27 'That's not what I said'
Interpretive conflict in oral narrative research
{Catherine Borland
(Catherine Borland received her doctorate in Folklore from Indiana University in 1994, and is the founding director of a program in Wilmington, Delaware, that motivates and supports inner city high school students to prepare for college. Reprinted from S. Berger Gluck and D. Patai (eds). Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. New York and London, Routledge, 1991, pp. 63 75. with permission.
In the summer of 1944. my grandmother, Beatrice Hanson, put on a pale, eggshell-colored gabardine dress with big gold buttons down the side, a huge pancake-black hat, and elbow-length gloves - for in those days ladies dressed
to go to the fair and off she went with her father to see the sulky (harness) races at the Bangor, Maine, fairgrounds. The events that ensued provided for a lively wrangle between father and daughter as they vied to pick the winner. Forty-two years later Beatrice remembered vividly the events of that afternoon and. in a highly structured and thoroughly entertaining narrative, recounted them to me. her folklorist-granddaughter, who recorded her words on tape for later transcription and analysis. What took place that day, why it proved so memorable, and what happened to the narrative during the process of intergencrational transmission provide a case study in the variability of meaning in personal narrative performances. This story, or. better said, these stories, stimulate reflexivity about our scholarly practice.
Let me begin with the question of meaning and its variability. We can view the performance of a personal narrative as a meaning-constructing activity on two levels simultaneously. It constitutes both a dynamic interaction between the thinking subject and the narrated event (her own life experience) and between the thinking subject and the narrative event (her 'assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence'1). As performance contexts change, as we discover new audiences, and as we renegotiate our sense of self, our narratives will also change.
What do folklorists do with the narratives performed for/before us? Like other audience members, we enjoy a skillfully told tale. But some of us also collect records of the performance in order to study them. Oral personal narratives occur naturally within a conversational context, in which various people take turns at talk, and thus are rooted most immediately in a web of expressive social activity. We identify chunks of artful talk within this flow of conversation, give them physical existence (most often through writing), and
' That's not what I said'   321
embed them in a new context of expressive or at least communicative activity (usually the scholarly article aimed toward an audience of professional peers). Thus, we construct a second-level narrative based upon, but at the same time reshaping, the first.
Like the original narrator, we simultaneously look inward towards our own experience of the performance (our interpretive shaping of it as listeners) and outward to our audience (to whom we must display a degree of scholarly competence). Presumably, the patterns upon which we base our interpretations can be shown to inhere in the 'original' narrative, but our aims in pointing out certain features, or in making connections between the narrative and larger cultural formations, may at times differ from the original narrator's intentions. This is where issues of our responsibility to our living sources become most acute.
Years ago, scholars who recorded the traditions, arts, and history of a particular culture group gave little thought to the possibility that their representations might legitimately be challenged by those for and about whom they wrote. After all, they had 'been in the field', listening, taking notes, and witnessing the culture firsthand. Educated in the literate, intellectual tradition of the Western academy, these scholars brought with them an objective, scientific perspective that allowed them, they felt, to perceive underlying structures of meaning in their material that the 'natives', enmeshed in a smaller, more limited world, could not see. Therefore, it is not surprising that general ethnographic practice excluded the ethnographic subject from the process of post-fieldwork interpretation, nor that folklorists and anthropologists rarely considered their field collaborators to be potential audiences for their publications. More recently, some researchers sensitive to the relationships of power in the fieldwork exchange have questioned this model of the scholar as interpretive authority for the culture groups he/she sttidies.2
For feminists, the issue of interpretive authority is particularly problematic, for our work often involves a contradiction. On the one hand, we seek to empower the women we work with by revaluing their perspectives, their lives, and their art in a world that has systematically ignored or trivialized women's culture.' On the other, we hold an explicitly political vision of the structural conditions that lead to particular social behaviors, a vision that our field collaborators, many of whom do not consider themselves feminists, may not recognize as valid. My own work with my grandmother's racetrack narrative provides a vivid example of how conflicts of interpretation may. perhaps inevitably do. arise during the folklore transmission process. What should we do when we women disagree?
To refrain from interpretation by letting the subjects speak for themselves seems to me an unsatisfactory if not illusory solution. For the very fact that we constitute the initial audience for the narratives we collect influences the way in which our collaborators will construct their stories, and our later Presentation of these stories - in particular publications under particular titles — will influence the way in which prospective readers will interpret the
322   Interpreting memories
texts. Moreover, feminist theory provides a powerful critique of our society, and, as feminists, we presumably are dedicated to making that critique as forceful and direct as possible. How, then, might we present our work in a way that grants the speaking woman interpretive respect without relinquishing our responsibility to provide our own interpretation of her experience?
Although I have no easy answer to this question. I believe that by reflecting on our practice we can move toward a more sensitive research methodology. In the spirit of reflexivity 1 offer here a record of the dispute that arose between my grandmother and myself when I ventured an interpretation of her narrative. First, 1 will summarize the narrative, since the taped version runs a full twenty-five minutes. Then I will present her framing of the narrative in performance and my refraining during the interpretive process. Finally, I will present her response to my interpretation. While 1 have already 'stacked the deck' in my favor by summarizing the story, reducing it through my subjective lens, my grandmother's comments powerfully challenge my assumption of exegetical authority over the text.'
Beatrice began her story with a brief setting of the scene: in the grandstand, she finds herself seated directly behind Hod Buzzel, 'who', she states, 'had gotten me my divorce and whom I hated with a passion'. Hod is accompanied by his son, the county attorney (who, Beatrice says, 'was jusl as bad as his lather in another way he was a snob'). Beatrices father knows them both very well.
Beatrice, the narrator, then explains the established system for selecting a horse. Observers typically purchase a 'score card' that lists the past records of horses and drivers, and they evaluate the horses as they pace before the grandstand. Beatrice's personal system for choosing a horse depends most heavily on her judgement of the observable merits of both horse and driver. She explains:
And if I could find a horse that right pleased me, and a driver that pleased me that were together . . . there would be my choice, you sec? So. this particular afternoon . . . \ found that. Now that didn't happen all the time, by any means, but 1 found . . . perfection, as far as I was concerned, and I was absolutely convinced that that horse was going to win.
Beatrice decides to bet on Lyn Star, an unknown horse driven by a young man. She knows that this young man's father is driving another horse in the race. Her father and the Buzzels select Black Lash, a horse with an established reputation for speed.
The subsequent action exhibits an inherent potential for narrative patterning. Sulky races, in which a driver sits behind the horse in a two-wheeled single-seat carriage, are presented in a series of three heats. In other words, the same group of horses races against each other three times during the afternoon, alternating with three groups of horses who race against one another in the same fashion. Normally, drivers act on their own. competing individually against their opponents, but the appearance of a father and son
'That's not what I said' 323 in the same race suggests to Bea the possibility that these two may collaborate with one another in some way. Each heat, from the perspective of the audience, involves three stages: selecting a horse and placing a bet, observing the race proper, and collecting on one's winning tickets. With regard to the particular race narrated, an additional structural element is provided by the repetitive strategy employed by the father and son upon whom Bea has placed her hopes.
In each heat, the father quickly takes the lead and sets a fast pace for the other horses while the son lopes along behind. As the horses turn into the second lap and start their drive, the father moves over to let his son through on the rail (the inside lane of the track) thereby forcing Black Lash, the next-to-front runner, to go out and around him Dramatic tension is produced by the variable way in which this strategy is played out on the course. In the lirst heat, l.yn Star wins by a nose. In the second, he ties in a photo finish with Black Lash. In the third, the father's horse, worn out by his previous two performances, drops back behind the others, leaving Lyn Star and Black Lash to really race. But because of the way the races have been run, Lyn Star's driver had never really had to push his horse. He does so this time and leaves Black Lash half a length behind.
As a superlative narrator. Beatrice recognizes and exploits the parallels between the observed contest and the contest between observers who have aligned themselves with different horses. She structures her narrative by alternating the focus between a dramatic reenactment of events in the grandstand and a description of the actual race as it unfolds before the observers. Within this structure, the cooperation between the father and son on the racecourse provides a contrast to the conflict between father and daughter in the grandstand.
Before the first heat, Bea's father asks her. 'D'you pick a horse'.'' And she responds that, yes, she has chosen Lyn Star. At this, her father loudly denounces her choice, claiming that the horse will never win, she'll lose her money, and she should not bet. Beatrice puts two dollars on the horse. When ■ Lyn Star wins, Bea turns triumphantly to her father. Undaunted, he insists that the race was a fluke and that Bea's favorite horse will not win again. Nevertheless, Beatrice places six dollars on Lyn Star in the next heat. By now, though, her father is irate and attempts first to trade horses with her so that she won't lose her money, and then, when she declines this oiler, he refuses altogether to place her bet. Young Buzzel, who has become an amused audi-i ence of one to the father daughter contest in the grandstand, offers to take her money down to the betting office. Since Bea has never placed her own bets, she accepts.
: With the third heat Beatrice's father catapults their private argument into |J| the public arena, as he asks his daughter, 'What are you going to do this time?' Beatrice is adamant. 'I am helling on my horse and I am betting ten hacks on that horse. It's gonna win!' At this. Beatrice, the narrator, explains, 'Father 8(1 a fit. lie had a jjt And he tells everybody three miles around in the
324   Interpreting memories
grandstand what a fool I am too. . . . He wasn't gonna take my money down!' So Beatriee commandeers young Bu/zel to place her bet for her again. When Lyn Star wins by a long shot, Bea's father is effectively silenced:
And / threw my pocketbook in one direction, and I threw my gloves in another direction, and my score book went in another direction, and ] jumped up and I hollered, to everyone, 'You see what know-it-all said! Thai's my father!" And finally one man said to me . . . no. he said to my father. 'You know, she really enjoys horse racing, doesn't she'.'" To understand how Bea frames her narrative, we must return to a consideration of her initial description of how a horse is chosen. This prefatory material orients the audience to a particular point of view, emphasizing that the race should be understood as an opportunity for racegoers to exercise their evaluative skills in order to predict an eventual outcome. Indeed, the length and detail of this portion of the narrative emphasizes the seriousness, for Beatrice, of this preliminary evaluative activity. This framing of the story gains significance if one considers that Bea's knowledge of horses was unusual for women in her community. Emphasizing the exceptionality of her knowledge, she explained to me that her father owned and raced horses when Bea was a child and 'though 1 could not %o fishing with my father on Sundays, or hunting with him on any day of the week, for some strange reason, he took me with him, mornings' to watch his horses being exercised.
Additionally, in her framing of the narrative. Beatrice identifies the significance of the event narrated, its memorability, as the unique coming together of a perfect horse and driver that produced an absolute conviction on her part as to who would win the contest. Since this conviction was proved correct the narrative functions to support or illustrate Bea's sense of self as a competent judge of horses within both the narrative and the narrated event. In effect, her narrative constitutes a verbal re-performance of an actual evaluative performance at the track
What do 1 as a listener make of this story? A feminist, I am particularly sensitive to identifying gender dynamics in verbal art. and, therefore, what makes the story significant for me is the way in which this self-performance within the narrated event takes on the dimension of a female struggle for autonomy within a hostile male environment. Literally and symbolically, the horse race constitutes a masculine sphere. Consider, racing contestants, owners, and trainers were male (although female horses were permitted to compete). Also, while women obviously attended the races, indeed, 'ladief dressed up' to go to the races, they were granted only partial participant status. While they were allowed to sit in the grandstand as observers (anoV having dressed up, one assumes, as persons to be observed), they were DOl expected to engage as active evaluators in the essential first stage of the racinj event. Notice that even at the very beginning of the story Bea's father did Of want her to bet. Betting is inherently a risk-taking activity. Men take n women do not. This dimension of meaning is underscored in the second
' That '.v not what I said' 325
when Beatrice, the narrator, ironically recounts that her father was going to be 'decent' to her, in other words, was going to behave according to the model of gentlemanly conduct, by offering to bear his daughter's risk and bet on her horse for her.
Significantly, as the verbal contest develops. Beatrice displays greater and greater assertiveness as a gambler. Not only does she refuse to align herself with the men's judgement, she also raises the ante by placing more and more serious bets on her choice. From an insignificant bet in the first heat - and here it bears recalling that in racing parlance a two-dollar bet is still called a 'lady's bet' - she proceeds in the second and third heats to bet six and ten dollars, respectively.
In portraying the intensification of the contest, Beatrice, the narrator, endows Beatrice, the gambler, with an increasingly emphatic voice. Her tone in addressing her father moves from one of calm resolution before the first and second heats 'That's the horse I'm betting on', and 'No, I'm gonna stay with that horse' to heated insistence before the third heat - 'I am betting on my horse!' (each word accentuated in performance by the narrator's pounding her list on the dining-room table).
Finally, if one looks at Beatrice's post-heat comments, one can detect a move from simple self-vindication in the first heat to a retaliatory calumniation of her father's reputation delivered in a loud disparaging voice 'You see what know-it-all said! That's my father!' Thus, at the story's end, Beatrice has moved herself from a peripheral feminine position with respect to the larger male sphere of betting and talk, to a central position where her words and deeds proclaim her equal and indeed superior to her male antagonist. Symbolically underscoring this repudiation of a limiting feminine identity, Bea flings away the accessories of her feminine costume her gloves and her pocketbook.
If on one level the story operates as a presentation of self as a competent . judge of horses, on another it functions to assert a sense of female autonomy ;and equality within a sphere dominated by men. From yet another perspective, the verbal contest between father and daughter results in a realignment iif»Of allegiances based on the thematic contrasts between age and youth, reputation and intrinsic merit, observable in the contest between the horses Black jUlsh and Lyn Star. When her father (tacitly) refuses to place her bet before $he second heat, young Buzzell, whom Bea has previously described as an antagonist, and who has been betting with the older men, offers to place her Rfet for her. In effect, he bets on Beatrice in the contest developing on the sidelines.
- y,  Furthermore, with regard to the narrator's life experience, one can view the ^pative as a metaphor for a larger contest between Beatrice and her social •eu. For in the early 1930s Beatrice shocked her community by divorcing .first husband. This action and her attempt to become economically l&endent by getting an education were greeted with a certain amount of ...   a' and familial censure. For instance. Beatriee recalls, when her mother
326   Interpreting memories
entered the date of the divorce in the family bible, she included the note: 'Recorded, but not approved." It also forced Beatrice to leave her two young daughters in the care of their paternal grandparents for the five years she attended college, a necessity that still saddens and troubles her today.
My grandparents agree that, in the ideology of marriage at that time, 'you weren't supposed to be happy". My grandfather relates that his grandmother suffered severe psychological strain during menopause, was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and, while there, crossed her name off her marriage certificate. In a slightly more active form of resistance, Beatrice's grandmother, after injuring herself while doing heavy farm work, took to her bed for several years. However, as soon as her son married, she got up. moved in with him, and led a normal, active life, becoming the strong maternal figure of Bea's own childhood. Bea's mother separated herself psychologically from both her husband and her family by retreating into a strict, moralistic, and. in Bea's view, hypocritical religiosity. For Bea's predecessors, then, a woman's socially acceptable response to an unhappy marriage was to remove herself from the marriage without actually effecting a formal, public separation. Although Bea's first husband was tacitly recognized by the community as an unfit husband    irresponsible, alcoholic, a spendthrift and a philanderer Beatrice was expected to bear with the situation in order to protect her own reputation and that of her family.
By divorcing her first husband Beatrice transgressed middle-class social decorum and was branded "disreputable". The appearance in the present narrative of the divorce lawyer and Bea's negative reaction to him leads me to link Beatrice's performance and status at the races to her previous loss of reputation in the larger village society. In both instances Beatrice had to prove in the face of Strong opposition the lightness of not playing by the rules, of relying on her own judgment, of acting as an autonomous individual. 1 would suggest, then, that the latent associations of this narrative to circumstances critical to the narrator's life, even if not consciously highlighted in the narrative, may reinforce its memorability.
What is essential to emphasize, however, is that this is my framing of the racetrack narrative informed by contemporary feminist conceptions of patriarchal structures, which my grandmother does not share. Moreover, after reading an initial version of this interpretation. Beatrice expressed strong disagreement with my conclusions. I quote a portion of the fourteen-page letter she wrote to me concerning the story:
Not being, myself, a feminist, the 'female struggle' as such never bothered me in my life. It never occurred to me. I never thought of my position at all in this sense. I've always felt that I had a line childhood. It seems, now. that I must have had a remarkable one. To begin with. I had a very strong father figure. Surrounded by the deep and abiding love of my Grandmother Austin (whom I adored): the clear, unfaltering knowledge of my father's love and his openly expressed pride in me. and the definite disciplines set
'Thar snot what I said' 327 by my grandmother which provided the staunch and unchallengeable framework in which I moved. I knew absolute security. (The disciplines were unchallengeable because I never had the least desire to challenge them. I would have done anything not to disappoint Grandma or make her feel bad, and I was so very happy and secure that only an idiot would have tried to upset the situation )
In consequence of all this, as I grew older, the inner strength which that sense of security had built in me, served always to make me feel equal to anyone, male or female, and very often superior. Feminism, as such, was of no moment to me - none at all. Privately, it has always seemed ridiculous, but that's neither here nor there. It makes no difference to me what anybody else thinks about it.
So your interpretation of the story as a female struggle for autonomy within a hostile male environment is entirely YOUR interpretation. You've read into the story what you wished to what pleases YOU. That it was never - by any widest stretch of the imagination the concern of the originator of the story makes such an interpretation a definite and complete distortion, and in this respect I question its authenticity. The story is no longer MY story at all. The skeleton remains, but it has become your story. Right? How far is it permissible to go. in the name of folklore, and still be honest in respect to the original narrative'.'
Beatrice brings up a crucial issue in oral narrative scholarship who controls the text? If 1 had not sent my grandmother a copy of my work, asking for her response. I could perhaps have avoided the question of my intrusion into the texts 1 collect. Discussions with our field collaborators about the products of our research are often overlooked or unreported by folklore scholars. Luckily, my grandmother is quite capable of reading, responding to. and resisting my presentation of her narrative. For my own and my grandmother's versions provide a radical example of how each of us has created a story from her own experience. While 1 agree that the story has indeed become my story in the present context. I cannot agree that my reading betrays the original narrative.
Beatrice embraces an idealist model of textual meaning that privileges authorial intentions. It makes sense for my grandmother to read the story in this way. From my own perspective, however, the story does not really become a story until it is actualized in the mind of a receptive listener/reader. As my consciousness has been formed within a different social and historical reality, 1 cannot restrict my reading to a recuperation of original authorial intentions. I offer instead a different reading, one that values her story as an example to feminists of one woman"s strategy for combating a limiting patriarchal ideology. That Bea's performance constitutes a direct opposition to established authorities reveals for me how gender ideologies are not wholly determinative or always determinative of female identity/
Nevertheless, despite my confidence in the validity of my reading as a feminist scholar, personally I continue to be concerned about the potential
328   Interpreting memories
emotional effect alternative readings of personal narratives may have on our living subjects. The performance of a personal narrative is a fundamental means by which people comprehend their own lives and present a 'self to their audience.6 Our scholarly representations of those performances, if not sensitively presented, may constitute an attack on our collaborators' carefully constructed sense of self. While Bca and I have discussed our differences at length and come to an amicable agreement about how to present them (i.e., the inclusion of her response to my initial reading in the final text). 1 might have avoided eliciting such a violent initial response from her if 1 had proceeded differently from the outset.7
1 could have tried to elicit my grandmother's comments on the story's meaning before I began the process of interpretation. During the taping session itself, however, this would have proved problematic. As I stated earlier, oral personal narratives occur naturally within a conversational context, and often the performance of one narrative leads to other related performances. These displays of verbal art provide an important context for understanding how the narrative in question is to be viewed, and from my perspective it would not be productive to break the narrative flow in order to move to the very different rhetorical task of interpretation and analysis.
Furthermore, during a narrative performance of this type, both narrator and listener are caught up in the storytelling event. Although associative commentary about the stories is common, at this stage in the fieldwork exchange neither narrator nor listener is prepared to reflect analytically on the material being presented. Indeed, the conscious division of a storytelling session into discreet story units or thematic constellations of stories occurs at the later stage of review and study.
Nevertheless, the narrator's commentary on and interpretation of a story can contribute greatly to the researcher's understanding of it. I now feel I ought to have arranged a second session with my grandmother in which 1 played her the taped version and asked her for her view of its function and meaning. Time constraints prevented me from doing so. I did solicit an interpretation from Bea with not much success after I had written and she had read my initial version of this article. At that time Beatrice insisted that the story was simply an amusing anecdote with no deep or hidden meanings. Although it may be that some narrators are not prepared lo interpret their own stories analytically. Bea's reaction may have been due to her sharply felt loss of authorial control.
With the benefit of hindsight, let me review two points that proved especially sensitive for my grandmother. First, Bea reacted very strongly to the feminist identity my interpretation implied she had. Though some might quibble that this problem is simply a matter of labels, the word 'feminist often has negative, threatening connotations for women who have not participated in the feminist movement. More important, Bea's objection points to an important oversight in my own research process.
When I began the task of interpretation, I assumed a likeness of nu'nflj
I
' That 's not what I said' 329 where there was in fact difference: I was confident that my grandmother would accept my view of the story's meaning. After all, she had been very excited about working with me when I told her I wanted to study older women's life experience narratives. She sent me a great deal of material and commentary on the difficult conditions of women's lives in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Maine, material and commentary that seemed on the surface to convey a feminist perspective. Moreover, she offered her own accounts and stories, some of which dealt with very sensitive matters, assuring me that I should feel perfectly free to use whatever proved helpful to me in my research. How, then, did we, who had a close, confidential, long-standing relationship, manage to misunderstand each other so completely?
The fieldwork exchange fosters a tendency to downplay differences, as both investigator and source seek to establish a footing with one another and find a common ground from which to proceed to the work of collecting and recording oral materials. Additionally, as we are forever constructing our own identities through social interactions, we similarly construct our notion of others. My grandmother has always appeared to me a remarkably strong, independent woman, and thus, even though she has never called herself a feminist, it was an easy step for me to cast her in that role. Although she knew that 1 considered myself an activist feminist, to her 1 have always been, first and foremost, a granddaughter. She was, therefore, unprepared for the kind of analysis performed on her narrative. The feminist movement has been criticized before for overgeneralizing about women's experience in its initial enthusiasms of sisterly identification. Yet it bears repeating that important commonalities among women often mask equally important differences.1'
for Beatrice, another troubling feature of my interpretation is the portrait it presents of her father. Here the problem arises from our different understandings of what the narrative actually is. 1 approach the story as a symbolic construction and the people within it are. for me. dramatic characters. Thus, Beatrice's father, the antagonistic figure of the story, becomes a symbol of repressive male authority in my interpretation. For Beatrice, however, the story remains an account of a real experience, embedded in the larger context of her life. She brings to her reading of the 'characters' a complex of associations built up over a shared lifetime. From this perspective my interpretation of her father is absolutely false. Whether or not it 'works' for the father figure in the story, it does not define the man. In fact, Beatrice's father was one of the few people who encouraged and supported her during the difficult period after her disastrous first marriage. She remembers her father with a great deal of love and admiration and speaks often of the special relationship they had With one another. Indeed, if anyone was the villain of Beatrice's youth, it Would have been her mother, a cold, judgmental woman. Nevertheless, in a written account of the racetrack story composed shortly after the event took iPlace, Beatrice herself remarks that at the track, 'Father and the Buzzels were :achng very male", quarreling over the results of the races.9
330   Interpreting memories
When I sent Beatrice a copy of my essay in which her narrative had suffered a sea change, she naturally felt misrepresented. To complicate matters, my original essay contained a great deal of theory that was unfamiliar and at times incomprehensible to her. Embedded in the context of my own scholarly environment, I had not bothered to provide any accompanying explanation of that theory. Thus, if I had 'misread' her text, I also gave her every opportunity to misread mine. I now feel that had I talked to Bea about my ideas before I committed them to writing, presented her with drafts, or even arranged to have her read the paper with me so that we might discuss misunderstandings and differences as they arose, her sense of having been robbed of textual authority might not have been as strong as it was.
I am not suggesting that all differences of perspective between folklorist and narrator, feminist scholar and speaking woman, should or can be worked out before the final research product is composed. Nor am I suggesting that our interpretations must be validated by our research collaborators. For when we do interpretations, we bring our own knowledge, experience, and concerns to our material, and the result, we hope, is a richer, more textured understanding of its meaning.
I am suggesting that we might open up the exchange of ideas so that we do not simply gather data on others to fit into our own paradigms once we are safely ensconced in our university libraries ready to do interpretation, liy extending the conversation we initiate while collecting oral narratives to the later stage of interpretation, we might more sensitively negotiate issues of interpretive authority in our research.
Quite possibly, this modification of standard practice would reveal new ways of understanding our materials to both research partners. At the very least, it would allow us to discern more clearly when we speak in unison and when we disagree. Finally, it would restructure the traditionally unidirectional flow of information out from source to scholar to academic audience by identifying our field collaborators as an important first audience for our work. Lest we. as feminist scholars, unrefleetively appropriate the words of our mothers for our own uses, we must attend to the multiple and sometimes conflicting meanings generated by our framing or contextualizing of their oral narratives in new ways.
POSTSCRIPT
On July 8. 1989. after a ten-month absence. 1 visited Beatrice and gave her a copy of the present version of this paper for her final comments. She took it to her study, read it, and then the two of us went through it together, paragraph by paragraph. At this juncture she allowed that much of what I had said was 'very true', though she had not thought about the events of her life in this way before. After a long and fruitful discussion, we approached the central issue of feminism. She explained, once again, that feminism was not a movement that she had identified with or even heard of in her youth. Never-
' That '.v not what I said' 331 theless. she declared that if I meant by feminist a person who believed that a woman has the right to live her life the way she wants to regardless of what society has to say about it, then she guessed she was a feminist.
Thus, the fieldwork exchange had become, in the end, a true exchange. 1 had learned a great deal from Beatrice, and she had also learned something from me. Yet I would emphasize that Bea's understanding and acceptance of feminism was not something that 1 could bestow upon her, as I had initially and somewhat naively attempted to do. It was achieved through the process of interpretive conflict and discussion, emerging as each of us granted the other interpretive space and stretched to understand the other's perspective. While Bea's identification with feminism is not crucial to my argument, it stands as a testament to the new possibilities for understanding that arise when we re-envision the fieldwork exchange.
NOTES
1 R. Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, Prospect Heights, 111., Waveland, 1977, p. II. For a discussion of the differences between narrated and narrative events, see R. Bauman's introduction in his Story, Performance, and Events, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1986. [Editors note: a number of discursive footnotes have been deleted from the original.]
2 For a discussion of new experiments in ethnographic texts, see J. Clifford and G.K. Marcus (eds). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley, Calif., University of"California Press. 1986, and G.E. Marcus and M.M.J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. I9S6.
3 For a discussion of the sexist bias in folklore scholarship generally, see M. Weigle. 'Women as verbal artists: reclaiming the daughters of Enheduanna', Frontiers, 1978. vol. 3. no. 3. pp. I 9.
4 The racetrack narrative I present here forms pari of an extended taping session I conducted with my grandmother during a three-day visit to her home in December 1986. A transcription of the full version of Beatrice's narrative appears in my article 'Horsing around with the frame: the negotiation of meaning in women's verbal performance'. Praxis, Spring 1990. pp. 83-107.
5 Beverly Stoeltje discusses the dialectic between individual behavior, changing environments, and ideals of womanhood in "A helpmate for man indeed": the image of the frontier woman', in C.R. Farrer (ed.), Women and Folklore: Images and Genres. Prospect Heights. 111.. Waveland Press. 1975. pp. 25 41.
6 Victor Turner views performances as reflexive occasions set aside for the collective or individual presentation of the self to the self in 'Images and reflections: ritual drama, carnival, film and spectacle in cultural performance', in his The Anthropology of Performance. New York, The Performing Arts Journal Publications, 19S7. pp. 121- 132. For a discussion of how personal narratives are tools for making sense of our lives, see B. Myerhoff. 'Life history among the elderly: performance, visibility and remembering", in J. Ruby (ed.). A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, Philadelphia. University of Pennsylvannia Press. 1982, pp. 99 117.
' In several lengthy post-essay discussions. Beatrice, my grandfather Frank, and I discussed both the story and what happened to it during the process of transmission. After hearing the revised version (in which my grandmother's comments were 'nciuded). F'rank stated that he had learned to see features of the society in which he
332   Interpreting memories
grew up that he had never really been aware of before. Beatrice was less enthusiastic about my alternative reading, but agreed that my perspective was thought-provoking. For her, the more general issue of how stories are transformed with each new telling was the most interesting point of the essay, and she expressed a desire to continue working on projects of the same type.
8 Equally serious is the tendency to discount as vestiges of false consciousness attitudes or behaviors that do not fit into our own vision of feminist practice. In a cogent critique of this tendency in feminist research. Rachelle Saltzman demonstrates how women who use sexist-male jokes within their own gender group see this activity as an expropriation for use rather than an acceptance of a belittled female identity, in 'Folklore, feminism and the folk: whose lore is it?', Journal of American Folklore, 1987. no. 100, pp. 548 567.
9 Quotation from a letter written to Beatrice's second husband, Frank Hanson, 6 August, 1944.