Take My Hand, Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Take my Hand is set mainly in the year 1973, Montgomery, Alabama, at a time where segregation, while no longer ‘legal’ was still prominent. It was felt in the jobs colored people could get, where they could live, how they were treated in schools, and the way the government took advantage of the often impoverished and under or uneducated people within that community.

The novel, while fiction, is, as Dolen Perkins-Valdez states, loosely inspired by the real case, Relf v. Weinberger. In Relf, as in Take My Hand, two black sisters, aged twelve and fourteen were sterilized without informed consent. The remainder of the book follows the books sisters, Erica and India, and their nurse, Civil Townsend, through the girls’ recovery and following court battle regarding not only their sterilization but those of hundreds, if not thousands of others who were also unwittingly sterilized with the use of federal funds: Read, the government.

The book is, no surprise, difficult at times to imagine, to read, and to lean into - I mean, really? Who could/would do this to anyone, let alone children? For me, and I like to think I am fairly versed with the atrocities my country has inflicted on others, I was astounded to (a) learn about this, and (b) learn I didn’t know about this.

As with many of the difficult subject books that have been released in the recent past, this book will make you swallow hard, look inwardly, and get angry.

An incredibly well-written book, I highly recommend Take My Hand. It NEEDS to be read, especially in the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade. It is timely.