Take My Hand

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

But back then, all we knew was that we had a job to do. Ease the burdens of poverty. Stamp it with both feet. Push in the pain before it exploded.

My daddy had made sure that I was educated not only in my books but also, as he had once described it, in the code that dictated our lives in Alabama. Knowing when to keep your mouth shut. Picking your battles. Letting them think what they wanted because you weren’t going to change their minds about certain things.

There were all different kinds of ministers. Ministers of congregations. Ministers of music. To minister was to serve. This work was a ministry serving young Black women.

Although I refused to believe there was such a thing as an unwanted child, there was such a thing as an unwanted pregnancy—and I could speak to that firsthand.

“If this is peace, this dead and leaden thing / Then better far the hateful fret, the sting.”

there isn’t one Black community, that we aren’t a monolith. But back then, when we talked about the community, it was something real, something defined by shared experience. Course that doesn’t mean we didn’t have our fissures.

It is a burden to stubbornly remain single even when you know it is the right decision for you.

There are a lot of things a mother can say to hurt her child, even long after the child is an adult.

The myth of old maids is a powerful one.

There is no greater right for a woman than having a choice, Anne. And I exercised that right. Fully and consciously.

A boy in a man’s body, I told myself. Until he kissed me and I understood that he was a man in a man’s body.

doing right by people, proving God was real.

“people got to reckon with the hand God dealt them.”

“Now, you know how some white folks feel about Black bodies. They think we can tolerate pain better than them. 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.”

I’m also thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer and her use of the phrase Mississippi Appendectomy.

Hamer had been sterilized without her permission in 1961, and the procedure was so common, women had labeled it.

Stubborn as a mule in mud.”

“Sometimes love can kill you, just like hate. You love too hard and you can lose yourself in other folks’ sorrow.

Maybe this optimism was a powerful thing to have in the girls’ corner—somebody crazy enough to stay in the ring even when his head was about to get bashed.

The white person drops in from the sky, saves all the Black folks, and by doing so, redeems themselves. We’re the channel through which they save their own souls, but we cannot save our own.

I know justice is as complicated as everything else in life.”

“Lou is making an argument about coercion. How poor women can’t make an informed decision when the government is all up in their business.

We were just stumbling our way through a situation that was the biggest event of our entire lives. But there was no denying that my love for those girls was genuine, inadequate and flawed as it may have been.

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, or HEW as we call it.”

I thought about the parade of health professionals testifying in the trial. How did they live with the gravity of their mistakes?

If we somehow draw a connection between the killing of unborn babies and unconceived babies, we might get the judge’s attention.”

We also found that the forms they signed at Baltimore City Hospital consisted of only seven lines. The lines stated that the patient was voluntarily consenting to the sterilization and would in all probability never bear children again. There was no information provided on the form about the benefits, risks, or alternatives to sterilization.”

“Your Honor, we have a copy of the Baltimore City Hospital sterilization form.”

we have found that sterilization is the rule, not the exception.

two-thirds of federally funded clinics’ patients are white and only one third are Black, 43 percent of those sterilized are Black.

the summer of 1972 and the summer of 1973, twenty-five thousand adults were sterilized in federally funded clinics. Of these, 153 were under the age of eighteen—”

“In North Carolina between 1960 and 1968, of the 1,620 sterilizations that occurred, 63 percent were performed on Black women—”

We were setting ourselves up for heartbreak by believing in his fairness.

Our research reveals that over the past few years, nearly one hundred fifty thousand low-income women from all over the nation have been sterilized under federally funded programs.”

Our bodies belonged to us. Poor, disabled, it didn’t matter. These were our bodies, and we had the right to decide what to do with them. It was as if they were just taking our bodies from us, as if we didn’t even belong to ourselves.

Whether it was the Birmingham church bombing or Ruby Bridges, there wasn’t any justice for little Black girls, and never had been.

intimacy working its natural path until the answer was reached.

I could comprehend that interpretive freedom was an important creed of civil rights for her.

“Today the judge is going to make a ruling that could end all sterilizations at federally funded clinics. He might order this temporarily until the clinics prove they are compliant with regulations regarding informed consent.

We sat there silently, each lost on our own islands of sadness.

“I’m sick and tired. I’m sick and tired.” Her words came out in a rush. “No husband. No life. No babies. I ain’t never going to be happy.”

John F. Kennedy: “Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.”

I was not my mother, whose mothering was affected by her illness.

The Williamses had always fed my soul, even when I did not know I was hungry. It occurs to me that I have received more from them than I ever could have given.

I know the time was not lost at all. It is just passed. Thankfully, there is more of it.

I needed to talk to her, to tell her I understood how a person could get so caught up in doing good that they forgot that the people they served had lives of their own.