MOTHERWIT An Alabama Midwife’s Story <i> by Onnie Lee Logan as told to Katherine Clark (E.P. Dutton: $16.95; 177 pp.) </i>

This beautiful oral history is not the result of someone’s discovery that Onnie Lee Logan was a colorful character. It was her own inspiration, a semi-literate midwife’s desire to tell her story to people who could learn from it, and to people who knew her simply as a black maid in a Southern household. “I just got so much experience in here that I just want to explode,” Logan tells her co-author. “I want to show that I knew what I knew--I wanted somebody to realize what I am.” Her passion rings through in every line.

Logan’s term motherwit refers to the inborn knowledge--Logan says it comes from God--of how to do what is needed at the moment. At the core of Logan’s art lies the knowledge that every birth requires unique treatment. She credits the required courses for the midwife license with only one-third of her knowledge of how to deliver children. The rest is motherwit: “I do whatever is suitable for that minute or that hour or that situation. I do it. I do it. Whether I’ve seen it in a book or read it or not, I do it. And it works. A lot a mothers says: ‘I didn’t do that with my other baby.’ I say: ‘That was that baby, honey. This is this one. They are all different.’ ”

In addition to offering a moving account, Logan’s record is a valuable document in the history of birth practices in the United States. Logan represents the third generation of midwives in her family, but the first to practice her art under the increasing hostility of the medical Establishment. When she was born, about 1910 (“They didn’t really keep an accurate record for black people”), half of all children in the United States were delivered by untrained midwives, known in the South as “grannies.” The system was simply the age-old tradition of summoning experienced women to act as birth attendants. At about the time of World War I, the United States began to realize it had the third highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world, and laws were drawn up aimed at regulating midwives and--insofar as possible--bringing births under the jurisdiction of doctors. By 1930, only 15% of American children were delivered by midwife. Regional differences were marked, however: Massachusetts outlawed midwifery altogether in 1915, while by 1930, 80% of all licensed midwives worked in the rural South, where doctors had always been scarce.

Midwifery was officially outlawed in Alabama in 1976, and in 1984, Logan received notice that her license would not be renewed. Katherine Clark observes: “Ironically, in 1989, Alabama’s maternal and infant mortality rates are now again among the highest in the nation. . . . In Alabama, as in many other parts of the country, doctors are leaving obstetrics in droves because of malpractice liability. . . . One solution currently under serious consideration is the establishment of a nurse midwife program. And so the history of midwifery may have come full circle.”