The second I saw what my grandmother had hidden inside that press all those years, I had to sit down right there, because it was books. Six of them, wrapped in oilcloth and then in a flour sack, dry as the day they went in.
Composition books, the marbled kind, and the first one starts in April of 1949.
Every page is the same four columns in her hand. A date. A name. A time. A weight.
Bertha Mae Coley, my grandmother, who I knew as a woman who made biscuits and hated the telephone, caught babies in this county for forty-one years.
Four hundred and sixteen of them. I counted twice, and then my cousin counted, and we got the same number.
She was what they called a granny midwife, trained by her own mother-in-law, and she worked the hollows and the tenant houses and the two streets on the far side of the tracks where the doctor in town would not go at night for money or love. There are entries in those books at two and three in the morning in January. There are entries where the column for the fee just says a ham, or nothing at all, or the word owed with no follow-up.
And in 1963 the state passed the rules that put women like her out of business, and after that the entries do not stop. They just get quieter. She kept on for twenty-two more years without a piece of paper permitting her to, and if the county had ever found those books she could have been prosecuted, and that is why they lived under an iron plate in a lard press on the back porch where nobody would look twice.
Every screw slot worn smooth. She was in and out of there for four decades.
On the inside cover of the first book, in pencil:
Write it all down. If a child ever comes asking who brought them here and where their people were standing, somebody in this world ought to be able to tell them. B.M.C., April 1949.
I took the books to the historical society in town and then, when they told me what I had, to the county health department, because a lot of those babies were born at home and never got a proper certificate, and there are people in their seventies in this county who have spent their lives fighting the Social Security office over a birth date.
Four hundred and sixteen names, with dates, times, and the mother’s name beside every one.
A man named Ottis called me in March. He is seventy-nine and he has been telling people his whole life he was born in June because that’s what his mother remembered. My grandmother’s book says the ninth of May, 1946, at twenty past four in the morning, six pounds and a half, and his mother’s name spelled the way his mother spelled it.
He cried on the phone with a stranger. He asked me if I’d read him the line one more time.
The books are being copied for the library now, and the originals will go in the archive with her name on the collection. The press sits on my own back porch and I have already told my children that nobody drags it off for scrap.