Sophie interrupted. “I was very young. I remember almost nothing of New Orleans.”
Which was a lie. She had been ten full years old when she left the city of her birth, and she remembered far too clearly what New Orleans had been, the smell of seawater and bougainvillea, how cool the tile was under her feet when she played in the courtyard, the children’s rhymes that still came to her now and then when she was very tired. She remembered the sound of her father’s voice and the way he cleared his throat before he said something he thought would make her laugh. She remembered her mother’s tone when she was happy and when she was worried and when she decided she had enough of work and wanted to go exploring and Sophie to come with her. She remembered the baker’s wife who came from the islands and told stories of the Iwa of Saint-Domingue, and Jacinthe who had only three teeth but ruled the kitchen and could make the servants tremble with a look. She remembered the quality of light that fell across her bed when she woke in the morning.
She remembered the war and the way the ground shook and the air itself seemed to scream. And when the worst had passed and everything and everyone was gone, she remembered the day Mrs. Jamison came to fetch her away from home. They boarded the steamboat Queen Esther on the big wide muddy green Mississippi and she watched the city disappear behind her.
Sophie would not share her story with Mrs. Campbell because people—most especially white people—born and raised in the north could not, would not understand what New Orleans had been. Sophie hardly understood it herself.
But her unwillingness to answer questions roused her patient’s suspicions. Between contractions she wanted to know how long Sophie had been a midwife, how many births she had attended. A deep line had appeared between her brows. “You do have training, I hope. Dr. Heath wouldn’t send someone without training.”
“Yes,” Sophie said, unable to keep the sharp edge out of her voice. “I am a fully trained physician.”
There was a startled pause. “Oh come now,” Janine Campbell said with a half laugh. “You don’t believe that yourself.”
Sophie could have recited the names of the seven black women who graduated from medical schools in Philadelphia and Montreal and New York before her, but it would do no good; she could no more relieve Mrs. Campbell of her willful ignorance than her labor pains. Instead she said, “I’m going to make you some tea that will help move this child along.”
? ? ?
MIDMORNING SOPHIE PUT a large, very loud boy with tufts of gingery curls in his mother’s arms. Mrs. Campbell, panting still, lay back against the pillows and closed her eyes.
“He’s a fine healthy baby,” Sophie said. “Alert and vigorous.”
“He is disgustingly fat,” said his mother. “I wanted a girl.”
The baby rooted and found the nipple; she arched her back as though to dislodge a pest and let out a small shuddering sound.
As Sophie worked to deliver the afterbirth Mrs. Campbell lay staring at the ceiling and ignoring the infant at her breast. From the window Sophie had opened came the sound of the street on a busy Monday morning. Horse carts, omnibuses, hand trucks; knife sharpeners and fishmongers calling out for customers, the wind rocking the spindly apple trees that took up most of the tiny yard behind the house. Nearby a dog barked a warning.
Sophie hummed to herself while she bathed the baby, cleaned his umbilicus, dressed and swaddled him. He was solid and hot and full of life, and he had been born to a mother who could see him only as a burden.
There were tears running down Mrs. Campbell’s face to wet the pillow when Sophie put her child back into her arms.
Women cried after giving birth for all kinds of reasons. Joy, relief, excitement, terror. Mrs. Campbell’s tears were none of those. She was exhausted and frustrated and on the edge of the dark place where new mothers sometimes went for days or weeks. Some never returned.
“I don’t like to cry,” she announced to the ceiling. “You’ll think me weak.”
“I think no such thing,” Sophie said. “I imagine you must be very worn out. Do you have no sisters or relatives to help you? Four little children and a household is more than anyone should have to manage without help.”
“Archer says his mother raised six boys and never had a girl to help. He told me so when he first came courting, back home, that was. I wish I had thought it all through right then and there. I’d still be working at the Bangor post office. In my good shirtwaist with a sprig of forsythia pinned to my collar.”
The most Sophie could do for her was to listen.
“The worst of it is, he wants six sons of his own. It’s a competition with his brothers, and I fear he won’t let up. He’ll keep me breeding until he’s satisfied. Or I’m dead.”