Angels Protected Me

Chapter 9c - An Angel Saved My Baby’s Life

I was happy to be a mother. My husband was in jail for six months and we had nowhere to live. My baby and I lived with my parents until my husband returned. We moved into his cousin’s apartment. His cousin was blind, but he got around very well.

After we lived with his cousin for two weeks, we had gone to bed and I fell fast asleep. That night the street lights shone through the sheer curtains at the windows; just enough to see without turning on a light in the apartment. We were sleeping on the sofa in the living room.

When he got out of bed it woke me up. I lay there quietly watching him lean over the baby’s bassinette placing the pillow inside. I had my eyes barely opened pretending to be asleep watching his every move. He looked at me to make sure I was asleep while he was moving toward the baby’s bassinette. I pretended to be asleep. It was just enough moonlight shining in the room so I could see him with my eyelids barely closed. I believe my angel woke me up just in time. I saw him getting closer to the bassinette. It was about two feet away from our sofa bed. I kept as still as I could while watching to see what he was going to do next.

So when I saw him lift the pillow up and put it in the bassinette I asked, “Harold what’s wrong with the baby?” He said, “Oh no I’m just covering him up.” He didn’t know I was awake when he first picked up the pillow. I didn’t say anything to him I just watched. The moon light was shining through the sheer curtains. I know he was getting ready to put a pillow over my baby’s face because he looked suspicious.

I heard on the news about babies who died from crib deaths. I felt in my spirit or may I say I had a strong intuition that he was about to smother my baby boy. My husband never said that Michael was not his son, but I do believe that he knew that it wasn’t his child.

My son’s complexion was the same as the man who raped me. Unfortunately, I didn’t know I was pregnant by him. I could see that my son didn’t resemble my husband. But it still didn’t dawn on me that Virgil was the father. I knew that Harold wasn’t telling me the truth when he said he was just covering up the baby that night. I thank God that he didn’t get a chance to kill my baby.

After giving birth, I was naïve about how I got pregnant from the man who raped me. All I knew is I missed my monthly period and my stomach was getting larger. I had a very small waistline before then. When I couldn’t fit into my regular clothes I knew something had changed. I was pregnant.

My son was three months old when we moved in with his cousin. My husband and I expected to live with his cousin for two months. But after his cousin made sexual advance toward me, my husband moved us out of there in a hurry.

So I took a little sip of mint gin and it tasted okay. So Julie teased me again and said, “Girl you can’t drink.” “Turn the bottle up and drink it.” She thought it was funny. It was about a fourth of a cup of mint gin left in the bottle. So I showed her that I could turn the bottle up and drink it all until it was gone. It wasn’t long before I felt like the whole room was spinning around and I couldn’t walk straight and everyone was laughing at me. I was only 15, I never had liquor before that day.

She didn’t know I’d been drinking. She gave him to me to hold because he was crying. He was 3 months old. I held my son while I was standing and tried to cover him with his receiving blanket. When I placed him on my shoulder, he flipped off my shoulder from the standing position, and he landed on the floor head first. It was a very serious fall. Then Julie told our mother-in-law that I’d been drinking Mint Gin.

I bent over to pick up my screaming baby. In a hurry, my mother-in-law pushed me aside so she could pick him up. I was so drunk that I got nauseated. I ran to the bathroom to vomit, and that was the last thing I remembered. I didn’t wake up until the next day. It was Sunday afternoon when I woke up in my bed. I asked my husband, “How did I get in bed?” So he said, “I picked you up off the bathroom floor and put you to bed.” “So how do you feel now?” He replied. “I have a headache and I’ll never drink anything that looks green, I hate mint gin.” His brother Jeffrey and our sister-in-law had left Saturday evening.

It was Sunday afternoon when they came back. I was sitting in the living room feeding my baby. My husband went to the market to buy extra groceries while we lived with his mother. The doorbell rang. I answered the front door. It was Julie, my sister-in-law. I let her trick me into getting drunk the day before. But when she came back the next day, she laughed and made fun of me. She said, “Do you want to drink some more mint gin?” I said, “No! I’ll never drink any green drinks again. I don’t care what it is.”

My husband and I were married a little over a year. My son Michael was three months old when I realized that I was three months pregnant with my second child. My husband didn’t like it because I was pregnant again. So, he told me get an abortion. He bought some quinine and castor oil and told me to take it. When he gave it to me, I went to the bathroom and I pretended to take it. But I flushed it down the toilet.

I said to myself, forget him. I’m keeping my baby. I thank God, I kept her. I know that I did the right thing. (She is 60 years old now! She is a minister of the gospel.) We lived with his parent’s until I was 6 months pregnant. Then one day my husband told me that his mother said we needed to move. I was tired of moving so much, but I didn’t realize I was part of the problem of having to move. Every time I broke up with Harold he would vacate the apartment. After reconciling with him, we had to find a new place to live. He asked a couple who were his friends if they could share their small apartment with us and we’d split the rent.

Chapter 10

PREGNANT AND PARALYZED

One evening, he brought a case of watermelons home to me. He made sure I had enough of them to eat. He had them delivered by truck. Anderson helped him lift the gigantic box from the truck. They left it on the front porch. It was huge. It was about 50 watermelons in that huge box. He called me outside to see it. I was amazed. Oh, my goodness, I said. My eyes got big. I said, “why did you get so many?” He said, “Now you won’t have to wait until I get home to have watermelons.” I shared the melons with the couple. They didn’t have a taste for watermelons like I did. Doll said, “Kamiah your baby is going to come here looking like a watermelon. We had a good laugh.

The couple decided to move out of the apartment and let us have it. We took possession of renting the place. I assumed Harold had paid the rent for the current month. Instead, he decided to abandon my son and me. The landlord knocked on the door to ask for the rent. “My husband has gone over for a month, I don’t know where he is?”

Two weeks after he left me, I went outside picking up trash off the front lawn. The weeds had grown tall and the lawn needed mowing. I walked across the yard barefoot. Accidently, I stepped on a rusty nail. It was in a board hidden in the grass. The nail went deep into my foot. My foot was bloody with a lot of pain. I yelled! Somebody to help me. But nobody came to help me. After injuring my right foot, I had to hop on the left foot to the front porch to sit down. I wrapped my foot with some paper napkins to stop the blood.

I was sitting on the front porch. My leg was leaning on the bush nearby. I felt something bit my left leg. It was itching, so, I scratched it. I had to hop on my left leg to get to the inside of my apartment. My right foot was injured by the rusty nail. So in order to go inside my apartment, I had to hop on my left. I lifted my seven-month-old son out of his play pen to hold and feed him. After feeding him, I laid him down next to me. After a few minutes, I discovered I couldn’t get off the sofa. My legs felt numb and I couldn’t move them. I was desperate and terrified. I sat there and cried so hard until my baby started crying too.

We cried together for quite some time. I didn’t know what to do. (I didn’t have a telephone to dial 911) The only thing I could think of to do was to call on God. I cried, “Oh God, please help me. After I cried out to God, I didn’t feel afraid anymore. I stopped crying. I had to face the fact; that I was pregnant and paralyzed. I had to take care of myself. I had no other choice. My baby cried so long, he cried himself to asleep. I lay down on my side and slid my body off the sofa to get down on the floor. I used my hands and elbows to pull myself across the floor to get around in the house.

It was July 1956, my mother-in-law, Marie Crown, happened to come by to visit me. Oh my God! As I write my story today, that was no mistake that she came by that day. I said, “Lord thank you for watching over me. After she saw my condition, she asked, “Kim what’s wrong with you?” I cried, “I don’t know.” She asked, “Why don’t you let me keep your baby until you get better?” I agreed with her. I thought it was a good idea. As a result, she picked my son up from the sofa, washed him up, and put clean clothes on him. She gathered up the rest of his clothes and left with him. I let her take my son because I believed she’d give him back...