76 research outputs found
Joy and Kenny
No full textNarrator Lisa Yarger asks Lovie about the possibility of accompanying her to a birth. Lovie tries and fails to get one of her Mennonite clients to meet Yarger. Yarger gives Lovie Chris Bojalian’s novel Midwives, which Lovie mistakes for nonfiction. Lovie hits upon the idea of introducing Yarger to her newest client, Joy Mitchell of Pantego, who grew up in the Dutch-American community of Terra Ceia in northern Beaufort County. This chapter includes the story of how Joy and her husband Kenny Mitchell decide on a home birth for the delivery of their fourth child after three dissatisfying hospital births.</p
I’m Doing This for Joy
No full textLovie and narrator Lisa Yarger visit Joy and Kenny Mitchell in their Pantego (Beaufort County) home. Lovie gives Joy a prenatal exam (seemingly for Yarger’s benefit) and explains some of her requirements for a home birth. The Mitchells invite Yarger to accompany Lovie to the birth of their fourth child two months later.</p
The Original Washington
No full textLovie Shelton takes narrator Lisa Yarger on a driving tour of her town, Washington, North Carolina, also known as Little Washington and the original Washington. The tour includes a stop at Bill’s Hot Dogs, a Washington landmark.</p
The House of Freedom
No full textThis chapter presents Lovie in her garden, the setting in which she is (after the birthing room) happiest and most relaxed. Not only is Lovie’s yard a place for her to relax and enjoy natural beauty, it’s also a place where her Christian faith spills out into three-dimensions, as when she creates “Bible scenes” such as her “Woman at the Well well.” The relationship between Lovie and narrator Lisa Yarger grows more informal as Lovie gently ropes Lisa into helping with various yard decorating schemes, including the creation of a literal “bed of roses” and painting instructional and moralistic signs to hang on Lovie’s trees. Yarger begins to reflect on her evolving relationship with Lovie and the challenges of shifting roles and expectations while doing documentary fieldwork.</p
I’m a Legend Down Here!
No full textA thumbnail sketch of Lovie Beard Shelton, a self-styled legend from Beaufort County, North Carolina, who was the first nurse-midwife to practice in the state. The reader meets a woman so taken by the central birth story of the Christian gospels that she keeps a mule in her son’s back yard to remind her of the story of Mary riding on a donkey into Bethlehem to give birth to Jesus; Lovie also speculates that a midwife was present at Jesus’s birth but that the Bible “forgot to put [her] in there.” In 1996 folklorist and narrator Lisa Yarger meets Lovie for the first time while working on the exhibit, “Health and Healing Experiences in North Carolina,” for the North Carolina Museum of History. When Yarger arrives at Shelton’s home in the town of Washington, NC for their first interview, the reader glimpses the mix of fascination and unease that characterizes the relationship between the two women throughout the book.</p
Lovie
No full textFrom 1950 until 2001, nurse-midwife Lovie Beard Shelton worked in eastern North Carolina homes, delivering some 4,000 babies to black, white, Mennonite, and hippie women, to those too poor to afford a hospital birth, and to a few rich enough to have any kind of delivery they pleased. Her life, which was about giving life, was conspicuously marked by loss, including the untimely death of her husband and the murder of her son. Lovie is a provocative chronicle of Shelton’s life and work, which spanned enormous changes in midwifery and in the ways women give birth. In this exploration of documentary fieldwork, Lisa Yarger confronts the choices involved in producing an authentic portrait of a woman who is at once loner and self-styled folk hero. Fully embracing the difficulties of telling a true story, Yarger gets at the story of telling the story. Woven throughout the book is an account of the relationship between Lovie and Yarger as they attempt to bridge the dramatically separate worlds they inhabit. As Lovie describes her calling, the reader meets a woman who sees herself working in partnership with God and who must grapple with the question of what happens when a woman who has devoted her life to service ages out of usefulness: when I'm no longer a midwife, who am I? Facing retirement and a host of health issues, Lovie attempts to fit together the jagged pieces of her life as she prepares for one final home birth.</p
Palm Sunday
No full textThis chapter explores some of the challenges of doing documentary fieldwork when researcher and subject find their belief systems at odds. Yarger discusses Lovie’s brand of evangelizing, which focuses mainly on whether or not someone is attending church. Lovie tries to understand Yarger’s perspective on Christianity and Yarger, feeling judged and lacking by Lovie and others (at a seder hosted by the Jews for Jesus and again at the Young Peoples’ Sunday School Class at Lovie’s church on Palm Sunday), finds her highly cherished tolerance tested. A disagreement between Lovie and Yarger about biracial babies leads Yarger to reflect on racism and the process by which white people acquire racist patterns, as well as on her own often unsuccessful attempts while doing fieldwork to separate people from the racist patterns they sometimes exhibit.</p
Receiving
No full textLovie’s health declines as Joy’s due date approaches. Members of the visitation committee at Lovie’s church stop by to cheer her, and Lovie must struggle with her antipathy towards being on the receiving end of good deeds. Yarger reflects on the challenges of doing documentary fieldwork with an evangelical Christian who sees her as a mentee, someone to be witnessed to. Lovie explains “dropping,” when a baby sinks lower in the uterus prior to the onset of labor. Yarger tries to figure out just when to join Lovie so as not to miss the birth and finally drives out 13 days before Joy's due date to be on the safe side.</p
Political Showdown
No full textThis chapter explores the resurgence of interest in home birth and midwifery (primarily among college-educated white women) as a result of second-wave feminism. Midwives such as Ina May Gaskin begin challenging the physician-controlled model of birth seen by many women as oppressive. Midwife-attended home birth also becomes popular among conservative Christians, who provide a new client base for Lovie. This chapter examines the response of the medical establishment to women's demands for more personalized care and details the political showdown in the early 1980s in which the North Carolina Medical Society pressured legislators to oppose home birth, despite Midwifery Study Committee findings about the safety of planned, attended home births. House Bill 814, passed in 1983, recognizes certified nurse-midwives for the first time and ends the licensing system for lay midwives. The bill also provides a “grandmother clause” for midwives who have practiced at least ten years. Lovie is one of two women to benefit from the exemption: although trained as a nurse-midwife, she did not maintain membership in the American College of Midwifery or seek to fulfill updated membership requirements. The other, Lisa Goldstein, becomes legendary among a new generation of midwives who have no idea of Lovie’s existence.</p
Lovie: The Story of a Southern Midwife and an Unlikely Friendship
No full textLovie: The Story of a Southern Midwife and an Unlikely Friendship. Lisa Yarger. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-4696-3005-2 (cloth, 19.99). 306 p
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