Rocking the Babies

Two Black women working as volunteer grandmothers for sick babies at a hospital feel a mutual distrust when they first meet but come to feel a great need for each other.

In the neonatal intensive care unit of an Ohio hospital, two black women sit rocking babies who are too small or too damaged to survive without the loving care of volunteer grandmothers.

Martha Howard is prim, educated, and middle class. She’s had many advantages in life, but she’s stuck in the past, ruminating about the death of her infant son.

Nettie Lee Jones is fat, poor, and caustically outspoken. She’s raised five children and two grandchildren. Among her children is her daughter Yolanda, who’s addicted to crack and who, as the novel opens, has just given birth to, then abandoned, her premature daughter.

Although these women first view each other with contempt and suspicion, they soon discover a profound mutual need. What begins as animosity ends in understanding.

In this powerful and hugely affecting novel, Linda Raymond draws on African-American storytelling tradition to create a glowing portrait of a complex and sometimes harrowing friendship. Rocking the Babies is both timely and timeless.