Take My Hand

“Take My Hand” by Dolen Perkins-Valdez   368 pages

Poor. Young. Black. Screwed. That’s the theme of this unflinching novel that takes a look at women’s reproductive issues in the 1970s. Primitive to say the least.

Civil Townsend is fresh out of nursing school and wants to use her training to make a difference in the world. Her father, who is a doctor, wants her to follow in his footsteps. Civil has worked with him in his clinic and believes that nurses can make more change than doctors because they are the ones on the front lines.

She obtains a position at the Montgomery (Alabama) Family Planning Clinic. A woman of her times, Civil believes that she can help women take responsibility for their own bodies and can decide if they want to have children or not. The clinic is overseen by a white woman, Mrs. Linda Seager, who has her own ideas about the issue.

The structure of the novel is dueling timelines and toward the conclusion, a triple timeline. When the story opens, it’s 2016 in Memphis. Civil is ready to retire after a forty-year career in medicine. She is getting ready to undertake a trip back to Montgomery and is relating the story of what happened there to her daughter, Anne. 

The story shifts to 1973. Civil has been assigned her first case with the clinic. She is to make a home visit to the Williams’ family and give India and Erica their quarterly Depo-Provera, a contraceptive injunction, which was used instead of the Pill. Many thought that it was more effective at preventing pregnancy because it lasted for three months instead of having to rely on a daily dose. 

When Civil arrives at the William’s shack, she is appalled by their living conditions. It’s a one-room cabin with inadequate ventilation, a dirt floor, a hole in the floor for cooking, clothes lying in piles, and dogs running in and out.  It smells worse than it looks. It is inhabited my two young girls, their father and their grandmother. 

What shocks Civil even more is that the India is only eleven years old and Erica is only thirteen.  They smell worse than the cabin. They haven’t even kissed a boy, much less had sex. It’s not even on their radar. I don’t remember how long the girls have been on the drug, but India hasn’t even begun her menstrual cycle. 

Civil’s sense of justice takes over. She cannot, and will not, allow those young, motherless girls to grow up like this.  She begins a crusade to take them off the shot and puts them on the Pill, get them into a subsidized apartment, on food stamps, and get dad a job. 

As Civil fights for the girls, she enlists the community to help. Eventually the girls’ case lands in federal court. This novel is based on the real case of Relf vs Weinberger. 

I could not book put this down. Some of the courtroom scenes were hard to read because they were based on law and were confusing.  That didn’t matter really, and I give “Take My Hand,” 6 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.