Divining Women

I got her in bed and called the doctor. I was told he would be there as soon as he could, but she was moving through things so swiftly that I knew he would never get there soon enough. The minister had a telephone, so I called and asked him to look for Mamie and bring her over. I had collected and set out the emergency supplies that she had put in the closet in case something like this happened. I sat by Maureen and held her when she struggled and when she rested.

Since all she wanted to have ready was the bird’s-eye for the diapers, there wasn’t anything more to do, nothing outward, at least. Watching her, bending close to wipe the damp hair back from her face, I had a sense that forces were assembling inside her that had nothing to do with anything I’d ever experienced. Her pores were pushing out an odor I recalled from a creek bed I used to go down to with a glass jar to be filled with water for science class—clean but old and mossy. She was perfect.

I had barely enough time to tell her that the odor was in the same category as the lunatic optimism of women, something you can half dream, half remember from a place you’ve only heard about and somehow be, right before she shouted, “Hush. Hush it. Now.” Then she reached up and pulled my head down by her face, kneading the psyche knot, saying, “Breathe. Now. In my ear. Splitting open. I wanted my mother, God damn it.”

As she worked through that jagged pain, I was close enough upon her body to feel and hear the surging of all the elements that had been gathering and doubling, the blood and the sheer force. So very much had been taken from her that it made no logical sense that she had enough of what the prophet had called nerve power not to have collapsed after the first contraction and announced that the baby would have to stay inside her indefinitely. Of course, her behavior had been more forthright lately, but it had enervated her just as much to stand up against her husband as it did incessantly to concede. I thought of all the cavalier or premeditated encounters that had tired her mind, body, and spirit, the ones I had witnessed, the episodes before my arrival, the beatings with those hospital towels, the electric currents shot through her. I had to stop myself from saying aloud, “A million other women are giving birth right now, and I know they’ve survived the same and different dangers, but where did they store up the power and life to form and then urge out a baby?” I was awestruck by the reservoir that had managed to swell within her, and although I loved her dearly and believed I knew her well, I had not known it was there. Foolish young women like me, I decided, can’t take excellent notice of what ultimately matters in life because we don’t know what it looks, feels, or sounds like, and it takes the wisdom of time and experience to be able to stand out after a rain and divine our own bodies.

Judith Stafford, my mother and grandmothers, and Maureen were women I wanted to be. Their bodies were their own ground, real, wet, dry, hot, cold, vibrating, and still. I kept as much of my body against Maureen’s as her writhing would allow, and soon the expanse between my accustomed place as a woman and the ground I wanted to own began to diminish. By the time I had apologized for being incapable of taking away the pain and heard her say, “No. You’re taking the pain with me, the weight of your body on me,” the life I was living was the one I wanted to live.

I had always heard of the miracle of birth, but the real miracle and mystery seemed to be that this terrifyingly magnificent occasion could just slip into the routine of a woman’s life. I had never heard women ask for gratitude from their children for having suffered this ripping pain for them or request special treatment from their husbands. I had never heard a woman on a streetcar tell a man, “I went through childbirth three times. I deserve your seat.” And I hadn’t heard my mother or grandmothers talk about what was expected of a woman at this moment, how much she would be made to give. I didn’t think they were protecting me or that they had forgotten. It had merely never been a part of any feminine conversation I’d heard. Perhaps, I decided, women go through it and go on. They make up the bed and go and do the rest of the day.

Maureen closed her eyes, while I watched Mamie’s face. She asked about the timing of the contractions, how they had started, whether they had remained even. She raised her head and laid it against Maureen’s knee, and with one hand under the sheet, she told us, “Wide and high. The baby’s pushing hard and then slipping back up high enough that we’ve got time to get the doctor over here.” Maureen shook her head, but Mamie told her, “You have been like a sister to me, and you know I want to bring this baby into the world, but Zollie and I just lost so much. As soon as this water breaks, you’ll have a baby in very short order, but either God or the doctor’s going to need to do it.”

I wondered whether this might be some custom from some small corner of the country, and so I left and stood outside the door and listened. The moment I listened and heard nothing, I knew that Mamie had sent me away out of respect for this sacred, horrible time. And when I opened the door, Mamie was leaning over Maureen’s stomach, lurching and struggling, trying to cut the cord from around the infant’s neck. It was futile. The child was lifeless, blue, a girl. Mamie tried to blow life into her anyway, and only when Maureen said, “Thank you, Mamie, but no more. Let her rest,” did Mamie place the baby in her mother’s arms and then lie down beside the two of them and weep.

I went around to the other side of the bed and lay on the sliver of space by Maureen. I reached over the baby and found Mamie’s arm, slick with blood, and told her not to worry. “I found my children that way,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t have made a mistake. You know that.” As I pressed my face into Maureen’s ear and whispered, “We’ll all be fine,” she began such a violent shaking that I had to catch the infant before she bounced out of her arms. I thought she was having a seizure, and worried her teeth or jaw would break. She’d lost so much blood, so rapidly.

I got several lengths of fabric and lay them out beside her, and then lifted the baby from her arms and wound her around and around. I handed her back to Maureen. Mamie quietly asked if Maureen wanted to be bathed now, if she wanted to move to another bed in another room. “No, I’m good, and I need to be here.”

When I telephoned the wire office, the clerk told me that there was a telegram from Mississippi waiting to be delivered to my uncle’s office. I asked him to read it aloud to me and then send it to the house. Maureen’s mother had said, “Thank God you’re not dead, but walking wounded is not living. Go and do, Maureen. Live.”

My uncle had to be told as well. I telephoned his office and started the process of looking for him in Durham. When I reached him, he assumed he was being unnecessarily bothered, and so I gave him adequate time to listen to himself and then told him that the child was stillborn, a girl. He was silent, and then he said, “Tell Maureen to give her my mother’s name.”

“Tell her that I’ll be back as soon as I can get things together here, probably early in the morning.” His tone was that of a man inconvenienced by an unanticipated automobile malfunction. The only credit I could give him was that he was not attempting to feign the appropriate emotion. He was too selfish to grieve or empathize, and there was nothing in his voice to say he was distracted by the fear his child may have felt while she was strangling. He told me how and when to consult a list of men that included a lawyer and a second doctor, as though some official documentation were needed for the death that the three women who had been in the room were incapable of conveying. He thought he was shifting people around their various stations, and he was happy to stay gone while emotions were spiking and blame for them was being passed around like butter at a table. He was never spiritually here, and I could not think of a time when we were all so grateful for his absence.

Sometime during the night, Mamie lifted the child from Maureen’s arms. Her breasts had ached and poured. The swaddling was soaked through with milk, so Mamie dried the child and wrapped her in the remaining length of bird’s-eye. Then she took her downstairs to meet the doctor, who, like Mamie, had not changed his clothes in some time. He said it looked as though about one in twenty people who developed bronchial symptoms were dying. The news that her children had been poisoned by the patent medicines had reached him, and he told her that he hoped it would help to know that this tragedy would go a long way to making store owners ban those products from their shelves. She said that she was sorry, but it was no consolation at all. As he examined Ella Eloise, he talked with me about the funeral arrangements; everything could be handled with a minimal amount of involvement, he said. My uncle had spoken to him about “things pertaining to the cemetery plot and things of that nature and so forth,” morbid unpleasantries that I was apparently too delicate to manage, despite my having walked through a maze of stacked coffins under the circus tent. But I wasn’t offended, as I had been by my uncle’s brusque direction that the women in the house be relieved of these hard responsibilities, for the doctor’s offer to intercede arose out of respect rather than contempt. He was kind, quietly chivalric. He treated us the way his mother had trained him to treat women, as had my uncle.

While the doctor was filling out a form, Mamie held the baby. She looked over his shoulder and said, “Dr. Morgan, the other day when I found my two boys, their mouths were full of something like a whipping cream, and I put my mouth to them and drew it over into mine. My husband washed them, and the two of us laid them in the coffins that Miss Oliver here stomped around that terrible tent and bought. Yesterday, she and I delivered this baby. I don’t have to tell you what that looked like. We appreciate your kindness this morning, and we’re going to take advantage of it on account of Mrs. Ross upstairs needs help, and I’m not feeling so well myself. But we handled these last few days and had to fight death with our bare hands, so we could go talk to the funeral home man. It would not be a problem.”

“Yes, she’s right,” I told him, not knowing what I could add. Yet I had to let him know I agreed with everything she had said. Any colored maid saying these things to a white doctor was at risk and put herself in line to be characterized as an “uppity nigger.” I told him that we were making the choice to accept his help, which was different from needing it. Making the distinction obviously meant more to us than it did to him, as he said whatever we wanted to do was fine. He finished up with the infant and wrote Maureen a prescription for laudanum before he examined her. We waited for him to come downstairs and give us a report, but when he returned he only lifted his hat from the banister and told me to tear up the prescription he had given me. “She’s fine,” he said. “She refuses to take anything. Someone from my office will be in touch shortly.”

By then, the death of an infant, even from an elite sort of family, wasn’t extraordinary. When the bells tolled that day, we had to decide for ourselves which belonged to the baby. After the men came over with the small white casket, after they placed a wreath on the door, Mamie said she and Zollie were going. She said that she hoped I could understand that they needed time for themselves. They had wanted to go back to the cemetery and had not done that yet. I told her that I understood, and so she went to find Zollie where he had secluded himself in the pantry. “Let’s go tell the boys good night, Zollie,” I heard her say. “Let’s go sit with them awhile.”

When I saw how the men had arranged the living room, how they had set the coffin between two tall mahogany chairs, I thought of how these rooms had appeared to me when I first walked into them, how it looked as though someone had created scenes to impress, awe, and perhaps even belittle people who stood there and knew they would never know what it was like to live like this, to be this lucky. But the finality of that white box in the picture should’ve been all the proof my uncle needed that he would never be able to order perfection. When he came through the door, his first instruction was that things be changed to accommodate guests. Maureen had already given me a note to place on the front door, thanking people for their kindness in honoring the family’s need for privacy. She was not going to share her grief with people in the community who had shared nothing pertaining to her life except whispers and lies during the years she had been among them.

I told Troop that I was sorry about his child, and that I hoped he understood Maureen’s need be to alone. He said he would deal with his wife, though he wanted to let me know that no one had the right to ban people from his home. He stood and watched me open the door and tack the note up. He stared at it, saying nothing, and then closed the door. Following me, he asked whether Maureen had been able to rest and whether she had required any treatment or medication from the doctor. When I answered to his satisfaction and told him I had drawn her a bath, he said, “It sounds as though you have everything handled. I have some things to do in the study. I’ll be up later.”

As he walked through the living room and past the coffin, I saw him stiffen. He stopped and turned, as if he wanted to tell me something, and then walked on. All during the night, I had been anxious about his arrival, and I wondered whether this might be the time he decided to correct himself, whether he would allow the baby’s death to pass for hitting bottom. I wondered whether he would let her death show him that participating even as a flawed human being in whatever the universe had to offer on any given day wasn’t so bad a proposition and that he should go ahead and live before it was too late. He was being crowded, at once, with more intimations of mortality than most people encounter in a lifetime, but the lesson plainly wasn’t taking.

Fantasy was required to hear him say anything authentic and straight, without the taint of harmful intent and calculation. I imagined him coming into my bedroom, telling me that Maureen had felt feverish, and he was expected to sit by her and keep a cool cloth pressed to her brow, but I needed to do it instead. He would say, “It is more than I can bear. I would look weak and possibly on the verge of losing control. I do not like the woman, certainly not enough to look after her. I want to look after myself. And that is more important than ever now that my mother is not here to love me unconditionally. I’m the only one left who’ll do it. All of you want me to do these things to earn your love, but it matters not a whit whether I help her today or not, because there will be something else expected of me tomorrow, a smile of encouragement, a kind word, an arm around the shoulder. It is too much to ask. There are always conditions placed on me. I’m expected to show emotions that embarrass me, but the rest of you seem to have them in abundance and have no difficulty speaking of them. I’m supposed to look at a beautiful wife who loves me and feel joy, I suppose, or some sort of deep happiness. That’s a tremendous condition. Her willingness to show her weakness and joy, everything she feels, frightens me on one hand and accuses me on the other. So venturing outside of myself truly isn’t possible, not today, not ever.”

When I went into her room, she was pushing the packs of ice Mamie had made for her down into her robe. She looked up at me and said softly, “These breasts haven’t been told yet.” The love and awed respect I felt for her were overwhelming—I could not fathom why he had dismissed her from his heart and mind, and I was glad that I had been raised by people who would not think it an immoral or despicable act that I had taken her into mine. We pressed enough milk out to give her some relief, but not enough, we hoped, to make them think that they were finally being put to work. Her breasts were as hard and round as the globe on her husband’s study desk, but when I told her she should rest now and dress to sit by the baby later, she said she could manage to do both if we wrapped a scarf around her to secure the ice.

As I was winding the long violet scarf underneath her uplifted arms, she said, “This is like the Hindu levitationist with Mrs. Stafford.” After I helped her put on a loose dark-brown blouse, she sent me into her closet to find a skirt that wouldn’t hurt in the waist. She sat on the bench at the foot of her bed and regarded the stockings and shoes on the floor beside her, calling out to me that bending over would not be possible for a while. I called back that I would be there in a moment, and when I came back into the room, I saw that she was trying anyway and that her husband was watching her from the door.

She was wearing the brown blouse and her underthings, and her hair was down. When she heard him, she pushed her hair aside and told him that he didn’t need to stand there, that he was welcome to come in. She was kind but not afraid, as though years of raw hurt and been coated with a balm, one that made the hurt disappear not forever, but just long enough to get through this day. I was unaccustomed to seeing her with even this temporary relief, and so was he. His heart was breaking at the sight. He turned his head to the side and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude. I only came in to tell you that some people have come and left food, and to see if you were all right, and you are, so, well, I apologize.”

He still had his head to the side and was pulling the door closed. In the largest act of either mercy or torment I’ve ever seen, Aunt Maureen told him to hold it a minute, and she went to the door, closer to him than was needed, and said, “Troop, our baby was strangled by the umbilical cord, and she died. My insides are still on fire. I am throbbing. But I’m alive, and I am so grateful for the pain. I’m grateful for all of it. And I’ve been thinking about my body, what I shall and shall not have done to it. So you will not take me anywhere and have me strapped down and have any of it taken from me. Enough has been taken.”

“No.” She looked to me standing at the far side of the room. “I have someone who isn’t going to pound gratitude out of me for hooking my dress. She’s not going to say I’m disgusting. She’s not going to hold up a glass and frighten me into saying I see something that was never there. So go ahead. You have all the time in the world you need for yourself today. We’re fine here. But thank you, Troop. Thank you so very much. I’m sure the offer counts for something, but if you think I would invite you to help me with my stockings so that you can remind me of how cheap you thought I looked at your mother’s funeral, maybe I would need more treatments, because I would be completely out of my mind.”