““When I say to you that what happened to those girls was the greatest hurt in my life, I am speaking the God’s honest truth” (p141).
These are the words of Dr Civil Townsend, in 2016 when she is already a 67 year old, successful obstetrician-gynaecologist. The novel oscillates between Civil’s contemporary life where she is revisiting her hometown of Montgomery, and the 1970s, when she was a new nurse in her early twenties. Her first patients were the Williams sisters.
1970s Alabama is the scene which Perkins-Valdez sets up so beautifully for the reader.
Heart of America’s Bible Belt. Hone at one time to nearly half a million enslaved humans. I am a born and raised Alabaman, but up until the time I met the Williams family, much of my life in Montgomery had been circumscribed by my little community on Centennial Hill (p20)
It is fascinating to see how far Civil’s class and education privileges protected her from race discrimination. Civil’s father is a respected doctor with a busy practise, and her mother had never had to work, so her mother is an artist, painting in her own shed in her own home, sans responsibility even for looking after her family and household. Civil seems curiously naïve, and very unaware of all the atrocities happening to black people in Alabama outside of her circumscribed community.
Our arrogance was a shield against the kind of disdain that did not have the capacity to even conceive of Black intellect. We discussed Fanon and Baldwin at dinner, debated Du Bois and Washington, spoke admiringly of Angela Davis (p9).
One of her first assignments as a nurse under Mrs Seager who runs the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic. The staff are taught that young black girls must be given birth control so that there are not so many unwanted pregnancies in their community. Civil herself starts out a believer, and goes to attend her first patients, the 11 and 13 year old William sisters, Erica and India. Civil believed herself to be serving young black women.
I walked right up in there with my file and bag of medicine, ready to save somebody, Little old me. Five foot five inches of know-it-all (p23)
She goes in to give the girls shots of Depo-Provera, birth control medication, which studies have shown can cause cancer in animals. Neither of the girls are even sexually active yet, and India had not even started menstruating.
In her own research aided by her friends, Civil learns of an experiment in Tuskegee, Civil’s own alma mater, conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service, of what would happen if syphilis goes untreated, which was conducted on 400 black men, without their knowledge and consent. Miss Pope, a librarian and Civil’s friend, tells Civil, Ty (Civil’s one time boyfriend) and Alicia (Civil’s fellow-nurse and friend),
Now you know how some white folks feel about Black bodies, They think we can tolerate pain better than then, According to some of these documents I’m about to show you, some of them even thought syphilis couldn’t kill us, It was as much an experiment about the effects of the disease as it was a crazy white man’s idea of a laboratory game with Black bodies (p76).
Civil becomes deeply uncomfortable with what she finds and what she is tasked to do. She breaks rules to move the William family (Mace, Erica and India’s father, and Patricia, their grandmother) out of squalor and into a new government assisted apartment. She helps them to furnish it, to get places in school for the girls. The women of the family are thrilled, but Mace has mixed reactions – he is grateful, but also resentful.
You know, we had a life before you. I appreciate all you done, but don’t come around here thinking you the Messiah. All you government folk this we ought to kiss y’all feet. (p107)
Civil refuses to give the Williams girls any more Depo-Provera shots, and moves them without her supervisor’s permission, to birth control pills. In retaliation, Mrs Seager takes the William sisters – without Civil’s knowledge, of course – to the Professional Hospital and has tubal ligation (surgical sterilisation) done on both girls, so they can never become pregnant. The forms are signed by their illiterate relatives who have no idea what they are consenting to.
Ty Ralsey’s parents are lawyers, who assure Civil they will file a case in court against the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic. Lou Feldman is a white lawyer whom Mrs Ralsey puts on the case. Senator Ted Kennedy who established a subcommittee to investigate federal oversight of health-care related abuses, hears of this case and wants to speak with the William sisters. It turns out that these injustices are happening nation-wide, and Lou decides the case needs to be at a far higher level, so drops the lawsuit against the Montgomery clinic, to sue the entire Federal Government, seeking to protect many more poor, exploited and innocent women and girls, but in the meantime, leaving the Williams family unprotected.
The novel is structured along two timelines, and while this is not at all difficult to follow, for most of the novel, it isn’t immediately obvious why there needs to be these 2 parallel timelines. It is unclear what it adds to the story, to know Civil is looking back at this story of the William sisters’ unlawful sterilisation over the period of some decades distant. (It is also a reminder of the different practises in the 1970s, to read in the first persona of Civil: “I was the only colored person among them” (p262). Very likely, in the current day timeline, Civil would have used the term, ‘person of colour’.) The plot of the current day timeline is of Civil going back to Montgomery – she now lives in Memphis – to visit Ty, Lou, Alicia, the William sisters, all of whom she has deliberately not kept in touch with. Throughout the novel, the thread is of Civil’s regrets – but right to the end, it is also unclear exactly what she regrets, since she was not actually responsible for the wrongs done to the William sisters, and in fact, went a long way to helping the whole family.
All that said, the novel is still a beautiful read, extremely engaging in how it illustrates class issues embedded in race issues of that period and place. Civil’s family and social status protect her from so much, privileging her in ways she is made more acutely aware of by comparing herself with the William sisters. It is particularly interesting to know how class can intervene with the racial discrimination, softening its travails and providing an effective shield to its harshness.
~ Take My Hand, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez ~ Berkley Press, 2022.
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