This ethnographic project on voice, self, and silence is centered on Black women in Southwest Louisiana's Cajun country. The three women who are the focal point of this dissertation operate out of a historical position that would have them relegated to the margins and marked as "other," forever placing them in a silenced state. Each woman discursively constructs a self against that paradigm of silence, effectively overturning its hold upon her life. The three chapters of this dissertation are comprised of analysis of one woman's narrative, using the discourse analysis model, and a novel by an African American woman writer. The inclusion of Corregidora, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo show fictional representatives of Black American women acting against the cultural strictures on their lives and, likewise, discursively constructing a self against those very constraints. Each chapter highlights a particular aspect of each Southwest Louisiana woman's narrative: agency, power, and disfluency. Each representative instance of self-formation disrupts the overarching paradigm that would have these women remain veiled and silenced.