The Handkerchief(Martha Huett) "Carlos!"

“Wassup?"

"C'mere! Look at this."

Carlos could almost feel the excitement and anticipation in Angie's voice as he trotted into the archives where a mysterious trunk with its equally intriguing contents was stored on the floor. Since working together as interns in the archives library, the two young Gen-Zers forged a friendship bound as tightly as the old, sturdy book opened in Angie's slightly trembling hands. Kneeling at the trunk, Angie looked up at Carlos, then breathed out in wonder, "There's a hanky with Morse code sewn on it hidden inside this super old medical book."

In the weeks after the trunk's anonymous drop-off, Carlos and Angie had come to love a historical mystery as much as Millie, their new friend, their supervisor, and the head archivist of the small Texas town's history museum. They were standing in front of Millie's desk after rushing into her office with the antique medical book and its strangely-coded handkerchief.

"Hmm, unusual," Millie remarked softly as she turned the handkerchief over to examine the series of stitches made on the yellowed linen. "Interesting. Angie, you've chosen well."

A self-described historical research nerd, Millie had determined early on, after the trunk's arrival, that she would instruct her two interns to choose items from it to determine their owners and their place in the County's history. Their first case was the discovery of a young, local boy who had committed a heroic deed. With pleasure in Angie's choice, she said with a chuckle, "We'll call this the Case of the Hanky in a Book."

Carlos and Angie turned to each other and fist-bumped.

"I better get started translating that code. I really want to know what it said. It could be directions to a hidden treasure or even secret war codes or something. I mean, who knows wh-...", Angie enthused before Millie gently interrupted her.

"Hold on, hold on," Millie said smiling. She really was pleased with how easy it was to ensnare both young interns with her penchant for historical inquisitiveness. "Before your deep dive into Morse code, Angie, you might want to take a closer look at the stitching," Millie suggested, carefully handing Angie the handkerchief.

"What do I look closer at?" Angie asked with courteous curiosity, peering at the series of tiny straight and sideways dashes stitched into neat, little rows with varying types of thread. Hundreds of the dashes crowded the old, linen handkerchief.

"Okay. First, look at the shape of the stitching. They're all either vertical or horizontal dashes, aren't they?"

"Yes, ma'am.' Angie found it easy to be respectful to her elders; it was how she had been taught in her multi-generational African-American family.

"In which case, it couldn't possibly be Morse code which is made up by a series of dots and dashes," Millie explained. "And besides, notice how the spacing is exactly the same."

"Whoa! You're right," Carlos exclaimed, peering at the handkerchief from over Angie's shoulder. This history detective stuff is legit, especially with Angie, he thought, then added to himself, Millie, too, of course.

"You're right," Angie echoed.

"And remember, Morse code was invented in the 1830s and 1840s. So, it's unlikely that its civilian use was widespread enough by the time this medical book was published and circulated," Millie stated.

Angie reached over and examined the frontispiece of the old book: 1850. Before the Civil War. Before Emancipation. She felt curiosity wash over her. What could those hundreds and hundreds of meticulously neat and lined-up stitches mean? And especially being hidden in an old medical book. It had to have been something very personal to someone, she figured.

"And secondly," Millie stressed, "the stitches themselves tell you that this handkerchief had been a work in progress from the latter half of the 1800s and into the 1950s."

"Wait...what?" Carlos asked.

More to the point, Angie asked, "But, how can you possibly know that, Millie?"

"By the thread of the stitch itself," Millie answered and pulled a large magnifying glass out of her desk drawer and reached toward Angie for the handkerchief. "Come around here and take a close-up look for yourselves."

Leaning down on either side of Millie, Carlos and Angie examined the magnified threads on the handkerchief as Millie pointed out the differences in the threads' ply.

"In mid-1800s Texas, women used 3-ply thread made from the flax plant. It was usually an off-white color..."

"Wait up. I've heard of plywood," Carlos announced, "but what's 'ply-thread'?

Angie giggled, and Millie looked sharply at her. "Now, Angie. That's a perfectly legitimate question."

"Oh, sorry. My bad, Carlos."

"No worries, Angie."

"Three-ply thread is sewing thread made up of three cords twisted together. This is what was used up until the last years in the 1800s, especially by pioneer women and women slaves. The source of both the linen fabric and thread, in fact, came from the flax plant."

Linen fabric. Women slaves. The memory of a slave child's linen dress, one that Angie had seen worn in a pre-Civil War daguerreotype, planted a seed in her passionately investigative mind; for that slave child in the photograph had been her great-great-great grandmother. The child had been posed with other slaves, with their 'master', to document the White man's 'property'.

Angie suddenly straightened up, took a deep breath, mentally filed that thought under family research, then leaned closer to look at the next lines of vertical and horizontal dashes stitched into the linen handkerchief that Millie was pointing out.

"See these dark green stitches?" Millie directed their attention to the magnified middle rows of dashes on the handkerchief. "If you look closely, you'll see that they're not only different in color, they're different in thickness. The thread on these rows are thicker. Most likely 6-ply. Made of six cords of cotton, not flax."

The three sleuths stared through the magnifying glass at the dark green stitches and clearly could see six distinct cords that made up their threads.

"This type of thread was widely available throughout the states in the early 1900s," Millie said.

"Miss Millie, how do you know all this?"

"I took a textile dating course in grad school, Carlos."

Millie then held the magnifying glass over the last few rows of stitches. Most were made with purple, green, and blue thread and were vertical with only a few horizontally stitched dashes.

Millie wrapped up her close-up inspection of the handkerchief by informing Carlos and Angie that the last few stitches were made by 3-ply mercerized cotton thread made in the middle decades of the 20th century.

"Mercerization was developed back then to make a stronger, smoother cotton thread. They did that by dipping the thread, under tension, into a solution of caustic soda," Millie said, putting down her magnifying glass.

"So at least we have some dates to work with to figure out what this hanky means and who it belonged to, right?" Angie asked hopefully.

"Yessum!" Millie replied good-naturedly. "I would guess this handkerchief was stitched somewhere between the 1850s and 1950s. But as to what these stitches mean? I have no idea."

"How can we find out?" The question spilled out simultaneously from the two interns.

"Let's start with what we can surmise. One, we have a pretty good idea of the time-line this hanky was stitched. Two, the nearly identical horizontal and vertical dashes were more likely than not stitched by the same person. Three, that person was most probably a woman, and she lived to a great age," Millie answered.

Angie said, slightly dejected, "So that means there's nothing more the hanky can tell us?"

"No. Not much." Angie's shoulders visibly slumped.

"But! But! But!" Millie quickly interjected, sensing Angie's discouragement. "There's always the book the hanky was hidden in, my dear."

Angie brightened and lifted the book off Millie's desk, practically cradling it in her hands. Carlos gave her a quick side hug. Millie smiled, closed her laptop and gathered her things, preparing to close up the archives and library for the day.

"Okay, Carlos. Angie. As you know, I've got to head out to my conference in Dallas. Remember, I'll be gone for a week. So, work together on the medical book and we'll go over what you have and continue from there when I get back. Be good, kids. See y'all later!"

*********


After discovering a faded inscription, 'MAMA - 1865', on the inside front cover, Carlos and Angie had been examining the parchment pages of their vellum-bound medical book entitled A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene: Designed for Colleges, Academies, and Families by Calvin Cutter, M.D., 1850, when they spotted four underlined words in the second paragraph of the preface on page six. It read '...Every scholar, and particularly every young miss, after acquiring a knowledge of the primary branches, --as spelling, reading, writing, and arithmetic--, should learn the structure of the human system and the conditions upon which health and disease depend, as this knowledge will be required in practice...'

"That is so weird," Carlos observed about the four underlined words. "Isn't that kinda futuristic or something, especially for back in 1850?"

"It's almost unbelievable that someone should write it, much less agree with it by underlining 'particularly every young miss'. Wow. I can't wait to show this to Millie when she gets back from her conference. It's amazing," Angie replied, somewhat perplexed.

At that moment, Angie recalled how her BFF, a third-year UT med student affectionately called BamBam for her name's initials, gave them both a good laugh a few months ago by recounting how shocked and dismayed people were when word spread that, after discouraging women to pursue a higher education and excluding them from medical education, three women were accepted into Johns Hopkins' first medical class. And that wasn't until 1893! Their mystery medical book was published 43 years earlier. "I guess Dr. Cutter and whoever underlined this were pretty forward-thinking for their time," Angie said. "Millie's gonna love this."

Carlos and Angie spent the next few days in a fruitless search for the owner of the handkerchief and the book. They determined early on that the same woman had owned both because the handkerchief's stitching imprinted hundreds of tiny grooves onto the first page of the last chapter - Chapter LXIX, which was entitled Directions For Nurses. The stitched handkerchief had been stored in the book for so long that the flip side of the chapter's page almost felt like Braille, Carlos observed. He had a blind cousin who tried to teach him Braille when they were little. Didn't take.

It wasn't until two days before Millie was due back that the two young interns had a major breakthrough. It'd all started when BamBam, Angie's best friend, called in the morning to tell her she had scored Bad Bunny concert tickets in Austin for next weekend. They had been trying for ages to go see the famous star, so Angie's hopes had soared when she heard the familiar phone chime. Still, out of habit, she'd looked down at her caller ID. Angie had gasped in astonished comprehension. Her caller ID had shown BAMA, the initials of her friend, Barbara Ann McAllen.

"BamBam, I love you! You've just helped me solve the case of the hanky in a book," Angie had exclaimed prematurely, but with much elation. "I gotta go. Bye."

"But..."

Click.

"Carlos! We did it! MAMA is not someone's mom. It's somebody's initials!"

"Okay okay. But how do we find out who it is? I mean, I suppose we could start by going through all the doctors who practiced in the County, right?" Carlos had asked. And they had spent the rest of the day and into the night sorting through all the doctors who practiced between 1850 and 1950. They had even looked into doctors in surrounding counties. Nothing. Disappointed and exhausted, Carlos and Angie had called it a night and had simply gone home to bed.

Angie had awakened the next morning as tired as she'd been when she went to bed. All sorts of different scenarios about the hanky in a book had flitted through her mind the entire night. She'd pushed back the covers and lain in bed for a few extra moments before getting up, thinking to herself, "I feel like death warmed over. I could stay in this horizontal position all day long." And at that very thought, Angie had bolted upright, flown through her morning ablutions, dressed and rushed, with care, to the Museum's archives.

Death. Horizontal. Six-ply thread of the early 1900s. The lovingly stitched handkerchief hidden in the Directions for Nurses chapter of an old medical book. It had suddenly all come together for Angie. "Of course!" she said to the empty room. Then, she had called Carlos.

Angie had been examining the handkerchief and had a web page up about natality decline and live birth rates during the Spanish Flu in Texas. "Oh my God, I was right! I think. Well, I'm pretty sure," Angie'd stammered when Carlos had come rushing in.

"Wow, you sure sound confident," Carlos had dead-panned with obvious affection for his fellow sleuth.

Angie had ignored him and explained her new working theory.

"Okay. This hanky is a record of life and death. The vertical dashes represent living souls. The dead souls are the horizontal dashes. Look how many horizontal dashes are stitched in the 6-ply thread. Didn't Millie say that was used in the early part of the 1900s?"

"Yeah."

"Do you remember what caused a lot of deaths in Texas during the early 1900s?"

"Um, yeah. Wasn't it some epidemic?"

"Yes! The Spanish Flu of 1918 and 1919. But obviously this isn't a record of all the people who died. There'd be a lot more horizontal stitches. So it must have been another group of dead people. What woman would be involved in medical care back then who would also care enough to record, as humbly and lovingly as she could, the lives and deaths of all her patients?"

Angie had given Carlos less than ten seconds to respond, then together they blurted out, "A mid-wife!"

**********


Angie sat serenely, waiting in the small, carefully-decorated living room stuffed with more pictures of babies than 'you could shake at stick at', as her Granny would say. Though filled with eager anticipation in meeting the descendent of the mysterious handkerchief's creator, Angie felt an exquisite relief that the nearly weeklong search was over. It had been fun but kind of hard.

She had been granted an interview with Dr. Wilma Strong, descendent of Miranda Alice Mabry Addison, or MAMA. Miranda was a freed slave who helped deliver her first patient at age 11, ordered a medical book when she was 15, gave birth to 12 children, and, as a midwife, brought over 900 babies into the world by the time she retired at the age of 92. Miranda's life story produced in Angie a feeling of awe and privilege. And pride. Not only because she and Carlos were able to identify Miranda, but because of the heroism of Miranda's work, her loving record-keeping of the babies' survival and her deserved freedom from the life as a childhood slave.

Right on time, Miranda's grand-daughter, Wilma, an elegant octogenarian and retired obstetrician, breezed into the room with a tray of iced tea and soft cookies. She set it down on the coffee table, asking if Angie would like to record their interview. Wilma hoped so; she loved telling stories about her Granny Miranda and how the many babies she delivered, Black and White, grew to make a positive difference in the world.

"Yes, ma'am," Angie answered politely.

"Good, let's start with my two favorites: the little White breach baby boy who grew up to be a second lieutenant in the Army during World War II and saved his entire company in a fierce battle after D-Day and the delivery of a premature baby girl who went on to become one of NASA's first African-American mathematicians.

Smiling, Angie picked up her phone and clicked 'Record'.

"My granny was only 18-years-old and a mother to my own mom and two aunts when a freed slave who worked for the White doctor across the river, Dr. C. C. Collins, came galloping up to our door on the physician's fine stead. My mom said she knew what was coming; she and her sisters would be alone for the rest of the afternoon and probably throughout the night," Miranda paused, seeming to reach back into the memory of her granny's and mom's recollections.

Angie took a chance and asked skillfully, "I understand it was quite common in the 1800s for girls to begin motherhood in their early teens. Is that correct?"

Wilma answered softly, "Indeed it was. For Blacks and Whites. In this circumstance, however, the multipara patient was well into her thirties and at risk of delivering a breach baby."

"Um, multipara?" Angie inquired.

"A woman who has delivered one or more children," Wilma explained, and added on a second thought, "and breach delivery, as described in layperson's terms, means a baby who is delivered body, not head, first."

Angie nodded in appreciation, too polite to say she already knew what breach meant.

Wilma continued, "And this White lady going into labor was Dr. Collins's very own wife! Imagine that." She looked down, shook her pretty silver curls and chuckled, "You know, a whole lot of White folks, even other doctors like Dr. Collins, often called on my granny throughout her years to deliver their babies because she simply was the most experienced and most empathetic 'obstetrician' available."

Taking a bite of a deliciously moist butter cookie, Angie waited for Wilma to continue after her sip of iced tea.

"Anyway," Wilma said, "on the afternoon when Dr. Collins's worker came scrambling over to fetch my granny, the sky was the color of a deep-tissue hematoma and..."

"Deep-tissue hematoma?"

"A very bad bruise. Sorry, my dear. I'm afraid I'll be speaking in clinical terms until the day I die."

I have no doubt about that, Angie thought, amused.

"Nevertheless, the storm clouds on that day were a near guarantee that danger was afoot for any traveller, but that didn't stop Granny Miranda from hitching her horse to her buggy and rushing toward the river. They had to cross by pulley-raft downriver where the Colorado of Texas was more narrow. She had no other choice than to risk her life to reach the distressed, laboring multipara. My granny couldn't swim, but compared to her fear of rushing water, her love for mamas and their babies was greater."

Whoa, this is getting good, Angie thought, glancing at her phone on the coffee table to make sure it was still recording. She wanted every word down for Millie to hear.

"By the time Miranda's buggy reached the Colorado, what had started out as a shower of big, fat raindrops metastisized into pelting slashes of cold Spring rain. Without hesitation, she jumped out of the buggy, lifted the hem of her top skirt, ripped a long length of the linen underskirt beneath it and wrapped it around old Hoss's head, covering his eyes. She then whipped around to the strong, young worker from the Collins place and shouted at him over the din of the wind and rain to help her load the horse and buggy onto the raft. With Miranda at the front of the raft calming the nervous, blind-folded horse, she yelled at the worker to pull them across the river using the pulley's rope that was tightly tethered on both shores."

"Oh my God. Didn't you say your Granny Miranda couldn't swim?"

"That's right. But after that, she made sure that my mom and all my aunts and uncles could. Can you swim, Angie?"

"Oh, yes ma'am. We all learned at church camp."

"Well, that's good. Miranda never learned. Too busy delivering babies, I suppose. But she made it to Dr. Collins wife in time that night to deliver that little breach baby. She told my mother that she was sick and tired of stitching those sideways dashes onto her birthing record hanky, so she did everything in her power to save that baby's life."

"It sure was hard to see all those horizontal dashes once we figured out that they meant babies who didn't make it," Angie admitted. "But how did she manage to save that breach baby? I thought most of them died in the old days."

"Oh, most of them did if their mothers weren't attended to by midwives with the field training like my granny's. You see, she was close with a Choctaw woman who was the chief herbalist, medicine woman and midwife of her tribe. And that healer introduced her to what were considered dubious birthing positions, natural antiseptics and coagulants."

"I think I need some more definitions here, Miss Wilma."

Wilma smiled indulgently. "An antiseptic helps clean wounds and stops infection and a coagulant helps stop PPH, which is postpartum hemorrhaging or bleeding after delivery," she explained.

"Sounds important."

"Herbs were more than important; they were critical to my Granny Miranda's midwifery. She used tinctures of yarrow, blue cohosh, and wax myrtle root bark to name a few, to help Mrs. Collins and others, but I think what saved that breach baby's life was Miranda's use of the breach-tilt birthing position. It's understandable that this position was considered quite radical back then because the mother's pelvis was elevated about nine inches above her head in order manually turn the baby in utero so that he'd be delivered head first. Had she not been successful in delivering this lofty White doctor's little son, I shudder to think what Miranda's fate would have been."

"She had more courage than I think I'll ever have," Angie said wistfully.

"Don't be so sure of that, my dear. We all have a power within us that holds us steady when we need it the most," Wilma said. "Now, come help me refresh this tea tray, and I'll tell you how that little White breach baby went on to become a hero like Miranda. He grew to become a second lieutenant in the US Army, you know, and like Miranda, saved many lives, just not in birth, but in war."

Angie picked up her phone which was still in 'Record' mode and happily followed Miranda's grand-daughter, the stoic Dr. Wilma Strong, into the kitchen. This was real history, she thought, and I can hardly wait to let Millie and the world hear every word about a freed Black woman's heroism and courage.

"Coming, ma'am!"

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