Root, Remedy, and the Right to Care

There is a version of Black history that was never written down.
It was practiced.

In kitchens, not classrooms.
In gardens, not institutions.
In the hands of women who learned the language of the body long before wellness had a name.

Root workers.
Conjure women.
Medicine women.
Midwives.

Their classrooms were the land.
Their teachers were elders, observation, prayer, and experience.
They learned which leaves cooled fever, which roots calmed pain, which waters cleansed, and which rhythms soothed a body back into itself.

At a time when much of Western medicine still relied on bloodletting and leeches (treatments people often feared or refused) these women were foraging, listening, and healing through relationship with the natural world and the spirit that guided it.

Long before formal systems claimed authority over healing, these women were life savers in the most literal sense.
They tended the sick.
They soothed the injured.
They stood at the threshold of birth and death, holding space where fear and hope lived side by side.

Midwives did more than bring life into the world.
They honored choice, timing, and safety … understanding that a woman’s body was not just a vessel, but a life, a future, and a spirit that deserved care. And because of them, today women have the right to choose.

For generations, people of every background preferred their hands, their knowledge, their presence. Why? Because it was personal. Healing was relationship, not transaction.

As formal medicine grew into institutions, systems, and credentials, much of this lineage was pushed to the margins. Knowledge carried through memory, apprenticeship, and community was dismissed in favor of paper, permission, and profit.

But this work did not disappear.

It went inward.
Into family practices.
Into quiet rituals.
Into the way women still turn to one another when systems feel cold.

This is not lost history.
It is living history.

In the prayer before a meal.
In the tea you sip while resting.
In the care you offer yourself when no one is watching.

You are not just remembering the healers.
You are becoming their continuation.