All-Time Great Baby-Birthin' Scene
Lamb in his Bosom
by Caroline Miller
(Avon, 1963)
I'm half-way through this impressive Pulitzer winner from 1934. I can't help wondering if Gone with the Wind and it's huge technicolor of a movie is partly to blame for this book being forgotten. But frankly, my dear, this book is so much better! Mitchell meets Faulkner meets Laura Ingalls Wilder. (Oooh.. hate that... way to NYT/Michiko. Never mind.)
This book has a baby birthin' scene that beats Gone with the Wind by a long shot. Here we have a woman alone in a pre-civil war Georgia cabin whose husband has gone off to the Coast to get supplies and whose family, though only an ox-cart ride away, might as well be on the moon because she's gone into labor. Not only does she have to feed her two toddler supper in the middle of her labor, she has to deal with a panther who gets past the guarding hounds. There is a disorienting moment when, thanks to the Southern dialect, the reader might think she's being attacked by a painter and the writing tends to be overblown at times, but, truly, I'm humbled by this heroine and her life. Shootin' a yankee and makin' a gown from curtains, is nothin' compared to what Cean (prononounced sea-ann) Smith goes through. Here's a bit from the chilling birthin' episode:
"She lay, spent and half-asleep, cold under the piled cover, with her first man-child on her arm. He would have no name until Lonzo should come and name him.
Outside in the dark, locusts chirred with long, beating shrillness that deafened the ears; that sound has always made her feel the heat more when she noticed it; now she did not notice it.
Suddenly the hounds gowled, and the hair on their backs bristled high down the ridge of each lean spine. So close that she could swear that it was just outside the door, Cean heard a painter scream, and another painter's hoarser scream answered the first. It sounded like women's high, agonized crying. The hounds bayed in dismay, and beat the earth to thundery dust going in pursuit of the painters' crying. Cean's blood seemed to freeze with fear, so that she could not move. The painters were after her new-born child and her. Hadn't she heard her mother tell how the painters could smell childbirth blood for any number of miles? And here were her other two children naked on the bed, and her only man-child still lying as he had lain yesterday and the day before, his chin and folded fists crowded on his breast, his little red legs crossed at the feet and drawn high on his body."