Blue Sunday & Her Grand Midwives: Elevating our Patron Saints, Pioneers, & Wisdom Keepers

Nursing students from the 1930 class stand proudly on the steps of Freedmen’s Hospital, a vital center for Black healthcare and medical education during segregation. Located in Washington, DC, Freedmen’s became Howard University’s teaching hospital and a sanctuary of healing, learning, and resistance for African American and Afro-Indigenous communities. As a site of radical care, it laid the foundation for today’s full-spectrum birthwork rooted in liberation, tradition, and community.

In veneration of our Afro-Indigenous Grand Midwives, 

whose nurture, wisdom, & enduring gifts transcend time & space.

“Do not forsake wisdom, & she will protect you.

Love her, & she will watch over you.”

– Proverbs 4:6 

Blue Sunday is the patron saint of grand midwives, laboring women, and freeborn children. “That was her name ’cause she was born on a Sunday & as black as pitch. Women of color in labor called on her and heard her songs when they risked mothering free children.”

In her 1982 novel Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo, The Honorable Ntozake Shange confides, “Now this is what the folks said. What actually transpired when the sea was rough & a woman was in labor was that Aunt Haydee pleaded with Blue Sunday to ‘Please give this child life, please, give this child the freedom you know.’”

Her words reflect a profound tradition of southern, Afro-Indigenous birthkeepers who have tarried at our mothers’ side, interceded on their behalf, and sustained our lives. The Grand Midwives of the antebellum South were pioneers in their calling, embodying many essential roles for laboring mothers and their families:

• Birth Partner  

• Cheerleader 

• Counselor

• Entertainer 

• Massage Therapist

• Mother Figure

• Shaman

• Spiritual Guide

Today, we are witnessing a resurgence of humanistic models of care, which have been inherent to our traditional ontologies. Both birthworkers and the communities we serve have been calling the restoration of holistic, sacred, and community-centered birth practices. A future conceived in love, autonomy, and respect for the sanctity of life is ours for the living. 

I am endlessly thankful for their lives and the examples they have set. This essay honors the sacred legacy of the southern Grand Midwives—whose wisdom, nurturing spirits, and enduring gifts have transcended time and space. Dear reader, I invite you to join me in reflection as we sit at the feet of our Grand Mothers of Wisdom. In tribute to Blue Sunday and those spirit-workers who came before us, let us rejoice, as we reclaim the wisdom they embodied with mastery and grace. 

Bearing Witness to Legacy

In the early 19th century, enslaved elder midwives of the antebellum American South were vital to maternal and infant health. Serving as the primary birth officiants in rural and underserved areas, these women provided emotional support, hands-on assistance during delivery, and guidance on breastfeeding and newborn care, fostering a deep sense of community among the families they served.

Historically, catching babies was both a distinction and a privilege, allowing these women to put their “big minds” to work for the benefit of their communities, as noted by Alabama lay-midwives in Margaret Charles Smith’s 1996 memoir, Listen to Me Good: The Life Story of an Alabama Midwife. 

Portrait of Margaret Charles Smith, legendary midwife and maternal health pioneer from Alabama. One of the firstAfro-Indigenous  midwives to be licensed in the state, she delivered over 3,000 babies without losing a single mother. Smith's legacy is a cornerstone in the history of traditional midwifery, Black maternal care, and Afro-Indigenous birthwork. Her wisdom and service continue to inspire generations of holistic birthworkers.

During labor and delivery, midwives encouraged mothers to remain upright and engaged to help facilitate the natural progression of labor and reduce complications. Immediately postpartum, they delayed cord cutting to improve the infant’s health and vitality. Highly skilled professionals, they were adept in preventing unnecessary interventions to ensure their mothers’ relaxation and continued comfort as well as favorable birth outcomes.

Traditionally, midwives considered childbirth a sovereign act. Being God’s servants, they believed that they received the most important information regarding a mother’s care directly from Him. In addition to providing warmth and encouragement according to mother’s needs, they encouraged mothers to labor unassisted and undisturbed. God delivered–they were only vessels. A southern midwife’s role was not to manage births, but to simply bear witness to them. Their rich cultural wisdom is apparent in their birth and postpartum rites:

• Abdominal and infant massages

• Maintaining a birth fire into the postpartum period

• Medicinal baths at the onset of labor

• Placing a sharp knife or open pair of scissors under the birthing bed

• Rubbing the body with sulfur or lard

• Salting down the afterbirth

• Vaginal steams

Traditional practices of spirit-work in historical midwifery were reinforced by ritual production, including:

• Baby Blessings

• Closing of the Bones

• Naming Ceremonies

• Placenta Gardens

• Herbal Baths

Indeed, the tradition of Afro-Indigenous midwifery has always been to provide holistic care without ceasing. Elder midwives and their apprentices cooked, cleaned, laid on hands, and continued to intercede long after childbirth–all for the family’s confidence, security, and overall well-being. Southern lay-midwives infused a reverence and intuition into even the most clinical aspects of their care.

Beyond Unction

Cultural suppression and spiritual persecution were rampant by the early 20th century as the American Medical Association (AMA) launched:

• Aggressive regulatory efforts and punitive legislation

• Anti-midwife propaganda campaigns

• Banishment of cultural practices

• Blame for rising maternal and infant mortality rates

• Extortion and exploitation tactics

Under the threat of imprisonment, many direct-entry midwives began preparing two bags: one for inspection and another for carrying to births. By 1975, several states in the U.S. had outlawed home birth midwifery. Fortunately, Southern communities could not be torn from their birthing customs. Medical professionals who once actively opposed midwives soon realized that families would not cooperate without their trusted birth attendants.

​This video clip features Mary Francis Coley, an esteemed African American midwife from Albany, Georgia, delivering one of over 3,000 babies during her career. Excerpted from the 1953 educational film All My Babies: A Midwife’s Own Story, produced by the Georgia Department of Public Health, the film aimed to educate Southern lay midwives and foster collaboration with the modern healthcare system. Coley's work exemplifies the enduring legacy of Black midwifery, Afro-Indigenous birthwork, and community-centered maternal care in the American South.​

Again, the Last Becomes First

Almost a century later, we are witnessing a resurgence of traditional birthworkers. As we support laboring women and their families throughout conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum, we advocate for the restoration of our sacred birth practices. 

Like the keepers before us, we celebrate the cyclical nature of life, acknowledging that the living, dead, and unborn are interwoven parts of a caring, cohesive, and interdependent whole. As a Holistic Fertility Coach, Yoni Steam Practitioner, and Traditional Full Spectrum Birthworker, I deeply value the sound wisdom, knowledge, understanding, and discretion of the Grand Midwives who preserved and shared our healing traditions as they shaped the sacred art of birthing.

They are the pioneers of modern birthwork and our cultural ancestors. Their communities once relied on these ancestral systems because of the miracles they produced. Today, our elder midwives are experiencing a reemergence of their own making. The late DC-bred, elder midwife Claudia Booker, CPM explained:

“The Elder African American Midwives, who had been referred to as “Granny Midwives” had a meeting about 20 years ago which was attended by many of our own current Elder midwives and proclaimed that they no longer wanted to be called “Granny.” They requested that they be referred to as “Grand Midwives.”

Grand Midwives survived because their care was needed and wanted. As the elders foretold, a collective return has always been imminent: “One day, all this is going to be banished away, and you’re going to have to go back to the midwife. 

So it is.