Jazz Cleopatra/He Included Me/Motherwit:
Weidman, Bette S
BOOKS JAZZ CLEOPATRA Josephine Baker in Her Time Phyllis Rose Doubleday, $22.50, 321 pp. HE INCLUDED ME The Autobiography of Sarah Rice Transcribed and edited by Louise Westling University of...
...I belong here!'" It is our good fortune that Onnie Lee Logan belongs here and has given us not only the benefit of her experience but the rhythms of her speech...
...Rose conveys a strong appreciation for Baker's energy and intelligence, especially her capacity to see herself in relation to large historical and social forces...
...This use of the word leaps to mind with the three African-American women whose lives are described in these books...
...Rice's oral history is described as autobiography...
...But even more interesting than this discussion is Rose's account of Baker's marriages and love affairs, her creation of a huge family, her heroic struggle with illness and the death that came at sixty-nine, in the midst of the triumphant opening in Paris of the revue, Josephine...
...Logan remembers many of the agricultural and domestic methods, as well as the generous spirit of her parents, who raised sixteen children and several orphans...
...thus it is to the credit of both women that Logan is able to speak of the depredations of the Klan and of complicated interracial sexual relations...
...Rose relates Baker's career, and the forms of popular culture in which her gift for movement was expressed, to Picasso's enthusiasm for African art and to the development of Cubism...
...In the fourth section of the book, "Motherwit," Logan discusses her experience-tested methods of aiding mothers...
...She gives us the history of her own family, notable for her parents' ability to consolidate the economic gains of able predecessors...
...she is a mother of mothers, citizen of the whole earth.others, citizen of the whole earth...
...So-and So.' I said, 'Let me tell you one thing.' I couldn't sit down and tell him...
...Sarah Rice was teaching an unbiased view of American Indian history in rural Alabama's black elementary schools in 1925, while the urban North lagged on this matter into the 1980s...
...HE INCLUDED ME The Autobiography of Sarah Rice Transcribed and edited by Louise Westling University of Georgia Press, $19.95, 181 pp...
...Unfortunately, Rice's fellow-Floridian, Zora Neale Hurston, is mentioned only briefly here, in a list of novelists and poets...
...Firm, capable, energetic, she recounts her family's way of life in rich detail, including information about food preparation, organization of the household, clothing, social events, childbearing...
...That miserable persecution by certain white people reappears in the last section of the book is a painful story...
...In the introduction, Rice's collaborator, Louise Westling, the daughter of a former employer, carefully explains her method of collecting Rice's memoirs...
...Her father inherited land and the skill to work it...
...There is a rich chapter on her early teaching that recalls W.E.B...
...Her relation to the oral historian {Catherine Clark, unlike that of Sarah Rice and Louise Westling, was not a personal, pre-existing one but emerged from Logan's desire to tell of her experience...
...In her introduction, Westling mentions the problem of the limits of trust between white employer and African-American employee: "When we began the project, we had a rapport which made the collaboration relaxed, even as it must certainly have limited some elements of the narrative...
...I had to stand up...
...But overriding this theme, another, triumphant layer of story emerges: Onnie Lee Logan's gathering of information to supplement her early curiosity about the work of a midwife...
...As she tells about managing difficult births and creating healthful household conditions, the reader can grasp the continuity of this work with the experience of Logan's childhood...
...But it is evident that the work was done with a sharp ear for dialect and a writer's interest in the speaker's English...
...But the reader will relish her rebuke: "I said, 'Let me tell you one thing, Dr...
...Generosity and vision were Baker's ruling characteristics...
...That she supported herself and her child by domestic labor simultaneously only emphasizes what a work of love it was: going out to homes of all conditions in every weather and hour of the night, often with little or no recompense...
...Logan does honor to her parents and her country...
...I was born and raised right here in America...
...In both the substance and the manner of her story, Logan conveys a sense of the plenty of earth and the competence of one who eagerly embraces it...
...Belle S. Weidmcm Citizens of the whole world When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his biographical studies of great men, he called them "representative" to express the way their individual genius concretely defined human potential...
...DuBois's account of an earlier period in The Souls of Black Folk...
...Rose devotes a particularly good discussion to the French cultural context that relished "African savagery" in rather gross racial stereotyping, but at the same time provided African-Americans acceptance of their real persons...
...The brief biographies of fifteen brothers and sisters are in themselves a history of Southern rural African-Americans in the early twentieth century...
...This is, above all, Logan's story of coming into her life's work...
...Josephine Baker, Sarah Rice, and Onnie Lee Logan are "representative" in Emerson's sense...
...In contrast, Motherwit is subtitled An Alabama Midwife's Story, and the profession of midwifery is the special subject of the book...
...The white doctors who instructed and encouraged her are remembered by name, as are the babies whose coming taught her midwifery through experience...
...He never had to share-crop, and the family was able to feed itself-even through the Depression-and to help the less fortunate...
...Phyllis Rose calls the life of Josephine Baker "a jazz improvisation...
...I don't belong in no Africa no mo' than you do...
...Logan's speech is deeply satisfying: from the special use of words ("When I came into know") to the repetition of stories for emphasis...
...Rice's father, a preacher, often away at conferences or other churches, did not provide amply, but the mother did domestic work, planted, sewed, taught her family, and even found time to read novels...
...Rose's biography begins in 1925 when Baker was nineteen, the star of the Revue Negre in Paris...
...From her childhood of poverty in St...
...If Josephine Baker is a representative artist and performer, Sarah Rice is a shaper of social institutions...
...Also born to poverty, she had a reliable family, particularly a mother whose skills and determination inspired her white employers to help the young Rice get an education...
...Hurston, folklorist and anthropologist, is of far more interest to a reader of Rice's story than are Booker T. Washington and Langston Hughes...
...MOTHERWIT An Alabama Midwife's Story Onnie Lee Logan as told to Katherine Clark Dutton, $16.95, 177 pp...
...Amos, the brother who is lost, might be a figure in a Richard Wright story...
...Perhaps because she is so interested in the contribution of granny midwives to maternal and infant health in Alabama, Clark does not devote any of her introduction to the method by which she collected, transcribed, and edited Logan's narrative...
...In telling these lives, Logan interweaves the influence of white racism...
...Their lives are full realizations of capacities we would otherwise know only abstractly, and their stories give us three rich chapters in the life of humankind...
...Sarah is cut out of this pattern...
...Rice's narrative describes her three marriages, her struggle to bring up her son, her move to Jacksonville, Florida, and her flowering as a church and civic leader in her new community and in statewide organizations...
...The limits of trust may have been even more significant in the production of Motherwit, as Logan and her family suffered deeply from racism...
...I stood up and I says, 'You done gotten me riled up now...
...Any reader who has borne children will wish she had had a coach with Onnie Lee Logan's combination of ability to observe, ingenuity in regard to physical arrangements, and calm faith...
...Born in Alabama in 1909, Sarah Rice led a very different kind of life, both public and private...
...If you want anybody to go to Africa to deliver babies, you go...
...Mules and Men, Hurston's collection of African-American folklore, and her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, would make good companion reading for He Included Me...
...Louis and young adulthood of glamour in Paris as a star of the music hall stage, Baker (19061975) became an undercover resistance worker in World War II Europe and the adoptive mother of twelve children of different races and nationalities...
...This book has the special quality that only carefully transcribed oral history can provide, letting us hear someone speak...
...Logan took abuse for transporting a hemorrhaging mother to a hospital when her attending physician could not be located...
...Onnie Lee Logan's personal life is fully treated, but subordinated to description of her work and the conditions she dedicated herself to improving...
...Important sources for Rose's book include autobiographical works, earlier biographies, and a novel Baker wrote with her husband...
...Onnie Lee Logan tells a multilayered story...
Vol. 117 • May 1990 • No. 9
