Once a Midwife

by Patricia Harman

  “I won’t go, Patience. I told you before, I won’t go!”

  7

  December 9, 1941

  War

  It’s official. The United States of America is at war.

  Today, Dan was called out to attend to a horse with bad colic on the other side of the Hope River and he didn’t get home until bedtime. While passing through town he bought a fresh copy of the Liberty Times and when he opened it on the kitchen table, we read it together.

  U.S. CONGRESS DECLARES WAR—THREE THOUSAND CASUALTIES IN HAWAII—HUNDREDS DEAD IN THE PHILIPPINES—GREAT BRITAIN JOINS OUR FIGHT the front page screams.

  “Part of what’s upsetting the politicians so much,” my husband explains, “is that there was a delegation of Japanese diplomats in Washington last week, supposedly meeting with the president trying to find ways to avoid war while their aircraft were secretly on their way across the ocean to Pearl Harbor.”

  I point to the side column about Great Britain. “So England’s coming to our defense with the Japanese, but we won’t help them fight the Nazis? That’s neighborly of us.”

  “Oh, we will! FDR has been waiting for something like this. Remember his speech about the sinking of the Reuben James by German submarines? ‘There are those who say that our great good fortune has betrayed us—that we are now no match for the regimented masses who have been trained in the Spartan ways of ruthless brutality.’”

  Dan perfectly imitates the president’s New England accent. “‘They say that we have grown fat, and flabby, and lazy—and that we are doomed. But those who say that know nothing of America or of American life!’

  “It’s only a matter of time until we declare war on Germany and Italy too, or they on us.” He folds his arms in despair and puts his head down on the table, something I’ve never seen him do.

  “The children are in bed, Dan, and the house is quiet. Why don’t you go to sleep? I can do the chores.”

  “You’re right. I’m exhausted. I’ll just take the paper upstairs and read it in bed.”

  “No, hon. Leave it here. It will only upset you.”

  “Right again. I’m sorry, Patience. I saw Sheriff Hardman and Judge Wade in town and they asked me to be on the Draft Board and the Civil Defense Committee. God, the attack on Pearl Harbor only happened two days ago and they’re already talking about having blackout drills.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I’d have to think about it. This war hysteria is out of control. I just told the kids that what happened in Hawaii wouldn’t affect us, that we’re safe and out of harm’s way. Next week we’ll probably have to tell them we’re hanging blankets over the window and using candles, because the Japanese or Germans might bomb us. People get whipped into a patriotic fever and start thinking the other side is pure evil; now look where that’s gotten us. The whole damn world is ablaze with hate and fear.”

  “Come on, honey . . . bedtime. You’re really wound up.” I lead him upstairs, rub his back, and cover him up. Then I go back down to the kitchen thinking about Dan. Something is festering in him, something that smells rotten, like meat that’s gone bad.

  I stare at the headlines again. U.S. CONGRESS DECLARES WAR!

  December 11, 1941

  Family

  Do you think Opal will go home to her family?” my friend Becky Blum wonders as we motor toward Hazel Patch to convey the message that Opal’s family has tracked her down and wants her to come home.

  All along the gravel road into the once prosperous community are abandoned one- and two-story houses, some made of logs, others of peeling painted wood. Once the village contained dwellings for about 100 colored people, subsistence farmers who thrived and supported one another, a beacon of harmony led by the Reverend Miller. One by one everyone moved away during the depths of the Great Depression.

  “Why shouldn’t she go back?” I challenge. “At least she has a family. Her father’s a porter on the B&O Railroad and, thanks to the union, the porters make good money. Mr. Johnson said on the phone they’ll take care of Opal and baby Joey too.”

  “Maybe she’ll have too much pride,” Becky says, winding a lock of her short dark hair around her finger. “Maybe she likes her independence.”

  “She’s not independent,” I remind her. “Bitsy’s taking care of her.”

  A few minutes later we bump over the ruts in the rough road and pull up at the old Bowlin place. Bitsy’s outside splitting wood, her slim arms as strong as maple limbs.

  “Everything okay?” she asks. “Anything new about Pearl Harbor?”

  “Just more of the same. You heard they attacked the Philippines too, and things aren’t going so well for us there?”

  Opal comes out on the porch and I introduce her to Becky. “I’ve been so scared,” Opal says, “listening for bombs all the time, though I know it’s foolish. Why would the Japanese bomb Hazel Patch?”

  I remind myself that this young woman is only eighteen, a year older than Sally Blum, Becky’s adopted daughter, who seems like a kid.

  “You probably know that Congress officially declared war. No surprise. I brought you a copy of the paper. The battleship Oklahoma was sunk in Pearl Harbor and the battleship West Virginia was all but destroyed. Some of the sailors were trapped inside the ships and couldn’t get out. The navy’s trying to drill through the metal.”

  “Come on in,” Bitsy says, swinging her ax so it sticks in the stump. “It sounds terrible. Can you imagine?” I’m a little tense, because Becky and Bitsy don’t know each other very well and since they’re both my good friends, I want them to like each other.

  “Nice place,” Becky says. “You’ve really done a lot with it.”

  “Every time I turn around, someone from town who remembers me from their birth gives me something,” Bitsy says. “Prudy Ott brought me the sideboard under the window. She said it was just in her attic gathering dust.” I look around the room at the white curtains Opal made out of worn sheets, the old sofa with a red patchwork quilt spread over it, and the rocking chair in the corner. Luckily, the abandoned home still had a wood heater stove.

  “I had a phone call this morning, Opal.” I begin my mission.

  The girl jerks her head up. “Was it Sonny?” Her eyes are big and shiny.

  “No. It was your father. He wants you to come home.”

  “Does he know I have a baby?”

  “Yes. I told him.”

  “Does he know it’s half-white and I’m not married?”

  “Yes.”

  Bitsy goes over and sits on the arm of the sofa next to her. “How’d he find Opal?” she asks.

  “They’ve been looking all over since Pearl Harbor was bombed. First they went to the hotel. One of the maids sent them to Sonny Faye and Sonny told them a yarn that he didn’t know whose baby it was, but he’d heard Opal was dating a white man. He made himself out to be the hero, that he took Opal under his wing and found a place for her to stay with some midwives that were friends of his mother.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Patience. I hope you told Mr. Johnson the truth, that the SOB Sonny Faye abandoned her.” Bitsy groans.

  “She can tell that part if she wants to, but none of it really matters now. . . . Opal, your father and mother are coming to see you and the baby at my house in a few days, so you need to think what you want to do.”

  “Don’t go if you don’t feel like it,” Becky says. “They can’t force you and they can’t take your baby either. He’s yours.”

  “Thank you,” Opal says. “I don’t want to be my parents’ little girl forever, but I do miss them, especially now. . . .” She looks at the baby lying in a cradle that I lent them and then at the headlines on the front page of the paper. It’s printed two inches high. U.S. DECLARES WAR.

  Another World

  So do you miss Opal?” I ask Bitsy a few days later as I sort through a box of old pans and dishes, things I got down from the loft of the barn that I thought she could use at her new house. The kids are out in
the yard playing war.

  “Die, you dirty Jap!” I hear Danny yell.

  “I do miss her a little, but Willie misses the baby a lot. He’s never had a brother or sister.”

  “So what’s Willie’s story? Don’t you think you should fill me in?”

  “He’s my ward. You delivered him on Black Sunday, back in ’29. Remember? The day Wall Street crashed.”

  In a flash it comes back to me. I’d listened for an hour for the infant’s heartbeat, running my wooden fetoscope up and down Katherine’s belly, and when I told her that her baby would be stillborn, she screamed. Even if you were outside on a warm summer evening and heard that sound through an open window, you would know what it meant; a mother had just lost a child. It doesn’t matter if it was an unborn baby, a toddler, or a twenty-year-old soldier, the sound is the same.

  Amazingly, Willie survived. He was the first infant I had to resuscitate, and it still seems miraculous . . .

  I slide back to the present, still pawing through the carton. “How about this blue pitcher? I think Mrs. Kelly got it from someone she delivered. . . . Are you lonely out in Hazel Patch?”

  “It’s not so bad, I’m used to being with just Willie.”

  “Want some more tea? I dried the peppermint myself.” I return from the kitchen with two cups, determined to get her story out of her. “So where the heck have you been for the last eleven years? Last time I heard, Byrd had just left you in Philly. . . .”

  “Well, let’s see . . . It will take a while.” Bitsy picks up her cup. “I guess our marriage was doomed from the start. I learned later that the whole time Byrd was courting me, he was playing around with some girl from Delmont. After he left me, I went back to live with my brother, Thomas, but then he lost his job driving trolley and wanted to try his luck in Chicago. Looking back, it was a mistake. He was killed on the way north.”

  “Oh, Bitsy. Was he riding the rails? Did he fall off of a boxcar?”

  “No, it was murder. Someone, in one of the hobo camps, slit his throat in the night for his pocket watch. The fellow was never found.” She pauses. “All for a lousy pocket watch that wasn’t even gold. After that, I had no one, so I looked up Katherine MacIntosh, in Baltimore.” Here, she stands and squints out the window into the past. “Do you really want to hear all this, Patience?”

  I nod, my eyes not leaving her face.

  “Well, Katherine asked me to stay with her and be Willie’s nanny in 1935. He was only six then, so I did. Then, because she still had a little of her parents’ money and was getting restless, we all went to Paris.”

  I’m still waiting to hear how Katherine dies, but this stops me in my tracks. “You went to Paris? Paris, France? Really?”

  Bitsy laughs. “Yes, the actual Paris, in France. What did you think I meant, Paris, Indiana? That’s where I met Bricktop.”

  “Who is this Bricktop? A man or a woman?”

  “You’ve never heard of her?” Bitsy is shocked. “She’s a redheaded colored woman from Alderson, West Virginia, and she owned the most famous nightclub in Europe. When Katherine and Willie went back to the States, I stayed on as Bricktop’s personal assistant.

  “It was wonderful. Every night at the club there would be all kinds of celebrities. Bricktop knew everyone. I met Paul Robeson, Ernest Hemingway, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, and the duke and duchess of Windsor.”

  “Oh, come on! The duke of Windsor.”

  “For sure! Bricktop taught him to do the Black Bottom. At first, I thought Miss Bricktop was taking me on as a charity case, but after a while I realized she just liked someone from the mountains around. Sometimes, I’d cook for her. You know, cook like Mama did, making baked beans, collard greens, biscuits, and fried green tomatoes. She loved my biscuits. Sometimes I’d do her hair.

  “In Paris, the negro is treated with respect. It’s a whole different world. There are thousands of brown-skinned people, musicians, dancers, artists, intellectuals, and businessmen from the U.S. and the Caribbean.”

  “Well, why did you come back?”

  “You know, the war. If Hitler was determined to eliminate Jews, what do you think he’d do with Negroes?”

  I make a bad face, realizing how little I know what it’s like to be Bitsy.

  “If it wasn’t for the Nazis, I probably would have stayed. I loved it there. You could be colored and no one cared. You could walk down the street and hold your head high.”

  “How about the war? You saw things firsthand that we only read about.”

  “Well, I wasn’t on the front line. Denmark and Norway fell in April of ’40. Then Hitler invaded Belgium and the Netherlands. The noose was tightening. It was worse for the Jews. There was nowhere they could go.

  “Roosevelt called a meeting about it in France in ’38. There were delegates from thirty-two countries, including Great Britain, France, Canada, and Australia, but only the Dominican Republic agreed to accept additional Jews. Then the U.S. Congress limited Jewish refugees to only ten percent of the quota! They even refused to admit twenty thousand Jewish children fleeing the Nazis.”

  I shake my head sadly. “Little kids! We couldn’t even take the little kids?”

  Just then our kids rattle in. “Can we have a snack, Mom?” Sunny wants to know.

  “Pleeease!” begs Mira. “We are so hungry battling the Japanese.”

  “To be continued.” Bitsy laughs.

  8

  December 14, 1941

  Billy Blaze

  Did I tell you Bitsy got a job at the woolen mill and Willie is going to go to school with our kids on the school bus?” I tell my husband as he and I and the kids drive toward Liberty on Saturday. She applied for a position about a month ago and just got the letter.

  “Right after the declaration of war, an order came in to the mill, from the army, for one million woolen blankets. Now they run day and night and they’re hiring anyone, coloreds, teenagers, women, and even old people. Sixty cents an hour. Isn’t that great? I thought of trying to get a job there myself . . .”

  “Forget it, Patience,” Dan says. “You already work too hard on the farm and the money isn’t worth it if you lose your health. Anyway, you can help Bitsy by taking care of Willie before and after school. How’s he doing anyway? The other boys treating him okay?”

  “He’s holding his own.”

  “Look!” Danny announces from the backseat as we drive down Main Street in Liberty. “The town already has a draft board in the old dress shop. There’s a line of men waiting outside. I wish I could join up. I’d be a pilot and lick those Japs!”

  The windows of the shop have been decorated with red, white, and blue streamers and political posters. ARE YOU DOING ALL YOU CAN? one says. WE’RE BEHIND YOU SOLIDER: KEEP AMERICA FREE, says another. JOIN THE ARMY NOW! says a third.

  “I’m already tired of the whole thing,” I complain. “There’s nothing on the radio but war, war, war: ‘Sources at the White House say gasoline will have to be rationed. . . . Americans on the home front are asked to sacrifice. . . . Hong Kong falls to the Japanese!’” I imitate a radio announcer. “It goes on and on . . .” Daniel doesn’t think I’m humorous, but the girls and I have a good laugh.

  After a few trips up and down Main, we’re fortunate to find a good place to park right between Stenger’s Pharmacy and the movie house.

  Our first stop is Stenger’s, where we buy a tin of Bag Balm for Daniel’s poor chapped hands. I glance at the Torrington Times in the rack. HITLER DECLARES WAR ON UNCLE SAM! the headlines shout.

  “No surprise,” Dan says, and hands a dime to the plump Mrs. Stenger.

  “I agree,” says a tall dark-haired man as he approaches the counter. He’s wearing round tortoiseshell glasses and a red bow tie. “That’s my article, by the way. I’m the new editor of the Liberty Times. Billy Blaze.” He sticks out his hand to my husband, but ignores me.

  “Daniel Hester,” Dan says, shaking it. “Town vet. This is my wife, Patience, town midwife.”

 
; A glance at the front page confirms the fellow’s claim: BY WILLIAM J. BLAZE it says in bold letters under the headlines. I look at the timepiece around my neck and before the men can get into a political discussion, I cut in. “Got to go,” I tell Daniel. “Nice to see you, Mrs. Stenger, and you too, Mr. Blaze.”

  Dan comes out with three newspapers, the Liberty Times, the Charleston Gazette, and the Torrington Times. I roll my eyes. They probably all say the same thing, but I guess we can afford the thirty cents.

  I was flabbergasted when I found that Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, Opal’s parents, had left two twenties on the mantelpiece when they came to get their daughter. A note with the cash said, Thank you, and God bless you for helping our daughter and beautiful grandbaby. I thought the money should go to Bitsy, but now that she has a job, she said I should keep it.

  “Look at all the flags, Mama,” says Susie, pulling on my coat. Susie, the smaller of the twins, is my most sensitive child, but she’s always the most observant. There are American flags everywhere, hanging on doors, stuck in women’s hats, and waving at half-staff on flagpoles at the school and the courthouse.

  Last night I tried to talk to Daniel about Christmas. I wanted us to make a decision about what presents we should buy and how much we should spend, but he said he couldn’t get in the mood.

  “Well, what are we going to do, then?” I asked, a little peeved. “There’s only eleven more days to get ready.” He just shrugged and went back to the newspapers. He hates the war, but devours every speck of information on it. This is not like Daniel. Usually, he gets as excited as the kids during the holidays.

  As we stroll pass the Eagle Theater, Mr. Flanders taps on the glass of the ticket window and waves us over.

  “Hello, Lloyd,” Daniel says. “How are things?”

  “Are we going to the movies?” the kids ask in excited whispers, pulling on my coat sleeves.

  “No, baby dolls. Christmas is coming and we need to save money,” I answer, forgetting that we actually have the cash.