The Community

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

I listened as she told me that because she couldn’t speak to me, she spoke to the babies instead. With them, she didn’t have to worry about English or Arabic or asking a question and getting nothing back but the blank stares she sometimes got from me. She invented her own language and spoke nonsense to them while they babbled back in the same nonsensical way. As a mother, she knew working with the babies caused resentment, and she empathized. For her own sake, she was terrified of becoming pregnant in the Community and then having to hand her baby over the way these moms did. As soon as new mothers left the hospitals, their babies went straight to her. From newborn to six months, Ummi was the Um they knew. Their mothers were only allowed to nurse them. When these discarded mothers did come, they greeted Ummi with glacial glares. Many mothers fought for peace with their babies because they had become strangers, and they blamed Ummi. Some even accused her of mental kidnapping. I asked Ummi how that made her feel. “I admit if I had been told I couldn’t work in the Infants’ Quarters anymore, I would have lost it,” Ummi recalled. “I would have clawed and screamed, snarled and bit until that person understood the infants and I were inseparable. If I couldn’t be near my own baby, I wasn’t going to miss out on being around babies altogether.” I was too stunned to say anything, too emotional. She found solace in taking care of other people’s babies instead of her own, even as those...