from Late Migrations

In Which My Grandmother Tells the Story of My Mother’s Birth Lower Alabama, 1931

We didn’t expect her quite as early as she came. We were at Mother’s peeling peaches to can. Daddy had several peach trees, and they had already canned some, and so we were canning for me and Max. And all along as I would peel I was eating, so that night around twelve o’clock I woke up and said, “Max, my stomach is hurting so much I just can’t stand it hardly. I must have eaten too many of those peaches.”

And so once in a while, you see, it would just get worse; then it would get better.

We didn’t wake Mother, but as soon as Max heard her up, he went in to tell her. And she said, “Oh, Max, go get your daddy right now!” Max’s daddy was the doctor for all the folks around here.

While he was gone she fixed the bed for me, put on clean sheets and fixed it for me. Mama Alice came back with him too—Mama Alice and Papa Doc. So they were both with me, my mother on one side and Max’s on the other, and they were holding my hands. And Olivia was born around twelve o’clock that day. I don’t know the time exactly.

Max was in and out, but they said Daddy was walking around the house, around and around the house. He’d stop every now and then and find out what was going on. And when she was born, it was real quick. Papa Doc jerked up, and he said, “It’s a girl,” and Max said, “Olivia.”

Let Us Pause to Consider What a Happy Ending Actually Looks Like Lower Alabama, 1936

In the story my grandmother told, there was an old woman of uncertain race who lived among them but did not belong. With no land and no way to grow anything, the old woman was poorer and more desolate than the others, and they looked the other way when she slipped into their barns after dark with her candle and her rucksack, intent on taking corn. Did a barn owl startle her that night? Did a mule jostle her arm? They never knew: she never admitted to being there. The howling fire took the barn whole and then roared to the house. Neighbors saved some of the furniture in a kind of bucket line, but an actual bucket line was impossible: the water tank had stood on a wooden scaffold already lost to the blaze. There was no time to save the clothes and quilts, the food my grandmother had stored for winter, the grain my grandfather had put up for his mules. Worst of all, there was no time to save the wild-eyed mules stamping in their stalls.

In my grandmother’s story, they brought what the neighbors had salvaged to her in-laws’ house half a mile down the road, and family came from every direction to resettle things, making room. The back porch became the room where Papa Doc and Mama Alice slept. The parlor became my grandparents’ room. The nooks where my mother and her infant brother slept were upstairs, in what had been the attic.

Decades later, when my mother told stories of her girlhood, she never seemed to recall how crowded the house must have been or how the tensions surely flared. Instead she remembered my great-grandparents’ devotion. Every day Papa Doc would leave for calls with his black bag or, on slow mornings, head to the store to pick up the mail. When he came home again, he always called out, “Alice?” as soon as he reached their rose border. And she would always call back, formally, from the garden or the kitchen or the washtub on the porch, “I’m here, Dr. Weems.”

My mother’s grandparents went through the day in a kind of dance, preordained steps that took them away from each other—he to his rounds across the...