Lovie: The Story of a Southern Midwife and an Unlikely Friendship

By Lisa Yarger

From 1950 to 2001, Lovie Beard Shelton practiced midwifery 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 artful 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 is able to get at the story of telling the story. As Lovie describes her calling, we meet a woman who sees herself working in partnership with God and who must wrestle with the question of what happens when a woman who has devoted her life to service, to doing God's work, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469630069

Lisa Yarger

Lisa Yarger is co-founder and co-owner of the Munich Readery.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

CHRISTMAS 2005

THE ALTE PINAKOTHEK, MUNICH. A small triptych by Jan Joest van Kalkar stops me in my tracks. It’s a simple Nativity, not the kind I usually fall for. The setting is rustic. There’s no gold paint, and all the angels are full-bodied (no winged baby heads). Mary and her newborn, both bathed in soft, creamy light, occupy the central panel. Mary is moon-faced in that lovely way of sixteenth-century paintings, with ringlets of honey-colored hair spilling down onto her shoulders. She wears a gown of blue-gray under a loose cloak of cerulean. Her hands are delicate, pressed lightly together at the fingertips, and her whole being is engaged in adoring the naked little baby lying before her in a hay-lined feed trough. While she’s serenely doing that, Jesus indicates her with his raised hand. And I’d like to thank my wonderful mother! his gesture seems to indicate. Couldn’t have gotten here without her! Three child-sized angels surround Mary and the crib, their demeanors placid, their gazes fixed reverently on the baby. Joseph, standing partly in shadow on the left-hand panel, looks reverent, too, but also preoccupied, as though thinking, This is really quite beautiful and moving, but I can’t seem to shake the feeling that it’s all going to get very, very complicated down the road, and could somebody please remind me what any of it has to do with me? On the right-hand panel, balancing out Joseph, two shepherds stand open-mouthed with astonishment. One of them looks straight out from the painting while pointing at Mary and Jesus, an exhortation to the viewer not to miss the main event. It’s nighttime. The sky is blue-black, star-laced. A mincing moon hangs in one corner. The little scene is framed by an arched structure, part wood and straw, part brick and stone, which tapers into ruins at the top of the frame. The old world is crumbling, but then: there’s this baby.

Es tut mir leid. A museum guard is at my shoulder. I brace myself for rudeness, but she is friendly, even smiling. I’m sorry, but you can’t have that backpack in here. You might swing around and bump one of the artworks. I twist my neck to catch a glimpse of my bulky load. Really? I ask. I thought it would be better this way. She smiles again. Let me ask. She gets on her walkie-talkie and has a static-filled conversation with a male voice. I’m sorry, she repeats, turning back to me. But it isn’t allowed.

May I just stay here for a moment more? I won’t walk around. I just want to look at this one painting a bit longer, and then I’ll go.

The guard smiles and nods, then leaves me alone.

I turn back to the little triptych. I know without a doubt that I’ve never laid eyes on it before, but the feeling I have while looking at it is one of overwhelming familiarity. It reminds me, in fact, of Lovie. It doesn’t just remind me of her, it screams Lovie at me, and I stand there trying to figure out why. The blue of Mary’s cloak is almost the same blue as Lovie’s midwife dress, but so what? Lovie’s home was filled with prints of religious art, but I’d seen lots of religious art, including Nativities, that hadn’t brought Lovie to mind.

The best I can figure is that it has something to do with the simplicity and stillness of the scene and the way the arched structure draws the discrete figures—Mary and Joseph and Jesus and the angels and shepherds—into a meaningful constellation. When I first met Lovie (in 1996, also at Christmastime), certain elements of her world rose up and arranged themselves in my mind into a scene, more or less fixed. Her life seemed a rich, tidy whole in which all the pieces matched up and made sense and were contained neatly in one wonderfully eccentric human being. At a time when I could see my life only as a big, sprawling mess and myself only as a chaotic work in progress, Lovie appealed to me as consistent and unchanging. A character.

As I stand there before the little picture, it sinks in that the Nativity is the place where everything came together for Lovie. And though I still puzzle over this, the Nativity is also where she and I connected. Very little about Lovie’s world was like anything in mine. And yet somehow, at the Nativity, a door opened, and something in Lovie’s world stretched out its hand, crooked a fleshy finger at me, and beckoned me to enter. I stepped through the door and was drawn into a place that, though unknown, felt familiar, where small, scattered bits of my past were gathered up like pinecones for kindling and returned to me. And at this particular Nativity, the door swings wide open once again, and I can perceive Lovie on the other side.

I stand there a long time, too long, until the baby on my back wakes up, lifts her sleepy, heavy head, and begins to cry. I come back a few days later, and then again, and again, and it isn’t until the fourth or fifth time that I look at that painting that it occurs to me that the scene isn’t static after all. There’s the backstory, for starters: the magi on their way; and Herod, threatened, searching for the child who might undo him. And although they point away from themselves, those two shepherds (talking over each other, mouths agape) are at the center of great activity. Behind them, visible through the arch, a tiny golden S-curve of an angel brings a long silver ribbon of tidings to other shepherds camped out on a hillside. The shepherds’ arms are flailing; they’re beside themselves with excitement . . .

1

I’M A LEGEND DOWN HERE!

I AM A MIDWIFE, and midwife means with woman. It does not mean that I’m the creator or the miracle worker or any of that. It means that I’m with woman and I’m helping her and supporting her through the delivery of that baby. Which is approved by the Bible. You read about it: midwives found favor with God, and he made them houses. That’s a promise, and God keeps his promises. And see I’ve got a house, even though it’s an old one with cracks. I’ve got a family, those kind of things. It’s just part of the teachings of the Bible, you know, because you’re doing his work. But you got to do it like he wants it done! He don’t want you interfering and tearing up and stuff like that. You can bring comfort and you can be a handmaiden to the woman, you can help her with her straining and her pushing and the stretching of her perineum so that the baby can come out. You can help with the control of the head so it won’t tear her. Doctors spent a century teaching women that the hospital is the place to have the baby, but it’s not the natural inclination of the woman. The natural inclination of the woman is to be with her loved ones in her home and to hunker down and just push her baby out in a natural fashion.

All this business today of 25 percent of the patients in the United States having cesarean sections? That’s not God’s plan. God gave women this wonderful functioning system, he puts the babies in there securely, he provides for nutrition, he causes them to grow, and he protects them for nine months. He put the baby in there, and I fully believe he’s capable of getting it out. And here menfolks who’ll never have a baby have taken all the rightness out of it. They took all the naturalness out of it and turned it over to men and insurance companies, and what they want is to have this fast technological stuff more than the humane human side. But what starts the human heart? Is it technology?

‘Course I know some things go wrong. But I was trained to look out for them! I could see if there was too much swelling or too much bleeding. I had the cooperation of the doctors and the health department, and I knew I could get help if I needed it. If I had to bring a patient to the hospital, you better believe she needed a cesarean.

The average nurse would be frightened to take on all this responsibility, but see, I was taught there’s no place to have a baby but in the home.

FROM 1950 UNTIL 2001, Lovie Beard Shelton practiced midwifery in eastern North Carolina. She delivered black, white, Mennonite, and hippie women, those too poor to afford a hospital birth or a doctor and three or four rich enough to have any kind of delivery they pleased. Most of her clients gave birth in their own homes, but Lovie also attended deliveries in each of her three bedrooms, in her dining room, and on the floor just inside her parlor door. In the 1980s, a couple whose baby she had delivered in North Carolina moved to Montana and flew her out there to deliver their next child; the trip was one of only two times she was ever west of the Mississippi River. She attended women as young as thirteen years of age and as old as forty-six; she also delivered nine sets of twins, a handful of breeches, and one baby whose mother was suffering, in Lovie’s words, from a case of voodoo. When she had her own children, she delivered babies right up to the week she gave birth herself and as soon as nine days after. As her career wound down, she took on only an occasional client, but at her peak she attended 196 births in a single year. This may not sound like much if you are thinking of a hospital-based doctor who pops in and out of the delivery room and can thus handle multiple births a day, but in the case of Lovie, who spent twelve, fifteen, twenty or more hours at a single birth, it represented a significant workload.

Oh, Lord, honey, she told me once, I was pouring out deliveries everywhere.

When I met her, Lovie was seventy-one years old and possessed a well-rounded shape, two arthritic hips, and a mean ax swing. She was a staunch defender of home birth, natural birth, and a no-nonsense approach to labor and delivery. Don’t pull that waterbed stuff on me, she told one client, because I don’t want no waterbed babies. The most she ever charged for a delivery was forty dollars, even for twins. Occasionally people gave her more than that, but more commonly she received no payment at all. She did not barter for her services, although once in a while a family that was unable to pay would show up at her carport door with a bag of homegrown vegetables or a cord of wood, and one time a client’s family gave her, instead of money, a framed picture of the Statue of Liberty. She saw her work as a calling and never turned anyone away for financial reasons.

Lovie maintained a large and bountiful yard where something was blooming no matter the season and where she presided as a sort of matronly, Southern Baptist Saint Francis—feeder of birds and protector of neighborhood bullfrogs. Her life was about giving and nurturing life, yet it was conspicuously marked by loss, including the untimely death of her husband, the murder of her oldest son, and the accident that left her youngest son, Wesley, in a wheelchair.

I am, she told me once, well acquainted with grief.

Lovie lived in the Beaufort County town of Washington. She was the first nurse-midwife to practice in North Carolina, and for most of her career, she was the only nurse-midwife in the eastern part of the state. Although she worked with doctors, nurses, public health officials, and traditional lay midwives, she never had what she considered true colleagues. She was always one of a kind, and she knew it. This left her feeling extremely isolated at times, but it also made her proud. Often she signed her letters: Lovie Beard Shelton, Pioneer Nurse-midwife.

I HEARD ABOUT LOVIE in 1996, while researching health-related topics for an exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, where I worked as a folklorist. The museum wanted to call attention to the community-based tradition of African American midwives that had thrived in eastern North Carolina through the first half of the twentieth century. I hoped to interview a black midwife but couldn’t find any still living. Finally, an anthropologist I know mentioned Lovie, who is white and professionally trained and who spent much of her career working as a public health nurse while attending home births on the side. A white nurse-midwife wasn’t what I was looking for, but Lovie sounded interesting, so I called and asked if I could visit.

On the phone Lovie was polite but not overflowing with enthusiasm for the exhibit. She explained that she had worked in eight eastern North Carolina counties and had delivered somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand babies, and that she even had a few clients lined up for the coming months. I’m a legend down here! she said. She said she had walked a fine line her entire career, often practicing on the edge of legality, and often with the feeling the state was breathing down her neck. On top of this, some of her nursing and public health colleagues, prejudiced against midwifery, had accused her of taking their profession back to the dark ages.

There’s been a lot over the years that hasn’t been right, she noted. And now I’m at the end of my career and I don’t want to get involved with anything that might jeopardize a happy ending.

Just when I thought she was about to tell me why I shouldn’t visit, she announced that I was welcome to come out whenever it was convenient. I thanked her and was ready to hang up when she added, Make sure you have a lot of time to spend when you get here, because I have a lot to tell.

I ALWAYS KNEW I WAS DIFFERENT, Lovie told me once. I was the biggest girl in high school, and I had the biggest feet. But now I’ve got big butts, big everything, so I reckon it’s all in proportion.

I have seen a number of photographs of Lovie’s nursing and midwifery classes in the 1940s, and it is true that even then she was not only several inches taller but somewhat heavier set than her classmates. In her elder years she shrank a few inches, vertically speaking, but before age and osteoporosis set in, she stood five foot eight. It was a sort of tall, raw-bony type of people that I come from, she said. There were no little folks. She claimed that she weighed somewhere between twelve and thirteen pounds at birth and that people used to tell her that her mother was unconscious for three days after the delivery.

When we first met, Lovie was still a great tree of a woman, an oak. She was fond of eating and made frequent jokes about her size, such as, Big woman, big meals, big ideas. Once I brought her a tin of homemade cookies, which she accepted with a chuckle. Lord, I look like I eat a bushel of them, she said. I’m into everything. Another time I saw her finish a meal with a piece of apple pie and then say, "I don’t know, I think I’d rather have the taste of chocolate, so she went onto her back porch and brought in a store-bought chocolate cake from atop the washing machine. I have to keep something around for the children and grandchildren," she said, peering at me from over the tops of her eyeglasses. Then she cut a liberal-sized slab and ate that, too.

Lovie had long, silky white hair that she would wind into a stiff knot and fasten to the crown of her head with hairpins and clear plastic combs. She dressed in sturdy skirts and blouses, all of synthetic fabrics that neither wrinkled and faded nor wore out. Because she wore sensible shoes and rarely purchased new clothes, people assumed she wasn’t interested in how she looked, but this wasn’t true—she just didn’t care about looking like anyone else. She had, in fact, two fashion weaknesses: hats and beads. She bought the latter at yard sales—short necklaces of blue or black or white plastic balls the size of shooter marbles. She never left her house without a hat and, over the years, accumulated more than sixty of all colors and styles. Her favorite was a small denim scrunch hat with a cloth rosette. Seems like it makes me feel jaunty, she’d say.

By the time I met Lovie, arthritis and joint deterioration kept her from doing things as quickly as she used to. She walked with slow, shuffling steps and a gait that pitched slightly to the left or right, depending on which knee or hip was acting up. Osteoporosis stooped her shoulders and pushed her head into the lead, so that when she walked, it jutted forward on a softly wrinkled neck, creating the impression of a rather old tortoise. I ain’t no fast person any more—zipping and whipping through things, she told me once. It’s true that her movements were slow and heavy—she made no superfluous gestures—but for the first years of our acquaintance she seemed to be always in motion: cooking for herself and Wesley, who lived next door, making fig preserves, raking leaves, taking food to shut-ins, tending to correspondence, caring for a sick grandchild, creating Bible scenes in her yard, or making holiday decorations for her church. She never had much use for social visits, especially ones that interfered with her projects. I met a woman who once called Lovie to chat and Lovie said, I cain’t talk to you right now, I’m making plum jelly! before banging down the receiver without another word. For years she would slow down only to drink a cup of coffee or peruse the local newspaper, but her life had been built around service for so long that she found it hard to stop working. "I wasn’t sitting around playing cards or whatever people do that just amuse themselves, she told me once. You know, or playing with dolls, so to speak. There are people that play with dolls. I don’t mean no offense but, you know, really, that doesn’t contribute to people’s welfare." She couldn’t recall the last time she went to see a movie, though her oldest daughter, Nancy, remembered accompanying her mother several times to see Gone with the Wind when it came to Washington for an extended run in the 1970s. "It was Gone with the Wind, Gone with the Wind, Gone with the Wind, Nancy told me, rolling her eyes. But other than that, I don’t remember Mama going to the movie theater that much. Oh, she did go see Julie Andrews in Hawaii, but she was really disappointed in that."

Really? I asked. And why was that?

"Well, it was just so different from Gone with the Wind."

LOVIE LIVED IN EASTERN NORTH CAROLINA her entire life except for four short periods, including a summer in Kentucky with the famous Frontier Nursing Service. In some ways she was ahead of her time: she traveled to Scotland to train as a nurse-midwife decades before the profession was widely accepted in the United States, and she pursued a career in the 1950s and 1960s while raising four children by herself. But in other regards, she was decidedly old-fashioned. Among the things that she never owned were a credit card, a clothes dryer, a dishwasher, and a computer. She also never had central heat or air conditioning, and only late in life, against her will, after a crisis, did she acquire gas heat in one room; before that, she relied on space heaters and a wood stove. Given her career history, one might be tempted to think of her as a feminist, and in some ways, perhaps, she was. But not in all ways. I will never forget the jolt I experienced, for example, when I heard her say that it comforted her to think of God as male because she felt more secure with a man in charge.

Actually, it came as a surprise to many people that Lovie was as educated as she was (she had degrees in nursing, midwifery, and public health, as well as a certificate in pediatric nursing), not just because of her old-fashioned ways but because she often came across as downright naive. A few years after I met her, her sisters took her to Wendy’s for lunch, and Lovie puzzled over the menu as though it were in Arabic; eventually it came out that she had never been to Wendy’s before and didn’t recognize any of the choices. Some people might have concluded from this that Lovie had never before set foot in a fast-food restaurant, but this wasn’t the case. It’s just that she usually went to Burger King.

Lovie had many interests other than midwifery—church, her family, her garden, and her animals, to name the key ones—but midwifery was the prism through which she saw the world, and much of what she said and did referred back to her experience with babies and mothers. The oral historian Studs Terkel recounted an incident in which the actress Geraldine Page was approached backstage after a performance by a man who wanted to know, of all things, who did her dental work. As it turned out, the man was himself a dentist; during the play he had sat in the front row, a vantage point that afforded ample opportunity to lean back and study Page’s fillings. It was not that he loved theater less, concluded Terkel, but that he loved dentistry more. I had a similar experience with Lovie one Sunday when I accompanied her to church. The pastor gave what seemed to me an extraordinarily long sermon, during which Lovie reached over and placed her hand on mine. A devout Christian, Lovie was always exhorting me to go to church, so I assumed she was either checking to see if I was awake or was about to tell me to listen up, because the pastor might have something to say that could do me some good. She leaned closer. See that child right there? she whispered, indicating a small boy several rows ahead of us who was skating the cowboy action figure from Toy Story along the back of his pew.

That child has got a big head, Lovie whispered. His mama’s got a big head, his daddy’s got a big head. You know what that means, don’t you?

I shook my own, presumably average-sized head and studied the three oversized heads ahead of us. Their religious significance was lost on me. Something to do with ego and sin? With God granting more brains to some people than to others?

No, I confessed. I really don’t.

Lovie nodded. My ignorance was to be expected.

Big heads, she confided. That means trouble with a home birth.

YOU DIDN’T SEE MUCH of Lovie’s house from the road. If you were driving, you were likely whizzing by; Market Street ran past her house as a fast, four-lane highway. Then, too, the house was set back a good fifty yards and was shielded from traffic by a bank of tall camellias that opened only wide enough to admit the driveway passing through. In any case, the house wasn’t exactly eye-catching. It was one story and white and wore its sloping green roof low and modestly, the way a shy child might wear the brim of a baseball cap pulled down over the eyes to avoid notice. The house had a wide front porch and a small screened porch in back; attached to the house on one side was a low carport, and connected to the carport was an even lower cinder-block storage room, all of which made it look as though the house wanted to keep extending itself and tapered off in trying. In place of an electric bell, a set of cowbells hung by the side door. (There was a front door, but nobody much uses front doors in the small-town South.) To my knowledge, no one ever rang the bells or knocked. Usually they just called through the screen door, Hello (Miz Shelton) (Miss Lovie) (Lovie) (Mama) (Grandma).

I didn’t have to worry about knocking or ringing the first time I visited because Lovie was sweeping her driveway when I arrived. She looked up when she heard my car but continued sweeping until I got out and shut the door behind me. It was a bright December morning and warm enough to be out without a jacket. I had the impression that she’d been watching for me for some time; I also had the impression that the sweeping gave her an excuse to give me the once-over before letting me into her house. She welcomed me politely, but without smiling. I followed her through the carport and past her car, an aged, wine-colored Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with a Hospice sticker on its rear bumper. I got into volunteering for Hospice after I retired, she noted as we entered the house through the side door. "After I retired from the health department, she clarified. I never really retired from the midwifery."

We stepped into an unlit parlor. Sorry it’s so messy in here, Lovie said, but if there was a mess I didn’t notice, in part because it was too dim to see much, but also because I was distracted by a Cabbage Patch doll hanging by its neck from the mantle. I learned later that Lovie kept dolls around the house for her clients’ children to play with when they visited; she also used them to demonstrate the birth process to parents-to-be. That the doll hanging from the mantle might have seemed grisly to some people had never occurred to Lovie.

We reached the dining room, a warm, well-lit space separated from the kitchen by a half-wall and a large, cast-iron wood stove. Lovie seated me at the table in front of a teetering stack of papers that included diplomas, photographs, a scrapbook, and thank-you notes from clients. These are my credentials, she said, pointing at the stack. You look through these and then we’ll talk. She turned and shuffled into the kitchen without another word.

I unpacked my tape recorder and notebook and settled myself at the table. I should say that I did not, at this point, possess a burning interest in midwifery. A generalist by disposition, I had dabbled in journalism before starting graduate studies in folklore with little sense of what a folklorist actually did beyond interviewing people. While writing my thesis, I had fallen into the museum job, and midwifery was merely one topic I happened to be researching for the exhibit I happened to be working on. On a personal level, I was twenty-nine years old and single, I had no children, and although the topic of birth did not exactly bore me, I didn’t find it particularly compelling.

Lovie, however, interested me more and more. Clearly she had an agenda for the morning. I sifted dutifully through the stack in front of me, making notes and jotting down questions. I saved the scrapbook for last; families from a Mennonite community the next county over, where Lovie had delivered dozens of babies since the early 1980s, had compiled the book. Each family had worked on a few pages and had copied in poems, Bible verses, tributes to mothers, and words of thanks to Lovie. They’d also pasted in photos of their children, with captions such as Nathaniel: A Shelton Special, and a few had made drawings and collages from magazine photos of chubby babies and birds in flight.

When I was halfway through the scrapbook, Lovie reappeared, bringing me a glass of orange juice and a dish of warm pecans toasted in butter. I started to ask about her work with the Mennonites, but she said, Look, I’ll tell you about the whole thing when you’re done there, and began rummaging in a squat, blue duffle bag sitting on the table. I returned to the scrap-book but stole glances at Lovie as she pulled out a white pinafore apron and a white, ruffled cap that looked like something Dolly Madison might have worn to bed. She pinned the front of the apron to her bosom, tied the strings around her waist, and put on the cap. Then she took a seat opposite me and fixed a stern eye on my tape recorder. Behind her the wood stove crackled and popped. I still had no idea what to make of Lovie, but the wood stove, at least, seemed reassuring, as did the enormous kettle of water sitting on top of it, hissing pleasantly. Later Lovie would tell me that she put on the cap and apron so that I could see how a midwife dresses for a birth. After meeting Lovie, I met many other midwives, and not one of them dressed for a birth like Lovie; in fact, not one of them was much like Lovie at all.

When I turned the final page of the scrapbook, she was ready for me. All right now, she said, still not smiling, you’ve seen my credentials. Now you tell me yours. And tell me how you plan to use the information on me, because I don’t write blank checks.

At this point I had only one thought, and it was a simple one, something along the lines of: Uh oh. I appreciated that Lovie felt it was within her rights to question who I was and what I wanted from her, but I wasn’t used to it. I had been going into the homes of strangers, often elderly ones, since my early twenties, and I was accustomed to receiving a warm welcome. No doubt this was at first because I represented a newspaper (and later an arts council, then the museum), which was seen in turn to represent an interested public. But the success of the encounter depended as much on the relationship between the interviewee and me as on my institutional affiliation, and always before I had been able to establish a fairly ready connection. Some of this could be chalked up to factors over which I had little or no control, such as my youth: some older people find it easier to talk openly to a young person with few parallel life experiences than to a peer. I tended to look younger than I was, and this, combined with my demeanor—open, curious, and maybe even a little naive—seemed to put people at their ease. In other words, I came across as pretty harmless. I’m sure my being white factored in many cases, too. Even the people with whom I had, at first blush, the least in common, such as an elderly African American bluesman and a middle-aged Cherokee woodcarver, seemed comfortable enough with me, used as they were to white folklorists, journalists, and other artists coming to sit at their feet. Still, I’m sure most of the people I interviewed did a certain amount of sizing me up: Can I trust her? Is she going to get this stuff right? Will she even know what I’m talking about? Yet if anyone had had doubts, no one had ever expressed them; no one had ever asked me to justify my presence or to convince them that talking to me might be a good idea. In short, I was used to feeling accepted, and usually liked, right off the bat.

Not knowing what would satisfy her, I gave her a nutshell account of my past: I was born in Ohio but had grown up in a Raleigh suburb; I’d studied English in college, was finishing my folklore MA, and had worked for the history museum for two years. The exhibit, I explained, would explore everything from healing practices of the Cherokee, traditional herbal medicine, and home remedies to twentieth-century experiences with diseases such as tuberculosis, polio, and cancer. One part of the exhibit—the part I hoped she would help with—would re-create a 1950s bedroom as a backdrop against which to present information on home birth and midwifery.

Lovie sat quietly while I talked. She kept her hands clasped in her lap and stared at a spot on the table, not at me. She pursed her lips, unpursed them, and pursed them again. When I finished, she nodded, and I relaxed a bit.

Are you a Christian? she asked.

I tensed again. I had no idea how to answer that question. I never knew how to answer that question; in fact, I hated that question!

Having grown up Catholic in the Bible Belt, I didn’t have a straightforward relationship to Christianity. Although there were a number of Catholics in our neighborhood, most drawn to Raleigh from the North by jobs in Research Triangle Park, many North Carolinians still found Catholics as exotic as Hare Krishnas. And we did seem different, I suppose. Catholics had a pope (whom my parents taught us to view as a slightly out-of-touch uncle: listen to him, then make up your own mind), attended Confession (which I never learned to appreciate, even in its post–Vatican II incarnation as the Sacrament of Reconciliation), and proclaimed that the wine and cardboard-tasting wafer served for the Eucharist really had been transformed into Christ’s blood and body. But probably because my parents had never dwelt much on the idea of blood atonement and salvation, church for me became more about people than anything else. The Christianity I knew from Saint Joseph’s, the small, integrated church that we attended in east Raleigh, seemed light-years away from the kind of Christianity I found in the evangelical pamphlets and Christian comic books my sisters and I perused in the children’s corner of the fabric store our mother patronized. The pamphlets made it seem as though salvation could be achieved merely by reciting the formula found on the back page, which seemed laughably simplistic even to me as a child, and the comic books were downright creepy, with stories of good-looking but rebellious teenagers mocking God and dying, moments later, in fiery car wrecks. One boy at school had cheerfully informed me that Catholics were all hell bound because we weren’t even Christians. Always too quick to judge the whole by the part, I decided at a certain point that if that’s what Christianity looked and sounded like, I didn’t much want to be a part of it. Whereas my parents learned to tell their new Protestant acquaintances that they were Catholic Christians, by the time I was a teenager, I preferred to simply call myself a Catholic and let people draw conclusions from that. I attended Mass through college, threw in my lot with a lively, social justice–oriented Catholic student group, got turned on to liberation theology at national gatherings of Catholic students, and even helped found and lead a short-lived association of Catholic students in North Carolina. I also took a series of philosophy courses and watched, as though it was happening to someone else, the underpinnings of my faith fall away, one by one. Still, I loved my Catholic friends and loved singing with them at Mass, so I kept on, but once I’d graduated and moved away, I stopped going to church.

Even if I felt Lovie would understand any of this, I didn’t feel like explaining it. In hindsight, this was unfair to both of us, and I would have to do plenty of explaining down the road. But at the time, a simple response seemed in order, so I gave the simplest one I could muster.

I grew up Catholic, I said. But I don’t go to church anymore.

Lovie chewed on this, pursing and unpursing her lips some more. Doodlebug, her Jack Russell terrier puppy, wandered in from the kitchen, his toe-nails clicking against the linoleum. He stopped by the wood stove, cocked his head at us, yawned, then turned and clicked away again. Inside the wood stove, a log shifted and fell with a thud. After a moment Lovie nodded gently, as though she’d received a satisfactory answer (not necessarily mine) to a serious inquiry (not necessarily the one to me). Then she announced that before we began talking, we would pray. She closed her eyes and ducked her head. Lord, we ask that our visit today result in something positive, she said. She brought out each word carefully, slowly. We ask you to guide our conversation, and we ask you to help keep our talk honest. We ask this through Christ our Lord, amen.

She was silent. You know about Mary riding into Bethlehem to give birth to Jesus? she asked finally, raising her head.

I nodded. Of course I did.

That part of the Bible means a great deal to me, she said. It’s just such a beautiful, beautiful story. You being Catholic, you ought to be very much akin and in tune with this, you know, in every way. It really is a beautiful story, and it’s lots of comfort and reason to believe.

JACK RUSSELL TERRIERS were Lovie’s preferred breed of dog. When I first met her, she had two, a mother and son. Soon after, the mother was killed by a car. The son, Doodlebug, was Lovie’s all-time favorite. When she had company, Doodlebug would race helter-skelter through the house, skidding around corners, springing onto the sofa and chairs and then bouncing right off again, as though the furniture was electrified. Sometimes his hindquarters wiggled so furiously you’d think the whole dog would flip over.

Lovie acknowledged that Doodlebug was a bit of a pain, but she was extremely fond of him, fed him all manner of table scraps, and let him sleep on her bed with his head on her pillow. She also talked baby-talk to him. Once when he put his wet paws on her skirt, she said, Good gracious, see what you did to me? You’s a big doodly, doodly dog.

Doodlebug had the run of Lovie’s yard, which was not fenced, and during one of my visits, he ran out in front of a car and narrowly avoided getting hit. Lovie hurried out to the curb faster than I’d ever seen her move and walked back with an unperturbed dog, whom she tried her best to chasten. Doodlebug! You like to give me a heart attack. Don’t you EVER do that again! I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re my company, my alarm clock! You wiggle on the bed at night and let me know I’m not alone. She said all of this in a sweet, high-pitched voice, the kind grown-ups often use when talking to small children.

At that time Lovie also had a matted, caramel-colored chow named Rusty (Wesley brought him home and I was short on dogs at the time so I ended up with him), an aged mule named Gus, three goats, and twenty-nine geese. She once tried to raise ducks, but after some months they flew away. They’re free agents, she said. They’re kind of like the wind: you never know when they’re coming or when they’re going. Sometime after I met her she gave away two of the goats, both females; the last she heard, they had two kids apiece. The third goat, Billy, grew increasingly aggressive, so Lovie sold him at auction: the high bidder was a slaughterhouse. She wrote me about Billy’s sale and concluded by noting, Be sure your sins will find you out!! I wasn’t at all sure if she meant it as a joke or as a