Jade West walked into a doctor’s office in Florence, Alabama, with her 1-year-old son asleep on her shoulder. They handed her a folder of forms, and she stared at it: with the baby in her arms, there was no way to write.
From across the room, an older man named Joe Hale asked if he could hold the child. She smiled and agreed, according to another patient. Hale settled him against his chest, rocked him, and began humming as she filled out page after page. Little Jayce never woke up once. He stayed asleep until they called him for his appointment.
Natasha Crittenden Wilson, who was waiting for her turn a few seats away, took a photo and posted it on Facebook. She covered the mother’s face because she didn’t know her. She wrote that the man rocked and loved that baby as if he were his own. The image was shared more than 300,000 times and, over the following days, surpassed half a million.
Wilson, a mother of seven biracial children, said that seeing a white man embrace a Black woman’s child so naturally gave her hope. West later explained that Hale told her he never stops being a paw paw—a grandfather—and that he loves children.