The granny woman: Healer, midwife and neighbor

FROM PODCAST: ‘Two of the Ozarkian Folk Chronicles with Hayden Head and Curtis Copeland’

Now let's sit in with Hayden and Curtis and learn about the granny woman.

One of our first podcasts was about the figure of the granny woman and her role in the daily lives of hill folks. You've probably heard the term, and if you're of a certain age and grew up in the Ozarks, you may have known one. She was the woman who delivered your mother, or your grandmother, or your grandmother's grandmother — the one who came on horseback in the middle of the night with her little satchel and stayed until the baby arrived safe and sound.

Before you dismiss the granny woman as just a colorful relic of a bygone era, consider what medicine looked like in the late 1800s. Ella Ingin Dunn, in her book “The Granny Women of the Hills,” points out that almost anyone willing to take a correspondence course for a year could become a licensed doctor. Beautifully engraved diplomas were available for fifty dollars or less. The county court approved the license, and that was pretty much that. So, when people say the granny woman was just a superstitious old busybody who got in the way of real medicine, it's worth asking: what real medicine? The granny woman had decades of hands-on experience, knew every herb in the holler, and — crucially — didn't charge anything. That combination was hard to beat.

One of our favorite granny woman stories comes from Otto Rayburn's Ozark Guide, and it's about a woman named Stonewall Bates of Bee Creek. Her given name was Samantha, but she picked up the nickname Stonewall somewhere along the way after she married a "wheezed little man named Rocky Bates," and she carried it to her grave. Stonewall weighed two hundred and forty pounds and could hoist the blacksmith's anvil over her head. She was, as Rayburn put it, notable for the absence of fat, with sinew "tough as Texas leather." She was also the most popular midwife for miles around and, by all accounts, rarely lost a baby.

The story that put Stonewall in the category of Ozarks legend happened during a flood in the 1930s. She was doing her washing down by the swollen creek when a massive boulder broke loose and pinned an eight-year-old boy's legs beneath it. The water was rising fast, no help was nearby, and there was exactly one option: lift the rock. She tried and failed. Tried again and moved it an inch. On the third attempt, with the water at the boy's face, she got it clear. Both his legs were broken, but he survived. She set the bones herself, applied homemade splints, and walked over to tell his parents what had happened. When the creek went down, folks came from all over to look at that boulder. The strongest man in the hills couldn't budge it. Her grave marker in the old Bushwhack cemetery reads: She Gave a Lift. I'd say that just about covers it.

Not every granny woman lifted boulders, of course, but they were all remarkable in their quieter ways. Viola Barrett wrote a beautiful piece in the Eureka Springs magazine Ark-Ozark about a woman named Grandma Prickett who delivered babies all over the back country of Northwest Arkansas. She went on horseback or on foot, with a father carrying a lantern to guide her through the dark, and she'd often stay for several days. She never took a dime for any of it. When her daughter bought her a new coat, she gave it away to a neighbor in need and kept the old one, because she said it wouldn't be true charity to give away something worn out. Her harshest words to anyone in recorded memory came when a stranded motorist berated her for bad roads and the lack of a telephone: "It didn't cost you anything to come here, and it won't cost you anything to leave." For a woman who spent her life giving everything she had to her neighbors, that was about as close to anger as she got.

Now, the granny woman's practice wasn't all herb remedies and practical midwifery. Superstition ran alongside the genuine medicine in ways that can be hard to untangle. Vance Randolph — our patron saint, as Curtis and I tend to call him — documented all manner of granny woman customs in his fieldwork: coins stolen from a church placed in the mattress to ease labor pains, an ax laid under the bed during a difficult birth, onion tea for newborns to bring out a rash that would supposedly predict whether the child would survive. Were these superstitions foolish? Some of them, probably. Were they harmless? Mostly, yes. Did they give frightened women and families something to do while they waited, which is itself a kind of medicine? Almost certainly.

Rayburn actually wrote a piece in his Ozark Guide in 1959 called "In Defense of Superstition," which Curtis and I both found more interesting than we expected. His argument was basically this: superstition is false logic, but it may have been better than no logic at all. It was a way of making sense of things that couldn't be explained, and in that sense, it was the beginning of reasoning, not its opposite: "Superstition is the protective shell of the egg from which reason is hatched," he wrote. Rayburn was an Ozarks idealist, so he may have given superstitions more value than they deserved, but perhaps not. In time, science may confirm the value of those old remedies. I’ve got a feeling we’ll be waiting a long time for science to recommend laying an ax under a bed though.

The day of the granny woman has mostly passed, as Rayburn observed even in his time. Younger doctors came into the hills, the roads improved, and laws tightened around the practice of midwifery. But the knowledge those women carried was real, earned through decades of experience with the bodies and fears and hopes of their neighbors. Stonewall Bates and Grandma Prickett weren't folk heroes in their own lifetimes. They were just the people you sent for when things got serious. That's its own kind of legend.

The Ozarkian Folk Chronicles is a podcast celebrating the folklore, history and culture of the Ozarks. You can find them at ozarkianfolkchronicles.com or your favorite streaming platform.

Tune in next week for some more learning and stories!