My Mother Was Born in a Segregated Hospital.
Earlier this year, while cleaning out my late grandmother’s house, my mother found her original birth certificate. Knowing my obsession with family genealogy, archives, and microhistory, she texted it to me immediately.
After we got off the phone, I found myself staring at the document. One detail caught my attention: St. Mary’s Infirmary. I typed the name into Google, clicked on a result, and gasped. I immediately called my mother back and asked, astonished:
“Mom, you were born in a segregated hospital in St. Louis!?”
“Girl, I keep telling you I was Black and poor!”
If you know my mother, she never shies away from her story. She is proud of where she comes from and her roots. And to be fair, my question was not couched in shame or judgment, just curiosity and astonished disbelief.
My mom was born at Saint Mary’s Infirmary in Saint Louis. In 1889, the hospital was erected. In 1933, the sisters who oversaw its operations decided to operate the hospital exclusively for Black patients. As a result, it became the first Catholic hospital in the nation to serve Black patients.
The hospital staff was fully integrated, with St. Mary’s Infirmary training and employing Black physicians, nurses, and other healthcare providers. However, Jim Crow laws and ideologies, rooted in false notions of white superiority, enforced strict separation. White patients were therefore cared for in facilities separate from Black patients. While white hands could treat and touch Black bodies, the reverse was never permitted.
My Mother Was Born in a Segregated Hospital.
I had to divulge this truth not only to honor my mother, but also to acknowledge that so many Black women like her and others are born and bred in tough truths. Yet, they manage to transcend them while also harnessing memory and their origin stories.
I also had to write this truth down for the humanity of today, to quell the historical amnesia and gaslighting. Some are hell-bent on sowing difference, discord, and conveniently forgetting lived history. Often, we are made to feel as if the past never existed, yet my mother, alive and well, a daughter of the North whose mother fled the terror of Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1930s, was born in a segregated hospital. You simply cannot erase history when it still lives among us.
In composing this piece, I thought of one of my absolute favorite books, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman, and the word “wayward.” It traditionally means difficult to control or predict, a label long ascribed to Black women, yet Saidiya arrests that meaning and implores us to see it through the prism of Black womanhood:
“Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe, when you have been sentenced to a life of servitude, when the house of bondage looms in whatever direction you move. It is an untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.”
My mother is a living bridge between segregation and self-definition. She was born into separation, but she never let it define her, and she raised me to live expansively. I never thought I could not be something just because I was a Black woman; I have my mother to thank for that; she showed me the way. My grandmother showed her the way.
Young, unwed, crossing the Mississippi into St. Louis to deliver her baby, her first child. I tried to think about how she must have felt. She had escaped the belly of the beast, the claws of Jim Crow, only to be told; this is where people like you go: you’re still Black. For all this country’s drivel on the sanctity of life, Black ones are expendable. Yet, as her progeny, here I am. She, and in turn my mother, made me happen.
My Mother Was Born in a Segregated Hospital… in the north.
This embodies the duality of Black American-ness. This double consciousness, as coined by Dubois in Souls of Black Folk, is almost a Black American birthright. So how fitting that the place where my mother was born was symbolic of that duality. The north is “free,” yet segregated. Black and human, yet unequal.
My mother has always had this beautiful way of carrying history, but not being confined by it. I have always said that I love stories and storytelling because once you know a person’s story, you can understand them; I got that from my mother.
She has a deep, intuitive understanding of people’s stories, and never judges where they come from. Instead, she is always a listening ear, and always the person who remembers bits and pieces of people’s unique history. I think when you’re born into separation and difference, it’s only natural to want to find commonality.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you.
Until Next Sunday,
Calyssa
This is a beautiful story that is relevant to me. Your maternal great grandmother was the first in the family to give birth to me at St.Mary's Infirmary Hospital. interesting. My mother told me about the process.