the story of seasoned urban midwife Claudia Booker
ashley
How did you get into birth work?
claudia
My father was a pediatrician in Washington D.C. and when he was in school my mother left college to work to help support the family. We didn’t always have money for a babysitter or daycare, so I often accompanied my dad to school. He went to Howard University Medical School. After he graduated sometimes I joined him when he was interning at Freedmen’s Hospital too. I used to come and have lunch and hang out with him when he was doing long shifts. So I’ve been around babies all my life.
My mother had a very traumatic birth with me. She was 20 years old, barely out of being a teenager, a sophomore in college, over 500 miles from her family... She was the first person in her girlfriends circle to get pregnant and to have a baby, so she had no mentors, no one for emotional support, no one to be with her when she was in labor.
It was before childbirth class, preparation and all that came into existence. She also had me at Freedman’s Hospital at a time in history where black women had their babies in a ward. There were six to nine people in beds separated by a curtain.
The lights in the ward were in the middle
of the floor, one huge light in the middle. So you were laying in a room in the semi-dark with a curtain between you listening to other women labor. You labored by yourself in a room listening to other women that you could not see laboring at the same time.
And due to racism and the social constructs, Freedman’s hospital at that point in time did not have any kind of pain management available. There was no epidural, they did not do Stadol, they did not do Twilight, they did not do any of that stuff that became more popular in the 60s.
claudia
My father was a pediatrician in Washington D.C. and when he was in school my mother left college to work to help support the family. We didn’t always have money for a babysitter or daycare, so I often accompanied my dad to school. He went to Howard University Medical School. After he graduated sometimes I joined him when he was interning at Freedmen’s Hospital too. I used to come and have lunch and hang out with him when he was doing long shifts. So I’ve been around babies all my life.
My mother had a very traumatic birth with me. She was 20 years old, barely out of being a teenager, a sophomore in college, over 500 miles from her family... She was the first person in her girlfriends circle to get pregnant and to have a baby, so she had no mentors, no one for emotional support, no one to be with her when she was in labor.
It was before childbirth class, preparation and all that came into existence. She also had me at Freedman’s Hospital at a time in history where black women had their babies in a ward. There were six to nine people in beds separated by a curtain.
The lights in the ward were in the middle
of the floor, one huge light in the middle. So you were laying in a room in the semi-dark with a curtain between you listening to other women labor. You labored by yourself in a room listening to other women that you could not see laboring at the same time.
And due to racism and the social constructs, Freedman’s hospital at that point in time did not have any kind of pain management available. There was no epidural, they did not do Stadol, they did not do Twilight, they did not do any of that stuff that became more popular in the 60s.
ashley
That had to be terrifying.
claudia
Terrifying, scary, and my mother was two weeks out of her teens. My mother’s birthday is October 27 and mine is November 5. So my mother had what she would describe as a traumatic birth experience with me. A traumatic day in her life. And we know now that can dramatically impact the bonding process between mother and child.
So that’s one of the reasons I decided to be a birthworker, after hearing her story — but to be one that’s concerned about policy and social justice and not just the physiological act of getting the baby out — the issues of bonding, of safety, of respect, of trauma and its long term impact on the way we feel about our children and our children feel about us and we feel about ourselves.
Then the third reason is I was a lawyer and I had just stopped being a judge and I really wasn’t crazy happy with continuing to be a lawyer and my gynecologist, who was a white man said to me, “You should be a doula!” He said it on May 30, 2004. He said, “You need to stop doing what you’re doing and go be a doula.” I was like, “Go be a doula?!”
ashley + claudia
[laughter]
claudia
“Why would you think I should stop being a lawyer and go do that?” He reminded me that a few years earlier my god-daughter, who had just turned 17 — she had a baby and she had one of those terrible labors — and I basically got the godmother call, “Can you help her? We’re tired, we need some help.” I remember I got there and she was drinking soda and eating frickin almond joys.
ashley + claudia
[laughter]
claudia
And so I went to the hospital cause that’s what you do for your god-daughter. The teenagers didn’t know what to do except to be together and talk and giggle and laugh, but they were scared and overwhelmed. So I spent a day and a half with her, we ended up with — and this of course is representative of what happens in America — we ended up with a c-section on a 17-year-old. Because of failure to progress.
And I didn’t know anything about anything. I’m just there being the godmother you know trying to keep her calm and positive. I went to the c-section and saw Simone Malaysia get born, and I dont know how I didn’t remember it — that my gynecologist was one of the attendees in the operating room at the time of birth.
ashley
And he remembered you.
claudia
He said, “I saw you that day in the OR and I’ve never seen you so happy in the 15 years I’ve known you. And whatever made you that happy that day, is something you should figure out how to do all the time.”
I’m crying now right. And he got on the phone and got me doula training with DONA, childbirth education with CAPPA, breastfeeding and peer counseling with La Leche League, and a mentor at CW Hospital, and he did it within about 20 minutes on the phone.
And so only a fool would say no when God and the universe opens doors like that. So two weeks later I was in my car driving down to take my DONA doula training. And then a year or so later I took the ICTC course with Shafia Monroe, culturally competent, culturally appropriate full circle prenatal and postpartum doula training so I’m certified in both.
claudia
When I finished training I went to the Family Health and Birth Center and said I wanted to volunteer for them. And honestly, they weren’t interested in me. I was not 20 at the time and driving a nice car, and they were convinced that the women from the projects who came there to have babies would never be interested in having someone like me because I didn’t look like their girlfriends from around the way.
And it’s exactly why they did identify with me. Because they got enough girlfriends — that’s like my goddaughter — got lots and lots of girlfriends but don’t necessarily have people who are older, you know. So I ended up attracting the younger, 17, 18, 19-year-old women because I gave them a chance to reconstruct how to be with older women and in some ways feel or better understand what their parents and their grandparents were going through. And because we didn’t have a history of not getting along and fighting over this and fighting over that our ability to relate to each other wasn’t do as I say, don’t do as I do, you know.
ashley
So what do you think about how to engage more with older generations?
claudia
My dad used to say the man who knows everything can learn from the man who knows one thing, okay?
ashley
I think the culture tells us, you know — we know all this new stuff that you didn’t know, therefore you can’t teach us anything when there’s really ancient knowledge we’ve already known...
claudia
So, when I became a mother, I was learning from my grandmother. My grandmother was one of them crunchy, strict ladies. When my daughter was born I had my grandmother come and spend the first week with me, okay. And she was one of those people that at that point in time, we put the rice cereal in the baby’s bottle so they’d sleep all night — that’s the stuff she taught me — well hell now we would never do that. Baby could choke, sudden infant death, allergies to rice — we now know better. So my grandmother and my mother and all of us did the best we did with what we knew then. Now we know more and can do more, and in five years we’ll look back on some of the stuff we did now and we’ll say that was stupid because we’re doing the best with what we have now...
ashley
So how did you become a midwife?
claudia
I decided I wanted to learn about homebirth. And I went back to The Farm (a community with homebirth midwives in Summertown, TN) and took some more classes and then I started looking for somebody to precept me. It took me five and a half years. I got turned down 20 times, not all separate midwives because I went to the same midwives two and three times… finally three of them changed their mind and said yes… I was given the explanation that their client base would not be comfortable with a Black person and — one of the people who turned me down, I did some prenatals with her and the people were not interested in having me touch their bellies, so she was right. When she got a more millennial, mixed-race, middle-class client base then it was okay to have a Black person… It was a very, very, very difficult process.
I ended up going down to The Farm and I went to Senegal — I did a bunch of my primary births in Senegal — it took me three tours at the Farm before they would let me come and see a baby get born.
The preceptor/apprentice relationship, in general, has been allowed to be one of indentured servitude, meaning come to my house and do prenatals but while you’re here you can help do some dishes for me and you know things that have absolutely nothing to do with midwifery — that’s not my job — second off, you don’t get paid. Apprentices do not get paid, so I’m driving from here to there and everywhere, I’m going to be there at lunch so I need money for food, I need to be available, I need to have some kind of flexibility in my job...
It was a long journey and I still have a hard time wanting to accept the reality that the same problems I had finding white people who would precept me — I have now finding white people who will back me up. And my mother’s like, um what’s wrong with you, if they didn’t want to help you become a midwife why do you think they’re going to help you now that you are?
ashley
Do you think they just don’t want to come because of your clientele?
claudia
I think for the same reason why they’re uncomfortable precepting Black people because — our view of what disrespect is is much broader than what theirs is and we are not going to take but so much — I’m not going to come and wash the dishes and do this and do that and you can’t just talk to me any old kind of way...
White people would call me and say you know I have this new Black client and — can you give me a class because I want to know how to handle these people? And now my reply is the way to handle these people is to give them to me... It’s that thing about being, as I like to say, cultural kleptomaniac, also known as cultural vampirism, and that’s how it is in the midwifery world...
After being a birth assistant for a while, okay — because I was working in environments with white midwives, and I didn’t think that the care they were giving Black people was the best care — the medical part was mostly good care but the social, psychological, emotional part of the care wasn’t what I thought it should be. And that was what I was like, oh I can do this part. I’m smart enough to be a midwife medically and I know what it is to be in the community, and communities I’m not familiar with I knew how to find out. I know how to do that. I serve a Cambodian community in Virginia and I’m not from Cambodia and nobody in my family is from Cambodia and you know, but I spend a lot of time getting to know the Cambodian community you know, and if we ever had a Cambodian midwife I’d gladly say to her take the folks you know.
Support midwives by having a collective, having a co-op to buy supplies together and things at a lower price and give fair stuff to newer midwives... and when they need back-up or mentoring do that. You train them, mentor them, support them in a way you can, but you surrender to them the community that’s been waiting for them.
ashley
Jazmine Waker said in a facilitation a little while ago, thinking about the work that we do now is also leaving an inheritance for people in the future. What do you think or feel is the inheritance you will leave behind?
claudia
I want to continue being politically active. I want to continue to listen. I want to continue to learn and I want to teach, I want to share. I want to give it away.
claudia
I’m gonna die one day just like anybody else. And there is no reason that there is anything in my mind that I haven’t shared with somebody else. It’s a waste. It’s a waste of what God gave me if nobody knows it but me. And we can’t afford that. We need every brain out here working because white supremacy and racism is all day every day. We can’t slack up.
claudia
You say “damn are they thinking about this stuff when they are asleep at night?” They don’t have to.
ashley
It’s already built in.
claudia
It’s already built in. They good, they snoring. Because they already got it in place, its already rolling if they don’t do anything. Every day it’s gonna keep on getting up. But we gotta keep on changing our game. We need to be thinking about thriving, not just surviving.
claudia booker
@birthinghands
interviewed by ashley johnson
@the_do_you_doula
