Medicine: Holy Moses

At 24, Effie Crawford looked old and worn and shapeless. Her husband Louis was on relief, working on the roads. It was always after dusk when he got back, dead tired, to their barren one-room shanty in a scrub pine clearing. He hardly looked at Effie, in her bare feet and loose cotton dress. When he did look, by the flickering of their kerosene lamp, he saw nothing different about her. He never held her in his arms any more. His WPA job paid only $26, and even in the piney woods of southern Louisiana that was not much for four mouths. More than a year ago Louis Crawford had decided not to have any more children. He knew only one way to accomplish that and, since he was 44 and even more worn than Effie, it was not too hard for him. After his decision, he and Effie slept apart in their two iron beds.

Late one night last week, familiar pains began to cramp Effie’s belly. Her husband and two small children were sound asleep. Stealthily she got up, padded out behind the woodshed 30 feet from the shanty. There in the darkness she squatted down, gritted her teeth. There was no sound but the crickets and the frogs and the wind in the pines; not a murmur from the agonized woman. After an hour and a half the baby came. Effie heaped up a little straw, put a match to it, wrapped the baby in a blanket and hid it in the woodshed. Then she went back to bed. For two days she kept away from the shed when her husband was around.

When Louis came home from work the second night Effie had a whopping surprise for him. She led him to her bed, pulled back the covers, revealed a healthy, blue-eyed, fair-haired baby boy. But that surprisewas nothing compared to the story Louis heard next. Just at dusk Effie had been standing in the doorway, she said, when a big brindle dog trotted out of the woods. It had a blanket-wrapped bundle in its teeth. From the bundle came a whimper. “Put that down, put that down!” Effie had cried. Gently the big dog had put down the bundle, trotted back into the woods. When Effie opened the bundle, there was the baby.

Louis Crawford was a Godfearing, Bible-reading man. He went down on his knees. “It’s a miracle,” he said. “We’ll name him Moses.”

The news shot through the piney woods like wildfire. In trooped Louis Crawford’s old mother, his two sisters, his seven brothers. In trooped all the neighbors from miles around Pearl River to gasp and wonder and give thanks for the miracle. In a few hours St. Tammany Parish authoritiesheard about it. Next day the Parish welfare officer came and took the baby away, 40 miles across Lake Pontchartrain to New Orleans’ Charity Hospital. All the Pearl River people had protested,Effie Crawford hardest of all. After the baby was gone she grieved and grieved, moaning that God had meant her to keep the baby. “If a dog had come and brought me a baby,” reproved tight-lipped neighbor Sairy Adams, “I wouldn’t have said nothin’ at all. I’d have known where he came from.”

Sam Ferguson, a truck driver who lived near the Crawfords, had a more practical explanation. Just a few hours before the dog appeared to Effie, he had seen a strange young couple hitchhiking along a nearby road. The woman had a baby in her arms, and a big brindle dog trotted at their heels. He described the dog and the baby’s wrappings minutely. They tallied exactly with Effie’s description. Sam Ferguson and a policeman set out to look for the hitchhikers.

Effie kept up her grieving for a whole day. Then, under a deputy sheriff’s questioning, she broke down and told the baby’s real story. Its father, she said, was her husband’s brother Frank.

At first the Pearl River folk refused to believe. Clinging to their miracle, they said Effie had just made the story up to get the baby back. But after a physician had examined her, they knew it was true. Husband Louis was thunderstruck. With his flabby face working he declared: “That’s all right, honey, I’ll stick by yuh through Hell and high water.”

But Louis Crawford’s seven God-fearing brothers were not so easy. Effie Crawford was a “come-here,” whose folks had not lived in the forest for generations as the Crawfords had. She must pay for the shame she had brought on their clan. Bitterest of all was brother Frank, who snarled at Effie’s charge against him: “It’s a damn lie. I ain’t had nothin’ to do with her.” His brothers believed him. One by one, carrying kerosene lanterns, they tramped through the woods that night to their mother’s house. There they agreed that Brother Louis must cast out his sinful wife. Easygoing Louis was easily persuaded. “I cain’t live with her no more,” sobbed he. “It would ruin my good name.”

Truckdriving Sam Ferguson had been sitting with reporters in an automobile as the Crawford brothers gathered in judgment. Shrinking back in his seat, Sam Ferguson had said: “Let’s get outa here. There may be trouble.”

This week—while the brothers muttered of tar & feathers and Effie Crawford cowered inside her shanty, refusing to cross the threshold—a judge, a juvenile officer and a State welfare, worker met in New Orleans, decided to give young Moses back to his mother. Said their statement:

“Mrs. Crawford, misguided and errant though she was, has violated no prohibitory law of the State. . . . Many women would have abandoned their children rather than face the same terrifying circumstances. … It is certain that only the mother who conceived and bore the child can give it the understanding, love and affection it will so sorely need in its early future life to overcome the sombre circumstances of its birth.”