Woman Born in 1843 Talks About Why She Never Once Held Her Youngest Daughter the Way Mothers Should

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]These arms have held everything a woman in the high country is asked to hold.

[00:00:04]They have held firewood, green oak, and dry hickory carried from the wood lot to the porch in loads that bent my back and reened my hands in the winters when the cold came down off the balsams and sat in the cove like something living, something heavy, something that intended to stay. They have held wash basins full of water heated on the stove, carried from the kitchen to the porch and back.

[00:00:27]The water slloshing against my wrist, the heat of it in winter a comfort and in summer a punishment. They have held lambs born in the March cold. Lambs too weak to stand, held against my chest, inside my coat to warm them back into the living from the edge of the not living. They have held newborn babies.

[00:00:48]Four of them, four children placed in these arms by midwives who expected the arms to do what arms do, which is close, which is pressed the child against the chest, which is contain the child inside the boundary of the mother's body. So the child knows it is held, it is enclosed, it is safe. These arms closed around Hosea, around Roda, around Gideon, around Martha. Four children, four closings, four automatic acts of the muscles doing what the muscles are designed to do without instruction, without hesitation, without the mind needing to intervene because the closing is not a decision. It is a reflex. The child is placed and the arms close the way a hand closes around a thing that has been dropped into it automatically.

[00:01:36]The body performing its oldest function, the function that precedes language and thought and every other human accomplishment, the function of holding.

[00:01:46]These arms did not close around Desa, my youngest, born September of 1878.

[00:01:53]Placed in these arms by the midwife, Mrs. Ensley, who had delivered all five of my children, and who placed Desessa in my arms the way she had placed the other four, with the expectation that the arms would close, and the holding would begin, and the mother and the child would be joined in the first embrace, that is the foundation of every embrace that follows. She placed Desa in my arms, and the arms opened, not closed, opened. The muscles that had been performing the closing for 15 years that had closed around four children without resistance. Those muscles received the command to close and they refused. They pushed outward instead of pulling inward. They created space instead of eliminating it. They said no in the language of muscle, which is not a word but a direction, and the direction was away. Mrs. Zensley thought I was tired. She took Desa. She placed her in the cradle. And I did not pick her up. Not in that hour, not in the hours that followed. Not that day, not that week, not in 49 years. I have not held my youngest daughter in the full embrace, the arms closed, pressing against embrace that every child requires and that every mother is supposed to provide in 49 years. I am 84 years old and the not holding is the fact of my motherhood that I must tell you about now because the telling is the only thing I can do with it and the doing of anything with it even the telling is more than I have done in 49 years which is carry it which is all I have done which is all the arms that will not close have permitted me to do.

[00:03:42]My name is Corinthia Vas Leadford.

[00:03:44]People in the cove call me Renthy, have called me Renthy since I was a girl running barefoot on the creek bank below my father's cabin, which was the same creek bank I would run on as a married woman and the same creek bank my children would run on and the same creek bank that Desa ran on, though I did not run with her because running with requires reaching for and reaching for is too close to holding and holding is the thing the arms refuse. I was born on the 3rd of November 1843 in Haywood County, North Carolina in a cove on the north side of the Balsam Range in the Great Smoky Mountains. The cove is a narrow valley between two ridges perhaps a mile wide and three miles long with a creek running through the bottom and the farms arranged along the creek and the ridges rising on either side like the walls of a room with no ceiling open to the sky but enclosed on every other side. You could stand on the ridge above our cove and see three other coes. Each one a separate world, each one separated from the next. By a ridge that took half a day to cross on foot, and longer with a wagon and impossible in winter, when the snow lay deep on the high ground, and the passes closed, and the coes became what they truly were, which was islands surrounded not by water, but by elevation. And the elevation was as effective a barrier as any ocean. My father was Lyman Dwise cove farmer. Corn and beans in the bottomland along the creek. A few hogs running in the woods eating mast. A milk cow. Some chickens.

[00:05:28]The farming was subsistence, which means the farm produced what the family consumed, and the family consumed what the farm produced, and the margin between the two was thin enough that a bad season or a sick animal could push the family from adequacy into hunger. My mother, Naomi Dwise, died when I was nine. Child bed fever after delivering a stillborn baby, who would have been my brother. My father raised me after that with the help of his sister, my aunt Kora, who lived in the next cove, and who came over the ridge when she could, and who taught me the skills my mother would have taught me, which were the skills of a mountain woman, which is to say, the skills of survival in a landscape that is beautiful and indifferent, and that will freeze you or starve you or drown you in a creek swollen with snow melt if you do not know what you are doing." And Aunt Cora made sure I knew what I was doing. The body. I must tell you about how I was raised to understand the body because the understanding is part of what happened and part of why I cannot explain what happened in the language that the understanding provided. In the mountains, the body is a tool. You do not discuss the body's feelings. You do not examine the body's responses. You use the body. You work it. You push it up the ridge and down the ridge and through the creek and into the field and out of the field and you feed it and you rest it and you push it again. And the pushing is the relationship you have with the body which is the relationship of a user to a tool. The tool works or it does not work. If it works, you continue. If it does not work, you wait until it works again and then you continue. You do not ask the tool why it is not working. You do not investigate the tool's history of use for explanations. You wait and you continue.

[00:07:25]This is how I was raised to understand my body as a tool, a capable tool, a tool that worked hard and carried heavy and endured cold and produced children and nursed them and raised them and performed every function that a mountain woman's body is required to perform. The body worked until it didn't, until it refused to close around Desa, and the refusal was a malfunction I could not repair because the repairing would have required me to investigate the tool's history. And the history contained a night I could not return to, and the not returning was the wall between me and the repair. And the wall has been there for 49 years. I married Arllford in 1862.

[00:08:11]I was 19. Arll was 23, a farmer in the same cove, a man I had known since childhood, a man whose family's land bordered my father's land, a man who was as much a part of the cove as the creek and the ridge and the cold. He was strong. He was quiet in the way that mountain men are quiet, which is not the reflective quiet of a thinker, but the functional quiet of a man who does not generate speech unless speech serves a practical purpose. He worked. He provided. He was present in the way that a ridge is present, large and solid, and not going anywhere. And the not going anywhere was what passed for security in a cove in the Smokies in the 1860s. and the security was real, even if the man providing it was not safe, which I did not understand then, in which I would learn in 1877, in which the learning would cost me the ability to hold my youngest child. We had four children before Desa, Hosea born 1863, Roa born 1865, Gideon born 1868, Martha born 1871. Four pregnancies, four deliveries in the cabin with Mrs. densely attending. Four children placed in my arms four closings. The arms closed around each one with the automatic unreflecting certainty of a body performing its deepest function.

[00:09:39]And the performing was easy. Not because childbirth is easy. It is not. It is the hardest work the body does, but because the holding that follows is effortless.

[00:09:51]The one effortless thing in a process that is otherwise entirely effort. the reward for the labor, the body's gift to itself after the ordeal of delivery. I held my children. I nursed them at the breast. I carried them on my hip through the kitchen, the garden, the yard. I slept with them in the bed when they were sick. Their small feverish bodies pressed against mine. My arms around them through the night. The holding continuous. The body warm against body.

[00:10:22]The mother enclosing the child the way the cove encloses the creek completely on every side with no gap. After Martha in 1871, I told Arll, "No more. My body was finished." Four pregnancies in eight years had taken what they take from a woman's body in the mountains, which is teeth and bone density, and the straightness of the spine, and the elasticity of the skin, and the resilience that allows the body to recover between children, and my body was no longer recovering. I was 28 and my body was older than 28 and the body was telling me what the mind confirmed which was that another pregnancy would take more than the body could give and the giving would be at the cost of the living and the living was required for the four children already present who needed a mother who was alive rather than a mother who was dead from producing a fifth child the body could not sustain. I said no more. I said it plainly. the mountain way. No decoration, no negotiation. I will not carry another. Arville heard me. Arville was not a man who argued. He was a man who waited. He waited the way a ridge waits. Not moving, not yielding, simply present. And the waiting was his form of refusal. His refusal to accept what I had said. His patience that was not patience but strategy. The strategy of a man who knew that time was on his side because the law was on his side and the church was on his side and the mountain itself was on his side because the mountain trapped me in the cove with him and the cove had no exit that he did not control. 6 years from 1871 to 1877. I managed a situation with the strategies available to me which were avoidance and timing and the practical knowledge that women transmitted to each other in whispers at the well and at the church and in the moments between the men's hearing. The knowledge of how to prevent what the men believed was theirs to produce. The strategies held for six years. They held because I was vigilant and because vigilance requires energy and the energy was available to a woman of 28 and 30 and 32 and 34. By 34 the energy was diminished but the vigilance continued because the alternative was the pregnancy and the pregnancy was the thing I had said no to and the no was the one act of will I had exercised in 15 years of marriage and I would not surrender it. Before we continue, a quick word. I've released 14 full recordings that will never be on YouTube. These are the voices too personal, too raw to share publicly, completely unedited, nothing cut. If you want access, the link is in the description. It's called The Lost Recordings, and getting it helps us keep making these videos. All right, back to the story. The night was in October of 1877. The leaves were turning on the ridges. The maples going red and the hickories going gold. And the cove was beautiful in the way that the cove is beautiful in October, which is the most beautiful month in the Smokies. And the crulest because the beauty is the announcement of the cold that follows and the cold in the Smokies is not gentle. I said no. I will tell you that I said no because the saying is important and the saying is the thing that the law did not recognize and the church did not recognize and the community did not recognize and that I am recognizing now at 84 in this room with the authority of a woman whose body was the sight of the event and whose body's testimony should have been sufficient and was not. I said no and the no was not enough. He came to me and I said no and he did not hear the no or he heard it and did not accept it which are different failures. The first a failure of listening and the second a failure of conscience and I do not know which his was because I did not ask because asking would have required me to speak about the night and I have not spoken about the night in 50 years and the not speaking has been the containment that prevented the night from spilling into the rest of the life.

[00:14:43]He took what I did not give. That is what I can say. Five words. He took what I did not give. The five words contain the night the way the cove contains the creek completely with no gap. And the five words are sufficient. And I will not say more about the night itself because the night is not the story. The story is the arms. The story is Desa.

[00:15:08]The story is the 49 years of not holding that the knight produced. I knew I was carrying within six weeks. The body that had said no was now producing the evidence of the no being overridden. The nausea and the tenderness and the sessation that meant a new life was being built inside a body that had not consented to the building. I carried Desa for 9 months. The carrying was the first holding and the carrying was tolerable because the carrying was internal. the child inside the body, the body not needing to close around the child because the child was already enclosed and the enclosure was automatic structural, the womb performing a function the arms would later refuse.

[00:15:56]Desa was born on the 17th of September 1878.

[00:16:00]The birth was fast, easier than the others, which seemed wrong because nothing about Desa should have been easy given what her existence had cost. Mrs. Ensley delivered her, cleaned her, wrapped her, placed her in my arms. The arms did not close. I felt it happen. I felt the muscles receive the command, the same command they had received four times before. The command to close, to pull inward, to press the child against the chest. The command went out from wherever commands come from, the brain or the heart or the soul. And the command traveled to the arms and the arms received it and the arms said no.

[00:16:40]The no was not a thought. It was a contraction in the wrong direction. The muscles tightening outward instead of inward. Creating distance instead of closeness. The body performing the opposite of the embrace. The opening instead of the closing. Because the arms remembered the arms remembered the night. The arms remembered the pressing.

[00:17:02]Not the child's pressing, but the other pressing. The pressing that had preceded the child by nine months. The pressing of a body against mine that I had not invited, and the pressing had contaminated the closing. The closing of the arms around a child requires the pressing of the child against the chest, and the pressing was the contaminated act. And the contamination traveled from the act to the gesture, and from the gesture to the muscles, and from the muscles to the refusal, and the refusal was permanent.

[00:17:37]Mrs. Ansley took Desa, put her in the cradle. I did not pick her up. The not picking up was the beginning of 49 years of not holding. And the beginning felt like the end because the ending of the holding was the ending of the one thing I believed every mother could do and the one thing I could not. I will tell you now what I could do because the not holding was not the not mothering. I motherthered Desa. I motherthered her for 49 years with every tool available to me except the one tool the body refused to provide. I could feed her, not from the breast. The breast required pressing the child against the chest, and the chest was the location of the contamination, and the pressing was the mechanism of the contamination, and the feeding from the breast was too close to the thing the body remembered.

[00:18:31]I fed Desa with a cloth teat dipped in goat's milk, which was the method used by mountain women who could not nurse, and the feeding was adequate. Desa grew.

[00:18:43]She thrived on the goat's milk the way the other children had thrived on the breast milk, and the thriving was the same, even if the method was different.

[00:18:53]But the other children had been fed against my skin, their mouths on my body. the feeding and act of the most intimate physical connection a mother and child can have. And Desa was fed at arms length, the bottle between us, the distance maintained, the feeding performed, but the intimacy withheld. I could bathe her briefly.

[00:19:16]The bathing of a baby involves extended touch. The hands on the skin, the water warm between the mother's hands and the child's body, the playfulness that bathing naturally produces, the splashing, the lingering. I bathed Desessa quickly, efficiently. The hands did what was required. Soap, water, rinse, dry, and the hands withdrew. The bathing was functional. It cleaned the child. It did not linger on the child.

[00:19:48]The difference between functional bathing and tender bathing is the difference between maintenance and love.

[00:19:54]And Desa received the maintenance and not the love. And the distinction was present in every bath for the years that I bathed her. And the distinction was visible to a child who, even as an infant, could register the difference between hands that lingered and hands that withdrew.

[00:20:12]I could clothe her. Clothing involves touch but not embrace. The difference between touch and embrace is the difference between contact and containment. When you dress a child, you touch the child's arms, legs, head, torso. You handle the body, but you do not enclose it. You do not press it against your own. The touching of clothing is transactional. The body is moved into the garment, and the garment covers the body, and the transaction is complete. The arms do not close. The pressing does not occur. I could perform the transaction. I could not perform the enclosure. I could comb her hair. This was the closest I came to tenderness with Desa because the combing involved standing behind her, touching her hair, which was dark and thick and tangled in the way that mountain children's hair tangles from running in the woods, and sleeping on corn husk mattresses. The combing required me to touch her without facing her, and the not facing reduced the intimacy to a level the body could tolerate. I combed her hair every morning. The combing took 5 minutes. The five minutes were the warmest five minutes of our day, the closest we came to the physical bond that should have been constant, and that was instead rationed to five minutes of indirect contact. while I stood behind her and she sat on the stool and the comb moved through the tangles and my hands were in her hair and my hands were gentle and the gentleness was real and the gentleness was the closest I could get to the holding and the closest was not close enough but it was what the body permitted and I took what the body permitted and I gave it to Desa and Desa received it five minutes of indirect tenderness per day for 49 years I could not hold her. Could not pick her up when she fell. Could not carry her on my hip.

[00:22:08]Could not sit with her on my lap. Could not embrace her. When Desa cried, her siblings held her. Roa held her. Martha held her. When Desa was sick, I sat beside her bed, but did not take her into my arms. When Desa reached for me, the way children reach, the arms extending, the hands opening, the body leaning forward with the trust that the mother's arms will receive and close and contain. When Desa reached for me, I felt the arms refuse, and the refusal was a violence committed against my own child by my own body. And the violence was not a choice and the not choosing was not a comfort because the result was the same whether chosen or not which was a child reaching for a mother whose arms would not close. Desa learned children learn what the body teaches them and the body taught Desa that her mother's arms were not available. She stopped reaching by the time she was two. The stopping was an adaptation, a survival mechanism.

[00:23:10]the child adjusting to the conditions of its environment the way all children adjust by ceasing to seek what is not provided and by finding alternatives.

[00:23:20]Des's alternatives were her siblings who held her and the dog who lay beside her and the creek where she played for hours in water that embraced without judgment water that closed around her body the way my arms could not. Water that provided the containment I could not provide. She became a child of the creek. She was in the water whenever she could be, summer and fall, the mountain water cold and clear and total in its embrace. And I watched her from the cabin and I understood what she was finding in the water. And the understanding was another wound because the wound was the evidence that my daughter needed to be held and was seeking the holding from a creek because her mother's arms were sealed shut by a night in October and the ceiling was the damage and the damage was between us and neither of us could cross it. The other children noticed. Children in a household observe the distribution of touch the way they observe the distribution of food. precisely comparatively with the acute awareness of any inequality.

[00:24:27]Hosea, Roda, Gideon, and Martha were held. Desa was not. The inequality was visible. The children did not ask about it because children in the mountains did not ask about the things their parents did or did not do, but they saw it. and the seeing produced in them a protectiveness toward Desa that I was grateful for even as I was shamed by its necessity. They held Desa because I could not. They provided the physical mothering I could not provide. They were in a sense my arms and the arms I could not use delegated to four sets of arms that could and the delegation was a mercy and a failure simultaneously.

[00:25:10]Arll did not notice or he noticed and did not consider it significant.

[00:25:16]Arll was not a man who attended to the interior of the household with the precision that the interior required. He attended to the exterior, the farm, the animals, the wood, the fences, and the interior was my domain. And what happened in my domain was my concern.

[00:25:34]And the concern, which was a daughter I could not hold, was invisible to a man who did not look inside the rooms he passed through on his way to the outside. He died in 1903. I have told you that I did not grieve him, and I will not tell you more about his death, because the telling would require me to describe feelings I do not have for a man who took what I did not give. And the describing of absent feelings is a waste of the time I am using to describe present ones. And the present feeling is the sorrow for Desa, which is the only feeling that matters in this account.

[00:26:11]There was one time I tried I I must tell you about this because the trying is the evidence that the refusal was not a choice. That I wanted to hold Desa. that the wanting was real and the refusing was real and the two existed simultaneously and the refusing won because the refusing was in the body and the wanting was in the mind and the body is stronger than the mind always stronger and the body's memory is longer than the mind's intention and the memory won. Desa was 30 years old. It was 1908.

[00:26:46]She had married a man named Huitt Presley from the next cove and she had a baby, a girl she named Pearl. She brought Pearl to the cabin to visit and she placed Pearl in my arms and I held her. I held Pearl, the arms closed. The muscles performed the closing without resistance, without refusal, without the contamination. The closing was automatic, natural, the body performing for the granddaughter what it would not perform for the daughter. And the performing was effortless, and the effortlessness was proof that the arms still worked, that the mechanism was intact, that the refusal was specific to Desa, only to Desa. And the specificity was the cruelty because the specificity meant the arms were choosing and the choosing was not random. And the not randomness meant the body was connecting Desa to the night and the connection was the contamination and the contamination was permanent and selective and the selection was my daughter. Desa watched me hold Pearl. She stood in the kitchen doorway and she watched her mother hold her baby with the full embrace, the arms closed, the pressing against happening naturally, instinctively, the warmth and the containment and the enclosure that Desa had never received from these arms being given to Desessa's daughter by these same arms. than the giving was visible, and the visibility was the crulest thing I have ever done to my daughter, cruer than the not holding, because the not holding was an absence, and an absence can be explained away.

[00:28:23]But the holding of the granddaughter was a presence, a demonstration, a showing of what was possible and what had been withheld. And the showing was performed in front of the person from whom it had been withheld. And the performing was not intentional, but the effect was devastating. Desa's face. I watched her face while I held Pearl, and her face did a thing I will carry to my grave alongside everything else I carry, which is already more than any one woman should carry, but which is what was given me and what I have borne." Her face registered recognition, not surprise, not anger. recognition. The recognition of a woman who has spent 30 years knowing she was not held and who is now seeing the holding performed on her own child and who is understanding in the seeing the full dimension of what was withheld.

[00:29:20]She knew she had not been held. She had always known. But the knowing had been abstract, a condition of her childhood.

[00:29:28]The way the cold is a condition of the mountains, present, accepted, not examined, because examining cold does not make it warmer. But seeing me hold pearl made the abstract concrete. The cold was not just cold. The cold was a choice, or appeared to be a choice, and the appearing was the thing that crossed Des's face in the doorway. The question, why her and not me? I cannot answer the question. I have tried for 19 years since that afternoon and I cannot answer it because the answer is in the body and the body does not explain itself. The body refuses or it does not refuse and the refusing is its own explanation and the explanation is insufficient but it is the only one available.

[00:30:16]After Desa left that day, I sat in the cabin alone. I held my arms out in front of me. I imagined Desa in them, not the baby Desa, the infant who had been placed in my arms by Mrs. Ensley, and whom the arms had refused, the grown Desa, the 30-year-old woman who had stood in the doorway, watching her mother hold her baby. I imagined her in my arms. I imagined the weight and the warmth. I imagine the closing, the pressing, the arms around her, the containment. The arms would not close even in imagination, even without the child present, even without the body in contact with another body. The muscles refuse the imaginary embrace the same way they refuse the real one. The refusal operated in the imagination as fully as it operated in the physical world. Which meant the refusal was not about the physical contact at all. It was about the association. the association between holding Desa and the night that produced Desa, the connection the body had made in the first minutes of Desa's life, and that the body had maintained for 30 years, and that the body would maintain for 19 more years, and that the body will maintain until the body stops maintaining anything, which will be soon because I am 84, and the body is ending its maintenance of everything, and the refusal will end with it, but the ending will not be a resolution. solution. It will just be the stopping and the stopping is not the same as the closing. The arms will stop but they will not have closed. That is the fact I will carry into the ground.

[00:31:59]The fact that in 84 years of living and 49 years of mothering Desa, my arms never closed around her and the never is permanent and the permanent is the sorrow. Desa is 49 years old. She lives in the next cove with Huitt and Pearl and two other children. She visits. The visits are conducted at arms length.

[00:32:23]There is always space between us. We do not embrace. We do not touch unnecessarily.

[00:32:30]She enters the cabin and she sits across the room and we talk about the weather and the garden and the children and we do not talk about the space between us because the space is too large for language and too old for examination and too much a part of us to be separated from us. The space is where we live together and apart mother and daughter separated by the width of an arm that will not close. Desa deserved to be held. She deserved to be held the way her brothers and sisters were held. The way every child on this earth deserves to be held, which is fully completely with the arms closed and the body warm and the pressing against that says you are mine and I am yours and the space between us is zero. She deserved this and I did not give it. And the notgiving was not a choice. It was a condition.

[00:33:24]The condition was put in me by a man on a night in 1877. And the man is dead.

[00:33:29]And the night is 50 years passed. And the condition remains. And the condition is in my arms. And my arms are the thing I have left of the damage. And the damage is the thing I have left of the night. And the night is the thing that stands between me and my daughter. And it has stood there for 49 years. And it will stand there until I die. Because the body does not forgive what the body was forced to endure. And my body was forced. And the forcing is in my arms, and my arms will not close around my daughter. And the not closing is my sorrow and her sorrow. And the sorrow belongs to neither of us. It belongs to the knight and the knight will not take it