1. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food (1949; Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1982); Rose Schneiderman with Lucy Goldthwaite, All for One (New York: Paul S. Erikson, 1967); [Jesusita Aragón as told to] Fran Leeper Buss, La Partera: Story of a Midwife (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1982). Further citations will appear in the text.

2. By using the phrase "making the self," of course, I mean to distinguish between the textual self and the actual "I"; between the subject represented in narrative, that is, and the authorial "I" that constructs this self on the page.

3. Californios writing as early as 1885 insist that it is the "Spanish" who are "native" to the state. See María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, The Squatter and the Don, ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita (1885; Houston: Arte Público, 1992), 66.

4. Jacob A. Riis, The Battle with the Slum (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 364.

5. As late as 1993, Margo Culley's introduction to her edited collection, American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992)—a text which includes a range of autobiographical voices—tends in rehearsing a conservative model of American autobiography to shut out many writers whose autobiographical practices have roots in other long-standing American traditions: "The dominant tradition of American women's autobiography has roots in Puritan beliefs about the self and the Puritan practice of conversion narra-

tives. . . . Even in periods when autobiography has become a thoroughly secular enterprise its forms and purposes can be traced to these earlier traditions" (10).

6. Sonia Saldívar-Hull, "Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to Geopolitics," in Hector Calderon and José David Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 206.

7. Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women's Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 23.

8. Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, "Introduction: De/Colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women's Autobiographical Practices," in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women's Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), xvii.

9. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 14.

10. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, We Fed Them Cactus (1954; Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989) (further references will appear in the text); Cleofas M. Jaramillo, Romance of a Little Village Girl (San Antonio: Naylor, 1955).

11. Genaro M. Padilla, "Imprisoned Narrative? Or, Lies, Secrets, and Silence in New Mexico Women's Autobiography," in Calderón and Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands, 47. See also Padilla's My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) for a more extended discussion of the discursive context within which Cabeza de Baca and Jaramillo wrote and published. My own readings of both writers owe much to the brilliant historiographic and textual analysis Padilla has brought to bear on their writing, and to whose work here as elsewhere I am indebted.

12. Many feminists have been quick to claim autobiography as the genre most hospitable to women writers. Certainly, as Patricia Spacks asserts, "Women, for obvious social reasons, have traditionally had more difficulty than men about making public claims of their own importance. . . . The housewife seldom offers her life to public view" (cited by Estelle Jelinek, "Women's Autobiography and the Male Tradition," in Estelle C. Jelinek, ed., Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980], 112). But to suggest, as Jane Marcus does in "Invincible Mediocrity: The Private Selves of Public Women," that because "the memoir made no grand claims to high artistic achievement . . . women could write in this genre without threatening male hegemony'' (in Shari Benstock, ed., The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988], 120) ignores the fact that for most women—women granted less privilege than that of the white middle class—even this apparently less intimidating avenue does not offer any easy literary entrée. See also Frances Smith Foster's attention to the politics of publishing for nineteenth-century black women in "Autobiography After Emancipation:

The Example of Elizabeth Keckley": "Racism and sexism made literacy difficult and often illegal for the white women and the people of color who together constituted then, as now, the majority of Americans. Those who were able to write or to dictate their stories generally found few publishing opportunities. And those who both wrote and published their versions of self found that the readers' expectations and prejudices required particular modifications of style and content and even then often distorted what was written" (in James Robert Payne, ed., Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives [Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992], 35).

13. Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 42.

14. Personal Narratives Group, eds., Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 7.

15. Raymond A. Paredes, "The Evolution of Chicano Literature," in Houston A. Baker Jr., ed., Three American Literatures (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982), 37.

16. William Boelhower, "The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States," in Paul John Eakin, ed., American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 125.

17. Onnie Lee Logan, Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story , as told to Katherine Clark (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989). Further citations will appear in the text.

18. Narratives of women of color are not only exploited for their ethnographic value, however bell hooks suggests another (mis)use of personal narrative: "Often novels or confessional autobiographical writings are used to mediate the tension between academic writing, theory, and the experiential. This seems to be especially the case when the issue is inclusion of works by women of color in feminist theory courses" ( Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black [Boston: South End Press, 1989], 37-38).

19. [Aragón as told to] Buss, La Partera, vii.

20. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, "Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour? Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and the Chinese American Autobiographical Controversy," in Payne, ed., Multicultural Autobiography, 262.

21. Wong, "Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour?" 264.

22. Wong, "Autobiography as Guided Chinatown Tour?" 262.

23. James Clifford's characterization of the nineteenth-century ethnographer as attaining ethnographic authority by "undergoing a personal learning experience comparable to an initiation" is suggestive here ( The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988], 28). The "initiation" accords the ethnographer cultural mastery, identifying him as bicultural: fluent in the cultural codes of his own world and the one he is studying. The presumed subject (object) of study, meanwhile, represented as ever more firmly rooted in his own world—or, rather, in the world the ethnogra-

pher makes for him in print—becomes by comparison far less of an authority. Thus ethnographic narrative in this sense works to (re)produce the ethnographer, rather than his apparent object, as subject. For a concise history of American anthropology in relation to its objects of inquiry, see Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), especially chapter 1, "Ethnography and Literature: A History of Their Convergence."

24. Some readers may see the absence of theorists of the subject like Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva, Butler, and Fuss in this study as a conspicuous lack, but this gap is studied. Certainly, these writers challenge universalist, humanist assumptions about subjectivity, as the attention they have received by autobiography scholars makes evident. I have chosen not to treat their work in any sustained way here, however, because a great number of studies of autobiography have already provided us with useful and extensive treatments of their theories in relation to the study of women's personal narratives. (The reader might wish to consult Françoise Lionnet's Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989] and Sidonie Smith's more recent Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body, two fine contemporary studies that do engage these theorists.) More important, notwithstanding crucial differences among them, the models of the subject such theorists produce appear essentially ahistorical and thus ill suited to illuminating the texts this study considers. The sweeping assertions they make about subjectivity are largely inhospitable, that is, to this project, which works to formulate and to privilege a theory of the concrete and which interests itself in arguing for the usefulness of a methodology of the local.

25. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography, ed. Robert Hemenway (1942; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 237.

26. Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945), 90.

27. From Georg Misch's compendium, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), to James Olney's collection, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), autobiographical identity is markedly isolationist. Hertha D. Wong provides a particularly useful discussion of this standard subject in chapter 1 of Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). See also her identification of "the Eurocentric insistence on such literary conventions as chronology, unity, and closure" (87) as the defining markers of traditional autobiography. See, in addition, Sidonie Smith's cogent description of the "universal subject" in Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: "Imperial interpreter, provocateur of totalization, the essential self is likewise a 'free' agent, exercising self-determination over meaning, personal destiny, and desire. Neither powerless nor passive, it assumes and celebrates agency. Its movement through time/history is purposeful, consistent, coherent, hence teleological" (8). For other useful critiques of autobiography theory's privileging of a model of the self that celebrates autonomy to the

exclusion of community, see Regenia Gagnier's "The Literary Standard, Working-Class Autobiography, and Gender," in Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography and Gender (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990); Jane Marcus's "Invisible Mediocrity: The Private Selves of Public Women." In Shari Benstock, ed., The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Arnold Krupat's discussion of "The Concept of the Canon" in his The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Sidonie Smith's A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Bella Brodski and Celeste Schenck's Introduction to their Life/Lines. Theorizing Women's Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Smith and Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the Subject; and Lionnet's Autobiographical Voices, among others.

28. In his 1970 Introduction to the autobiography, for instance, Robert Hemenway describes Hurston as "nonconfrontational" and her book one that "sacrifices truth to the politics of racial harmony" (xiii). His 1984 edition of a less bowdlerized version of the text acts as a corrective to this earlier assessment, however, as does Claudine Raynaud's analysis of omitted sections of the narrative. In " 'Rubbing a Paragraph with a Soft Cloth'? Muted Voices and Editorial Constraints in Dust Tracks on a Road" (in Smith and Watson, eds., De/Colonizing the Subject ), Raynaud suggests that the censored portions emphasize "the complexity of [Hurston's] resistance to the white publishing world, and the ways in which she eventually complied. . . . It restores from the original text a more accurate, if still extremely puzzling, portrait of Hurston'' (35). See Françoise Lionnet's discerning reading of Dust Tracks for another important exception to this critical history. In the following passage, for instance, Lionnet critiques those scholars who have held Hurston to account for careless record-keeping and suggests that we discard the notion that autobiography enjoys a closer relation to referentiality than do other genres: "If over-enthusiasm can be seen as another word for hyperbole, then Hurston the writer is hereby cautioning her own reader to defer judgment about the explicit referentiality of her text. Why come to it with preconceived notions of autobiographical truth when the tendency to make hyperbolic and over-enthusiastic statements about her subject matter is part of her 'style' as a writer? Couldn't we see in this passage Hurston's own implicit theory of reading and thus use it to derive our interpretive practice from the text itself, instead of judging the work according to Procrustean notions of autobiographical form?" ( Autobiographical Voices, 101-2).

29. Frank Chin, "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake," in Jeffery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds., The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (New York: Meridian, 1991). In her analysis of Christian Indian autobiography, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff suggests that apparently assimilationist texts

may use tropes of acculturation subversively:"The spiritual confessions linked Indian autobiographers to Protestant literary traditions and identified these authors as civilized Christians whose experiences were as legitimate subjects of written analysis as the experiences of other Christians. Apes, Copway, and later American-Indian autobiographers, like the slave narrators, used personal and family experiences to illustrate the suffering their people endured at the hands of white Christians" ("John Joseph Mathews's Talking to the Moon: Literary and Osage Contexts," in Payne, ed., Multicultural Autobiography, 3). Granting the different historical and cultural trajectories of two distinct American literary traditions, Ruoff's argument about Native American personal narrative nevertheless provides a useful methodological corrective to Chin's "either/or" reading of Chinese American autobiography.

30. Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices, 128.

31. Thus, for instance, Chin's reading of Wong's narrative as acculturated because it espouses a "Western" idea of individualism ignores this writer's frequent invocation of a specifically Chinese American collective. Consider the following description of mutual aid associations: "Family associations took care of personal and business matters for Chinese in America. Controversies without legal status in American courts could be taken up in association meetings; destitute Chinese families or widows who were not American citizens could get immediate assistance; men without relatives could have their funeral arrangements assured" (Come All Ye Asian American Writers," 118). It is just as easy to find passages celebrating a distinctly Chinese American culture as it is to locate what Chin might characterize as more ideologically compromised portions of the narrative.

32. This formulation means neither to suggest that all white autobiographers refuse to assign cultural coordinates to their self-representations nor to assume that all writers of color are focused primarily on enunciating their cultural and ethnic origins, but merely to assert that until very recently, autobiography critics have either ignored the cultural inflections of Anglo-American canonical texts or have described them all as variations on a single Puritan theme in such a way as to preclude comparative cultural study.

33. For an example of this tendency to overcorrect for the "existential" model of the subject by celebrating a wholly collaborative idea of identity, see hooks in Talking Back: "I evoked the way of knowing I had learned from unschooled Southern black folks. We learned that the self existed in relation, was dependent for its very being on the lives and experiences of everyone, the self not as signifier of one 'I' but the coming together of many 'I's, the self as embodying collective reality past and present, family and community" (30-31). This formulation seems to me to oversimplify the range of representational strategies African American autobiography provides readers, but hooks's assertion that we read the self historically ("Social construction of the self in relation would mean . . . that we would be in touch with what Paule Marshall calls 'our ancient properties'—our history") is crucial.

See chapter 6 for a more sustained discussion of critical constructions of the relational self.

34. In "Women's Autobiographical Selves: Theory and Practice," in Benstock, ed., The Private Self, 43.

35. Krupat, The Voice in the Margin, 133-34.

36. With our sometimes foreshortened scholarly memories we may take such correctives for granted, yet these revisions are both relatively recent and hard won, and the ground they question remains a contested site. Thus as late as 1980, Roger Rosenblatt supported what Krupat identifies as "egocentric individualism" ( Ethnocriticism, 29) when he described autobiography as "one person in relation to one world of that person's manufacture, which is that person in macrocosm, explained and made beautiful by that same person in the distance, playing god to the whole unholy trinity" ("Black Autobiography: Life as the Death Weapon," in Olney, ed., Autobiography, 169), and in the same collection James Olney rehearses the standard definition of autobiography as deriving from a tradition inaugurated by St. Augustine, celebrating the "dawning self-consciousness of Western man that found literary expression in the early moments of modern autobiography" (''Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and Bibliographical Introduction," 13). It is pronouncements like these, by no means exceptional, that make the argument for the kind of more expansive definition advanced implicitly by Blackburn, and more explicitly by Krupat, so necessary.

37. See William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), and Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1986); Joanne M. Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

38. Carolyn Porter, "Are We Being Historical Yet?" South Atlantic Quarterly 87 (Fall 1988): 782.

39. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, ed. Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, introduction by Dexter Fisher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 149.

40. Michael M. J. Fischer, "Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory," in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 125. Fisher does not deny that cultural practice may be undertaken consciously, but his use of a psychoanalytic model of transference and of what he calls "dream-work" to explain ethnicity tends in practice to privilege unconscious mechanisms of transmittal as more "sophisticated"—and thus more worthy of study—than more direct means of cultural reproduction. See, for instance, the following weighted comparison: "Ethnicity is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual and . . . it is often something over which he or she lacks control.

Ethnicity is not something that is simply passed on from generation to generation, taught and learned; it is something dynamic, often unsuccessfully repressed or avoided" (195; emphasis added).

41. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women," in Benstock, ed., The Private Self, 83.

42. Cf. Françoise Lionnet's discussion of ethnic and autobiographical authority in Hurston's Dust Tracks: "Despite its rich cultural content, the work does not authorize unproblematic recourse to culturally grounded interpretations. It is an orphan text that attempts to create its own genealogy by simultaneously appealing to and debunking the cultural traditions it helps to redefine" ( Autobiographical Voices, 101). Orphan and affiliate, Hurston is at once a presence distinct from others and a cultural arbiter wholeheartedly engaged with a racial collective. According herself the power to revise the cultural standard also grants her more weight as an autobiographical subject.

43. Michael Omi, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986), 72-73.

44. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 38.

45. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 49.

46. This formulation is Genaro Padilla's in My History, Not Yours . Padilla suggests that "ideologically subordinate speech . . . actually constitutes multi-addressed utterance in which pragmatic appeasement reads at one surface of language while anger and opposition read at other, and often within the same, surfaces. Such strategic utterance constitutes a form of rhetorical camouflage which first appropriates a public 'voice' for an individual from an otherwise 'silenced' group and then turns that voice to duplicitous purpose. Such discursive duplicity functions to communicate different stories to different audiences, with an implicit understanding that one's own people will . . . someday read them 'de una manera digna de ellos'" (draft version of chapter 1, msp. 42). Given the all too common practice of figuring the speaker as "always already" silenced, the focus on speech is crucial here. Although her essay works in general to deconstruct reductive notions of oppressor/oppressed power relations, Chandra Talpade Mohanty's description of resistance as inhering "in the very gaps, fissures, and silences of hegemonic narratives" is illustrative of this tendency to deny voice to those who lack political authority (Introduction to her Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991], 38). This focus on silence may be an eloquent metaphor for oppression, but I would argue that it is inaccurate at the level of the literal and disabling as a trope.

47. VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking; Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970; New York: Ballantine, 1986), xv.

48. Omi, Racial Formation, 67-68.

49. John Brenkman, Culture and Domination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 24. Mohanty makes a similar point in Third World Women when she suggests that "it is possible to retain the idea of multiple, fluid structures of domination which intersect to locate women differently at particular historical conjunctures, while at the same time insisting on the dynamic oppositional agency of individuals and collectives and their engagement in 'daily life'" (13).

50. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1989), 168.

51. José Antonio Villareal, Pocho (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 108.

52. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 258.

53. Marine Baca Zinn, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton Dill, "The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in Women's Studies," in Gloria Anzaldúa, ed., Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990), 34. For another useful critique of Anglo-American feminism see Norma Alarcón, "The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism," in Calderón and Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands . Alarcón argues that privileging gender effaces the ways in which "'one becomes a woman' in opposition to other women" as well as in "simple opposition to men" (33).

54. Julia Watson, "Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography," in Robert Folkenflik, ed., The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 71.

55. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, "Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach," in Eakin, ed., American Autobiography, 161.

56. Fox-Genovese, "My Statue, My Self," 71.

57. Charlotte L. Forten [Grimké], The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era , ed. Ray Allen Billington (1953; New York: W. W. Norton, 1981; Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Penguin, 1964); Marita Golden, Migrations of the Heart: An Autobiography (New York: Ballantine, 1983); Maya Angelou, All God's Children Wear Traveling Shoes (New York: Random House, 1986).

58. Mary G. Mason, "The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers" in Olney, ed., Autobiography, 210.

59. Margo Culley, "What a Piece of Work Is "Woman'!" in her collection, American Women's Autobiography, 15-16.

60. Elizabeth Hasanovitz, One of Them: Chapters from a Passionate Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918).

61. Schneiderman with Lucy Goldthwaite, All for One, 76.

62. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow (New York: George H. Doran, 1918), 259.

63. Mathews's recognition of the specificity of women's lives is worth quoting in full:"'Moreover, beyond acknowledgment of diversity among the groups of women, there is the need to acknowledge the diversity of each individual woman. . . . Each woman in any society is not simply a member of one definite social category, but is a unique and female focus of a multitude of coexisting and competing social groups and relationships'" (as cited by Mary Jo Maynes, "Gender and Narrative Form in French and German Working-Class Autobiography," in Personal Narratives Group, eds., Interpreting Women's Lives, 40-41). Acknowledging the specificity of such narratives allows us a measure of defense against the critical complacency which can follow upon any sustained inquiry. It allows us, for instance, to read a critique of paternal authority encoded in a text that presents itself as all filial duty, without discrediting a more affirmative representational moment of the relation between father and daughter. Consider the irony with which Jade Snow Wong mocks this moment of fatherly self-importance: "One day when the family was at dinner, father broke the habitual silence by announcing a new edict: "I have just learned that the American people commonly address their fathers informally as "Daddy"! The affectionate tone of this word pleases me. Hereafter, you children shall address me as "Daddy.''' No comment was required; the children mentally recorded this command" (12). Or this remembrance by Marita Golden: "My father was the first man I ever loved. He was as assured as a panther. His ebony skin was soft as the surface of coal. . . . In school he went as far as the sixth grade, then learned the rest on his own. . . . By his own definition he was 'a black man and proud of it.' Arming me with a measure of this conviction, he unfolded a richly colored tapestry, savored its silken texture and warned me never to forget its worth. Africa: 'It wasn't dark until the white man got there.' Cleopatra: 'I don't care WHAT they tell you in school, she was a black woman'" (3).

64. hooks, Talking Back, 4.

65. Sarah Rice, He Included Me: The Autobiography of Sarah Rice, transcribed and ed. Louise Westling (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 77.

66. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 9.