sitting around a lot of the time, waiting for people to visit who were .... You keep me waiting an hour ... know where I keep the key â and meet me around in front." .... "I'll keep working out." "Do you ... nurses seemed to mind too much. It was in ...
Kuhn, Thomas 1970 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mernissi, Fatima 1975 Beyond the Veil; Male-Female Dynamics in a Muslim Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman.
Leenhardt, Maurice 1978 Do Kamo; Person and Mvth in the Melanesian World. Basia Miller Culati, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rabinow, Paul 1978 Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mead, George H. 1956 The Social Self. In On Social Psychology. C.H. Mead, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Witherspoon, Gary 1977 Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
MERCY'S CHILDREN Celya Frank UCLA In an article in the Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly on ethnographic fiction (Langness and Frank 1978), the authors suggested that short stories and novels by anthropologists succeed when the events themselves and the narrative style are compelling to the reader. Ethnographic detail, and the anthropologist's point of view, are useful only as they advance the reader's ability to grasp the constraints of circumstance on the characters portrayed. We referred to a well-known African novel in which the leading character kills his adopted but favorite son because his status in the clan depends on it. Here the cultural description is integral to character and plot, and not in the least obtrusive. Many ethnographic novels have suffered from didactism. Following the lead of Clifford Geertz, we proposed that to accurately convey the lives of strangers, their systems of significant symbols, and the plots and counterplots of life, anthropologists might be called upon to adopt a rich and flexible prose style quite beyond what has been employed to date. The present story, Mercy's Children, attempts to show how a thirty-year-old woman, born without limbs, and the subject of my research since 1976, manages to live in a world designed for people who are not disabled. Hers is an alternative reality, such as ethnographers often take as their task to describe. Diane Fields, the subject of my research, negotiates the physical and social world with an aura of purpose and grace. Her competence in moving herself, and other people, is what I have tried to convey, in a style that would be accessible to anthropologists and non-anthropologists alike. I have tried to meld the rhythms and phrases of my informant's speech with the flavor of the gothic romances that she likes to read. This approach represents a thorough departure from my earlier work about Diane Fields, written in a phenomenological vein, where I discussed her life in terms of "embodiment" and other such topics. In
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those writings, a continuous life history narrative is entirely lacking. Instead, there is only my scholarly prose, interrupted by quotes from documents and interviews. It is a style that Diane Fields has accepted, but without notable enthusiasm. Yet it was this early research that transformed my initial comprehension of Diane Fields' life and my own, mainly because I aimed to clarify the process of understanding, itself. To do this, I wrote a number of autobiographical pieces, some of them in fiction (Frank, in press a and b), explored my choice of Diane Fields as a research subject, and examined my expectations about her life. My empathy for Diane Fields was drawn from a part of myself that felt victimized and restrained from action. But it became increasingly clear to me that the overwhelming theme of Diane Fields' life is not that of "victim," but of "survivor" (Frank, forthcoming). In an article on the life history method (Frank 1979), I proposed that we understand another person when able to step into that person's position for a moment and make it our own. Rather pessimistically, I added that "the closeness with which the other's consciousness is assumed serves to highlight the impossibility of ever reaching that position completely or of abandoning one's o w n . " Eiichi Shimomisse, philosopher and my tutor in phenomenology, objected to this assertion. I now agree with him. Diane Fields' own response to Mercy's Children assures me that I have learned to see the world through her eyes. Receiving the story in draft, she immediately called to say how much she liked it, how real a portrayal it was for her. "I have to admit," she said, "it was a thrill to read." Approval such as this — unqualified as well as unprecedented — is nothing 1 take lightly. For me, it indicates that things reported or observed have been reconstructed accurately. But more than that, it tells me that the parts I invented as an artist were true to some essential reality not my own. In an examination of some ethical and moral concerns in life history
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research (Langness and Frank 1981), it is suggested that our research can be compatible with our informants' need to create positive self-images for themselves and succeeding generations. Why not, it might be asked, allow our informants to be the heroes of their own stories? • • • • • I came into this place on a Tuesday. Came in of my own volition, walked in willingly, valise in hand, and received that very day a bed, a locker, and an application for the pay TV suspended in my room. I filled out the application for the pay TV right away, knowing it was going to be a wait. I was going to be sitting around a lot of the time, waiting for people to visit who were going to be late, or not come. Waiting for my checks to start coming again so I can get out on my own. I kept thinking about how the soap opera never ends, and so I could hardly believe it when there, right after Mom and the kids left, was Victor. He looked at me long and hard, then said, "What took you so long?" There we were, together again, just like we were at Mercy Home for Crippled Children. Teddy, my own husband, didn't help me move my things here after all. It broke him up inside, he said, and anyway I told him not to bother coming if he was going to be drunk. It was Mom who finally brought my things over, along with Donny, Doreen, and Kristy. They stayed a while, a short while, then kissed me goodbye, saying they'd call soon, and backed off in a bunch. Except for Kristy, who looked at them and said, "Hey, what's the hurry?" Kristy's too young to remember, but Doreen does, and even Donny Lee, about how Mom used to avoid visiting me at Mercy and Dad would shout at her about abandoning her little girl. She'd shout right back that I was his little girl and that the reason I'd never amount to anything was that he never expected me to do things for myself. But like nearly everything Mom ever said, that was a lie. It was Dad who built my portable desk, the one that fits on the arms of my chair so I can eat and write without having to transfer. And my fork so I can feed myself. He made me that, too — a bracelet that curves around my arm with a fork piece riveting to it exactly so it reaches my mouth. Now, that's not spoiling someone. That's just making things possible. The day I walked in here, it might as well have been 1950, the year I was born, back in Missouri, for all that people's heads have changed about people like me. We had to more or less snake our way through the wheelchairs because the whole entire place, patients and staff, was jammed in the lounge watching three blond sisters on guitar, aged fifty-one two and three, in fringed white miniskirts and cowboy hats, a-singing and a-playing, entertaining the poor cripples and old folks. Now I'm sitting here, it's a Friday, twenty-five after two, and do you know, the lunch carts are still standing in the hall with the empty milk cartons and left-over slop on them. Donny Lee
still not here yet, and I'm going to take a walk up the hall and check in on Victor one more time. To hell if the doctor quarantined his room. That's not what's wrong with him anyhow. Victor told them it was a plain old respiratory thing, he'd had it before, many times, but that the symptoms were different for quads. But doctors never listen and think, "Yeah, he must know something I don't." No, they put you in quarantine and study you like you're an orchid, at their leisure. The problem is, he's not getting any better, spitting up real thick stuff. Finally they said they'd call Dr. Spalezzi, Victor's old pediatrician at Mercy. He still knows Victor Vasquez probably better than anyone, except for me. Victor Vasquez used to say that there were maybe two people who really knew him. One was his old pediatrician at Mercy, and the other was Karen Ann Foster, who was now headed up the corridor towards Victor's room. The door was still closed, with a typed sign on the front of it, and a red tie through the handle. A tanned sixteen-year-old ran up from behind, T shirt chopped at his ribline, blond hair flying, and slapped the handles of her chair. She looked back and caught the blue eyes of her brother, Donny Lee. "Hi, I'm here," he announced breathlessly. "You ready to go?" Karen flipped the lever on the arm of her chair and turned around to face him. "Hi, where you been?" "I had to go get something from a friend." He grinned and patted his shirt pocket. Karen saw the outline of two joints. With Donny, you couldn't always tell whether he was being selfish or innocent, and she had decided long ago that it was better not to get too upset over little things, or life would be nothing but one asthma attack after another. Donny glanced up the hall in the direction of the parking lot outside. "Well, you ready to go?" he asked again. "Yeah, just as soon as I see if Victor's doctor got here yet." Donny jogged from one foot to the other. "Do you have to do that now?" "Donny Lee, you are unreal. You keep me waiting an hour and then don't have three minutes extra you can spare." "If I don't make it by four today, they're going to dock me at work." "Then go get my wallet — it's in the closet, you know where I keep the key — and meet me around in front." Donny took off and Karen headed over for a talk with a bored aide talking desultorily on the phone at the nurse's station. No, Victor's doctor hadn't come. He was expected by four. And you would think Karen would be back by four, with Donny Lee so afraid of showing up late for his afternoon job at MacDonald's. But as Fate had it, the ugly head of Snafu, nemesis of the handicapped, reared up and showed its jaws. Returning
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from the Montgomery Ward's mall with a lycra body shirt, a Barbra Streisand tape, and a family size box of Wash 'N Dry, they espy an officer of the law writing them a citation for parking in the handicapped zone. "It's parked in the handicapped zone," he said, as Karen and Donny approached, looking at each other and at him with wide-eyed incredulity. Karen said, "Did I hear you right?" And the police officer replied, "There's no permit on this car." "God," Karen groaned. "You can see that I'm in a wheelchair, and in case you haven't noticed, I am handicapped." The officer surveyed the thirty-year-old woman seated before him missing most of her arms and both legs. "The problem is," he said, police academy composure unblemished, "that the car has no sticker." "How about looking at the registration. It's my car." "I'm real sorry, but you can bring it up in court and try to get it settled there." Donny let the officer hang the ticket in the windshield wiper, pulling it out when he had gone, and turned it over one side to the next looking for a clue to what he was going to do with it. Karen waited until they were in the car before she said what next came out of her mouth. Donny meanwhile opened the passenger door and without a word reached under Karen's arms and swung her into the front seat, folded the wheelchair, stowed it in the trunk, and got in. As he leaned forward to turn the ignition, Karen said, "You didn't want to be driving it with the handicapped sticker in front of your friends." "I guess not." "Well, I can understand that, but Donny you could at least have peeled the sticker off and kept it in the glove compartment in case I need it." Donny sat back, crossed his leg, and looked at the graying cuff of his levis. "It's just that with Teddy gone, you can't drive it," he blurted. Karen took in a breath and let it out slow. "Look at me, Donny Lee. Now we made a deal when Ted and I broke up. I told you I'd let you use this car, but once in a while you'd have to take me where I needed to go. And didn't you say you would?" Donny nodded. "Well, I can understand how it feels to be sixteen and have your own car," Karen said softly. "And you and I know that Mom's never going to get you that car she keeps dangling before your nose whenever she wants you to do something for her." "Yeah," Donny agreed, again nodding. "I remember what it's like not to have wheels and have to depend on Mom to get you everywhere. But Donny Lee, that car is mine — mine and Ted's, most of the money was mine — and you have to understand that even if Teddy and I don't get back together, I'm going to save my checks and get out of that
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convalescent home. I'm going to need that car, especially if my attendant doesn't have one. And even if I get Rehab to give me a van, there's three, four hundred dollars in that car. We paid $350 for it, put on shocks and tires, replaced the water pump, and put covers on the seats. Now, do you think I can afford to let three, four hundred dollars go just like that?" "But maybe Ted's going to want it back," Donny answered, not wanting to believe what she was telling him. "Car's mine, Donny. The only thing Ted put in himself was those wiper blades, coming home alone drunk in the rain. He was too scared to drive without any. What I'm trying to get you to understand, Donny Lee, is that I can't give you this car, much as I'd like to. I need it, but you can still loan it for this while." "I know it's only for a while, Karen." Donny paused before continuing cautiously. ". . . if it's still your car, aren't you the one who has to pay the ticket?" "You can't be serious." "Where am I going to get the money?" "Huh?" "If I don't cut my hair by Saturday, my boss said he's going to fire me." "You didn't say anything about that before. You going to cut it?" "No way." Karen was mad now. "Well, just tell the judge that you can't bring all the money at once," she said. "They'll give you lots of time to pay." When Donny finished getting Karen back to her room, and helped her transfer back to her electric E&J, it was in fact four o'clock, and Karen could only wonder whether Donny really was going to be in trouble for being late, was he really going to get fired for not cutting his hair, or was it all a story? She noticed a squeak coming from the left wheel, but only in reverse. That was puzzling. It was always a relief to walk wherever she liked again, without needing to be pushed. A quick check showed that Victor wasn't in the corridor, and the tie was still on his door handle. One of the supervisors was at the desk lecturing Doretta and Lucie about letting the patients use the in-coming lines. Even if someone would drop the coins for her, the public phone was out of order. She would have to wait. The problem with waiting, though, was her growing fear that something was wrong with Victor. From the beginning at Mercy there was a bond between them, almost like they knew each other's thoughts without speaking, without words. Sometimes he bordered on cryptic, but it was the poetry in him that set him apart and made him so appealing to her from the start. Karen was sixteen when he appeared one day in the TV room at Mercy. He was fourteen years old, pale, and it was perfectly obvious from the way he purposely rammed his wheelchair into stray pieces of furniture in his path that he was angry as all hell about
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what had happened to him. It had probably been about five months since his accident, because there were hardly any bruises visible on his body, and his stitches were already nicely healed. His shoulder muscles may have still been prominent beneath the football jerseys he preferred wearing, but his hands hung very slack, typical of recent quads she'd seen. After they became lovers, lying together in his bed in the dark, they would make up stories. Victor's were unpredictable, full of forests and pools. One stayed with her always, one in which someone who looked like Karen found a talking jewel in a meadow. Karen wanted to know, "What did it say?" "You're supposed to figure it out yourself." "But it's your story." "No, it's yours," he insisted. Although the prospect of getting out and living together filled and sweetened their days, Karen wasn't sure it was realistic to expect that they could make the whole thing come true. Victor said he would go to school and become an architect — he had been apprenticed to a draftsman before the accident. It was those times of uncertainity in which Karen couldn't overlook the fact that Victor still couldn't hold a pencil, let alone draw a line. "I'll keep working out." "Do you know what your chances are?" Victor scowled and jerked his chair around in the direction of the door. "If you can't take us seriously, then forget it," he told her. "Just tell me, Victor, how you think we can live together and take care of a baby when we can't even take care of ourselves?" "We'll hire attendants, three of them, one for each of us. You just don't believe enough to wait and see it happen." With that, he walked away, but his gears got stuck and turned him around in a slow circle while he pulled on the control lever, ineffectually, forward and back. Karen wanted to laugh and she wanted to cry, but instead she just turned around quickly and headed for the opposite door, as if she hadn't seen it happen. It was ironic how after she'd left Mercy and was living on her own, she met Ted, lived with him, married him, and divorced him after eight years in all, finally realizing that able-bodied though he was, Ted's spirit was crippled. He was just one more person to lean on her, like most everybody in her family did. Victor never leaned on her, and if he did, it was somehow never heavy. And Victor was courageous. There was no doubt of it. Maybe it was his early brush with death that made him that way, or perhaps just that he stayed young under the periodic anger and malaise. Karen found herself staring at the fresh paint on the wall next to Victor's door, where the fire bombing had taken place earlier that summer. They were in bed together in Victor's room — it had become an established thing, the aides all knew about it, and not even the nurses seemed to mind too much. It was in the still
heat of July, when the patients really had to be kept clean because of the smell. Being July, the aides were out of school, not caring about getting up in the morning for classes, and sometimes they were blowing so much PCP that they couldn't remember their own names when you called them. For Karen and Victor, the situation with the aides posed a trade-off to be weighed outloud when there was nothing else to talk about. On the one hand, it meant more privacy to be together at night, but, on the other, it was hard to make love when Victor's catheter was in and the bag full. The scales of the debate tipped when bedsores on the leg of an old man down the hall turned gangrene because no one bothered to move him. It was then that Karen filed a formal complaint with the county, because she knew that if it were December and not July, the stench wouldn't have carried, and besides amputation, the old man might have died. Five of the seven aides in their wing were dismissed, but not without leaving ominous threats of vengeance behind. The two lovers were together in Victor's bed when the fire bomb came hurtling through the window, spraying the room with fragments of glass as it burst into sudden flames. Victor's roommate Manuel slept through it — they could hear him snoring. "Hey, Lalo. Wake up," Victor shouted into the dark. The old man sat up and stared dreamily at the flames, too drugged to move. "Get him walking," said Karen, as she slid off Victor's lap and inched the light switch into a corner of the pillow, where she leaned her arm against it and pushed. The lamp between the beds switched on. "Get up, Lalo," Victor urged. "That's right, man, get up." Victor's voice guided Lalo to the door as fire enveloped the mattress where the old man had lain. It was several days later that the words of an anonymous phone call were relayed. The bombs — there were two that night — were meant for "the bitch with no arms and legs."It had to have been an aide, brain cells blown away, yet knowing that Karen most likely would be with Victor in his room. The room the other bomb exploded in was hers. When five o'clock arrived and still Karen hadn't seen Dr. Spalezzi, or heard that he was on his way, an unbearable sense of urgency came over her. She walked up to Victor's door, following a root impulse of hers since childhood — to get to the heart of the matter, just as quickly as possible, to get a jump on whatever needed to get done. With this resolve, she faced Victor's door and began tugging at the red cord wrapped through the handle. It was tight, as she might have expected from the looks of it. Too tight to loosen with her stumps alone, no matter how precisely she positioned the point of one end against the other. She hated to do what she was about to do next. It was with a twist of repugnance, such as she felt as a girl at Easter Seals camp, when she saw another girl stick her whole face into a plate in order to eat. And
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yet Karen felt compelled now to use her mouth to accomplish something another part of her body was supposed to do. The tie loosened. She backed up her chair and jammed ahead full speed at Victor's door. It quickly rebounded, with a whack, but not too quickly for her to see inside. There was Victor, laid out on the bed, his head tilted to one side, dead, a warm yellow circle of light from his lamp illuminating the room almost cheerfully. About a week passed before Karen realized that she hadn't yet cried, and so she stopped taking the Valiums they were giving her. When the tears came, she consoled herself with the thought that she didn't need Victor. Life would go on. He had lived his as best he could, and she had gone out and lived hers. She had been surprised but not shocked when one day Victor opened his wallet to show her a picture of his child. One had to accept realities — seek them out, even — or else life could pass you by quicker than a freight train in the night. She had no illusions about a future that included Victor. What bothered her, and would continue to bother her, was knowing that Victor's life had been thrown away before he had been ready to let it go. He had been very much alive, and this was what caused the grief to well up and spill over. This, and the sense that the simple and deep bond between them was snapped. He was gone. The feeling of being alone was probably why Karen actually was eager to see Donny Lee when he gave her a call, just to see if he could come by for a while. Karen figured he wanted something, and in part was right. But mainly he was coming to show off his haircut. He decided he'd keep his job, and maybe even put some money down on Karen's car, if she'd agree to sell it to him. Karen knew he probably wasn't going to have the money by the time she was ready to make her move, because if Victor's death told her
one thing, it was that the time had come to leave. But she didn't tell Donny this. Instead she told him the news about Victor, and, later, when he leaned over to hug her goodbye he let her arm brush the fresh-cut ends of hair sticking out over his ears.
REFERENCES CITED
Frank, Gelya 197') Finding the Common Denominator: A Phenomenological Critique of Lite History Method. Ethos: lournal of the Society lor Psychological Anthropology 7 (1):68-94. Lumiere. Rara Avis # 5 . P.O. Box 3095, Terminal Annex, Los Angeles, CA 90051. (In press a).
From Chile, With Love. Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics # 1 2 . 225 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012 (In press b).
Venus on Wheels: Self-image and Collective Myth in the Life History of a Congenital Amputee. In Celya Frank and Martha Lifson, eds. Personal Myth: Narratives and the Creation of Self. (Forthcoming). Langness, L.L., and Gelya Frank 147K Fact, Fiction and the Ethnographic Novel. and Humanism Quarterly 3 (1,2): 18-22.
1981
Lives: An Anthropological CA: Chandler and Sharp.
Anthropology
Approach to Biography. Novato,
A WORKER IN EL DORADO: SELF-NARRATIVE O N COLONIALISM
Kathleen /. Adams Wheaton College
Some places in the world have been invested with fantastic expectations. The interior of Guyana has been one of them. It is thought that fabulous wealth in gold awaits the adventuresome there. This European dream of El Dorado was reinvented by folk populations created in the cycles of economic exploitation in this part of the New World. The Afro-Guyanese gold-seeker, then, is a western identity, part folk and part elite in its connotations. This contradiction has lent ambivalence to the life course of those Afro-
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Guyanese who have become gold-seekers. The life history of Wellesley A. Baird' is a discourse on this dilemma. A life lived reveals an individual performance within cultural patterns, also social rules and the historical sequence of opportunities. Wellesley A. Baird in his autobiography, recorded in his 60s, also departs from learned patterns and intended life course, and he continued his rebellious protest into the process of self narration (a recurrent theme in American black
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