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Autoethnographic Reflections on Life and Work

Carolyn Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315420752
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Carolyn Ellis is the leading writer in the move toward personal, autobiographical writing as a strategy for academic research. In addition to her landmark books Final Negotiations and The Ethnographic I, she has authored numerous stories that demonstrate the emotional power and academic value of autoethnography. This volume collects a dozen of Ellis's stories—about the loss of her husband, brother and mother; of growing up in small town Virginia; about the work of the ethnographer; about emotionally charged life issues such as abortion, caregiving, and love. Atop these captivating stories, she adds the component of meta-autoethography—a layering of new interpretations, reflections, and vignettes to her older work. An important new work for qualitative researchers and a student-friendly text for courses.

Part One
Growing Up in a Rural Community, Getting and Education, and Finding My Place in Community Ethnography

Chapter One
Goin' to the Store, Sittin' on the Street, and Runnin' the Roads

Growing Up in a Rural Southern Neighborhood

I still think of this place, Luray, Virginia, as "home," though I moved away in 1969. Has it really been forty years? Its strange familiarity, when I visit there, mesmerizes me as I feel "of" it and "outside" it at the same time. I walk on Main Street where the Five and Ten used to be, drive through Fairview—my old neighborhood—and past my high school. I am drawn to the high school football field, where I stare at the sign on the building dedicated to my brother, reading the words over and over: "Rex A. Ellis Memorial Field House." I make the run between the two Tastee Freezes, and then up to Wal-Mart, which opened about fifteen years ago and quickly led to the demise of the few department stores on Main Street. Now only churches and banks occupy the center of town. I talk to familiar strangers I see in Wal-Mart about who they are, how many children and grandchildren they have, what year they graduated high school, when I left town, and what's happened in Luray since 1969. I try to imagine how I would have turned out had I, like so many of my classmates, stayed in Luray. Then I have to remind myself how much of this community I continue to carry with me.

Born in 1950, I grew up in a farming area on the outskirts of Luray, a small town of about three thousand people situated in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I lived with my parents, Arch and Katherine; my mother s sister, Florence; my older sister, Judi; and my younger brother, Rex. My older brother, Arthur,¹ left home to go to a local college when I was only four years old. My neighborhood provides the center of my earliest memories. After school, and in the summers, I spent most of my time playing with the kids who lived along the half-mile stretch of my country road, named Fairview. So did my brother Rex. My sister, Judi, stayed closer to home until she began to concentrate her attention on boyfriends from school. For Rex and me, though, Fairview was our world.

Fairview: The Neighborhood

The neighborhood kids often played Softball or baseball in the open fields that stretched between our houses. We had deep red bruises on our hands to prove it, since baseball gloves were too expensive for most of us. Later, when my brother and I put up a basketball net—a misnomer since after the first week there never again was an actual net, just a rusting hoop—we played basketball outside our garage almost every afternoon. H-O-R-S-E, where players had to match shots of their opponents, was our favorite game, since even a quarter-court energetic "man-to-man" game presented the danger of running into the garage door just behind the basket.

Not all our time was consumed by organized sports. To ease any sense of boredom, we also played games of fantasy and challenge for long stretches in the massive sand pile that occupied the front "yard" of our property. The sand pile changed daily as the men in my father's big trucks hauled in the sand and took it away; sometimes the mound temporarily grew to the size of a small house. There we built castles and roads for our toy trucks and action figures—pretending we were contractors like my father—and competed for "king of the mountain," wrestling and falling without harm, caught in the arms of the soft brown sand. Just as good was the large "junk" yard behind our garage, where my father stored lumber, gravel, and old tractor and truck parts. Unsupervised, the neighborhood kids played hide-and-seek there, raced over piled-up lumber, swung on ropes, built playhouses with castoff lumber, and chased each other in "you're it" and "follow me" games. Later, we built clubhouses in the attic over the garage in which my father s men repaired equipment. Sometimes these hidden-away places became opportunities for same- and cross-sex explorations in games of "house" and "doctor," but mostly they provided opportunities to run out our incessant child energy.

Occasionally we took our hide-and-seek games to the cornfields nearby, though then we had to deal with the wrath of Jack, a farmer and my cousin. "You're destroying the corn," he'd yell from his pickup as he drove slowly up and down the stretch of Fairview Road that fronted his field. Then he'd threaten to get his gun, though he never did. At this, we'd run as far away from him as we could, moving quickly in a tiptoeing motion, and trying not to ruffle the corn stalks. Out of sight, we'd squat quietly in the far side of the field, our fingers over our lips, shushing others, and holding back our own laughter. Part of the fun was the adrenaline rush of hiding from Jack and not being sure about the seriousness of the threat he made.

If the weather were bad—rainy or just too hot—we'd play board games. My friend Janet and I set up a Monopoly game on a card table in her unfinished basement where we wouldn't be disturbed. When the game was in danger of ending because one of us was going broke, the other person loaned money to be paid back later when the recipient was more solvent. Then we got the idea of making more money. We traced the Monopoly money onto white sheets of paper, gave it a value, and distributed it equally to each other and the bank. The object was to have fun and pass time, not to win. Besides, who wanted to give up Broadway and Park Place, once you had built hotels on them? Sometimes games lasted all summer. They ended only when we tired of them or each other, or more likely when school started in the fall.

All these activities were fun, but the pursuit that consumed most of our time was "goin' down the road," as we called it. Almost every day, the neighborhood kids walked or rode bikes for hours on end along the country road that connected our houses. At first, the girls and boys stayed in same-sex groups. But before each day was over, we'd all usually meet up somewhere. Barefooted and paying little attention to the hot pavement or our stumped and bleeding big toes, we chased each other, found a field of grass or a forest of leaves to lie in, sat together on the side of the road, or simply walked from house to house and back. In the heat of summer, we went to "The Creek," where we devised rope swings that dropped us into the deep end of the rocky, cool water. But most often our destination was Ruth's Fairview Grocery, our favorite hangout.

The Store

About a third of a mile from my house, "The Store" formed the nexus of the Fairview community. It provided a safe space for kids to play a meeting grounds for men to talk about farming and the weather and to play cards, and a convenient place for all who lived in the neighborhood to pick up staples and items forgotten at the town grocery store.

The Store was an eight-hundred-square-foot brick-fronted building. A rusted tin roof and tin-covered sides were painted a deep red to match the brick. Inside the one-room store, a large wooden plank counter ran the length of one side, covered by displays of tobacco and packages of peanut butter and cheese nabs. An old-fashioned pull-arm cash register sat in the middle alongside empty space for lining up your purchases. Boxes of candy and snacks, cigarettes and cigars, chewing tobacco, loaves of white bread, cereal, canned goods, and a few supplies, such as toothpaste, detergent, matches, and car oil, covered the single row of shelves in the front of the store. Beside the counter was a horizontal ice cream freezer. A meat counter holding a hand-operated meat slicer occupied the rear of the store. Behind it were boxes of dry goods needed by farmers, such as overalls and rubber boots, as well as sprays and ointments useful for their horses and cattle.

The place I always headed to first was the tall glass enclosure just inside the front door. As a child, I would lean against the short, horizontal drink cooler in front of the glass enclosure and point high to the penny candy, nickel candy bars, chewing gum, and Life Savers protected behind the glass. Once I had my candy, I'd open the lid of the cooler—with "Drink Coke" emblazoned on it—grab a bottle of icy-cold pop, stand back from the melting ice crystals that covered the bottle, and admire the hiss that came from popping the top under the bottle opener on the front of the cooler. I loved the first big gulps of the sweet, brown liquid, and the way the bubbles sizzled on the way down, tingling my tongue and slightly burning my throat. No doubt I enjoyed the caffeine and sugar high as well.

Sometimes my father stopped by The Store to talk and buy "cloth" bologna, juicy, thick-sliced, fatty meat wrapped in a cloth fiber that was coated with wax. Dad took the bologna home to my Aunt Florence, who lived with us and cooked our meals. Aunt Florence made a cut in each slice so it wouldn't curl up, dipped it in water, rolled it in flour, and then fried it in Crisco. With added Miracle Whip on two slices of Wonder Bread, bologna was one of our favorite lunches. Dad's favorite purchase, though, was what came to be called "Arch Ellis cheese," sharp cheddar cheese cut from a round with a black or yellow rind. Dad often unwrapped the block of cheese from its white waxed paper and ate it with sardines or raw oysters on Saltine crackers with lots of pepper while standing in the store. Since he liked the cheese warm and sweaty, not cold from the cooler, the owners often kept some on a shelf especially for him.

In the winter, we sat for hours on old bus seats, patched with electrical tape, around the wood- and coal-fed potbellied stove in the center of the room. Warming our hands, we listened to the fire crackle and stove pipe rattle as it belched smoke through the roof. We unbuckled our plastic galoshes and watched melting snow disappear through the cracks of the uneven floorboards, which sometimes swallowed the pennies and nickels we dropped as well.

In the evenings, this space was transformed as the men in the neighborhood gathered to play cards. They constructed a table by laying a piece of plywood on barrels and played "Set Back"—a simple high/low bidding game—from the bus seats pulled around the table.

In the summer, we dangled our feet off the stores front porch, swigging pop and eating ice cream, and listening to the talk of the adult men who sat on empty kegs or perched their feet on sacks of feed on the porch. When Mr. Fox rode up on his white horse, Ruth would bring him his chewing tobacco. If we grew bored, we chased each other around the parking lot, careful to stay out of the clutches of old Sam—an ancient-looking, wrinkle-faced man—whose shaking hand extended his cane to hook little girls when we ran by. We squealed and resisted, fearing his trembling hand almost as much as we dreaded the slobbery kisses he'd bestow on our cheeks as he pulled us onto his lap and tried to hold us there. Nobody ever tried to stop him; nor did they scold us, unless we ran though the store or hit each other too hard in one of our paper-rock-scissors games. When I interviewed Ruth in 2007, she said, "I didn't have any problems with you kids. You had good times. Oh, you picked on each other and all, but that's all. I knew all of you. I think that made a difference."²

When we arrived at The Store, our hands were filled with wet sacks and cartons of empty pop bottles to trade for their two-cent deposit. When we left, our hands were filled with bags of penny candy we had purchased and our fingers covered with the sticky ice cream and pop we had consumed. Bottle collecting was one of the few ways we had of making money. We extracted most of the pop bottles from among the worthless beer cans, cigarette butts, and wrappers that littered the ditches along Fairview Road. People then didn't have much consciousness about littering and assumed the kids would pick up the returnable bottles. I can still see my brother Rex pulling his little red wagon down the road collecting bottles.

I begged my parents for the empties that collected at home. They usually complied, forgoing the opportunity to return them during their weekly grocery shopping. I also got pop bottles from the men who worked in my father's construction business. Peg Leg Les, Moon, Gil, John, Slim, and Billy called me "Pickles"—I don't remember why—and, in addition to their empties, they often gave me money to bring them a cold drink from the store and a nickel or dime for my efforts. Happy to oblige, I loved to walk to the store and besides, I had money then for my own purchases and also could lay claim to the men's next round of empties.

I went to The Store almost every day, sometimes twice or more. It gave me something to do and offered the possibility of seeing my friends also walking along the road or hanging out at the store. "I'm goin' to tha store," I'd yell into the house and take off whether anyone replied or not. My mother and my aunt liked getting me out of their hair and didn't care where I was as long as I stayed in the neighborhood. All the kids had lots of freedom and nobody in the neighborhood ever seemed to worry about our safety or about what we were doing. If we got in trouble—which we rarely did—our parents were bound to find out from the many relatives living along the road.

Ruth, my first cousin—though she was twenty-five years older than I—inherited The Store from her father, my uncle, and from the time she graduated high school she worked behind the counter every day from early in the morning until late at night. Since she didn't have a car, she walked to work, though someone usually stopped to give her a ride in the morning and the last person in the store drove her home at night. Sometimes Ruth hugged us tightly and we loved the feeling of disappearing into her ample bosom. With her easy style, Ruth trusted us to tell her how many pop bottles we had in our bags and cartons, and she paid us our nickels and dimes without checking the count. She let us serve ourselves; sometimes we didn't pay until we were leaving and then we just told her the total of what we had eaten and what we had in our bags. If Ruth was busy waiting on other customers, we'd leave our money on top of the cash register.

A day's collection of bottles, buttressed by my weekly allowance of thirty-five cents, fifty cents when I was older, bought a bag full of penny candy. I loved watching Ruth fill my paper sack with the goodies I pointed out to her: waxed lips and waxed bottles (I drank the sweet syrup inside, then chewed the sweetened, waxy coating until it hardened and broke into pieces in my mouth), taffy, peanut butter cups, caramels (a deal at two for a penny), Mary Janes (my favorite), Tootsie Rolls, and bubble gum (to entertain my tastebuds, massage my mouth muscles, and make my companions laugh when I tried to blow the biggest bubble ever and it burst all over my face). I also bought pop—a six-ounce Pepsi, or occasionally a Mountain Dew—sometimes even a creamsicle or fudgesicle, a popsicle, an ice cream sandwich, or maybe a Nutty Butty—a frozen cone of vanilla ice cream rolled in nuts and topped with hard chocolate. After picking out candy, my friends and I would socialize in the store, reaching our hands time and again into our individual stashes, and sometimes trading with each other. We made sure to save plenty for the walk home, depositing the paper wrappers alongside the rest of the trash on Fairview road.

Unfortunately, the exercise I got from walking (and playing sports) did not cancel out the calories of the candy and ice cream I ate. A pleasingly plump child, I was unaware of the connection between my weight and my consumption of sweets. Surprisingly, no one pointed out that I weighed too much, perhaps because I was similar in size to other family members and kids in the neighborhood. I have not lost my love for sweets now almost fifty years later, nor my few extra pounds, and understanding the connection between sweets and weight hasn't changed my behavior all that much. I still think a day without ice cream and/or candy is not much worth living.

Get Your Nose Out of That Book

When no other kids were around, or if I had just made my weekly trip to the small town library, I s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Reflecting on Meta-Autoethnography
• Part One: Growing Up in a Rural Community, Getting and Education, and Finding My Place in Community Ethnography
• Part Two: Becoming an Autoethnographer
• Part Three: Surviving and Communicating Family Loss
• Part Four: Doing Autoethnography as a Social Project
• Part Five: Reconsidering Writing Practices, Relational Ethics, and Rural Communities
• Notes
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author