Take My Hand

Adult fiction 

     "'There were eleven.'

     'Eleven what?'

     'Eleven girls in the past three years.'

     'What do you mean?  Eleven girls sterilized?  In Alabama?'

     'No,' Alicia's voice rose.  'Eleven at this clinic.'"

     Although Heather Gudenkauf's novels are scary, Dolen Perkins-Valdez's Take My Hand is even more chilling.  Although a work of fiction, it's based on an actual court case.  The victims were children.

     The year is 1973.  Civil, a newly minted nursing school graduate, is starting her first job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic.  In addition to her work she has an off-site case to monitor: two sisters, Erica and India, to whom she must give regular birth control shots.

     Her first visit to the Williams family is a real eye opener.  Four family members, the girls and their father and grandmother, live in a squalid, stinking, rundown shanty.  No electricity.  No running water.  No indoor plumbing.  And the girls are thirteen and eleven.  The younger one hasn't even started menstruating.  Neither is sexually active.

     There is something about the girls that makes Civil really want to help them.  She takes them clothes shopping and lets them clean up and helps them with their hair at her house.  She helps their family qualify for and move to a real apartment in a public housing complex.  She stops giving them birth control shots.  

     One day when Civil stops by their new apartment the girls are out and the adults are surprised to see her.  Her supervisor has taken the girls to a hospital, allegedly to get their shots.  But Civil finds the girls in a hospital room crying.

     "They done something to us, Miss Civil.  I thought we was coming for shots.  But they done something to us.  They say we can't have no babies."

     And this wasn't going on in just one clinic.

     A tragic 1927 Supreme Court ruling making forced sterilization of "undesirables" legal, Buck v Bell, has had tragic consequences.  In fact it was cited at the Nuremberg Trials as inspiring the atrocities of Hitler's Germany.

     And nonconsensual sterilization is not just a thing of the past.  Almost 150 women in California state prisons between 2006 and 2010.  Immigrant women under ICE custody in 2020.  And Buck v Bell still gives the agencies involved federal protection.

     Perkins-Valdez ends her Author's Note with this poignant plea.  

     "My hope is that this novel will provoke discussions about culpability in a society that still deems poor, Black, and disabled as categories unfit for motherhood.  In a world inundated by information about these tragedies and more, I still believe in the power of the novel (and its readers!) to raise the alarm, influence hearts, and influence lives."

     I'm trying to do just that by posting this review on my blog.  If you read it and find it worthwhile could you please recommend it to at least one family member, friend, or colleague?

Jules Hathaway 

     

     

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