A year-and-a-half of ethnographic fieldwork in a primarily African-American neighborhood suggests that praxis and ethnographic methods can be stirred together to produce empowering literacy artifacts and discourse in the community. Originally a Marxist notion, praxis requires researchers to understand how people characterize their own situations within larger social and political contexts. In the present context, it also asks the researcher to put something back into the community he or she studies. Embarking on a study that asks, "How do African-Americans use language and literacy to navigate the institutional settings with which they come into contact?" one researcher found that she could help to empower the people she worked with. As an ethnographer, emowerment meant: (1) enabling people to achieve a goal by providing resources for them; (2) facilitating actions--particularly those associated with language and literacy; and (3) lending the researcher's power or status to forward people's achievement. Academics who often take quiet space and time for granted can help to offer such space to the objects of their study, many of whom may not normally have such luxuries. They can also simplify access to the university and its services. And they can serve as character references; that is, they can use their status to further the goals of the people they work with. (Contains 26 references.) (TB)