The
Chickasaw
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Short (True) Story
SUNDAY’S CHILD: THE BIRTH OF THE
CHICKASAW
World War II had
begun the previous December with the bombing of
Then, in the
dramatic Battle of Midway, forces under Admiral Chester Nimitz
forced the Japanese to withdraw from those crucial waters, leaving the
sea-bottom littered with their ships, the waters haunted by their dead.
Persons of Japanese
ancestry in the US, including those who were American citizens, were herded
into isolated and fenced detention camps, their property and lives given over
to wartime hysteria and racism. Even so, many Japanese-Americans fought bravely
for their country in segregated units on the European front.
With great agony
the south was changing. Lynching had tapered off,
though there had been upward of 3,500 such events known since records began to
be kept in 1882. Some 160 of those were in
The offenses with
which the victims were alleged to have committed included intemperance, a
variety of interactions involving white women ranging from looking at one the
wrong way to charges of rape and attempted rape. Attempting to become qualified
to vote, altercation with a white man, and failure to refer to a white man as
mister could also get a black person killed by our own homegrown terrorists of
the Ku Klux Klan variety. But by 1942 legal, rather than extra-judicial,
lynching had become the most popular way of dealing with uppity blacks.
***
I once had a
patient, an ever so meticulous sparrow of a woman who lived at home under the
care of the extended family that venerated her.
On the visit after
she turned 103, I said to her, “Mrs. Watson, what a lot of history you have
seen.”
She looked at me
and nodded her head slightly, noncommittally.
“They tell me you
were born a hundred and three years ago.”
She stirred a bit,
drew her shoulders up, then said with the kindness
good people reserve for fools, “Well Doctor, you see, when I was born, I was a
baby. And I doesn’t know when it was.”
Of course I don’t
know first hand about my own birth either. Two of the three lay midwives
present, though, who would later be patients of mine, were pleasant older women
who were pleased to tell me their stories, including the one of my own birth.
***
Sunday,
March 8th.
My mother was
cleaning the kitchen sink of the residue from breakfast.
“Uhh!” She stopped suddenly, straightening up,
and clutching her bulging abdomen. The smell of amniotic fluid, earthy, seminal
and funky, filled the room as her water broke and pooled on the unfinished pine
planks at her feet.
Two girls and one
brother quickly appeared, looking between the studs that partitioned off the
three rooms. The fact that the walls were not finished yet eased communication
though it diminished privacy.
Mary Ann, fifteen,
and Juanita, thirteen, were getting dressed in their Sunday best for church. My
brother Luke, eight, braced both hands against the two by four studs of the
partitioning. He was rangy and tall for his age, endlessly interested in how
things worked; it was he who as a toddler had found his father’s screwdriver
and removed every doorknob in the house.
Roger, already
neatened up for Sunday School, stood beside my father,
his Baptist Sunday School quarterly in hand, one finger marking his place. My
father looked into the kitchen to see how my mother was faring after her sudden
exclamation punctuated the morning.
He was tall, deeply
tanned on his arms and face and neck from the sun. He was a hard working man, a
truck driver. Most truly, though, he was that most impractical and difficult of
all creatures, a poet. A dreamer. An
idealist.
Sometimes for my
mother, this took an exasperating turn. When she had gone into labor with the
previous child, Luke, Daddy was busy with an oyster fry. It was a labor union
event, and thus related to saving the world.
After all, in that
time and place birth quite normally occurred at home, with the support and
attendance of family members or friends; particularly those women who had the
dignity, courage and experience to assist.
He felt, I suppose,
that since Mama had already given birth three times, she had enough practice
now and could handle things with a little help from her friends. She never
quite forgave him for his absence. Perhaps that had something to do with the
fact that I didn’t come along until eight years later.
My mother sat in a
straight-backed kitchen chair for a while, then as her labor progressed,
prepared to lie down. Because of the lack of privacy in the house, a house that
was a work-in-progress, she said, “You children go to Aunt Helen Ruth’s. You
can stay with your cousins tonight, and tell Aunt Helen Ruth I need her to come
help me.“
They departed,
eyeing the sky as they cleared the door, for clouds were moving in, and the
wind whipping up, stirring and rattling the dead leaves left over from winter.
The contractions
became more frequent, gripping my mother and bending her to their will.
***
“I’ll get Mame Bell to help too,” said my Aunt Helen Ruth, who was as
solid and capable as a fireplug. She went next door to summon reinforcement
from her neighbor. Mame had a visitor, neighbor Eva
Roland, a petite woman, bird-like and intense. They were sitting at Mame’s kitchen table, both enjoying a cup of Luzianne coffee with chicory.
“Oh, Mame, I see you got company,” said my aunt. “It’s
“Why Lordy, honey,” Mame said, “we’ll just both come.” She and Eva Roland pulled on their
sweaters.
None of the three
had any formal training as midwives. They had a wealth of practical experience
though. The three walked down the hill to our house, hurrying against the
rising of the storm, chatting as they leaned into the wind.
***
Aunt Helen Ruth
stood at my mother’s bedside. “Now push,
My mother licked
her lips. “I hope so, Helen Ruth. Lawsy me, it’s been
slow this time.”
Mame Bell selected
towels, threadbare but fragrant from drying in the
When the
contractions gripped my mother, she contorted, red-faced, the veins bulging in
her face and neck with the effort. They wiped the beads of sweat from her brow.
Hours passed by, and the contractions became less frequent instead of more
frequent, and still no baby arrived.
“I’m worn out,” my
mother said.
My father
approached the bedside.
Helen Ruth turned
toward him; “I don’t see the baby’s head yet.”
He looked toward my
mother, then back to Aunt Helen Ruth, and said, “I’ll go to your house. To use your phone to
call the doctor.”
As he sat out to
walk the half-mile toward Aunt Helen Ruth’s house, the wind whipped his neatly
brushed back hair a bit. The first rain began to fall, lazily, drops big as
acorns plopping against his blue jacket, leaving darker splotches where they
struck.
At Aunt Helen
Ruth’s house he spoke briefly with Helen Ruth’s husband, then picked up the
candlestick phone hook and waited for the operator’s crisply pleasant, “number,
please?”
No operator
responded. He jiggled the phone a little, then
listened again, then again. On the line there was a series of distant clicks,
some bit of static induced by the lightning that was in full play outside now,
but no voice. He slowly replaced the earphone, and sat silently as the children
played noisily in the adjacent room.
***
My mother labored
on in the house described by one uncharitable neighbor as “a tar-paper shack.” The
spring gale now whirled like the furies, whistling through the chinks in the
walls. The room was illuminated periodically with cold white lightning that
shamed the single bare bulb that hung above the bed, and made the air ripe with
ozone. This was followed by a cannonade and a dwindling roll of timpani that
rolled back and forth between the foothills of the
Though the
contractions coiled about her like a serpent, they were not yet strong enough
for deliverance. Aunt Helen Ruth wiped the lank strands of sandy blond hair
that hung over her brow back into place.
***
My father continued
his efforts to call Dr. Alford. Finally the slight crackling on the line was replaced
by the operator’s voice. The doctor’s phone sounded, and a female voice said,
“Dr. Alford’s residence.”
He told the
disembodied voice of his wife’s labor.
“I’m sorry, Mr.
Guthrie,” she said. “The doctor isn’t in. He went over to
Daddy spoke to
Helen Ruth’s husband in the next room, then began the
trek back home, drawing his thin jacket tightly around him. He was soaked when
he arrived. He went into the kitchen and began to mop his streaming face. He
finally tossed the towel on the rim of the sink, and said, “Helen Ruth. . . .”
She
left my mother’s bedside and approached him, her eyebrows twin question marks.
“I had to wait. The
phone was out....the storm...” he said in a low voice. “When the line came back
on, the doctor wasn’t in. Gone to
Helen Ruth took a
deep breath. “We’ll have to do the best we can, won’t we?” she said, then returned to my mother’s bedside.
Daddy moved to the
other side of the house and looked out the window. The wind flailed the limbs
of the great white oaks outside, rain falling on the tin roof above like lead
shot.
“
Feeling the
tightening of the uterus, she said, “now push, push, push, Miss Rosa.” This
cycle repeated, again and again. It was two hours later when Helen Ruth
exclaimed, ”I see the head.”
“It’s about time.”
“Here we go again. Push now, push,
There was a gasping
groaning cry as she was seized by one great and convulsive final effort. I
arrived in this world streaked with blood and protesting loudly.
The tattoo of the
raindrops on the roof lessened and the storm outside dwindled away.
Mame Bell spruced me up a bit and wrapped me in a towel
that had been warmed on the open door of the kerosene oven. “Right cute li’l ol’ boy baby,” she said.
Whether there was consensus on this I do not know.
A short while
later, car headlights cut through the gloom of the driveway, and Doctor Alford
entered carrying a capacious house call bag. He checked things over, palpated
the uterus that was now spent and empty. He pulled on rubber gloves and checked
for excessive bleeding, then examined the moist and liver-colored placenta in
the wash basin. Aunt Helen Ruth presented me, laying me out on the bed beside
my mother. He noted with approval Mame Bell’s neat
tying off of the umbilical cord with cotton twine.
“I’ll take care of
the paperwork in the office. Have a name yet?”
“John Robert
Guthrie, we’ll call him John,” my mother replied.
He scribbled my
name on a blank prescription pad. “Got it. Bring him
around to see me in a few weeks. Need to check you too.” And he left,
presumably to his next call of that long and stormy Sunday. Dr. Alford was to
be an inspiration to me, a hero through all of my growing up years. After all,
within brief days of my arrival in the planet, he had officially added my
unique presence to that of the other 130 million in the country, reported me to
the government, and finally severed the redundant portion of my infantile penis
and cast it away. How could I not have a respect bordering on reverence, tinged
with fear, for such a figure?
--Excerpted
from: WITHIN THE DRAGON’S LAIR by John R. Guthrie
The
Chickasaw
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