MATTIE'S GENEOLOGY PAGES
OPEN EYES
MY LIFE IN WEST TEXAS
&
EASTERN NEW MEXICO
By
MATILDA BARBEE
Opening of eyes
There is no sound, as she opens her eyes. Thick, smothering quiet is all around her. She slowly looks around, and wiggles her hand . . . and then her toes. Slowly she moves her leg. Everything seems to be working . . . except for this silence.
She lifts her hand and touches something rough and scratchy. She looks up to find that she is touching the ceiling. That surprises her! "How can I touch the ceiling?" she thinks.
She looks around. A bed is sitting to her left with a table beside it. On the table is a lamp, a pitcher with a bowl and a glass two-thirds full of water. A young woman is lying there, looking pallid, extremely tired and very, very weak. She has rumpled dark hair and a very smooth white skin. Her dark brown eyes look black with the fear that grips her heart. She is half sitting up, looking anxiously toward the handsome man standing in the middle of the small room.
The man is very thin with skin burned dark brown from the sun and coal-black hair. He is turned with his back to the young woman on the bed. He stares intently, with worried eyes, at the large Indian woman bending over a small table against the wall. She is wearing a long dress with white, blue, and vermilion diagonal stripes and must weigh about two hundred pounds.
The young girl, with her hand near the ceiling, tries to see what the Indian woman is doing, but she is too far away to see clearly. So she stays and watches from her perch near the ceiling.
In a few minutes the large woman turns around. Now, the girl can see! The woman has a small bundle in her arms, wrapped in a blanket. Slowly, the Indian woman hands the bundle to the anxious man. He still looks worried; but he takes the bundle lovingly in his arms and gently rocks it, as the girl watches. Then slowly, she is drawn closer to the man . . . closer still . . . to see the bundle in his arms. Inside is a tiny baby!
Then an amazing thing happens that she could neither understand nor prevent! Slowly she becomes one with the baby in that young man's arms! First the foot, then the leg and then, pop!!! All of her is inside! Suddenly, she can feel his arms enfolding her, as she lies there against his chest.
So!!!… Now, I realize I am that baby! I don't like this! I liked the freedom of touching the ceiling and seeing everything from above! I can't even get my hands to move right, much less move them where I want them to go, as I could before I entered this confining physical body!
Then, I look up into the young man's eyes and see the love pouring out at me. "Well, if I can't go where I want, or make this body move like mine does, then at least I have this loving man to carry me where I want to go!" I thought.
He seems to know what I feel. He assures me that all will be well and that I do not have to worry in his soft, low voice. I hope that he is right and that he knows what he's talking about, for I don't! This human body is too confining . . . too clumsy . . . too restrictive.
Slowly, he turns and hands me to the young woman on the bed and then I understand that she belongs to me, too. She holds me to her soft gracious breast and I feel something warm inside my mouth. It soothes me and I sleep!
So opens the first chapter of my life, here upon this fragile round ball that we call Earth. I did not know at the time that my experience was unusual in any way, if it was. I thought all people could remember their birth and knew who and what they were from the beginning of their days.
I never told this story to my family until just before my mother died. I had listened to the stories they told about the wagon in which we moved to Roswell . . . about the doctor who was there that day and what he had said . . . about the trouble they had trying to keep me breathing . . . and about the mid-wife giving me an "adjustment." But they always made it seem that the doctor was there at my birth.
This was greatly confusing to me. I couldn't remember any man there except my Daddy. Finally, I asked Mother to tell me the story again. I listened intently as she told the same story, which I had heard so many times before.
Finally, I asked her, "Mother, was the doctor there at my birth?" "Well, no!" she said, "but he arrived shortly after the mid-wife had delivered you." At last, I could be sure that this was indeed a memory and not just a dream, which I might have had as a child.
I was born in Roswell, New Mexico where we had only been a few days before my arrival. We were still living in the small covered wagon that we had moved from Lorenzo, Texas, until the "relief", as Mama called it (a government agency), found us a house just before I was born. I sometimes wonder, at my awaking, what I would have experienced if we had still been in that wagon! Would I have stopped at the canvas ceiling of the wagon; or sailed right on into Heaven?
Matida E. Barbee
Looks like my cow, Betsy, even though I was too little to milk her!
My Native American Pages ;
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