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. 

A Sparrow Alone

A Sparrow Alone by Mim Eichmann  311 pages

When the story opens, thirteen-year-old Hannah Owens sits quietly staring at her mother’s face with her two younger siblings. Their dead mother’s face. I was never sure exactly what killed Mother, but it seemed a sort of wasting disease; I’m thinking cancer of some type. Their father is a psalm-singer (very strict Puritan), constantly spewing psalms and working on occasion. He also seemed insane to me.

Author Eichmann sets readers down in 1890s Colorado, where the Owens family lives in horrible, horrible poverty. The family hasn’t eaten much in several days. The doctor’s wife, Mrs. Hughes, arrives, demanding to know what has happened. She rolls up her sleeves and takes charge, making sure Mother is promptly buried.

Mrs. Hughes convinces Pa that he cannot take care of the three children. She takes Hannah with the intention of training her as a house maid. While that seems like a generous thing to do, Mrs. Hughes isn’t the person she appears to be. Soon, she is whipping Hannah, leaving scars that resemble slaves’ backs after beatings.

When Dr. Hughes decides to abandon his wife, Mrs. Hughes throws Hannah and Zuma, the cook, out. The women follow Dr. Hughes to Cripple Creek, Colorado. The doctor is investing heavily in his mistress’s new venture, one that becomes the most famous brothel in Cripple Creek.

Hannah’s life is one of such hardship that it seems that the young woman would not be able to overcome. But Hannah is a fighter, always picking herself up and going on. That is until multi-millionaire Winfield Scott takes a shine to her.

The story is well-researched and gives a truly extraordinary look into just how difficult life was in those days. Much of the story is written in dialect, which always threw me out of the story. One or two times are all a story needs of dialect, and most readers associate that with the character through the rest of the book.

The biggest issue for me, however, is the last chapter. It seemed to come out of left field. It seemed, to me, that Eichmann was tired of writing and wrapped it up neatly. But that can’t be the case because there is a sequel that I want to read. Surely poor Hannah’s life has to get better.

For the two reasons above, “A Sparrow Alone” receives 3 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. 

 

Wild Women and the Blues

 Wild Women and the Blues by Denny S. Bryce 384 pages

I knew from the minute I saw the cover of the book that I wanted to read it. I find the 1920s period fascinating. I was hooked from the first page and didn’t want to put it down.

The books starts in 2015. Sawyer Hayes goes to visit 110-year-old Honoree Dalcour in her Chicago nursing home. She is the last living link to famed African-American movie director Oscar Micheaux. The fact that Oscar is a real forgotten Hollywood legend endeared me more to this story, and I spent an afternoon researching him (thank heavens for the internet!).

Sawyer thinks he has found a bit of lost film history---a snippet of a film from the 1920s that stars Honoree---in his grandmother’s long-ago box. Mostly, Sawyer is working in Paris with his dad, waiting for the film snippet to be restored and trying to finish his doctorate in media studies.

Honoree is guarded by one of the nurses, Lula. He smooth talks his way into see Honoree, and it doesn’t hurt that his grandmother has been paying the bills at Chicago’s Bronzeville Senior Living Facility since 1985. Honoree is a rather ornery old woman. She may be ancient, but she is still mentally alert and feisty. She loves to give Sawyer a hard time, questioning and accusing him at every opportunity.

The novels moves back and forth between 2015 and 1925, also in Chicago, and shifts from Sawyer’s point of view to Honoree’s. There readers are immersed in Honoree’s life and her ambitions, along with seedy bars, dancing girls and yes, gangsters. To start, she is a dancer at Miss Hattie’s…a seedy joint with its share of fascinating characters. Her dream, though, is to dance at the Dreamland Café…and that dream may be in reach.

But a lot happens to try to stop Honoree. The man she has always loved and disappeared from her life three years ago, Ezekiel, reappears. She has also become the quasi-guardian to the most innocent young woman she has ever met, Bessie Palmer.

Things really heat up when Honoree witnesses a murder at Miss Hattie’s. Now she not only has all those other things to worry about, but she has to keep a low profile to stay a step ahead of the Capone gang.

Author Bryce’s debut novel is a quick read. I look forward to more novels by her. I wish there had been more about Oscar Micheaux...something at the end. That would have deepened the story a lot...for me. Therefore, “Wild Women and the Blues” receives 4 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.

Yellow Wife

Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson  288 pages

I came of age when the Old South was in its final death throes, and I was no stranger to the horror stories of slavery. This well-researched, oftentimes hard to read, story evokes those stories that I heard as a kid.

Pheby Delores Brown lives on the Bell Plantation in Virginia with her mother, Ruth.  Sired by Master Jacob, he has promised Ruth that Pheby would be educated and freed on her eighteenth birthday. Pheby believes that she will have a good life and is in love with one of the other slaves, Essex Henry. But after her mother dies and Jacob is away traveling on business, Jacob’s wife, Miss Delphina, decides that the uppity young woman must learn that she is in charge.

Delphina sells Pheby to a notorious slave trader, Rubin Lapier, who reigns over Devil’s Half Acre, an infamous jail in Richmond where slaves are taken to be sold or to have their spirits broken. The beatings and whippings, described in minute detail, some of the slaves must endure is the stuff of nightmares. After a torturous walk from the Bell Plantation in Charles City to Richmond, Pheby is chosen by Rubin to be his mistress.

Pheby is treated better than most as Rubin sets her up with sewing clothes for the incoming slaves, especially the ones who he puts to work as prostitutes. Rubin wastes no time in making Pheby is mistress. As the year go by, Pheby longs for the promises of education and freedom that were denied her and she longs for her one true love, Essex.

By the time Essex is brought to the jail, Pheby has had several children with Rubin; Children he dotes on. They are raised in his home where Pheby now lives and sleeps in a bedroom across the hall from Rubin. He even introduces her as the the Mistress of the Jail.

But Pheby cannot forget the man who has her heart, and she does whatever she can to make things better for him.

Author Johnson does not shy away from the realities of slavery, from the fears of being sold to harsher masters, from the fear of the whip and from the fear of familial separation that haunt a slave’s every waking and sleeping minute.

This is not an easy book to read. I swear as I read, I could hear the crack of the whip, the screams as flesh is torn open.

I was disappointed in the ending. It seemed like Johnson got tired of writing and just wound it up. I was planning on giving Yellow Wife 6 out of 5 stars, but the ending forced me to lower its rating to 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world. 

 

I Dreamt I Was in Heaven: The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang

I Dreamt I Was in Heaven: The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang by Leonce Gaiter   288 pages

 One of the things I love about historical fiction is that it uncovers forgotten stories, and this is one of them.  I have never heard of  the “Hanging Judge,” Isaac Parker nor the notorious Rufus Buck Gang. I thought the “Hanging Judge” was Roy Bean. That could have been the movies’ fault, especially the one with Paul Newman.  I’m not saying that that movie had it all wrong, I haven’t seen it in decades, I’m saying I probably got confused.

The Rufus Buck Gang was “an outlaw multi-racial gang whose members were part African American and part Creek Indian. They operated in the Indian Territory of the Arkansas-Oklahoma area from 1895 to 1896. Formed by Rufus Buck, the gang consisted also of Lewis Davis, Sam Sampson, Maoma July, and Lucky Davis.” (Wikipedia) It’s refreshing not have the usual band of white dudes trying to evict the American Indians from their land or the Indians killing white dudes, trying to send them back to where they came from. What fascinated me most about this story was that Rufus and his “gang” were all teenagers. These kids brought with them years of oppression and abuse they have suffered.

That and Rufus thought he was on a mission from God, who talked to him through a white girl, 13-year-old Theodosia Swain. That’s where the novel’s title originates.

Set in the Indian Territory story focuses on a shocking 13-day, violent rampage where Rufus and the gang embark on a mission to reclaim the Indian territories from the United States. Rufus believes that their actions will cause the Indians to rise up and reclaim their land. Rufus even purposely gets sent to the same prison that houses Cherokee Bill. He makes plans to bust out Cherokee Bill, who will then aid him on his mission. 

I wish I could say it better, but this blurb from the back cover is the best way to describe this hard-to-read (due to the violence) and eye-opening novel: “…famous, historical figures dance with fictional characters to create a turn-of-the-century tapestry of violence and innocence, love and betrayal, butchery and grace--mirroring and chafing against the backdrop of a burgeoning United States, and a disappearing American West.

One important item to note is Gaiter's prose.  I would never have thought that a western could be literary, and that's the classification I would give this: Literary Western

Warning:  Contains scenes of graphic sexual violence.

“I Dreamt I Was in Heaven: The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang” receives 5 out of 5 stars in Julie’s world.