When Birthwork and Warfare Mix: Black Birthworkers as Mediators Between Realms
Photographer: Rain Hoskins
Audhu billahi min ash Shaytaan ir rajeem. Bismillah, bismi Blackness ir rahman ir raheem.
[Today we seek refuge under Allah and our Ancestors, from Shaytaan, any negative energies, any negative entities. In the name of God, in the name of Blackness, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful.]
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The largest lesson at the core of every experience is an homage to Black birthworkers and shelter-bearers. We rain down life, combat evil forces, and reintegrate our kin into original realities. Black birthwork is led by justice, coated by spirit, and creatively realigning our babies’ strengths. This is birthwork that is performed by Black people, living a code for Black people, and armed with allegiance to the spirit of Blackness. By virtue, it is a sanctified practice that sits in the war between Blackness and anti-Blackness, as well as mediating between life and death.
While anti-Blackness and whiteness push for the eradication of the self, all soul, all heart, Black birthworkers adamantly help us come into existence━ and stay in it.
Many of us have gotten so used to living like this, that sometimes it’s easy to reject that multiple wars are taking place during our lifetimes━ with us forced directly into the crossfire. The war against Black life is unnatural. It has never been “a simple form of human prejudice.” To be against Blackness and against allegiance to it is to be enemy to the health of all realms. It is to place cosmic imperialism, gain that’s worth less than nothing, the eradication of all facets of love and what it means to exist over the spiritual and material protection of natural bodies.
Anti-Blackness isn’t just the threat against Black life, but all life, including beyond any earthly realm. To remove the spirit of Blackness from any world is to render it devoid of protection. One of the key strongest ways that non-Black collectives throughout time have sworn to this system and entity of permanent spiritual death has been severing Black family lines/lifelines. Through deliberately sabotaging, breaking apart, and attempting to eradicate our genealogies, efforts continue to be made to repress any resurrectional energy of Black lineages, at all angles, human and non-human. This not only directly informs the traumas we walk with and inherit, but also how and which Ancestors get to return (come back down to fulfill certain missions, which commonly includes returning to a baby form).
With this anti-Black persecution that’s rooted in spiritually dead and corrupt lines, dangers across all realms, including the spirit realms and our earthly households, intensify. It also means that babies are coming down with anti-Black spiritual entities already set on their demise, in addition to those who were already planning to show up to counter the babies’ personal destinies.
Photographer: Rain Hoskins
MEDIATORS BETWEEN REALMS.
My story started off as "the baby retriever." The year that birthwork chose me was my destiny reinforcing itself once again, settling right in front of me, giving me no choice but to look. In came a sudden surge of back-to-back strong warfare-related spiritual practitioners placing their unborn and physically unconceived children’s security into my hands and sight. Like igneous rock, a new aspect of my career was crystallized. But it was one that I had never sensed bubbling to begin with.
I was now not only a diviner, but the on-call skilled professional rescuing unborn baby spirits from predacious and emergency situations, and bringing them back to safety.
“Children are continuous lessons for their parents because they are the possibility of connecting to spirit,” an Ancestor of mine once spoke. “That’s why parents are so sacred, too.” Babies forever help parents engage with the spiritual realm, even as they propel into adulthood. In my line of work, we never let that go. The spirit realm is where everything starts, not necessarily a physical womb.
As someone whose job is to work both with and for the spirits of unborn children to ensure their protection, my days look like constantly preparing both children and their parents for re-strengthening their connections to their lineages, and being able to fulfill their destinies. Through technologies and shamanic styles indigenous to my People, these relationships often include creating strategic partnerships both in the spiritual realm and physical realm, when necessary, to ensure that any needs are being met. The spirits of unborn babies are assisted with staying on track regarding any lessons and also assisted in feeling comfortable enough to come into this physical world, if they so choose. Education occurs about the sciences of what’s happening with our individual spirits in the various contexts of conception and pregnancy. For those who are not as familiar with engaging in spiritual discipline, families, especially the birthing parents, are also gently prepped to directly interact with their Ancestors, other spirits, and the baby, as well as their personal destiny at times.
My job’s utmost priority is examining children’s destinies to see how they fit into these worlds, and letting that inform their teachings, study + care plans so that all, including the babies themselves, are nurtured in every aspect.
My days, of course, also do still look like helping babies escape their enemies + predators, both returning them to safety and maintaining that safety. Sometimes babies go where their parents can’t follow. This is where baby retrievals come into place, and why they happen to be so important. Baby retrievals allow for the spirits of babies to be tracked and removed from danger as quickly as possible. In this work, there has to be clear understanding that sometimes these things do happen, and that that likelihood will most commonly intensify depending on how extreme or esoteric the lineage is that the baby is coming from.
However, in my line, we work towards preventative care and security as best as possible, so that emergency baby retrievals are not necessary to begin with.
Graciously, Black birthworkers are constantly weaving between worlds to gain assistance on behalf of our families and clientele. Birthwork is a very specific form of guardianship, at times also overlapping with warriorship. Black birthwork that centers the spirit of Blackness is an integrous navigation system. Its motion comes with many variations, but one line at its core: Always redirecting us back to ourselves and back to our communities, materially and in spirit.
Traditionally, we've all had to receive a calling or go through an extreme experience in order to recognize our roles. Down South, most Granny Midwives would credit their roles and gifts to a God, after commonly being told through dreams, visions, Granny Midwife Elders, or falling ill until reaching acceptance. They then would often receive training or be spotted out by an Elder holding the same role, to guide and support them. In my experience, it was more closely related to the latter. It began with finding out through repeating emergencies that had very little to do with me, yet called me forth anyway. Only then were the pieces put together and all smoothly fell into place━ the emergencies lessened, "new" paths not only revealed, but acknowledged. Storms calmed until half a year later, where I fell incredibly ill out of what seemed like the blue. It finally subsided the immediate morning only after I merged deeper with the spirit origins of my role.
My history and present of mediating between realms for babies occurs often most specifically through shamanic technologies. Other types of Black spirit-centering birthworkers, specifically traditional birth doulas or midwives, may also have specialties: negotiating between different forces with herbs, tools, prayers, cloths, following their instinct (usually just their spirits), etc. No matter what titles we may be using or inherit to describe it, Black birthworkers are ancestrally serving as mediators through warding off enemy spirits away from delivery, from the womb, adding extra protections to the baby and/or carrying parent. We are assisting in babies mounting their birthing parent for pregnancy (fertility + strength). We’re being a friend, but also a security measure for the baby.
These are prestigious systems that could never effectively be co-opted. In order to do so requires the same partnerships our clans have, the same hearts our guardians have, the same blood that serves as our keys.
Those continuing to record and pass on these practices must be given credit, too. Additional examples of our indigenous Black healthcare roles + makers for families and babies include Tori Rodriguez and Divine Bailey Nicholas. These are two Black birthworkers and herbalists currently doing the work of preserving and educating about Granny Midwifery (what I like to also just interchangeably call Hoodoo Midwifery) traditions, a traditional Black form of birthwork especially distinct to the Black elders in the U.S’s South. The form of Black birthwork on now-U.S land, where the physical and spiritual well-beings are never separate.
Tori Rodriguez, head of The Southern Earth Mama, leads Our Gran Roots’, a Black-only 6-week conversational study and class on Granny Midwifery traditions in Alabama. Divine Bailey Nicholas is of Divine Birth Wisdom, where she operates Grandma’s Hands Pregnancy and Postpartum Herbs & Nutrition. This is a course focusing also on the herbs and healing modalities historically used by Southern Black Midwives. Both of these birth professionals come from studying healing traditions rooted in West and Central Africa, constantly importantly honoring the genealogies of our Diasporan and Continental shelter-bearing and medicine-making. In this lifetime, they are doing the legendary work of tracking and preserving this lane of Hoodoo history, which is Black medical history.
As Black spirit-centering Black birthworkers, we help cultivate these necessary connections whenever we can: helping babies being able to come into this world when that needs to happen, and also simply renewing family connections. We are constantly strengthening the hearts and connections of those who give birth to new life. Black people deserve to choose their reproductive realities. And Black children deserve to be fought for in every aspect. (Deserving to have safety and protection in the spirit realm and the agency to come down or not.)
When birthwork and warfare mix, it looks like the sanctified practice of Blackness fighting for its right to be in harmony with Life + Death, and not outside of it. Even if the mortality rate for Black pregnant people that derives from anti-Blackness was not as high as it is, it would still remain a fact that Black birthworkers possess extremely crucial and high roles of maintaining and reconnecting Black lineages, as well as preserving legacies and traditions.
WHY NOW━
We've always been here. But the times are changing, and the new babies that are coming simply did not come to play. I’m constantly learning from the baby spirits that I work with, because they are so badass and smart, and are often coming from these strong ass backgrounds. They need all the loving guidance and learning that they can get, and from experienced Black spirit-centering/led individuals.
What I tell people quite often is, "Them babies got things to do." They ain't come down here just 'cause, and if you're being drawn to me for services, then 9.99 times out of 10, that is especially true for you. The babies are here tapping into their magic and lineages at such extreme rates than our generations have honestly ever seen before. We've got to be just as ready as them. To support them, to cherish them, to love them.
While anti-Blackness tragically disrupts Black kinships and genealogies, Black birthworkers remain one critical key to reconnecting those same beings and protecting the physical, emotional, and spiritual healths of Black communities. Birthwork that is by Black people, for Black people, and centered in Blackness looks like never allowing for the disruption of Black lineages to go unchallenged.
Taylor Amari Little (Tay)
Taylor Amari Little (Tay) is a Black gender-variant diviner, Muslim, Conjurewoman, a protector for the Unborn, and overall lover of research and history. At (Un)Veiled Divine Technologies, she works with her spirits and that of her clients to create handmade prayer blankets, run birthwork services for people’s lineages, create writings, Tay in the Water Podcast, and operate other loving projects. Tay's work is ultimately performed with the purpose of reconnecting Black lineages and fighting for Black Indigenous power.
We are raising money to provide free and highly discounted services to Black birthing people. Consider supporting below:
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