet to discuss the way that these conversations would be "organized" by the editor? What

principles of selection did Buss use to transform untold hours of taped recollections and dialogue into seventy-two pages of text?

While, as Blauner indicates, "editing personal narratives is a creative process which actively shapes materials by reducing them" (51), what takes the place of any such admission in La Partera is a substitution of gesture for word, a picture of rapport between editor and speaker so complete it need not be communicated through speech. Buss foregrounds her memories of Aragón's "touch, the touch of her arms as she embraced me, the memory of her hands stroking mine, holding them in times of greeting and parting, and touching them for reassurance or emphasis" (8), while leaving unrecorded the inevitable conflicts that arise in any effort at communication: disagreements, misunderstandings, differences in emphasis, corrections, amplifications, questions. As anthropologist Patricia Zavella indicates:

Rapport is not automatic. . . . It is a continual process to achieve intimacy not only with the same informant through successive interviews, but also throughout each encounter. . . . We also need to anticipate that our status as insiders will only allow an entrance. From there, because we are also outsiders, we must be prepared for reticence, political differences and various social distances.^[41]

Ignoring the difficulties dialogue involves, Buss's insistence on elemental harmony avoids emphasizing what should be a crucial admission in this interracial collaboration: the question of difference.

In fact, this editorial version of harmonic convergence is typical of recent collaborative narrative more generally. Lejeune characterizes "identification" rather than "distance" as the dominant relation in mediated narrative: the editor, "imbued with his story . . . is going to try to imagine himself as the model in order to be able to write in his place" (190–91). Judith Stacey argues that this kind of affiliation is particularly appealing for "feminist researchers," who are "apt to suffer the delusion of alliance more than the delusion of separateness."^[42] What both critical formulations point to is the tendency of recent editors to style themselves as literary "mediums," endeavoring like Virgil to guide other souls through the difficult passage from speech to writing. When editor Pat Ellis Taylor describes healers like Jewel Babb as "conduit[s], seeing themselves as bringing supernatural forces to bear on the patient" (116), she more accurately

describes a kind of editorial desire, an (impossible) wish to remain characterless in order to take on the character of another. In the case of La Partera, editorial "channelling" creates a very compelling speaking voice. But whose voice is it? If the Buss and Aragón venture results in a kind of writing that looks alive on the page, it is built on concealment, on the pretense of speaking as one, an Other, rather than as both doubled and divided.

This erasure of difference is troubling, as feminist scholar Elizabeth Jameson reveals when she discusses concerns about her own interviewing process: "I asked a friend who is an anthropologist with much more field work experience in other cultures than I have, if she felt that I sounded as if I were leading my informants. Her reply relieved me, and I hope vindicated the complex relationships represented on the tape. 'Yes,' she said. 'You led them right where they wanted to go.'"^[43] Given the potential for misreading—("How . . . did we, who had a close confidential, long-standing relationship, manage to misunderstand each other so completely?" Katherine Borland recollects of her relationship with her own "informant," her grandmother Beatrice Hanson)^[44] —how can any researcher be assured that she has correctly, consistently, and fully determined "where they wanted to go?"

As is the case in Borland and Hanson's collaboration, in La Partera the assumption of a shared point of view erodes Aragón's authority while bolstering the editor's. Buss's introduction, for example, provides an interpretive rubric for Aragón's narrative that directs readers to perceive this text as contiguous to—more precisely, as illustrating—an editorial thesis. Yet Aragón's own arguments, the subject of the next chapter, are ideologically at odds with this imperative. Suffice to say here, however, that what is foregrounded in Buss's introduction is not really Aragón's life history, but, instead, a sketch of a culture in decline: a New Mexican landscape drawn both from postcard vistas and from the modernist interest in primitivism, where skies are perennially "turquoise," the sun constantly "brilliant," the desert always "vast," "stark," and "immense" (2–3). The language of ethnography shows itself in other ways as well: in consistent images of deserted adobes crumbling in Parthenon-like silent grandeur, of "deteriorating buildings" (12) and "broken" windmills (13), of churches "fallen into disarray" (14) and "the graves of relatives and friends" (14)—in sum, a description not of people but of their "remains" (13).

Notwithstanding a commitment to convey the nuances of Aragón's speech, invoking the discourse of what I can only call "romantic ethnography" (consider its elegiac tone and lament for lone survivors) inevitably reduces the speaker to artifact. And, as I have already indicated, this ethnographic imperative is not specific to La Partera . Like Buss's figuring of Aragón as midwife, Katherine Clark's titling of Onnie Lee Logan's narrative as Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story constructs the speaker as representative subject. This story of a midwife—doubly glossed as such by Clark's preface—is as poorly documented as is La Partera . Clark provides no acknowledgment of the way in which the narrative has been constructed, other than to affirm that Logan provided the "inspiration" for the project. She is about to "explode" with the desire to "write this book," Clark writes, if, despite her status as "a semiliterate woman with little formal education, she 'had to scratch it out' herself" (ix). Such a statement, as Sandra Gunning reminds me, can as easily be read as a veiled threat—Logan's defiance of editorial efforts to manage her speech—as it can as evidence in support of Clark's editorial venture.^[45] In any case, such strenuous advocating of Logan's agency here seems suspect, for it insists simultaneously on the urgency of the speaker's need to textualize her life history and the urgency of editorial intercession: since Logan barely writes, someone else must be persuaded to assist her.

This scrutinizing of editorial motive is severe, yet it seems to me a necessary corrective for Clark's own lack of self-scrutiny. The following quotation will make the point more clear, for it constructs the impetus for the project as contingent upon the speaker's anticipation of her own death, as the shift in verb tense indicates: "'I got so much experience in here that I just want to explode,' she told me. 'I want to show that I knew what I knew —I want somebody to realize what I am '" (ix–x, emphasis added). Succeeding upon the definition of "midwifery as her real life's work," a work she wants to describe in order " 'not to die with it'" (ix), this description of the text's inspiration suggests that the narrative motive is one of sanctification, of enshrining a person/practice that is passing.

Like La Partera and Motherwit, He Included Me: The Autobiography of Sarah Rice at once obscures editorial motive and styles the speaker as cultural anachronism.^[46] According to editor Louise Westling, it is Rice who calls upon her to provide the necessary technological apparatus. "The ini-

tiative for the project was hers," Westling affirms, echoing the editors of interracial textual collaborations as a whole, "in response to the urging of family members and friends that she record the story of her life. Through my sisters and brother in Jacksonville, she let me know that she would like my help" (xi). Yet, clearly, whether it is speaker or editor who initially prompts the telling of the life story, the process of collaboration constructs a subject quite distinct from the authority who writes her history without the assistance of another; as Carole Boyce Davies argues, "The phrases 'I edited,' 'I arranged' and 'selected' camouflage a whole host of detailed ordering and creating operations."^[47] To insist, then, that "control of the narrative's shape and progress was always Mrs. Rice's. My job was simply to turn on the tape recorder and occasionally interject a question for clarification" (xi) is to ignore the entire context of the story's production. Since one presumes that Mrs. Rice could have performed this mechanical operation by herself, this positioning of the editor cannot help but look disingenuous, an editorial sleight of hand to mask the mediated nature of the speaker's story and to obscure the narrative frame of what is, as the title page reminds us, a joint labor.

Perhaps most significantly, Westling's refusal to invoke the context of textual production means she must deny as well the structure of power that informs this Southern relationship. Ignoring how unequal political authority must inevitably inflect a collaboration between a white professional and a black domestic, the editor instead relies upon a picture of intimacy: "We have known each other for 30 years, ever since she began working for my mother once a week when I was 14" (xi). That this "close relationship," which she affirms is "typical of Mrs. Rice's associations with families in which she has worked," may be defined differently by employer and employee does not figure here. Nor does she distinguish between the intimacy of friends and that maternalism which Judith Rollins documents as characteristic of the relations between domestics and their employers in the American South.^[48] Westling does acknowledge that the relationship between editor and speaker has some bearing upon the text: "When we began the project, we had a rapport which made the collaboration relaxed, even as it must certainly also have limited some elements of the narration" (xi). Yet she does not recognize that her vantage point as the child of a household in which Mrs. Rice was an employee may give her a perspective very different from that of Mrs. Rice herself.

Toward a Methodology of the Local: Life History as History

To isolate Mrs. Babb's role as a faith healer is a distortion not only of the way she perceives herself but also of the way in which she is perceived by the outside observer, who in this case was myself.  . . . To me, she is primarily a strong, yet compassionate, woman, able to be at home in a desert environment that most of us would consider at best unfriendly, at worst unlivable. In recounting her story, she gave at least as much emphasis to her trials and tribulations as a young bride and mother as to the manifestations of healing abilities and spirit helpers.  . . . However, Mrs. Babb's role as faith healer held a great degree of interest for me, and for that reason I urged her on in that area while I might not have urged her in others .
Pat Ellis Taylor, Afterword to Jewel Babb, Border Healing Woman

Notwithstanding the respects in which I am a Southerner, I tended to operate with a Northerner's "sociologism" about the South, that is, with an abstract schema lacking the texture of lived lives. By contrast, my grandmother dealt in actual people and places, in the choices that she or her neighbor confronted, in what a man or woman did given a particular circumstance. Aggregated, much of this could become the events and processes so dear to social scientists, but my grandmother was telling me about experience before it became either .
Karen Fields, Introduction to Mamie Garvin Fields with Karen Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places

I have critiqued the tendency of some recent life histories to exploit an individual life in order to dramatize an editorial thesis about culture.^[49] Yet politically sophisticated life histories do exist, texts that acknowledge the autobiographical subject as the product of a relationship among the various people involved in the transformation of spoken memory into written reminiscence. Arnold Krupat praises Lucullus Virgil McWhorter's work in Yellow Wolf: His Own Story (1940) for consistently noting "shifts in tone, pauses, or changes in diction on Yellow Wolf's part, refusing to erase the inevitable gaps and fissures of the actual narrative event to produce the illusion of the unified, seamless textual object" (158). Further, he notes,

McWhorter "interrupts Yellow Wolf's monologues within the various chapters, to speak directly in his own voice . . . to explain that Yellow Wolf is speaking in direct response to a question McWhorter has posed, or in acknowledgment of a request to follow up some earlier matter" (157–58).

This self-conscious textual practice identifying the speaker's narrative as constructed out of what anthropologists call "field dialogue" is used by Pat Ellis Taylor in Border Healing Woman as well, allowing us insight into the way the relationship between speaker and editor is narratively inscribed. The Babb/Taylor book is from the point of view of the critic of collaborative work both interesting and frustrating: interesting for Taylor's detailed and self-conscious discussion of her own editorial concerns and her recognition of the ways that they sometimes come into conflict with Babb's own; frustrating because despite her integrity as a scholar and her sharp-eyed acknowledgment of narrative difference, the editorial apparatus she provides nevertheless works to reposition the speaker as icon rather than individual. While Taylor places a high value on "preserv[ing] . . . Mrs. Babb's unique 'voice,' editing as little as possible, other than to arrange the spoken and written segments in orderly sequence" (xvi), she intersperses between portions of the speaker's narrative her own "impressions of the time I spent with her and of the environment which, in my opinion, has contributed to the formation of her personality and her beliefs" (xvi).

Such editorial intercession tends to position the speaker not as co-authority but as specimen subject, upon which a scholarly apparatus of preface, afterword, and endnotes will be brought to bear.^[50] Endnotes are especially crucial to this process: as the final word, they provide an authoritative reading of Mrs. Babb's narrative, establishing two levels of interpretation in the text. The speaker's explanations, many organized under the ethnological rubric of folk tales (see in particular the "stories," bracketed with such titles as "The Light That Saved the Beggar's Life" and "The Man Who Could See into Another Life," at the close of chapter 6, "Changing Circumstances") become "raw data" to be glossed by the editor's notes in a series of "scientific" affirmations, elaborations, and negations. In addition, the notes mark specific passages of the text as direct transcription from tape but fail to indicate which portions of the narrative are in fact reproduced—with or without editorial intervention—from Mrs. Babb's written recollections, making it difficult to determine to what extent Taylor has reconstructed Mrs. Babb's reminiscences. Nevertheless, Taylor's insis-

tence on the text as the product of dialogue clearly affirms the life history as collaborative process. Furthermore, if such interjections tend to dispel the quality of voice the editor works to (re)produce, her decision to alternate chapters of Mrs. Babb's narratives with her own perceptions of the speaker calls attention to the fact that Mrs. Babb is situated by this process as a kind of textual character . If the final product appears more Taylor's than the speaker's, such an effect at least honestly directs readers to consider the relation between editorial author(ity) and autobiographical subject in this book.

In fact, thanks to Taylor's very extensive accounting of editorial practice, Border Healing Woman foregrounds the narrative tensions between the speaker's own ordering—and thus, interpretation—of her history and the reconstruction of her memories by an editor. Taylor's "Afterword," which distinguishes specific events as particularly formative of the speaker's character, suggests how such editorial reevaluation effectively disguises the speaker's own impulses toward self-formation. For instance, Taylor assigns Jewel Babb's move from Langtry, Texas, to the hot springs near Sierra Blanca a value at odds with Mrs. Babb's own gloss. The editor identifies the shift from urban to rural environment as "undoubtedly . . . the major turning point in Mrs. Babb's life" (112) for its contribution to her knowledge of healing. Yet her previous admission that her own "interest in her ability to heal" has no doubt led Mrs. Babb "into certain emphases on the material that she might not have chosen herself" (104) allows us to evaluate Taylor's later judgment more critically. Character descriptions such as the following provide a perfect example, in addition, of how autobiographical presence can be overwritten by editorial ethnography: "And when she left the hot springs, she was very different from the simple ranching woman who had first arrived. In the course of time, Mrs. Babb had learned as much as anyone who had ever been associated with the hot springs about how to use the mud, mosses, and waters" (115). The autobiographical subject is trivialized here, yet Jewel Babb's own recollections of her ranching work—her relationship with her mother-in-law; her feelings about the physical and emotional trials this work involves; her assessment of the relation between this kind of labor, traditionally perceived as masculine, and her sense of herself as a woman—all suggest that this "simple ranching woman" would not necessarily agree with the "healing woman" model Taylor ascribes to her.

The frankness with which Taylor acknowledges her own interests in the text is as commendable as it is exceptional. What her comments indicate, however, is that the process of selecting a given person's life story as worthy of note is contingent on a conservative model of history, one that situates the personal record as valuable only insofar as it is monumental. Or, as Cletus E. Daniel reframes this in his introduction to Victoria Byerly's collection of oral histories, it requires a model of history as "somehow larger than the individual lives that populate it."^[51] Either you are a distinguished citizen whose self-formation becomes conflated with political formation more generally (thus Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography is read as defining the American-made self, while, conversely, Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia is glossed for the insight it affords readers into the character of its author), or you attain distinction by the extent to which your particular history works as a synecdoche to invoke a monumental historical force—of class formation, of racial politics, of gender conflict. This "typographical" theory precludes, of course, precisely what a more accretive version of history would guarantee as valuable: the study of particular lives as significant through their very particularity.

In distinguishing between two quite different interpretive modes, the excerpt from Lemon Swamp with which this section opened provides a useful outline of this alternative historical model. "I began my part of Lemon Swamp with a mental map showing historical events and processes, a map strongly colored with discrimination, violence, economic pressure, and deprivation of civil rights," Karen Fields begins, identifying her own perspective as "sociological." Her grandmother, she realizes, by contrast, "was not trying to convey 'how black people fared in Charleston over the first half of this century,' but 'how we led our lives, how we led good lives'" (xix–xx). The distinctions Fields is drawing here between ethnographic or "sociological" discourse and autobiographic utterance—what she defines as articulating the "texture of lived lives"—identify the conflicting narrative impulses of collaborative texts with compelling clarity. Because she does not privilege abstract modes of analysis over more concrete conceptual systems, Fields avoids reducing autobiographic discourse to "data" upon which editorial analysis must be imposed. Instead, she points to the very significant theoretical work such recollections may produce. In remembering how people lived "good lives," Mamie Garvin Fields is in fact organizing the details of experience just as the ethnogra-

pher would, that is, within the rubric of an evaluative (in this case, ethical) system. Focusing on the particular, then, does not indicate the absence of an interpretive framework and thus does not require the imposition of ethnographic analysis in order to be granted value. Rather, it provides readers with a means to argue the political and moral usefulness of detailing "the texture of lived lives."

By contrast, the way the "monumental" theory of historical value operates can be seen quite clearly in Taylor's comments about the production of Border Healing Woman:

This book represents Mrs. Babb's life story and her views on her healing powers in her own words. The account which emerges of her developing consciousness as a faith healer is an exciting one, not only because of the insight it can provide on healers in general but also because of the model it presents of a strong, individualistic woman coming into her own powers without benefit of the support either husband or community would usually provide. (xvi)

Ranching and goatherding and fanning and healing work: memories as a daughter, granddaughter, sister, wife, daughter-in-law, and mother are filtered through an editorial lens that focuses on the exposition of two "abstract schemas." The editor directs us to see Mrs. Babb as a "model" of self-reliant femininity and—a prescient choice, given its current popularity in academic circles—as an icon of "border culture"; as a healer, that is, Babb functions as a kind of "cultural medium" or "cultural bridge" (105). While Taylor is clearly interested in the implications of Mrs. Babb's story for feminist autobiography, it is the second argument that ultimately defines the speaker. And define her this argument does: by the close of the text, any self-presencing impulses the editor has gestured toward in her prefatory and concluding comments, as well as the speaker's own oblique contentiousness (her resistance to "reminiscing" [54]—the ostensible project of this text!) and explicit directions for interpretation, both strategies that I will trace in the next chapter, have been completely obliterated. Taylor explicitly anthropologizes Babb as "an example of the survival and revitalization of a . . . border culture" (105). The final sentence of the book clamps down on interpretation as it effectively reduces the speaker to type: "But this is sure: Mrs. Babb is a true representative of a border culture which has provided a climate for bringing traditions together. . . . Mrs.

Jewel Babb: border healing woman—a special breed of woman in a very special part of the world" (122).

This wholehearted reassertion of editorial interpretive control accords with romantic ethnography's formation of the subject-as-anachronism. A "special breed," Jewel Babb is a throwback to a (fantasied) earlier age where the land and its inhabitants conversed in a prelapsarian tongue very different from what the academic establishment—tired of the successive linguistic estrangements of modernism and postmodernism?—mourns as its own bloodless circulation of words. "Yuccas eight and ten feet high" nod to each other in anthropomorphic splendor, "as if they were the incarnations of desert people friendly with each other and watchful of strangers" (4). Meanwhile, Mrs. Babb becomes at once animal, vegetable, and mineral, her quavery voice not the result, as she herself suggests to Taylor, of "a broken blood vessel in her esophagus," but, rather, at one with "the melodic waver the goats speak with to each other" (23). Still later she takes on the serenity of a desert plant: a picture of still tranquillity, she "sat in her big armchair by the window with her palms held up toward Chuck, who was sitting, relaxed, on the couch" (24). With "hay in her hair from the last feeding time of the goats at sunset" (24), she becomes the Earth Mother incarnate.

My somewhat fanciful interpretive imposition here may look as overdirective as Taylor's own. Hyperbole aside, however, it is impossible to ignore the nostalgic yearning for an apparently more "primitive" past that colors the narrative, a yearning that is invariably produced when the discourse of ethnography is invoked to explain autobiographical utterance. Arnold Krupat has suggested that the primary goal of twentieth-century collaborative Indian autobiography is to allow "the scientist to express his objectivity. The first-person pronoun demonstrates his absence from the text, and so, too, demonstrates the 'objective . . . authenticity' of his account."^[52] This may be an overstatement if applied to the kinds of life histories discussed here, but Krupat's description of "academically based anthropology" as ethnographic "salvage" (155) nevertheless points to the use of this kind of literary production as a cultural epitaph. In Border Healing Woman, this narrative impulse is never more clear than at its close. "I would think about death, that is always just a breath away," the final paragraph begins. "Then I would turn around, and there would be

the sunset. Beautiful beyond description. And I think there will be a time I can step right off my hill and walk right up through it. And maybe I will just go away that way" (103). Here the speaking "I" and the textualized "I" find closure at the same moment, to make the flesh-and-blood subject of the narrative its scripted object.^[53]

That collaborative autobiographies that position the editor and speaker in ethnographic relation appear so consistently to undermine the speaker's attempts at self-presencing is distressing, but hardly surprising. The etymological link between the words representation and representative suggests that observation, regardless of context, must always rely to some extent on categorization. But if the textual apprehension of another always involves a negotiation between levels of description, the ethnographic project uniformly favors one end of this sliding scale of perception. Contemporary criticism often conflates theorizing with generalizing, according "abstraction" a higher value than "specification." This impulse to provide a typology of the subject is especially fraught in ethnographic representation. All too often, the privilege of both activities is assigned to the editor, "collaboration" becoming monopolization of intellectual resources.

Recognizing that an oral history is produced from a context of political inequality does not mean that we should dismiss it, a priori, as a form of ventriloquism for the Voice of Authority, however. Clearly the conjunction of editorial and publishing interests works to impose its own interpretive rubric upon the mediated text. We can acknowledge that such autobiographies operate in a land of Bakhtinian world of linguistic struggle, however, without conceding that the victory is foreordained. That people will use the languages available to them—whatever their ideological self-positioning—should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever tried to get published. What we need to listen for, then, are those inflections that mark even what may look like the most rigidly controlled text as a place of contending forces.^[54]

Chapter Four—
"You Might Not Like This What I'm Fixin to Say Now":
The Speaker as Author(ity) in the Edited Text

"I Found Space to be Alone": Making Room for the Subject in Singing for My Echo

When I take my patient to the hospital I tell the doctor, "Don't give her any X-rays. Take her in there; she's this way and that way." The doctors found out; they trust me.  . . . I go and examine that girl, and it's a tube baby.  . . . I call the obstetrician right away and tell him I have a girl like this.  . . . He operate on her that night, and tells me, "Jesusita, how did you know this?" I tell him "I don't know, I just use my hands, no instruments, and my hands can tell."
Jesusita Aragón, La Partera: Story of a Midwife

I coached her right on through that along with him. And I hadn't had my own baby yet. I was just coachin her what to do and what not to do. I didn't give him a chance to do it. That's how come he was givin me the eye. I know he was wonderin "Where is that comin from?" And that's when he asked me he wanted to know where'd I get trainin.  . . . As so on as he finished he sit down and have a long conversation with me and he said, "You would make a good midwife. Not only make a good midwife. I think you'll make a good doctor."
Onnie Lee Logan, Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story

In this chapter I wish to consider the forms self-possession takes in collaborative narrative. Chapter 3 argued that self-authorization is generally sustained against editorial dictum; here I would like to engage the speakers themselves. What is it that authors, not editors, wish to say? Given that they are often impeded from speaking their mind and corrected (in editorial introductions, prefaces, afterwords, and conclusions) when they do so, what kinds of representational strategies do different speakers exploit to further their own arguments? This chapter considers a number of edited texts as autobiography and critique, looking closely at the relation between self-representations and representations of work. Editors Buss and Clark read the lives of Aragón and Logan wholly to examine their labor; the speakers themselves, I would argue, develop more variegated self-portraits in which their lives as working adults compose one narrative strand rather than the whole cloth.

What speakers have to say cannot be summed up with the ease and brevity of editorial theses. I shudder to think of my own curriculum vitae reproduced as an index for an autobiography, of my sense of my profession used to explain and stand in for my sense of self. Yet this land of interpretive imposition is the rule rather than the exception in edited personal narrative. Leaning for support on the textual frame the editors provide may allow academic readers like myself quick interpretive access to the memoirs of rural women. This dependency on editorial gloss may also mean, however, that we fail to hear those phrasings, hesitancies, and accents that give each voice its distinctive inflection.

Following editorial direction in Gregorita Rodríguez's transcribed memoir Singing for My Echo: Memories of Gregorita Rodríguez, a Native Healer of Santa Fe, for instance, would lead readers to see Rodríguez's script not as a sustained personal history—which it is—but as shorthand for the cultural history of Santa Fe.^[1] The cover photo literalizes this metaphor: two santos, their faces level with the Señora's portrait, compete with her for attention. On the back is a photo of "author" (that is, editor) Edith Powers, who "with the publication of this book . . . continues a long-time interest in the healing ways of the Spanish and Indian traditions of the Southwest." Rodríguez's own epigraph merely reinforces this transformation of autobiography into ethnographic case study: "All my life," she is quoted as saying, "was preparation for the healing I would do someday." As if these prompts were not enough, Powers's Introduction explicitly

transforms the recollection of memories into the gathering of herbs for healing. Señora Rodríguez's childhood home. El Quelites, a place the speaker herself locates as the repository of autobiographical rather than cultural memory ("I love it here. I found space to be alone" [7]) is significant for the editor because it is the place where the Señora "learned the secrets of the herbs and the balance that exists in the natural order of things. She held these treasures close, and she shared them with those she helped. Gregorita is a healer, a curandera" (8).

But editorial orchestration is undone a few pages into the "curandera's" recollections. Notwithstanding its memorializing Introduction and the illustrations of herbs and healing practices which interrupt the narrative in a series of visual non sequiturs, this book has very little to say about curanderismo. Instead, Rodríguez speaks of herself: of the imperious two-year-old demanding bread from the archbishop; of her childhood at El Quelites, picking wildflowers and dressing up as royalty; of mourning the inauguration of New Mexico into statehood (which enables her to provide readers with a revised, critical representation of the state's history); of growing up hoping to be discovered as a singer, and, later, of wishing to enter the convent or work as an army nurse; of her sense of betrayal and loneliness when her mother urged that she marry; of her father's and sister's deaths from typhoid and the ensuing loss of the family rancho; of her married life, her children, and the difficulty of finding time for herself; and finally, after some seventy pages have elapsed with only the briefest mentions of herbs and massage, stomach problems and backaches, of her work as a curandera.

Even here, however, Rodríguez's self-description is curiously at odds with the editor's romanticization of curanderismo as her life's work rather than as a means of helping neighbors and putting food on the table. A "reluctant" healer (70), Señora Rodríguez, according to her own recollections, was led to learn and practice through external coercion, not by some inner voice:

Both Tía Valentina and I were busy with our own lives. I wasn't able to go visit the sick as often as she asked me to go. There were times when she insisted that I go with her. . . . When she became forceful in teaching me, she began to expect me to massage her patients.  . . . This was hard for me to do. In my family we did not touch each other very much. I was not used to touching the flesh of other people, especially people that I was not related

to. . . . My natural response was to throw up my hands and turn away. (66–67)

Describing her healing as distinct from rather than synonymous with her self ("busy with our own lives"), as a practice unnatural rather than innate ("I was not used to touching. . . . My natural response was to . . . turn away"), allows Señora Rodríguez to relate stories of healing without sacrificing herself to these miracles. What we are left with in her narrative (an account supplemented by the editors of Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors, who interview Mrs. Rodrçguez along with Jesusita Aragón and Sabinita Herrera)^[2] is a tribute not so much to native folkways as to stubborn self-possession. Even when she accepts recognition as "Mrs. Senior Citizen of New Mexico" for her work on behalf of older people like herself, she frames this honor as an official legitimization of her own private authority: "I did not realize that anyone important had noticed who I was and what I was doing. I had just done what I thought I should" (83).

Midwifery as Mothering: Maternal Desire in La Partera and Mothenwit

A bunch of us riders was together when this here lady come up and begins askin questions 'bout the buffaloes; and Injun names of flyin,' walkin' and swimmin' things and a lot of bunk. Well, you know how the boys are. They sure locoed that there gal to a finish; and while she was a dashin' the information down in her little tablet, we was a thinkin' up more lies to tell her .
Mourning Dove, Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range

Notwithstanding its heavy-handed editorial apparatus. Singing for My Echo sustains a vocal quality unhampered by Edith Powers's voice-over. Rodríguez's rich patterning of memories provides the autobiographical "I" with more than one vantage point to speak from, so that her narrative develops a sense of full family life without endangering individual integrity. The other collaborative narratives I consider more closely in this chapter, Aragón and Buss's La Partera: Story of a Midwife, Logan and Clark's Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story, and Babb and Taylor's Border

Healing Woman: The Story of Jewel Babb also describe women who maintain distinctive speaking voices while giving detailed portraits of familial networks and community service.^[3] But where Rodríguez's recollections open outwards at a leisurely pace, meandering from childhood through adult life to old age with ample time to pause for full-scale portraits along the way, Jesusita Aragón's history and the memoirs of Onnie Lee Logan and Jewel Babb seem at once more directed and more directive, constrained by editorial interference, pushed to dwell at length on patient histories and doctors' offices, so that stories of childhood play or of relations with spouses and kin surface only momentarily, to be as quickly reabsorbed into the dominant autobiographical schema established by editorial shaping.

Such unaccommodating textual politics, as I have argued at length in chapter 3, cannot help but leave their mark. We can trace criticisms of masculine medical practitioners with relative ease, for instance, because they accord with editorial interest in providing readers with models of "heroic" women (as Alice Walker put it on the cover of Motherwit) and in depicting independent, self-reliant womanhood. Nor is such attention to sexual politics unwarranted. To say that recollections which encourage us to read a life history with attention to its gendered configurations may in interracial textual collaborations between women be marked more clearly than other memories is neither to discredit a speaker's consciousness of herself as feminine nor to devalue her observations about oppression suffered on the basis of sex. An emphasis on indictments of gender inequities, however, occludes other memories—generational conflicts, familial relations, racial politics, detailed evocations of landscapes, personal rituals, community events—all of which must work together to define the emotional high tides and low water marks of any particular life.

But speakers do find ways to speak around editorial overdubbing. The editors of Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors implicitly document resistance to their own interpretive impositions:

Carte blanche from informants was not easily forthcoming, and we were not automatically granted permission for publication. In most cases, stipulations were required. For example, Dhyani Ywahoo objected strongly to a brief history of the Cherokee people written with the use of academic sources as references. She insisted that the portrayal of her people's history was not accurate and was biased from a white, Anglo educational system's point of view. Accordingly, the segment about Cherokee history has been deleted from this

text.  . . . Although more interpretation of the information might be wished for, it could not be achieved without substantial risk of losing permissions. (xiii)

Pat Taylor more self-consciously acknowledges the way Jewel Babb corrected interpretive "imbalances" in Border Healing Woman by sending "additional segments whenever she would recall some incident which seemed to her to be of value to the story" (xvi)—supplementing and revising editorial interpretation, that is—and by "beginning a manuscript devoted to her goats . . . because, to her, goats are at least as large in her life as is faith healing" (104–5). Nor is it difficult to read in Babb's refusal to affirm a rose-colored vision of the past a critique of those who dredge it up; as Taylor notes, she "does not think it is healthy to be drawn into reminiscing" (54). At the least, this discrediting of the autobiographical project by the autobiographer suggests that readers should listen to the personal record with an ear open to hearing those observations made sotto voce as well as comments accorded amplification by editorial technologies.

Consider the gendered readings supplied by editorial prompt in La Partera and Motherwit, feminine bildungsromans which interpret the mother-daughter relationship as the origin for Jesusita Aragón's and Onnie Lee Logan's obstetric careers. In La Partera, Aragón's initial self-situating as her mother's daughter provides the narrative with a frame of reference that will remain one of its structuring principles: "My mother got pregnant again, her eighth baby. All girls. Eight girls, trying to have a boy. Only three girls lived. I was the first that lived" (17). Here Aragón describes herself not by virtue of her singularity but, rather, as the issue of a maternal labor. In that the missing subject of the phrase "trying to have a boy" is "mother," this syntactical positioning of the "I" reproduces the maternal absence which structures the story as a whole.

Maternal lack is thus posited, as early as the second paragraph of the text, as the shaping principle of self-formation. Nor is this focus on denied maternal desire confined to the early pages of the narrative; it continues to make itself felt throughout Aragón's recollections. The memory of her mother's death provides one particularly telling illustration, as it follows closely upon the description of Aragón's birth and thus radically disrupts chronological sequence. The middle portion of La Partera, which records Jesusita's difficult years as a single mother, also interpolates a maternal presence, privileging her own mother as a figure of enormous symbolic

value: "There is nothing in the world like your mother. That's your best friend. I never forget her or forget how she looks or how she holds me. If I'd had my mother I would never have been put out of the house later. Never. She would have been good to me" (19).

While this textual "motive" accords with Buss's editorial design, the syntactical and stylistic construction of such allusions suggests that it is an impulse shared by Aragón herself. The speaker's assertion that "there is nothing in the world like your mother," for instance, by ungrammatically slipping into the present tense, underscores the intensity of Aragón's desire to foreground maternal absence as integral to the shaping of her identity as an adult. Likewise, Aragón's insistence on the curative power of her own touch ("when I touch people they feel better 'cause they trust me" [78]) reflects her faith in the redeeming quality of her mother's touch.

Although the combined weight of editorial interests and the speaker's own agenda directs readers to see this maternal deprivation as the single most important event leading to Aragón's calling as a midwife, consideration of the nuanced recollections of her early life suggests that this thesis fails to describe the complicated mesh of intimacies and distances which characterize familial bonds for her. Aragón may frame her work as a midwife in order to represence her mother, yet she suggests early in her narrative that this impulse is itself rooted in her relation to her father, or, more precisely, in her father's denial of her status as a daughter. She affirms feminine relationships not by distinguishing woman-to-woman ties from human relations in general but, on the contrary, by contextualizing them; her autobiographical revision of femininity, that is, is predicated upon an assessment of the ways in which masculinity is defined as well. She explains, for instance, "You know how my daddy used to call me? Amigo. Because when my mother was pregnant he was thinking that I'm going to be a boy. So that's why he called me amigo. 'Mi amigo, mi amigo, mi amigo'" (19–20). The tripled repetition is suggestive here—of a certain weariness on the part of Aragón; of stubbornness on the part of her father. That such a misnomer has complex effects on the daughter is indicated by Aragón quite explicitly. If she acknowledges that being called "amigo" "made me feel good," she asserts in the same sentence that "I wish I was a boy, but I wasn't" (20). The respect and authority of her position as her father's compañero comes at a cost which the articulation of unfulfilled desire in the second half of the sentence spells out. Despite eighteen years

of being raised "like a boy" (20), that is, Aragón places the greater emphasis on the disjunctive shift from daughter to fellow itself. Ultimately, the constructive aspects of playing the masculine part are outweighed by the dislocation of the self such a shift in gender roles produces.

In fact, Aragón makes it clear that her peculiar upbringing was designed so that she might more adequately fill the role of the missing son—not to "liberate" her from traditional sex roles, but precisely because of the necessity of keeping such roles intact. She is taught "to ride like a boy" (23), for instance, so that she will be able to do the work reserved for sons. A contemporary reader might be inclined—on editorial cue—to read her description as an affirmation of the enlarged possibilities open to women freed from constraining gender roles. But Aragón stresses the restricted options of a feminine upbringing, not to stigmatize women as hopelessly crippled by their circumstances but, rather, to praise their greater strength. "It's easy to be raised for a boy" (22); it is far more of a challenge to grow up female. Whereas Aragón is taught to ride like a boy, her grandmother sits a horse sidesaddle: "She can run and do how she wants on horseback, and she didn't fall. Every woman used to ride like her. But they didn't teach me to ride that way" (23). Far from impeding her progress, her grandmother's riding sidesaddle demonstrates her superior control, for she can maneuver on horseback as well as anyone riding astride.

Ultimately, the assumption of masculine chores is physically isolating and psychically estranging: "And when we have big fiestas over there, and I have to take care of the sheeps and everybody was at the fiesta, I have to come by myself on horseback, like a boy. Not like a girl, like a boy" (23). In her guise as vaquero, Aragón invokes her geographical liminality at the border of campo (country) and hogar (hearth) as a metaphor for the spiritual frontier she sees herself occupying as female "amigo." Her acknowledgment that her outdoor work fosters an independence and resilience that will help her survive her later difficulties contrasts with the fond nostalgia other Hispana writers express for their rare excursions "outside the walls."^[4] Yet she perceives her roaming as divorcing her from the love and care of the feminine domestic sphere from which she derives strength. Masculine work, it turns out, does not so much signify paternal respect as indicate familial disregard. Not surprisingly, her solitude on the land evokes longing for her mother:

When it rained and I was out far with the sheeps I have to stay there, taking care of them. I get under a rock or under a good tree. Sometimes I'm scared. . . . I cry for my mother. You know what I said? "Oh, dear mother. If I have you I wouldn't be here." She wouldn't make me work outside like that. I would be able to stay home, but the others don't care for me like my mother. (24)

Yet with this recollection we come full circle, for Aragón's unusual direct appeal ("You know what I said?") focuses our attention not so much on her recollected past as on her present relation with the editor who is calling up this series of memories. Is the address to Buss a way for Aragón to stress the significance of maternal absence? Or is it a response to a question of the editor's directing her to frame her history in terms that satisfy Buss's own interest in gendered readings?

The representation of maternal identity in Onnie Lee Logan's edited autobiography, Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story, provides another instance both of the temporary accord of autobiographic impulse with editorial design and of the ways the speaker's gloss of familial and professional affiliations escapes editorial assignment of value. Like Jesusita Aragón, whose work as a midwife suggests the need to recreate the mother-daughter bond, Logan posits maternal loss as formative of her own career. Some fifty-five years past her eighteenth year, Logan recalls the death of her mother as a severe trauma to her adolescent self. The reiterative exclamations of loss testify to the intensity of the shock: "When I lost her I was at a loss. I didn't have nobody to go to ask. . . . I was lost. That's the very reason I didn't go on to school. I was lost. I couldn't find myself" (73). Like Aragón, Logan describes her own birth in the third person, but where Jesusita's opening paragraphs sustain this self-distancing reference point, Logan's provides readers with two locations for narrative self-insertion: "The next sister, Evie Louise, raised the seven-month-old baby along with her baby. He was older than Lily Mae's baby. Evie taken Lily Mae's baby and raised it. Then Onnie was next to Evie Louise. I was the fo'teenth child. Next to Onnie is Bernice" (34).

With the advantage of hindsight, the speaker marks her interest in her vocation as originating in her mother's teaching: "Mother tried to give us the best thing to grow up on. She loved to get us around her sittin on the flo' around her and she start tellin us these things that would he'p us. She

would just sit us around and she'd start tellin us these stories about her mother-in-law that was such a good midwife" (47). A glance at the editorially selected title of this oral history suggests that acknowledgment of maternal influence does as much to develop Clark's agenda as to articulate Logan's own interests. On the one hand, the privileged location of this tribute as the opening paragraph of "Tradition" (a section and heading presumably designed by Clark) indicates that we should situate the emphasis on the maternal as an editorial interpretation. On the other hand, Logan's patterns of repetition suggest that this gloss is shared by the speaker:

Whatever they needed and whatever had to be done I did it. I could just see Mother in me doin those kinda things. I could just see Mother all over and I still can see her. When I get to doin somethin that's constructive like that for somebody else that's what Mother would've done herself. That's what she wanted me to do. That's the way she taught me to do. So I enjoy doin it. (96)

Such reiterative patterning is not unique to this paragraph but operates throughout the text. Over and over, Logan's work identity is framed as an outgrowth of a maternal legacy. "My mother did the same work. My mother delivered a many babies. She had the same record" (49), Logan affirms early in her story. Then, later:

My mother would send me down to tend and bathe my sisters' and brothers' babies. I got my good experience by bathin. That's where I got my start. That gave me experience in my early days—teenage. That just grew at me. That's what I want to be. It really did. It just expand in me that that's the job I want and I tried so hard. Mother told me, she said, "You've got to study to be gettin it. You've got to study to do nurse work." (71)

That this impulse cuts across section divisions suggests that Logan is articulating her own narrative goal here.

Lake Aragón's affirmations of maternal influence, Logan's frequent allusions to her mother effect a rapprochement between editorial agenda and autobiographical impulse, as the speaker's emphasis on maternal influence coincides with the editor's desire to equate midwifery with feminine authority. This confluence of goals conveniently overlooks the collaborators' racial differences and thus helps to suppress questions about the role of race in the making of the book. In reality, this conditional narrative accord

raises more questions than it solves. Yet it also allows Logan to develop her most sustained critique, a critique directed explicitly at the medical profession and more obliquely at editorial resistance to Logan's reassessments of obstetric "progress." Not surprisingly, given its publishing context, the clearest indictments of medical practice are developed around the question of women's reproductive rights. In one of the most assertively voiced theses of the text, Logan insists that decisions about birthing methods must be made by the mother. "Childbirth is not a sickness," she argues:

I declare a woman gonna have a baby if she out there in the middle of the street. She gonna have it. All she needs is somebody to wrap it up and take care and put some clothes on it. Fact of business, she can get up and do that herself. . . . Nobody supposed to pull that baby unless there is an emergency that she cannot have her baby normal. The contractions and the pressure brings the baby. . . . She can get up and do it herself. (130–31)

The statement provides a pointed critique of medical dependence on forceps. Coupled with the vigor and willfulness of her rhetoric here, Logan's attention to maternal resourcefulness, capacity, and will (read: "defiance") suggests that her comment is directed not only to a specific invasive technique and the abuses of (largely white and male) medical practitioners nor even to obstetric resistance to lay midwifery as a whole, but also to Clark's unwillingness to support her own critique of the medical system.

Consider, for instance, the editor's initial representation of lay midwives, " [In 1910] one-half of all births in America were attended by unlicensed, untrained midwives" (x), a statement that confuses an unlicensed practice with a lack of practice. Lay midwives are not by definition inexperienced. They are unlicensed simply because they work outside the aegis of the American Medical Association, which confers certification only upon midwives who are also nurses; people trained, that is, within the AMA's own educational system. Throughout her Introduction Clark discredits Logan even as she is apparently affirming her narrative. " [Logan's] story is not only the story of midwifery, but of her personal odyssey as a rural black woman determined to lead a life of meaning and fulfillment," she states (x); apparently women are exceptional if their lives have "meaning and fulfillment." She then proceeds to describe the story of midwifery by derogating the skill involved in labor coaching and assistance: "Midwifery

 . . . persevered through time as little more than the practice of childbearing women calling upon other women in their community to serve as birth attendants" (x, emphasis added). As if this were not enough to pull the rug from under Logan's feet, Clark continues to undermine midwifery: Massachusetts is a "progressive state" because it "had been able to outlaw midwifery altogether," whereas, "on the other hand, in 1919, Alabama"—Logan's home state—"was just passing its first law to regulate midwifery" (xi).

A focus on editorial as well as medical opposition to Logan's work reveals a first-person defense embedded in the following third-party description of labor coaching: "Durin labor I kep' em on their feet where in the hospital they buckle em down. . . . They don't like bein buckled down to have their baby. They don't likes it when they have the baby, they buckles em down and the nurse and the doctor leaves em. They get so uncomfortable being there and nobody sayin nothin to em" (141). Direct as is this critique of the medicalization of childbirth, what is perhaps most compelling here is Logan's affirmation of the subject, maternal and literary. What is really insufferable about hospital childbirth, the comment suggests, is the way physicians, through their use of invasive labor procedures, objectify the person who is giving birth. Similarly, what is most damaging about editorial-assisted autobiography is the way invasive scholarly representation deprives the autobiographer of authority over her own story.

Desanctifying the Clinic: Racializing Medical "Progress"

The ear accustomed to Onnie Lee Logan's clear-voiced defiance of the obstetric standard may not initially hear Jesusita Aragón's censure of physicians. Where Logan's narrative frequently stages opposition, Aragón's text as often uses the rhetoric of affirmation to further her critique. Presenting her relationship to the medical establishment by locating the doctor within her own frame of reference, for example, allows Aragón to recuperate her apparently subordinate clinical role. When a physician from Santa Fe comes to observe her work (presumably to ensure her "competency" under his own standard of measurement), Aragón retells the visit with the doctor as pupil-supplicant rather than teacher-examiner: "He asked me many questions and watched me. He's a midwife. What do you call it? An ob-

stetrician. He wanted to know how I used the olive oil and how I held the baby. . . . Other doctors come too. It makes me feel so good to have them come and watch me and talk with me" (72). Rather than distinguishing between their positions, Aragón emphasizes their professional similarity. By renaming the doctor as a midwife, she levels differences in authority.^[5]

In spite of Buss's resistance to this reading—which she articulates in her prefatory and concluding remarks—Aragón not only succeeds in criticizing the regulatory methods of the medical establishment, but manages to use that criticism as an effective vehicle for censuring the invasive tactics of Anglo-American political dominance more generally. Medicine, in her narrative, becomes simultaneously the referent and the metaphor for race relations.^[6] The confidence she demonstrates in the face of a potentially critical physician not only shores up her own authority as a midwife but allows her to resist medical and editorial censure.^[7] Recall that she repositions her "supervision" by the obstetrician as an exchange between colleagues; this kind of revision is pervasive throughout the narrative. By reauthorizing the techniques of midwifery, Aragón indicts medical blunders without sacrificing the affirmative rhetoric which sustains the narrative. In her story, it is Aragón who educates physicians about proper health procedures. "'Don't give her any X-rays. Take her in there; she's this way and that way,'" she explains (72), the repeated imperatives made imperious by the arbitrary generality of "this and that." The doctors are forced to recognize the accuracy of the midwife's diagnosis and to comply with her directives.

In contradistinction to medical wisdom, which as late as 1968 saw rural midwives as "untrained individual[s]" in no way to be compared with the "modern, well-trained . . . obstetrical assistant,"^[8] Aragón defines AMA techniques as generally inferior substitutes for Hispano practices: "I go and examine that girl, and it's a tube baby. . . . I call the obstetrician right away and tell him I have a girl like this. . . . He operate on her that night, and tells me, 'Jesusita, how did you know this?' I tell him, 'I don't know, I just use my hands, no instruments, and my hands can tell'" (77). "Hands of flesh" have been displaced by "hands of iron," putting into question the extent of this medical "advance."^[9] Whereas the doctor is at the mercy of his instruments, Aragón can control the diagnostic process herself, using her hands and a knowledge of childbearing acquired through personal ex-

perience and the familial expertise that has been passed down to her. The expression of uncertainty ("I don't know") is a deft rhetorical maneuver; apparently noncontentious, it in fact sustains the critique.

This discursive strategy of apparent acquiescence is characteristic of the text as a whole; where it is found, readers can expect to see Aragón at her most argumentative. The speaker uses a similar rhetoric when she describes the way she renegotiates her work schedule at a Las Vegas parachute factory. What looks like acceptance of the boss's demands for overtime—"When my boss asks me to stay two or three hours after work, overtime, I never say no" (57)—actually defines her as indispensable. "'I can't send you home because I like your work; you do everything I tell you,'" her supervisor acknowledges (58). Recollecting a bet the two made, she describes herself as working above and beyond his demands. Yet, just as Joanne Braxton cites Charlotte Forten Grimké's constant apologies "as a literary strategy" to avoid appearing "presumptuous or self-serving" (92), so we can see that Aragón's more contemporary accommodation masks her appropriation of authority. Although the boss's gamble is an exploitative strategy, her recollections focus not on the way he extracts her labor but, rather, on the means by which she establishes rules for working.

What begins as conciliation concludes unapologetically. By the close of her account, the balance of power between employee and employer is reversed. When Aragón lets her boss know that she also works as a midwife, he asks: "'Why didn't you tell me? I was ready to fire you, to send you back three times,'" to which she responds, "'Well, if you send me home I can look for another job.' 'No, that's OK, and you can go out when they need you'" (58). Not only does her defiance reveal her boss's threat as signifying nothing, it forces him to acquiesce in her restructuring of the work environment. Rather than endangering her job at the factory, her insistence on the priority of her work as a midwife consolidates her position there. It also improves conditions for other women workers:

So, he never bothers me again. When somebody goes to the office and asks for me, my boss goes and stands by me and says, "Somebody needs you better; you have another baby." And they let the ladies who are pregnant work to the last minute, and you know what he says, "You don't have to quit; here is Jesusita." And when they're to lift a heavy box or something, he says, "No, don't do it" and he looks for something easier for them to do. (58)

Aragón uses a similar disarming rhetoric whenever she passes judgment on the AMA. Consider the reiterated gesture of humility that prefaces each of her most significant rebuttals to Anglo health practices in the following passage:

So many things have changed over the years. Many things change in how we deliver babies. When I first be a midwife, some mothers give birth the old way; the way that's gone now. . . . I deliver two that way, and one of them was my sister-in-law. I don't know why, but with her first baby, she kneels down, and she says, "I feel better that way." So kneeling down is not too hard. And another lady, she does the same thing. It helps. I don't know why they stop doing that way, why they start laying on their backs. I think because to squat down is an old-fashioned way. (63, emphasis added)

A cursory reading might frame this comparison as noncommittal, a lament for tradition more quizzical than critical. A more attentive reading, however, suggests that the comment develops a sustained argument on a number of levels. Aragón's emphasis on the "help" that squatting provides in easing labor pains implicitly censures physicians for their cavalier neglect of the mother's welfare by suggesting that the change in methods has more to do with their out-of-hand dismissal of the "old-fashioned way" than with any considered opinion about the advantages and disadvantages of a specific technique.^[10] In addition, by initially invoking change to signify difference in the abstract ("So many things have changed over the years") she frames the specific change in birth method as argumentative support for a more general thesis about cultural change. The charge against "modern" medical practice encodes a racial inflection as well, for "the old way" is implicitly defined as Hispano here, while "change" is enforced by an Anglo-American system that disregards established practices without regard to their merit.

When the speaker does concede a certain efficacy to hospital birth practices, she frequently describes these techniques in the context of her own methods, a discursive strategy which reaffirms Hispano practice as it demystifies the "inventions" of the AMA. Such a strategy is particularly significant when one considers that arbitrary seizure of political power is often justified as a scientific "advance."^[11] For example, Aragón presents hospital incubation of premature infants as an alternative to an already

existing practice rather than a miraculous innovation of AMA-sponsored medical science: "Now if there are tiny babies, premature babies, they take them to the hospital and into the incubator, but long ago I had two babies, two-pound babies, and they grow; they're alive" (65).

This strategy of desanctifying the clinic by deconstructing the peremptory association of "change" with "progress" operates throughout Aragón's description of the Anglo health-care system. Recalling her sister's death and the doctors' inability to care for her, she focuses on the humble origins of Anglo medical techniques. Modern medical knowledge does not spring fully formed from the doctor's head; rather, it is painfully compiled from past mistakes—mistakes paid for by a community which had heretofore practiced its own methods of healing without the intercession of Anglo-American patron saints. Notwithstanding the apologetic disclaimer designed to disarm editorial resistance, Aragón's story indicts physicians for their ignorance, as her concluding remarks emphasize: "Now that I see too many things, I don't want to say the doctors don't know anything in those years, but the doctors know more now, have more experience, and they study too much, and they found how people get sick. Then the doctors didn't know what happened with my sister, and she got worse" (48).

Nor is medical ignorance solely a function of the past. Aragón discusses her experience with one young woman who almost dies because she is mistakenly assumed by both her physicians and her father to be pregnant. This anecdote upholds her own medical authority by documenting her correct diagnosis of the girl as sick with a tumor, but the story also focuses attention on her restoration of the daughter over and against patriarchal injunction. By juxtaposing medical disregard with paternal insensitivity, she demonstrates how gendered articulations of power intersect with racist hierarchies. If Anglo physicians are thus implicated in a violation of the woman's body—"the doctors do anything they want to with me" (77)—the father is also censured for his willingness to sacrifice the daughter as sexualized scapegoat for what is "bad" in the family's situation: "Her daddy says, 'No, I know she's going to die because you know what's the matter with her? She's pregnant, that's why she is bleeding and swelling. She's a bad girl, that's why'" (78).

In this consistently self-affirming narrative, Aragón explicitly voices the tension between speaker and editor only once: two pages after this unusually direct theorizing about the intersection of racial and gender oppres-

sion, she addresses Buss in a gesture that records the strain of maintaining a consistently confident stance with respect to medical and editorial authorities. Like the young woman whose own word she defends against paternal indictment, Aragón insists, "I do many things for the patients and I'm not lying; I'm telling the truth. I'm working hard, working so hard" (81).^[12]

Like Aragón's strategies for self-affirmation, contested both within the narrative by Anglo-American medical authorities and metatextually in the conflict between Buss's editorial agenda and Aragón's own, the critique of medical authority in Onnie Lee Logan's account of her work as a midwife is self-authorizing. Whereas Aragón often introduces her severest critiques with disclaiming modifiers, Logan, like Sarah Rice, generally calls attention to conflict directly. When she discusses race relations, for instance, she frequently invokes the racial politics encoded in her own mediated reminiscences. Thus in an argument about white-on-black rape she critiques the privileged status of white women in a gesture which includes her editor, Katherine Clark:

Now I tell you what they would mostly do. If they thought a black man was after a white woman, was likin into a white woman, off go his head and his foots too. . . . That happened, honey. That's just the way it was. But now let me tell you one thing. In those days—you might not like this what I'm fixin to say now. In those days when the white woman was involved, the white woman mostly involved herself. (38)

Such gestures toward the narrative frame—and to the conversations between editor and autobiographer that eventuate in the narrative—compel readers to recognize how these inequities of power structure the speaker's ideas about race relations. They ask us to consider to what extent Clark's probable disapproval ("you might not like this what I'm fixin to say now") shapes Logan's speech. Here is a particularly explicit account: "They didn't have to accuse em in those days. They didn't have to have no reason. Or they'll make up a reason. Because we was Negroes, that's all I can say. We had to keep to ourselves. I could say a slight word to you and you could say anything in this world to me you wanted to. If I would answer you back I was go'n get it" (40, emphasis added). The manipulation of personal pronouns requires readers both to question their own responses (how does ethnicity inform my/our/ their reading practice?) and to consider how racial dynamics structure the

speaker's sense of her audience. Significantly, Logan establishes ethnic identity without losing the distinction of autobiographical voicing. Negotiating between the languages of ethnography and autobiography, she connects notions of the self with ideas of community by linking them syntactically in the relation between "they/[th]em" and "we/I/you."

This focus on the mechanics of textual production almost always accompanies the speaker's more direct critiques of racism, even when such open denunciation is modified by being filtered through an appraisal of specific obstetric practice. The most severe condemnations, then, are framed in such a way as to discourage both a resistant editor and any defensive listeners from argument. Explaining why blacks preferred a midwife to a physician, Logan indicts racism and corrects Clark's representation of "'grann[y]'" midwives as poor substitutes for obstetric medicine: "The white doctors at this time—let me tell you about the white doctors at this time. . . . They didn't care. . . . One thing, honey, two-thirds of em didn't use the black at that time as a human being. They thought that we was—as they used to call us—animals" (56, emphasis added). The same open appeal characterizes this later discussion of the subject: "But now I'll tell you the truth . The black people would always prefer a midwife &x188. The general run of em was white that was runnin that clinic. The black have always avoided the white. Why? I can tell you why black people was afraid of white doctors. They was afraid for the way they know they was gonna be treated" (101, emphasis added).

Logan's censure of racism is not always so explicit, however. When the speaker shifts from discussing "those days" (the irretrievable past, that is) to recollecting her own history, her language becomes more circuitous: "The white girls they start readin mo' about havin their babies and they learn mo' about what they do in the hospital. Now this is what they say. In the hospital they acts mo' like it's their baby than it's my baby.' I'm tellin you what they tells me. I ain't talkin bout what I said. This is what they say" (129). Despite the fact that her point about the doctors' preemption of maternal prerogative coincides with Clark's agenda here, the sources Logan uses to authorize her reading of the situation compel her to state this thesis less directly. That affirmative voice with which Logan asserts her critique of medical practice begins to falter when her comments address racial politics. Note how she describes the turn from home remedies to over-the-counter drugs:

Open up the chest from the smell of the turpentine. No doctor—had to have some kinda medicine. It worked. But now since the world gets weaker and wiser the doctors has gotten to the place and science has gotten to the place they makes all these other medicines to take the place of those old Indian remedies. You don't have to have so much of it now. Befo' it wasn't to be bought. (62)

Initially Logan appears to be describing turpentine as a medical anachronism, a rough approximation of "some kinda medicine" to be discarded with the advent of physicians' pharmaceuticals. Certainly the discourse of progress is here; insisting "You don't have to have so much of it now" locates the earlier remedy as a historical necessity rather than a preferred cure. But a closer reading suggests how Logan subverts the very language of medical progress the passage appears to be supporting. The emphatic assertion of the third sentence, for instance, insists that we not discredit practical solutions merely because they are less glamorous than medical substitutes. The following sentence builds on the implicit critique in this phrase, the alliterative conjunction of "weaker" with "wiser" calling into question the nature of this medical "advance." All of this quiet irony works to destabilize the discourse of progress, allowing us to read into the final assertion, "It wasn't to be bought," a marked feeling of loss, a sense of a kind of knowledge beyond the dictates of the medical marketplace.

The discrepancy between received notions of obstetric advance and Logan's critical reappraisal of them is even more acute in the discussion of "those old remedies" which follows this passage. Asserting that she does not depend on home cures as much as her mother did, Logan discusses the apparent merits of newer drugs:

Along about my time they was plenty of medicine that you could go buy. Vicks salve for fever and for colds but I always have said it's made outa the same stuff that lil weed is. See all a that start comin in that you could go to the drugsto' or you could go to the sto' and buy it durin my time. So I didn't have to deal with those home cures but I've heard of it so much so until I know they used it in those days. I'm glad I wasn't here to have to in those times. I knew better. Everything had improved since those times. With all of that science I didn't have to come in contact with so much of that other stuff. (64)

I have quoted this passage at some length in order to demonstrate its circuitous discursive strategy, a strategy which ultimately reauthorizes "that

other stuff" censured by medical advance. Logan frames her critique by invoking the discourse of progress, gesturing toward the improvements of science. The most extensive argument of this passage, however, flies in the face of the assertions that introduce and conclude it. Rather than deriding home cures as a tradition of the past, the middle section insists on their continued efficacy by establishing a link between "old remedies" and "science." Drugs like "Vicks salve," Logan maintains, are derived from the herb midwives use to cure colds and fever. Subversive use of the language of technological innovation thus allows Logan to praise her own methods of care without appearing overly contentious and without seeming to contradict that assumed wisdom which any midwife practicing under the rubric of the AMA would necessarily be expected to appreciate.

Granted, this kind of rhetorical see-saw is not always the rule in Logan's narrative. Nevertheless, we very rarely see theorizing about race relations outside some kind of modifying discursive frame. Where she is more explicit, as I have suggested, she calls attention to the narrative frame by appealing to her editor.^[13] In the absence of direct address, however, Logan frames her critical remarks within a rubric like the one discussed above, one ostensibly affirmative of the medical norm.

Her reaffirmation of midwifery against obstetric judgment (65) provides a final illustration of this oblique form of argumentation. On the one hand, she appears to accept the medical judgment of midwives as unskilled: "They were doin . . . a job well done as fur as their knowledge would lead em." On the other, her insistence that "those old midwives in those days was black womens not doin it for a job but doin it as a person knowin there was need for it" pointedly suggests that the obstetrician's driving concern is not so much his patient's welfare as his own financial health. Having censured physicians both for their lack of concern for mothers—"The person with all the knowledge and all the sense didn't come around and didn't make no effort and didn't do nothin"—and lack of support for midwives—"They were doing the best they can . . . I don't call that ignorant"—Logan then disarms potential resistance by a rhetorically dramatic concession which, if it distressingly mimics racist discourse, constitutes a form of critique in and of itself: "I don't say she wasn't filthy. I don't say she wasn't uncompetent. Those old Negroes in those days needed trainin."

Like Aragón's comparative critique, Logan's arguments not only restore status to midwifery but insist upon her own authority. Assertions like "I

got a permit quicker than any midwife that was in Mobile" (88) articulate what is distinctive about this autobiographical subject and thus work against the editorial tendency to define the speaker as significant because she is somehow "representative."^[14]

Many of her most vigorous affirmations of self-worth depend on a religious discourse. Where either a literary or a political context would discourage such expressions of self-worth, defining her medical successes and personal triumphs as God-given enables her to focus attention on her strengths without appearing contentious or overly prideful. Thus Logan follows a particularly pointed story of medical triumph by ascribing her success to God. When the physician in charge counsels her not to attend the birth of a breech baby, it is the Lord who provides her with the means of contravening this superior (medical) authority, and the Lord who blesses her with success: "The Lord said, 'Now you don't need Dr. Muskat. You can handle this'. . . . About three or four minutes later I had delivered that breech birth and that was my first baby and I did it all by myself" (91). Thus the rhetoric of divine power authorizes self-congratulation in a historical climate that demands from the midwife humility above all else (recall J. Clifton Edgar's smug assertion in the preceding chapter that "the great body of midwives . . . have a . . . wholesome respect for the doctors"). It also provides a way to reaffirm cultural practice (given that spirituality is a racially coded discourse) and to sanctify personal triumph with an unarguably potent stamp of approval. Consider, for instance, the following claim in Motherwit:

The classes taught me how to tie the cord. The classes taught me how to put the silver nitrate in the babies' eyes. . . . But so many things that I have run into that the classes did not teach me. . . . I can only put it this way and I can be for sho that I'm right. Two-thirds of what I know about deliverin, carin for mother and baby, what to expect, what was happenin and was goin on, I didn't get it from the class. God gave it to me. So many things I got from my own plain motherwit. (90)

Logan's invocation reiterates an "I" defiant of the medical establishment and affirms the authority of "my own mind" (91) as superior to the teachings of that establishment. The need to justify her power as derived from God, then, enables rather than mitigates self-possession.^[15]

Aragón, too, represents her healing and divining powers, as well as her

fortitude in caring for two young children alone, as of divine origin when she insists that "I never get too tired when I was young. Never, and nothing hurts me. . . . I don't know why, but never, and that's a good gift. God gave me that" (50). God's grace, Aragón suggests, renders familial neglect and economic hardship insubstantial, making her impervious to hurt.

Such self-validating comments do not only allow Aragón and Logan to speak pointedly about familial and medical neglect. Perhaps more important, they provide a language for theorizing about racial and sexual politics in discursive contexts that discourage plain speaking. Thus Aragón follows up her comparison of medical systems by gesturing toward the cultural conflict that underlies it:

Now kids don't pay no attention to your eyes. It's hard to make them understand. I don't know why. Once I asked a doctor about this, about these modern kids who don't mind  . . . "Because they are drinking milk instead of nursing when they're babies." . . . And I believe that. But I think it's harder now for kids to grow. They don't know so much what to do with themselves. Things have changed a lot, and there's no more land. (86)

The question of feminine—here, a specifically maternal authority—cannot be disengaged from the facts of racial exploitation. It is the seizure of Hispano property, Aragón argues, and the poverty, unemployment, and frustration that attend it that lead to familial abuse: "I think of why people are so poor, so many poor ladies all along. I think that . . . people don't have their land and that people are unhappy and drink. I think of single mothers who are afraid to ask their parents for money, and I think of ladies whose husbands don't want to work or they're getting drunk all the time, and that's why they don't have money" (84).

Similarly, Logan's critique of medical practice acts as a metonym for a discussion of racist practice more generally, as in the following substitution of "white doctors" for "whites": "You know why the blacks avoided the white doctors? Because, honey, they avoided the whites period" (58). Or consider this story about a mother in labor. Just as the mother must learn patience—"You will have a much easier, shorter time if you get in yo' mind, it's my baby and God's gonna let me have him in due time" (176)—so "I would say to black people that are bitter to take yo' time. You cain't hurry God. That was my point. . . . A midwife like me, they just take their time and let God work the plan" (176). Marking the segue from maternal

labor to a measured racial advancement as "the point" of her story does not displace autobiographical distinctiveness, however. In the final assertion the speaker reinserts herself (albeit as midwife) as the pivot upon which the entire theory of race relations turns.

An Object Lesson from Resisting Subjects

The analysis of such rhetorical strategies suggests that current critical models are inadequate for explaining discursive practice in the apparently nonoppositional text. In demonstrating the capacity for resistive, even radicalizing utterance in La Partera and Motherwit, Jesusita Aragón and Onnie Lee Logan demand that we reevaluate Philippe Lejeune's thesis about "Those Who Do Not Write."^[16] Clearly, the demands of collaborative publishing make plain speaking difficult; it would be politically naive to expect otherwise. Yet the mere presence of linguistic constraints does not preclude resistance. Both Aragón's critique and Logan's methods of argumentation, for example, are no less pointed for being framed indirectly. In fact, in the process of learning to recognize their discursive patterns—contentions developed "on a bias" across gestures of accommodation, criticisms articulated by invoking the "master's" language only to read against it, emphases developed through patterns of repetition, arguments that do not bulldoze the opposition but proceed circuitously or through a process of accretion—I have begun to recognize the degree to which such sophisticated critical maneuvering, by inflecting the scripted discourse, allows the speakers to direct the text. Jesusita Aragón and Onnie Lee Logan, then, do not so much, as Lejeune assumes, "accede to" those "images of themselves that have already been formed" (199–200) as work around such representations. Rather than assuming that working-class speakers are inevitably either "spoken for" or "spoken about," we need instead to pay closer attention to what they are actually saying and to recognize that rhetorical resourcefulness which allows the subject of a collaborative text to use someone else's literary script to speak her own mind.