The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
and unnamed fears—those were between them and Jesus. This is not a “tell-all” biography. I did not write this to expose them but to better understand the private worlds of white women in this generational cohort. Moreover, given my position as intimate insider, my mom and my aunts did not have the same privilege of withholding information as do strangers we encounter in the field. I know things about them that they could have kept hidden from outsiders. This ethically required a more restrictive reporting strategy. I had to allow them to edit out material that they felt made them vulnerable.
Some of my social science colleagues worried that I gave the Grasinski Girls too much control, and that their stories would be too “constructed” in a way that implied falsehood. But anthropologist Clifford James argues that ethnographies are always constructed truths shaped by the politics of the academy and the observer, and they are always partial, but not necessarily false. He writes, “All constructed truths are made possible by powerful ‘lies’ of exclusion and rhetoric. Even the best ethnographic texts—serious, true fictions—are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through time in ways their authors cannot fully control.”18 Our understandings of the world are always shaped by paradigms and ideologies (hidden or visible), as well as taken-for-granted privileges and power. We are mistaken if we see only the paradigms and partial truths of the people of study, and not those that belong to the social scientist. We all look at some parts of the social world and ignore others. We manipulate data to argue a point or minimize conflicting data to emphasize analytical categories. We construct theoretical questions to fit with the methods that we know. We censor the solutions we propose according to the political ideologies we espouse.
In this study, the Grasinski Girls’ life stories were constructed in the relationship between us, and in that relationship I was a niece and a daughter. As such, it felt odd and ineffectual to use only a traditional academic style of writing which, as Susan Krieger notes, “is designed to produce distance and to exclude emotion—to speak from above and outside experience, rather than from within.”19 Sociological language seemed too stark and sterile to be able to describe Aunt Caroline’s wheat-colored baskets of overflowing dried flowers cascading from the tops of large wooden cabinets, or Aunt Nadine’s rich desserts that are not too gooey, not too chocolaty, but have a lingering sweetness that makes me hold them on my tongue and groan, reluctant to swallow. When speaking from within, the complexity of the world is magnified by closeness. When we look at ourselves, or people who are close to us, the intimacy breathes contradictions and defies stark categorization: we can love and hate the same person, we resist and roll over in the face of oppression, we are both privileged and disadvantaged. The distant social scientist can more easily see individuals as social categories. But when I write about my aunts, I cannot see the categories for the faces.
What price did I pay for this closeness? While this insider knowledge made me privy to a lifetime of glances, nods, and stories that they do not want told to nonfamily outsiders, how does the fact that they are my mother and my aunts, for heaven’s sake, interfere with my ability to “get it right?”20 Sociologist Robert Merton notes that the problem of being an insider is that the myopic vision obscures the interpretation. “Dominated by the customs of the group, we maintain received opinions, distort our perceptions to have them accord with these opinions, and are thus held in ignorance and led into error which we parochially mistake for the truth.”21 But Merton also argues that in every situation researchers are both outsiders and insiders, and outsiders err by mistaking their own paradigms for the truth. Too close, we have distortions; too far, we have misunderstandings. The best we can do is work to correct our near- and farsighted visions.
My distortions come from a deep respect for the working class and my love for my family. Sharing my work with other academics helped adjust for this myopia. My misunderstandings are found in my feminist framework, which was critical of the Grasinski Girls’ life worlds. I’ve tried to correct this by including in the text their responses to my interpretations as well as my objections to their responses. Ironically, the feminist stance that created the potential for misunderstanding also provided a corrective. Feminist inquiry rejects the methods of traditional science based on a positivist model which posits a duality between object and knower, and instead promotes methodologies that bring the researched into the research process to both minimize objectification and make evident the subjectivity of the researcher.22 Allowing the Grasinski Girls to comment on and edit the manuscript helped correct the biases that arose from my outsider (academic and feminist) stance.
. . .
I want this story not only to be about them but also to reflect them, to contain their affective, textured life of color, taste, sound, and light, to embody the warmth of thick breasts and fleshy arms. I want you, the reader, to meet them, giggling and jiggling and not finishing sentences, losing their selves in mixed pronouns, talking about “you” when they mean “I” and rearranging and reinventing the English language so that they can say what they want to say. I want you to see how they created space for themselves at their kitchen tables, found and lost their voices by talking and silencing each other, and maintained their happy faces by singing and praying and wearing lots of makeup.
To better hear them, I chose to use long passages from their oral histories, and to keep the words in their spoken form. Oral speech is less formal than written speech and captures their kitchen-table style of talking. To make the narrative more readable, I edited out many of the dead-end sentences and tried to tame the rambling, disjointed nature of conversation. I spliced sentences together, sometimes dialogue that was pages apart, because I wanted to keep intact the thread of the story. What I did not do, however, was “clean up” their language. I kept the rhythm of the oral speech, for example, the repetitions and partial sentences; I also kept the double negatives, the noun-verb disagreements, and a lot (but not all, or even most) of the filler phrases such as “you know,” “like,” “watchacallit,” as well as the elided and blurred nature of oral speech (for example, “gonna,” “wanna”).
My intent from the beginning was to “give them voice.” I wanted to empower them by letting them narrate their lives on their own terms in their own voices.23 But the stories told in their own words while sitting around their kitchen tables became “sort of funny looking” when “we see it on paper, and we don’t like it”—especially when their informal, spoken words were placed next to my formal, written, professional language. Stuff that could be fixed, like poor grammar, they wanted me to fix. They wanted this for the same reason they put foundation on sallow skin or brighten their eyes with eyeliner. They didn’t want a face lift, just some eyebrows. One sister said, “like, you always say ‘gonna,’ and I don’t know if you did that purposely because you say that all along and it sounds like a hillbilly talking.” As a result of exchanges such as this, I took most of the “gonna’s” out of their text. As for the grammar mistakes, they all had a chance to edit their words. They did things like replace “kids” with “children,” and “stuff” with “things.” Some took out their double negatives. When they caught their own mistakes, I changed them. When one sister caught another sister’s mistake, however, I did not fix it.
Some of them tried to rewrite their narratives, or at least large chunks of them, but I would not substitute written autobiographies for oral histories. I took some of their written comments and included them in different parts of the manuscript, but I always labeled them as written. For their life stories chapters, however, I pleaded with them to keep their animated, spirited style of oral speech, reassuring them that it did not sound “bad.” I gave them pep talks about how the repetitions in spoken speech serve as emphasis, tone, mood, emotion, and that these are “typical” of spoken speech—they are “normal.”
ME: There’s nothing wrong with your words. You can communicate very well. It’s not about using fancy words.
GG: You make me feel good because everyone always told me I didn’t know too much.
ME: Using big words—
GG: —doesn’t mean everything.
But using big words usually does mean something. It is one way that people signal their education as well as class position.
It is not just the content of