"Curious about Knowin' all Them Things": Reproduction, Intergenerational Folk Knowledge, and Affrilachian Girlhood, 1850-1945

As an elderly woman recalling her time as an enslaved child for the Work Progress Administration slave narrative project, Serena Mulberry remembered how, when she was just a girl and "curious about known' all them things I didn' have no business knoin'," she learned the secrets of reproductive health.  When the black midwife came to her plantation, she hid, eavesdropped, and took in the advice given to a woman newly pregnant.  Mulberry learned that a spoonful of whiskey in the left shoe would help keep evil spirits from the baby, and that scraping grey fuzz off the top of a rail, boiling and drinking it prevented morning sickness.

Making use of various oral history collections in the Mountain South, this presentation considers how black Affrilachian girls learned about reproductive health through intergenerational networks of black women in their community.  They learned about their bodies, pregnancy, and childbirth from 'granny midwives', their mothers, aunties and their grandmothers.  At the same time, black folk knowledge was placed in opposition to the newly powerful fields of reproductive medicine and public health. By the early 20^th-century, there was concern among medical professionals and state officials that "granny midwives," particularly in areas such as Southern Appalachia, were undertrained and ill equipped to care for the health of black women and girls. In this paper, I argue that black girls' intergenerational conversations provided a framework for understanding their bodies based on black folk culture rather than on racist assumptions of black girls' promiscuousness or primitiveness.