Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings (review)

The history of midwifery has been investigated by anthropologists, nurses, physicians, historians, and midwives themselves. In Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers, Valerie Lee provides an original approach to the study of black midwives in the American South. A literary scholar, Lee performs what she calls “reading double-dutch” (p. 2): an innovative approach in which she juxtaposes the life stories of historical black midwives and the fiction of black women writers. She seeks to show how the meanings of midwives in history and in literature interact with each other, akin to the two ropes in jumping double-dutch. On the one hand she provides a context for understanding the fictional representations of black midwives and healers in African American literature. On the other hand, she shows that literary representations actively participate in the cultural recuperation of black midwives. Thus, Lee argues that even as history is needed in order to understand literature, literature is rewriting history.

Lee focuses on understanding the interplay between the power of literature and the weight of history through analyzing the granny figure. She demonstrates that black women writers such as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor are “participating in the reconstruction of the granny” (p. 2). Her decision to use the term granny is guided by the fact that although it is a historically contested word, grannies themselves have reclaimed it (p. 5). In reviving the granny, she states that black women writers preserve and affirm the legacy of black midwives as empowered figures. Despite the historical decline of midwifery, writers like Naylor in Mama Day (1988) emphasize the importance and value of midwifery. In contrast to health officials’ characterizations of grannies as dirty and ignorant, black women writers present the dignity and skills of the women who practiced midwifery.

Lee states that in the early 1920s the federal government determined that there were more than 43,000 lay midwives in the United States, most of whom were black. However, it was the black midwife, she notes, who lost the most in the “movement from folklore to forceps” and from “licensing from God to licensing by the State” (p. 17). Indeed, she argues that one of the reasons for state intervention in midwifery was “the growing presence of the black woman as the prototypical midwife” (p. 27). Racial politics meant that health officials were less interested in the black woman’s actual midwifery skills and competence than in whether she appeared clean and compliant with state rules.

Although most of Lee’s historical knowledge of black midwives comes from secondary literature, she has drawn on some archival records and has conducted oral interviews. For example, she examined an extensive collection of midwife records from the Georgia Department of Health, and she conducted archival and ethnographic field work in Mississippi. As her work shows, not all black midwives registered with the state. Midwife Easter Parker of Mississippi, for example, who lived from the 1850s to the 1950s, delivered babies well into her seventies without state sanction. Despite Parker’s extensive experience as a midwife, she could not read or write or fill out the birth certificates, so she never sought a permit. Who knows how many more midwives are absent from state records, reminding us of the incomplete nature of governmental sources.

Informed by a black feminist sensibility, Lee sees midwives as resistant figures, both historically and in contemporary literature. Although this was an enjoyable read, there were times when I felt that Lee moved too far from her focus on midwives and gave too much attention to the details of plots and characters in specific novels. Yet, even the literary sections have moments of historical insight. As one black midwife she interviewed clearly understood, “grannies were in vogue again, not for delivery of babies, but for their stories” (p. 158). Lee helps us to understand why. A creative, interdisciplinary scholar, she provides a fascinating analysis...