or the African Bethel Church? How many backyards are home to how many dead? We will never know. Is the community of Greenville one huge cemetery? Every time a new basement was dug, did those old bones become backfill in that same basement? Did the building of my own home desecrate the resting ground of one of Greenville’s former residents? One can ask a million questions, but there will be no answers.
A story was told to me by Arvella Johnson (Mrs. George Johnson), a trustee for the Greenville Church. Before the church was enlarged, allowing for some change to the layout, whenever there was a funeral the caskets had to be lifted in and out through a side window. Because of where the door had been installed, it was impossible to manoeuvre the caskets through the door and around the corner. Ms. Belle (as she is affectionately called) also told me that the church cemetery surrounds the church like a horseshoe and the graves are almost to the road’s edge and as far as the church’s well to the right. To the left, the cemetery may have gone beyond the yellow house that now sits next to the church property.
MIDWIVES
It is recorded that Greenville had three midwives, the only three whose existence has been recorded. There would have been earlier midwives. In their turn, they took charge when babies could no longer wait for a doctor to come from town (Yarmouth). Nearly all babies born in Greenville, until the time that women were forced to go to the hospital, were brought into this world by midwives. Three of the women known to be the saviours of some of these pregnant women were: Ruth Hannah Johnson, Deborah Ann (Herbert) Wesley, and Mary Agnes (Jones) Johnson, affectionately known by all as “Nanny.”
Ruth Hannah Johnson, a midwife, photo circa 1941, was the matriarch of her family in the small community of Greenville. She loved children and family was all important to her. She helped raise, or indeed did raise, the children of one of her daughters. Ruth Hannah was my husband’s grandmother.
Ruth Hannah Johnson, born circa 1847, died on June 2, 1945, at age ninety-eight. According to the funeral ledger entry, Ruth Hannah was the daughter of George Crawford and Elizabeth Brown. She was born in Greenville, as was her father. Because of her advanced age when she passed away, it is assumed that she had been a midwife in the community of Greenville well into the 1870s and later. Those who remember her say that she was a robust woman and an extremely hard worker.
Deborah Ann (Herbert) Wesley, born on July 10, 1869, was the daughter of Harriet Jane (Herbert) Jones and Winston Tobin. She married Frederick Henry Wesley on June 20, 1894, in Greenville. Like those women who came before her and those who came after, Deborah Ann Wesley performed a much-needed service in her community. How many babies may not have survived without her caring presence? Deborah Ann passed away on May 5, 1938, at the age of sixty-nine.
Mary Agnes (Jones) Johnson was born April 15, 1908. The daughter of James Jones and Agnes Hubbard, she was baptised at St. Ambrose Catholic Parish on April 19, 1908. She married Clarence “Bampy” Johnson, a resident of Greenville, and in the 1950s was baptized into the Greenville United Baptist Church. Mary was a midwife for more than fifty years and brought many of today’s residents of Greenville into the world. She loved what she did and would help anyone who came knocking on her door, no matter the hour. On February 10, 1995, “Nanny” was honoured by the Black Cultural Society for Nova Scotia and was inducted into the cultural centre’s Wall of Honour. She died on September 2, 2001, at ninety-three years of age.
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