My Bag Was Always Packed

When she got there I couldn’t deliver her ‘cause I didn’t have the go ahead. So I got in the car with her ‘cause she was having little pains, to go back down to the doctor’s to see if I could talk to him. But when we got down to the funeral parlor down by Calvary Church, about a mile and a half, something happened to the car. So in the meantime we carried her into the funeral parlor. See my cousin owned it, and he lived there too.

So they worked on the car, and after they got it started, the highway was so snowed in they couldn’t get out of there. And cousin Quentin said, “Cuz you probably gonna have to deliver her right here, do the best you can.”

And he didn’t have a wife, you know, just a man there, but in the meantime we lucked out, and the pains were about ten minutes apart and we saw the Highway Department coming along with a truck with a snow plow. So the men stopped 'em and told 'em what the problem was and came back and told me just what was what. I said that if I could get her to my house, I told the truck driver where I lived, I’d deliver her there.

He said, “okay, you all can get in the car, and I’ll open up the highway.”

So we drove behind that snow plow, and he went right to my house and made a drive on round my house. And we carried that girl in the house, and I rushed around and got everything ready. In less than fifteen minutes, she had a real big boy. I tied the cord and after the placenta came I went and called the doctor to see if I could cut the cord.

He said, “Sure, Claudine, it’s all right if everything looks normal, go ahead and cut it.”

So I cut the cord. That’s the only person, that and one other person that I can remember, are the only two people that owed me anything for delivering a baby. She paid hers down to ten dollars. She could have paid. She was a young girl, but her family made good money. Some people are just hard payers.