BookLife Review by Carol O'Day: Take My Hand (Dolen Perkins-Valdez, author)

Montgomery, Alabama, 1972, involuntary sterilization of women and minors, Tuskegee Study, nursing, poverty, family planning clinic, Civil Rights

BookLife Review: Take My Home, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Newly-minted nurse, Civil Townsend, armed with a nursing degree from Tuskegee University, arrives at the Family Planning Clinic in Montgomery, Alabama in 1973. She is brimming with intelligence, compassion and a commitment to the mission to deliver contraceptive services to the women of Alabama to allow them to pursue education and employment, to avoid unwanted pregnancies and to lift themselves out of poverty. What she encountered was nothing short of a nightmare. Based on a true story, Take My Hand gives life and voice to a tragic scandal that may have been dimmed by the national firestorm just one year earlier surrounding the Tuskegee Study, a horrific, racist clinical experiment in which men of color with syphilis were left untreated. 

Civil had grown up in a professional household-the beloved only child of a  doctor father and an artist mother. In her early years, she eschews her father’s urging to attend medical school, preferring the hands-on relationship between nurse and patient. Little did she know that her very first patients, Erica and India Williams, ages 14 and 11, would alter the course of her life and medical history. 

Under a federally funded program, The Family Planning Clinic was dispensing shots of Depo-Provera, a monthly contraceptive medication. Unbeknownst to Civil, the drug had not been FDA approved for this purpose, and particularly for minors. Civil administered the shot to both girls as directed, and later learned that neither girl was sexually active, and that the eleven year old had not even begun her period, rendering the medication inappropriate for her. At her first home visit, Civil is appalled by the squalor in which the girls, her father and their grandmother live, in a sharecropper’s shed. She falls head over heels into their lives, far beyond her role as the girls’ visiting nurse, and orchestrates the family’s move to subsidized housing and other federal assistance. Civil investigates the medication and secretly stops administering it to the girls. 

No good deed goes unpunished as the old adage says, and on one of Civil’s days off, her supervisor visits the family, has the illiterate dad and grandmother sign a “consent” form and takes the two young girls to a hospital where she has them surgically sterilized. 

Grief and outrage follow. Civil enlists a friend of her parents who is an attorney and soon a young civil rights attorney has undertaken the case, suing the federal government on the girls’ behalf for Civil Rights violations. Senator Ted Kennedy learns of the abuse and invites the family, Civil and their attorney to testify before Congress about the travesty. Justice is wildly imperfect and is only partially served, as the surgery is not reversible and no damages are ever awarded to the sisters. 

Perkins-Valdez tells the story through Civil, as a seventy year-old now-doctor approaching retirement, looking back and sharing the story with her grown adopted daughter. In the course of the telling, Civil takes a road trip to visit the key players in the drama-her former love, Ty, her nurse colleague and friend, Alicia, the civil rights attorney, Lou, and ultimately India and Erica themselves. The experience molded every aspect of Civil’s life-her decision not to bear children or marry, and her decision to pursue a medical degree and to work and advocate for women as an obstetrician and gynecologist. 

The underlying story arises from the real case of Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, and the case of Relf vs. Weinberger. It was prosecuted by Joseph Levin, Jr. of the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Like the Tuskegee Study, It is a black eye in the medical history and federal assistance programs of the United States, but is a piece of history that is best aired as a bulwark against repetition. 

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