Etta Mae Nichols:
The Last Midwife
Miss Etta Mae
Nichols was too old to continue workin' as a midwife any longer so her daughter
took her in and cared for her until she died.
They needed a loan and for that the bank required an appraisal and that's
how I came to meet Miss Nichols for the first and only time.
I had heard
mention of her of course, she had been here in Del Rio, Tennessee all of her very
long and fruitful life. Her home
was a small frame country house, nothin' fancy mind you, built many years ago and it had
been modified to also serve as a clinic as well as a home.
My cost book described it as a 'low cost,' one-story, single family
residence-except for the clinic part. Her
home was located about three miles farther up State Road 107 [southeast] from us
towards Round Mountain and North Carolina [to
the head of the grade as the locals say] and off about a mile on the right in a
small hollow just below Round Mountain.
Miss Nichols
had delivered hundreds of babies durin' her life and charged only what the
patient could afford. Even in the
inflationary early 1980s, cash wasn't necessary, a good layin' hen or two or maybe a
couple of piglets would do, but like as not her patient paid nothin' for her
services. And many's the time, her
'services' included meals and a bed.
Sometimes when a lady had a difficult delivery, she would stay with Miss Nichols for several weeks. How that little lady made a go of it for all those years is beyond my comprehension.
The local
multiple award-winning TV show, 'The Heartland Series' came to do a segment on
Miss Nichols. [If you want to learn
about this area and its people, that's the series of video tapes you need to
buy.] They popped in on her while
she was watch'n her favorite soap opera and she quickly shooed them out the
door or shushed them up and went right back to her TV set as she wasn't about to
miss her
Miss Nichols, the last midwife, is gone now. But the legion of children that she helped bring forth are scattered all over this world. I'm sure they know who Miss Nichols was, but I wonder if they'll pass it on to their kids. It sure is hard to find a body that there giv'n anymore, ain't it?
Don "Brer Bear" Valentine
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