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Margaret
Charles Smith’s mother, Bueha Sanders, died three
weeks after giving birth to a woman who became a legend for birthing
babies.
Her grandmother, Margaret Charles, a former slave, raised the future
midwife,
who delivered over 3,500 babies and never lost a mother. She lost very
few
babies.
Smith
unexpectedly began her career as a midwife when she
was about five years old. She was asked to stay with the wife of a
cousin of
her future husband while the father went for the midwife. Before the
father and
the midwife returned, Smith “caught” the early arriving
baby!
She
completed the third grade in a one-room rural grammar
school in Eutaw, Alabama while living on her
grandmother’s
farm. She never stopped learning, however. She continued to read and
study. The
farm became her lifelong residence. Farming was both a hobby and a
necessity
for her. She continued farming until just before her death.
In
1949, Smith obtained a permit from the Greene County
Public Health Team to practice midwifery. She was one of the
first of Greene County’s
official midwifes. In that time of segregation, even if black women had
money
local hospitals were not interested in having them as patients.
Being a
black midwife in rural Alabama
was not an easy way to earn money. Smith
often had to make her way through fields and wade through water before
delivering up to four babies a night. The mothers she attended were
often
malnourished and overworked. She often delivered twins, breech babies,
and
premature babies. Sometimes the mothers could not afford to pay
anything.
Sometime they paid in produce. Sometimes they paid up to five or ten
dollars
per birth. In 1976, Alabama passed a law outlawing
midwives.
Smith and about 150 other black traditional midwives were told they
would be
jailed if they continued to work as midwives.
In 1983
Margaret Charles Smith became the first Black
American to be given the keys to Eutaw, Alabama,
her hometown. In that same year she was
honored at the
first Black Women’s Health Project in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1996 she co-authored a book with Linda
Janet Holmes called “Listen to Me Good: The Life Story of an
Alabama Midwife.”
Smith was
the 1997 keynote speaker at the New Orleans Rural
Health Initiative. In 2003, she was honored by the Congressional Black
Caucus
in Washington, D.C. In
2004, she was given a lifetime achievement award
at the Black Midwife
and Healer’s Conference.
Smith put a
lot into life, and a lifetime of hard work was
not kind to her health. She suffered from uncontrollable hypertension
and
peripheral vascular disease. Nevertheless, she lived to be almost a
hundred
years old.
Ina May
Gaskin, President of Midwives’ Alliance of North
America, said that “Margaret Charles Smith is a national
treasure. She can
teach us about courage, motherwit, perseverance, our history, and how
to face
what’s coming – if we listen.”
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Past Inductees
