Before hospitals, before birth plans, before sterile gowns and fluorescent lights, there were women like Oriana “Aunt Orie” Frazier-Richards.
A proud Gullah midwife from Georgetown, South Carolina. Aunt Orie’s hands were guided by generations of wisdom. She didn’t need a license to know how to bring life into this world; her license was ancestral, her wisdom inherited, her calling divine.
Aunt Orie, the youngest sister of Tanya Jones’s great-grandfather David Dorsey, would quietly say, “I caught many babies in my life.” She learned not from textbooks, but from watching, helping and listening.
Here’s an oral story of her from Fedrick Cohens. Click Here
Aunt Orie, whose dedicated practice spanned Georgetown and Williamsburg Counties, claimed to have facilitated over 1,000 births. Her service extended to the Gullah Geechee communities of Oatland, Choppee, Lanes Creek, Morrisville, and Plantersville. Furthermore, Oriana Richards was a steadfast congregant of St. Paul AME Church in the Browns Ferry community in Georgetown, South Carolina.
The midwives of that era didn’t attend medical schools; they attended the births of their mothers, aunties and neighbors. They learned by spirit, not by syllabus.
And guess what? Those babies were healthy. Born into love, bathed in herbal washes, and swaddled in hands that believed in both prayer and peppermint oil. Midwives like Aunt Orie knew what teas to boil, how to turn a breech baby with oil and song
and how to read a laboring woman’s breath like scripture. They walked miles in the dark with nothing but a lantern, a satchel, and faith. And babies thrived.
Control Over Care
But then came the state. Then came the laws.
Suddenly, midwifery was labeled “dangerous” or “untrained.” Black midwives were told their ways were old-fashioned, unscientific—even backward. The very knowledge that had kept our communities alive was being regulated out of existence.
You had to go to school, be licensed, and be approved by systems that never approved of us to begin with. It wasn’t about safety. It was about control.
One by one, Gullah midwives like Aunt Orie were pushed out. Their stories were often buried. Yet, the memory of their essential work lives on.
We Remember
We remember how Aunt Orie longed for family and tradition, how she was pulled between the old ways and the new rules.
We are the descendants of babies caught by women who had no letters behind their names—but had God, gum spirits, and granite resolve.
During the Jim Crow era, when white hospitals often denied care to Black women in labor, these midwives stepped in. They birthed babies in sweltering heat and deep cold, sometimes walking miles through fields just to reach a mother in need.
Their tools were simple:
- A clean sheet
- A tin basin of hot water
- Sweet gum and pennyroyal leaves
- And the Holy Spirit
While some received “granny midwife” licenses in the early 1900s, by the 1960s and 70s, state laws pushed many out. Hospitals became the norm, white coats replaced headwraps, and birth, for many, lost its soul.
Let us honor them. Let us say their names. Let us tell their stories.
Because they didn’t just catch babies. They caught the future. And their future… is us.
What stories of ancestral wisdom do you carry? Share them in the comments below and help us keep these vital legacies alive.
