Stories from Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience

Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience is an ethnographic autoethnography that collapses traditional ethnographic research, creative writing techniques, and autoethnography to tell a multi-generational story of growing up black and female in the rural South in the twentieth century. The following excerpts, taken from the Prologue and Chapter One, offer a framework and context for the reviews contained in the forum. By introducing the perspective of the writer, who situates herself as a researcher and insider in the community, these excerpts give the reader a glimpse into Sweetwater,* a rural community in the “heart” of North Carolina, where the stories take place.