You're listening to Chapter 1, Getting It Right.

I was not leaving the South to forget the South, but so that someday I might understand it.

An excerpt from Richard Wright's 1954 memoir, Blackboy. I was just like, well, whatever happens, it's supposed to happen.

You know, we thought about, like, what if we go in the labor on the road?

We packed a bag.

You know, he packed a delivery bag, three bags of, like, pads and stuff in case, you know, I go to labor in the car, just all the supplies that we would need.

That was the best we could do was to like try to prepare to have a baby on the road.

And if just worst case scenario, like, yeah, we would go to the hospital, but that was just going to have to be absolutely 100% necessary last worst case scenario.

It was the summer of 2020, and eight months pregnant and recently evicted from their home in Tempe,

Arizona, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shaila

Brown and her husband Eric made the decision to move back to where the beginning began, Mississippi.

Both in their early 30s, Shaila and Eric were already the parent of four young boys, Samuel,

Jeremiah, Messiah, and David. They initially moved to Tempe

in 2015 because Eric started naturopathic medical school because he wanted to help people look at

their health in holistic and integrated ways. And Shayla quickly found work as a certified

birth dula, both with private clients and with the local Healthy

Start program. But in 2019, Eric decided to withdraw from school. Over those four years, he had

taken several leaves of absences, repeated a few courses, and even racked up nearly $200,000

in student debt. But that last semester, after coming just shy of a

passing grade, Eric realized that his dream of becoming a naturopathic doctor was just too much for his

family to bear. The upside to this, however, is that this new change allowed him to focus on his

job at a local drug rehab clinic, where he had just been promoted to a case manager.

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