She heads to her bedroom to pack her bag: a journal, lavender lotion, sage oils, heating pads, a copy of Hazel’s birth plan, and affirmations the girl had written on index cards.
“I could use you,” she says as she stuffs her bag full. “The thing is, her boyfriend isn’t going to make it after all. She has aunties and cousins but they moved to Baton Rouge after the storm. You don’t have to stay the whole time, just the early part before we head to the hospital. The first stages of labor could last hours.”
“I’m in,” I say, almost embarrassed at how excited I am to be joining. “I’m not taking care of Martha,” I add. “I don’t have anything else to do.”
We stand at Hazel’s door for some time after we ring the bell. When she finally opens it, she’s clutching the base of her stomach.
“That was a bad one,” she says.
“Yeah, it’s going to be like that for a while,” my mother says back.
She walks in and starts to work: clearing space in the living room, laying quilts and blankets onto the floor, guiding Hazel to positions that might take the pressure off, all fours, then on her side. Before we’d come, I’d watched my mother fill socks with rice. She heats them now, as Hazel bends with another contraction, and presses them against Hazel’s back.
“It’s just energy,” she says when the pain has ebbed. “It’s all just energy,” she repeats. “Our job is to diffuse it. Rock it out. Sing it out. You’ll know the best way to move, the best way to let the pain out. Some people want to grunt, but that just traps the pressure inside. No, it’s more of an exhale.”
There’s quiet as we wait, and my mother closes her eyes and presses her hands to the ceiling, palms up.
Mother God, Yemaya, Spirit World, Guides, and Ancestors,
We call on you today to show us the old ways.
We know there’s nothing new under the sun, and we ask you to
Fill our minds with ancient wisdom, our hearts with intuition.
Take our hands, order our words,
So you are the one touching Hazel, hollowing out her pain,
So you are the one directing her thoughts, opening her heart to peace.
Center Hazel’s mind in the present moment.
“Yes, Lord,” I call out, without meaning to.
Show her how you create a new thing, a new moment, new life
In the magic folds of your own womb.
Let her lean on you,
Settle her heart with thanksgiving.
Be with us tonight and always,
Amen.
“Amen,” I repeat.
Before I open my eyes, Hazel screams. My mother hurries over and takes her hand. She kneels down on all fours, swaying from side to side, and Hazel follows her, awkward at first, but as the pain deepens, her body loosens. She closes her eyes and groans.
“Good,” my mother says. “Good,” and she makes the sound with her. “Let the pain guide the exhale,” she says. “Let it find the chord that’s going to match it. Let it find the chord that’s going to bring it home.”
As they’re talking, a voice tells me to run a bath. I fill the tub with warm water, walk back into the living room, and sit on the other side of my mother, rubbing Hazel’s back up and down. It’s not just her back but the top of her legs that seems to be calling for attention. Watching her writhe has awakened something in me, a memory of that steep throb that preceded King’s birth, the one I never thought I would overcome. And it’s not just memory because it’s based on what’s in front of me, like a part of my body corresponds with Hazel’s, and I know before she sits up and says the contraction is over that the pain has ebbed, for now.
“Next time, let’s go straight to the tub,” I say. “It’s getting to that point,” and I surprise myself with my own authority.
My mother looks over at me with a smile and says, “All right.”
Variations of the same unfold over the rest of the night. Hazel has quiet spurts where she’s joking about the old-school music my mama is playing: Dinah Washington and Ella Fitzgerald.
“This sounds like this was recorded in like 1492 or something.”
But she always braces up right before the contraction hits. I lead her back and forth from the tub, guide her to a kneel; I knead the base of her back with my fists, squeeze her hips together. I feel awkward at first but I know the scale of moan that needs to be expelled to soothe her, and I model the sound so she won’t feel funny making it alone in her house, and I get on all fours with her, rocking my hips and groaning so the pain isn’t trapped inside her body but given a channel to follow out.
By midnight, Hazel is ready to go to the hospital. I sit in the back with her while Mama drives.
When we arrive, the nurses lead Hazel to a room, examine her, and find she’s eight centimeters dilated. My mother leaves with them to look for a doctor. As comfortable as I’ve become with this process, I’m nervous being alone with her. The pain has spiked, so has her terror, and the methods I’ve tried seem to be waning in usefulness. She’s sitting on a birthing ball now, leaning against the hospital bed for support, and I’m squatting behind her, pressing into her back with my palms.
I can see from the monitor that there’s another contraction coming.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s going to be okay.”
She closes her eyes and sways and groans through it. When she’s done, she turns to me. “I can’t do this anymore. It’s even worse than last time, and you see how that turned out.”
“You’re so close,” I say. “You can’t give up now. In less than an hour, you’re going to be a mother.”
“That’s what they said before,” she says, and she starts to cry. “I was so geared up for it, I was so ready, and then—” she holds her face in her hands. “And then nothing.”
“That was last time,” I say, “but it’s different now. You have to accept it’s possible that things are going to be different now.”
She shakes her head.
“You can use it though,” I say. “All the pain, the disappointment, the anger, let it give you strength, let it give you power.”
“I just want it to be over,” she says.
And I feel like the same force that had been moving my hands earlier today, guiding them up and down her back, squeezing her hips, telling me what temperature to run the water, is there again, directing the flow of my words, lending them a confidence they wouldn’t have possessed on their own.
“I’m going to be here with you today,” I say. “Where you don’t have the strength, I’m going to give you mine, let you stand on it. I’m going to sit here with you and see it through.”
That seems to calm her. The doctor comes in, my mother trailing her, and we help Hazel back onto the bed.
The doctor reaches inside her, then tells her she’s ready to push.
“Can you give me one big one?” she asks.
And Hazel nods through a contraction.
I lean down to whisper in her ear, more a chant than a sentence, “All the women who came before you are standing beside you and they’re cheering you on, they’re guiding you to the finish.” My eyes are closed as I talk, and I can see Josephine standing in her farm, just like the picture. This time, she’s holding two children’s hands in hers, a girl around the age of five and a much older boy, and they’re all gazing at me with expectant eyes.
“Good girl,” the doctor says. “Very good.”
I can see the baby’s head’s out, slick and black.
“One more,” the doctor says, “you got one more push in you, Hazel,” and she grunts.
I keep talking.
“This is it, everything you’ve been preparing for, and it’s already done; it became yours when you rose up to meet it.”
She pushes again, and the baby is all the way out, quiet at first, but then he lets out an undeniable wail, and Hazel joins him.
“You did it,” my mother screams. “You did it.”
“I did it,” Hazel repeats. “
I did it.”
The nurse lays the baby on her chest and he stops crying. He has thin skin the same peach color King was and I am taken aback for a minute. I close my eyes to say a prayer, and Josephine is there again, still holding the children’s hands but looking elsewhere.
Hazel turns to me. “I couldn’t have done it without you,” she says. She looks down at the baby now, kissing the top of his head, and he squeezes her index finger in his fist. “You couldn’t have told me today was going to go any different than it went last time,” she goes on. “I really couldn’t see it. But it’s like another world opened up for me. I’m telling you, I don’t feel like it’s the same world.”
HAZEL’S AUNTIES AND COUSINS MAKE IT IN, SO AFTER my mother helps the baby latch, we head back home. King is waiting for us there, and when I walk in, he rushes into my arms.
“You’re in a good mood,” I say.
He shrugs, trying to play it cool. I tell him about the baby.
“He reminded me of you, coming out. I can still see you in my arms. I could hold you in the palm of one hand.”
“We’re going to be here for a minute,” I say, sitting down, “while I get myself together. I’m sorry about that.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not. A change will be good.”
He kisses me, then heads upstairs. My mother joins me on the sofa.
“You really came to life tonight, huh? I hate to say I told you so. You know I hate to say it.”
“You were right,” I say. “You were right.”
She nods and smiles, places her hand over mine.
“How are you feeling otherwise?” she asks.
“Bittersweet,” I say.
In the car, my father had called and told me the hospital was going to admit my grandmother. She’ll likely go to a facility when she’s released. A nice one, he’d stressed, and I know that is best, but I’m sad for her too. Still Hazel had said she felt like another world had opened up, and in that world she was going to be allowed to keep her baby. I could see a new world opening for me too, and there’s no room for guilt in this one.
I remember Josephine. I close my eyes, and she’s not as vivid as she had been earlier, but still close enough that I know I didn’t imagine her. She’s settled in for the night, her hands folded beneath her face, a blue scarf wrapped tight around her head, a cluster of stones circling her pillow. Her eyes are closed but she is smiling. She seems so pleased with herself.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My editor, Jack Shoemaker, enhances my vision and grounds it in the page. My agent, Michael Carlisle, is an advocate and friend. Jane Vandenburgh makes me and my work better. Megan Fishmann and Jenn Kovitz are pillars of knowledge and support. Jennifer Alton, Dory Athey, Katie Boland, Nicole Caputo, Jordan Koluch, Miyako Singer, Yukiko Tominaga, and everyone at Counterpoint and Catapult who has had a hand in this project—you are magicians, and it is awesome to behold. Jaya Miceli, the cover is perfect.
I am indebted to the following books: Chained to the Land: Voices from Cotton & Cane Plantations by Lynette Ater Tanner; Rise and Fly: Tall Tales and Mostly True Rules of Bid Whist by Greg Morrison and Yanick Rice Lamb; American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt by Daniel Rasmussen; To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War by Tera W. Hunter; Back Through the Veil: A Brief History of African-Americans Living in Mansura, (Volume 1) by Donald G. Prier, PhD; Slave Escapes & the Underground Railroad in North Carolina by Steve M. Miller and J. Timothy Allen; Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi by Noralee Frankel; Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals by Luisah Teish; Mammon & Manon Early New Orleans: First Slave Society by Thomas N. Ingersoll; Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup; The Way of the Elders: Western African Spirituality & Tradition by Adama Doumbia and Naomi Doumbia; Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife’s Story by Onnie Lee Logan and Katherine Clark; Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South by Albert J. Raboteau; American Negro Songs: 230 Folk Songs and Spirituals, Religious and Secular by John W. Work; Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall; Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow by James H. Conrad, Thad Sitton, and Richard Orton; Sharecropping in North Louisiana: A Family’s Struggle Through the Great Depression by Lillian Laird Duff and Linda Duff Niemeir; Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America by Sterling Stuckey; Freedom After Slavery: The Black Experience and the Freedmen’s Bureau in Reconstruction Texas by Lavonne Jackson Leslie, PhD; Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons by Sylviane A. Diouf; Mississippi Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Mississippi Slaves by Federal Works Project; The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom: A Comprehensive History by Wilbur H. Siebert; Eight, True, Short Stories of Daring Slave Escapes: Tales From the Underground Railroad by Julie McDonald; Delivered by Midwives: African American Midwifery in the Twentieth-Century South by Jenny M. Luke; The Underground Railroad: Authentic Narratives and First-Hand Accounts by William Still and Ian Finseth; Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon; Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton; What Love Can Do: Recollected Stories of Slavery and Freedom in New Orleans and the Surrounding Area by Arthur Mitchell and Gayle Nolan; New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom by Justin A. Nystrom; Seven African Powers: The Orishas by Monique Joiner Siedlak; Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon F. Litwack; The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette.
Thank you, Blane Clayton, Crystal Tenille Irby, Jamie Kennedy, and Debhora Singleton for your doula, bid whist, New Orleans, and life jewels.
Kathryn Kefauver and Leta McCollough Seletzky, your edits are indispensable and so is your encouragement.
Anisse Gross, Rachel Khong, Lydia Kiesling, Reese Kwon, Caille Millner, Andi Mudd, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Colin Winette, it has been an honor.
I am deeply grateful to Allysia Adams, Lucy Alvarez, Melinda Bowman, Katherine Williams Brinkman, Chanda McGhee, Vanessa Motley, Meredith Robinson, Erin Shelton, LJ Smith, Betsy Sexton, Carlton Sexton, Nubia Solomon, Iris Tate, Johanna Thomas, Kathryn Washington, Josie Wilkerson, Patsy Wilkerson, Felthus Wilkerson Jr., Bruce Williams, Trevor Williams, and so many others for holding me up this year.
My mother is a creative genius. I’m just glad she passed some down.
Chuckie, becoming a founding member of TFC has been my greatest joy and honor.
Nina, Carter, and Miles, may you always know you are loved beyond measure; may you always remember you are ten thousand strong.
© Melissa Schmidt
MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON, born and raised in New Orleans, studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and law at UC Berkeley. Her debut novel, A Kind of Freedom, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, won the Crook’s Corner Book Prize, and was the recipient of the First Novelist Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. Find out more at margaretwilkersonsexton.com.
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