2525
years will be essential to an under-
standing of Black life and Black his-
tory in the U.S. in the early 21st cen-
tury, but the museum can’t collect it
all. Navies wants us to take up this
work in our own families and local
historical societies. “Historians will
be looking at this period for years to
come,” she says. “I would really advise
everyone to spend some time record-
ing their elders.”
But, she acknowledges, it’s already
too late for many of those stories to be
collected.
Twice last year, while working on
various stories, I learned that sources,
both Black and under the age of 50,
had, in a matter of weeks, died of
COVID-19. The loss of American life
is now measured in the hundreds of
thousands. What was held in those
minds is less easily tallied.When navies Was a graduate stu-
dent, she gathered oral histories
from Black midwives in the South.
And this Black History Month, the
NMAAHC anticipates sharing the
stories and work of Black women
who have worked as birth doulas. All
that made me think of the remarkable
things I’ve been told about Booker.
Her story is, in many ways,a quintessentially American one.
Prior to the 20th century, mid-
wifery was often a tradition passed
from mother to daughter and re-
garded not as a job, but a calling, says
Jenny Luke, who trained as a nurse
before becoming a historian of mid-
wifery. Especially throughout the
American South, Black “granny mid-
wives”—women who are today often
referred to in birthworker circles
as Grand Midwives—were part of
the health care infrastructure. They
provided not just physical care at
the time of a birth but also whole-
person care, Luke tells me. But in the
20th century, amid a gradual but in-
tentional squeezing out of midwives
by doctors, hospitals, and federal law,
“lay midwifery became associated
with poverty, being Black and unedu-
cated, being rural,” says Luke.
As their work was demonized, scru-
tinized, then relegated to the shelves
of history, lay granny midwives—
mostly Black women—became the
subject of a small number of books
and ethnographies; Luke’s Delivered
by Midwives is a detailed history. But
in practice, Black birthing traditions
were in danger of being lost until a
movement of Black women, driven
in large part by grim statistics about
Black maternal and infant mortal-
ity, began to foster their resurgence.
In 2005, Booker became one of those
women, starting the process to be-
come a certified professional midwife.
“Becoming a midwife is something
that happens gradually over time to
you,” Booker said in a 2010 interview
published in the Midwives Alliance of
North America newsletter. “It is some-
thing we grow into. It is the journey
of birthing a midwife—you have to
sit, reflect, and simmer in ‘being with
women.’ ”
When Booker—a fierce advocate
for birth justice—took Black birth-
workers under her wing, she insisted
that they too obtain both a combina-
tion of modern training and an under-
standing of birthing traditions that
had been passed down through gen-
erations and carried across the Atlan-
tic Ocean. When she celebrated a pe-
riod of remission in 2019 by hosting
a training, it covered not just modernprenatal-care techniques but also
post birth rituals that for thousands of
years have helped Black mothers heal
and babies thrive, says Taiwo “Tia”
Ikeoluwa Adeloye-Ajao, an attendee
who is a registered nurse training to
become a midwife.
Booker bequeathed her midwifery
bag and instruments to Alaina Snell-
Broach, a doula and midwife-in-
training. But the passing on of all that
Booker knew was cut painfully short.
Birthworkers like Booker often
say that the people in the room when
a midwife catches a baby are pres-
ent when the veil that separates the
living and the dead is at its thinnest.
The ancestors are in the room, sharing
their support and, when needed, their
wisdom.
Not too long after Booker died,
Tamoyia Ragsdale-Hashim, who owns
and operates Rise Birth and Postpar-
tum in Prince George’s County, Mary-
land, was assisting at a birth with a
mother who had worked with Booker
for two previous births. Ragsdale-
Hashim says she could hear her pre-
decessor’s voice, giving her encour-
agement and, in that special Claudia
Booker way, admonitions that she
could do this or it was time to do that.
Ragsdale-Hashim asked if anyone else
in the room was also hearing “Ms.
Claudia.” The mother and father said
they too felt her presence.
“I was so sad, angry. I was like,
‘Why now? I didn’t have enough
time,’ ” Ragsdale-Hashim says of her
feelings just after Booker died in Feb-
ruary 2020. “The wealth of knowledge
that not only went with her but [that]
she also left here is immense.”
The more I learned about Booker, the
more I was reminded how essential it re-
mains that the stories of people like her
are preserved, that the knowledge they
had is passed on. Some of this history is
gone forever. Some of it, with each pass-
ing day, is intentionally suppressed.
But, experts like Navies say, those of us
who remain can still mitigate the dam-
age. Press recorD on one of our many
devices. Lean away from selfies and into
capturing now what we see, think, and
feel. Ask others questions. Remember
what we learn. —With reporting by Sim-
ILLUSTRATION BY JOELLE AVELINO FOR TIME; BOOKER: COURTESY CANIDA AZULAI BOOKER mone Shah and Julia Zorthian □