Reverend Byrd wrote that white people who cheated black people and treated them like slaves had forgotten the lessons of Jesus. “When a child is born to a black household,” he wrote, “all the townsfolk, black and white, assemble to receive the blessing. And yet the same white townsfolk who gather to kiss the child’s feet forget that black men, too, are blessed by baby Jesus.”
In Fairchild there were no huge farms like in Texas, and the few black people in town were tradesmen and small farmers like white people. But it was true that all the black families lived on the far side of the river, in a part of town called Coralton where the land was marshy and worse for farming.
I had thought little of this fact when I still lived at home, but now, removed from the unspoken laws that governed that place, I could see them more clearly: how the children of Benjamin Rockford, the cooper, did not attend our school though they were of age to do so; how Rockford himself ran his cooperage out of a shed adjoining his family’s home rather than a store on Main Street; how I saw his wife at the dry-goods store and the butcher’s and the baker’s but never having tea at Ulla’s house or Susie’s house or, for that matter, at ours.
And it was true, too, that when a baby was born in Coralton, the white families gathered just as they did for a birth in Fairchild proper, though across the river the houses were smaller, so that people often had to stand out on the front steps, waiting their turn to receive the baby’s blessing.
On Saturdays Sister Dolores was busy with the laundry, so instead of catechism I had free time in the library. Technically I was supposed to study theology—Burton or Viletti or The Diary of Eleanora Funt, which was about a lady who decided baby Jesus spoke to her and went around telling everyone, mostly important mayors and priests. But the library had thousands of books, more than I’d ever seen in one place. It had herbals better than Mama’s, almanacs better than the ones in the headmaster’s office at the school back home, and histories of the colonies, the United States, the Flu years of the 1830s, the fall of the governments, and the founding of the Independent Towns west of the Mississippi. My favorites, though, were the natural science books, with their beautiful and complicated etchings of the insides of people and animals. I saw a slice of kidney, a cross section of an eye; I saw the four valves and four chambers of the heart; I saw the twenty-seven tiny interlocking bones of the hand. I saw, too, the penis cut open to reveal the spongy flesh inside, and all the tiny tubes of the testicles. I saw a woman splayed as I’d seen countless times, but with each fold and furrow frozen by the draughtsman’s pen, so I could confirm with a hand mirror what I had suspected: that on the outside at least I was like any other woman. And I saw a woman’s insides—the stretchy purse of the womb, with and without a child inside it, the tubes with their frilly fingers, the ovaries like little stones.
But no book explained the why of it. Even Burton, who had an explanation for everything, was silent on the question of why some women could have children and some could not. He spoke of “those whose bodies reject the blessing of a child,” but said also that Jesus personally loved and cared for every single descendant of the Flu survivors. If Jesus loved us, why would He let our bodies reject His blessing? I knew that Mrs. Spencer’s explanation would involve the evil workings of witches against Christ’s design, but hadn’t He sent the Flu to cleanse the world of evil? Why did he leave witches behind? It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in baby Jesus—I prayed like anyone, I always had, when I was afraid or grateful or in pain. The year Mama was sick I had prayed every day. It was only that I found the lessons of baby Jesus insufficient to explain the world.
One book in the library did claim to explain the origins of barrenness and other conditions. It was by one Dr. Edward Lively, whose name I’d heard before—some of the town ladies had a pamphlet he’d written on exercise and mental hygiene. This book, however, was called On the Heritability of Maladies, and initially, I found it interesting. Dr. Lively posited that barrenness, clubfoot, and many other ailments were passed down from grandmother to mother to child in the blood. “When a woman is barren,” Lively wrote, “we commonly find an aunt or close cousin who was barren as well, suggesting a kind of familial contagion.”
This made me worry for my sisters, and I hoped nobody back in Fairchild happened upon Lively’s book. In later sections, however, Lively made claims I knew were untrue, like that babies born to one black parent and one white one were frequently feeble and sickly due to “incompatible bloodlines.” As proof, the doctor offered a series of etchings of deformed sheep and goats, whose ailments he claimed were caused by crossing noncomplementary breeds.
I had seen Mama deliver two babies in Coralton with a black mother and a white father, and both were strong and healthy infants. Moreover, I knew that having two white parents was no protection against feebleness or deformity, since many children born to white families in Fairchild did not survive their first year. The more I read, the more Lively’s book reminded me of the superstitions of some of the town ladies, who claimed that simply sharing a meal with a black person could give a white person the flu. I tucked On the Heritability of Maladies away on a back shelf, next to a book on the benefits of oat flour.
“Can we get more science books?” I asked Sister Thomas, the librarian.
She was in her forties, with a face that changed from ugly to pretty in different lights. Sister Rose didn’t know why she had come to Holy Child, but had heard she was brought in handcuffs, by a sheriff.
“I built this library myself,” Sister Tom told me. “It has every book the medical students in Chicago use, and more. What else do you want?”
“I need to know what causes different diseases,” I said.
“Rawley’s Handbook of Flu Transmission should be over by the window, under the death records. He’s got one for rheumatic fever too.”
“Not those kinds,” I said. “I want to know what causes barrenness.”
Sister Tom rested her elbows on her desk.
“The bookseller can get us the latest tracts on problems with the reproductive system,” she said. “But they cost money.”
Mama had given me twenty golden eagles when I left, but the wagon driver had taken all of it. The fee, he’d said.
“I don’t have any money,” I told Sister Tom.
“That’s okay,” she said. “You can work for it.”
The library had a basement storeroom I’d never seen before, cooled by the earth around it, the small window at ground level looking out on grass and dandelion heads. Wooden boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, full of records dating back to the convent’s founding and books too rare and fragile to keep on display. In the center was a desk, lit brightly by a phosphorus lantern, with an inkwell and a sheaf of papers and a hand-bound book lying open to the middle.
“The big monasteries like Saint Joseph’s,” she said, “they have printing presses. But when I want to make books, I have to copy them out by hand. Then the bookseller buys them from me, or we do a trade.”
I shut the book to look at the cover: On the Regulation of the Monthlies.
“My mama taught me about this,” I said. “She was—she’s a midwife.”