Perkins-Valdez describes Civil’s first visit to the cabin in visceral detail, as Civil fights off nausea at the stench and horror at the filth. Alternating between these memories and her present in 2016, Civil describes her privileged, educated upbringing in Montgomery, calling herself “five foot five inches of know-it-all.”Ĭivil’s boss, the clinic’s white director, assigns her to give birth control shots to 11- and 13-year-old India and Erica Williams, who live with their father and grandmother in a dirt-floor, one-room cabin. Perkins-Valdez fictionalizes this injustice through the narration of Civil Townsend, a 23-year-old Black woman who begins her first nursing job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic in 1973. Their horrific, groundbreaking case eventually shed light on thousands of other impoverished, primarily Black girls and women who had been sterilized across the country under federally funded programs. Such is the feeling from the first pages of Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s illuminating third novel, Take My Hand, which was inspired by a 1973 lawsuit involving Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, 12- and 14-year-old sisters who were sterilized without consent in Montgomery, Alabama. There’s nothing better than settling down to read a novel and immediately sensing that you’re in the hands of a gifted storyteller.
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