08/31/2026
Lovely recognition! Thanks for the share!
In Camilla, Georgia there is a house on Dyer Street that a Black woman turned into a business the federal government now files under Commerce. đźŹ
Beatrice Borders was the third generation of midwives in her family. Her grandmother Katie Jones did it, her mother Georgia B. Williams did it, and Bea got her state license and did it too. By the early 1940s she had built out the back of her own home into a real facility with a delivery room, two recovery rooms, a nursery and a lobby, and she named it the Georgia B. Williams Nursing Home after her mother. The state licensed it for eight clients at a time.
Here is the part that stays with me. Mothers stayed about three days and got three meals a day. For a lot of women doing farm work in southwest Georgia, that was the only real rest anybody had ever handed them in their lives. She charged twenty five dollars and up, and when a family did not have it she took sausage, ham, or whatever came out of the garden.
She and her assistants brought thousands of babies into the world over about thirty years, and her handwritten birth registers from 1949 to 1971 still exist, with the mother's name, the date and the baby's weight all in her own hand. She had no children of her own and adopted six. 👶🏾 Do you know who caught you when you were born, or who caught your mama?
