The Birth

Sally lay in the narrow straw bed, wedged into a small corner, butted against the slightly larger one shared by Nell and Ib. At the first sign of her bulging belly she had moved into the small cabin, still referred to as a slave cabin, even though slavery was technically over. The white folks had thought it best that she be with her own kind, or that was the reason they gave her. She knew differently. Nell and Ib were sisters and the closest black folk. Getting on in years and not having anywhere to go they had stayed behind after the war when most had left.

Her belly continued to grow. Still she spent her time in the fields along side Nell up until the hour her water broke flooding the ground below. She and Nell made their way back to the small structure they called home, summoning that Ib be fetched along the way. Unlike the white folks, Nell had been sympathetic to her occasional pains and to the fact that she carried a child by a white man. It had been a way of life for as long as she could remember and could not be condemned as either right or wrong. It just was. Ib, on the other hand, working in the big house during the day, could sometimes be swayed by the whims and idle gossip of her mistress. Many a mistresses eyes were blinded when it came to such goings on by their men folk. The sinful glares were often cast on the poor tragic figure who suffered the consequences. Today, though, Ib’s compassionate nature came through, as she was all business in making Sally as comfortable as possible.

Ib and Nell took care of business. They boiled water and prepared the muslin sheets, paying particular attention to the contractions. Each had considerable mid-wife experience, and both concurred it would be a short labor. This was often the case for black women, who were leaner and tougher than their white counterparts. Sally laid against the wool-blanketed straw, the scratchiness of which was now her least misery, reflecting on her short life of eighteen years amid each contraction and pain. The sweat that trickled off her body was different than summer field sweat. The smell was sweeter. There was a womanly aura to it, a new experience for her. While most were having babies at much earlier ages, Sally, until nine months ago, had been immune to both the affections and lusts of the opposite sex.

Sally had been thrust into a situation where she lived between worlds, an oddity to both the black world and the white world, not truly fitting into either. Humans pushed to the brink have to make a decision, one that will regulate the course of existence. She didn’t want to see the same harsh world that others saw. Therefore, she niched out her own groove in the place where both all and nothing is, from which all things come, being of this world but not of it. It was a life adjusted to and adapted to by necessity, rather than choice, and learned over time. The color of her skin, which others saw so prominently, forced her into a limbo. The limbo between worlds was all she knew. It was a hard road to follow at times from both her own perspective and from the outside as well, if one on the outside took the time and consideration to see her plight. Such lives fraught with difficulties and bad circumstances are the ones that help to polish the soul. Sally took each difficulty as it came, adapting and surrendering, finding a depth inside herself she discovered and used as a harbor of safeness.

Sally drank in her life from a much wider perspective. She could see what came with a narrow vision, and she didn’t want that. At nights she held her head towards the stars beholding the universe with all it’s brilliance from which she surely must have come rather than the small spot on the planet where she worked during the day and slept at night.

Sally began to observe her surroundings from an undercurrent of stillness in which everything happens. When she could go deeper she discovered she was in fact that same stillness. Within the stillness she beheld the same power of the stars she gazed upon at night. The more she listened the louder the stillness became. There were her thoughts, and there was a gap between her thoughts where the stillness lay. There was a whole new identity in this gap, one that couldn’t be labeled. Her identity couldn’t be the labels people put on her. Her true identity was found somewhere within that gap. There was the pity, the shame, the judgment, and the torment. She was more than that. She was so much deeper. She looked out from the deep place that others couldn’t see into. She removed the mental sufferings from her mind dissolving them with the steady beat of her heart, a heart that became more determined to see love instead of hate.

When the pitfalls, which were many, would come, an inward pulse of determination would always set her on her feet again. Despite the circumstances dealt her she endeavored to live a good life. She knew by so doing that everything would become right in the end. She felt liberation would come closer with each good quality she cultivated. As each obstacle was left behind her current would become stronger. Her mind moved downward towards her heart. She became absorbed in her heart. She lived like a monk, drawing from the universe, to help those in her immediate world, striving to be above any hate or bitterness she observed.

The inner self was her dearest teacher. She detached herself from the images people had of her. She discarded the improper images she had of herself leaving them behind. She discovered her real nature within her inner self – where she met with God. God was the father she had barely known and the mother she lost as a child. God was in all. She rested in a childlike awareness, into a purity that pulled her beyond desires, and into her own consciousness. She fell into her own eternity, into her own nothingness, and saw the greatness in her own being. None of this she could explain. There was a multitude of feeling and wonder inside of her. The words were beyond anything she was able to express. On the outside she merely conveyed simple-mindedness.

Nell held the squalling child up, the cord still connected to Sally. Sally saw the greatness in the being coated with her own blood, a child with skin as black as her own, despite the whiteness of the father. Any judgment on him would now soon be forgotten, as new suspicions would rise in their place. At one moment she interpreted the baby’s strong cry with strength, a quality that she would need, if this child’s life was to be anything like that of her own. Then the cry tapered into a whimper, which belied confusion about the world in which she was born into. Sally, even though beholding and assisting with the scene of childbirth many times, lay with her own legs spread, stunned that this process was happening to her. She remained in her silence and in a state of exhaustion. The baby was merely called “Little Sally.” It was at a time when not much thought was given in naming. There seemed to just be a hand full of names that went around in any family, just handed down from generation to generation, as the child was seen as an extension of the one who came before. With colored babies, the name was merely an afterthought.

Sally held the baby in her arms and smiled as any proud mother would.

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Tags: birth, God, life, racism, slavery, woman, womanhood

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