Midwives of Invention: Black Healers and Reconciling Worldviews of Wellness in American Emancipation

Of all the transformations that an enslaved woman hoped for in coming into a refugee camp during the American Civil War, foremost in her mind was surely the transformation of her reproductive labor. Her children could be her own. If we have characteristically viewed the Black Union soldier as serving his country and tugging his family with him into freedom, we should expand the paradigm to include the Black mothers who staked all to give birth out of slavery’s reach and the Black midwives who knew how to keep them all alive. More than an act of recovery, bringing Black wartime midwives’ perspective into view enriches the political emancipation narrative of soldier to citizen as well as the modern medicine narrative of primitive to professional. Midwives imparted intimate knowledge of Black women’s bodies as sites of vitality as well as subjection. Attending to their role brings not only Black female leadership to the fore but also spiritual practice as the locus of power and the location for making meaning of freedom’s birth.