Take My Hand

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

I know you want to argue that 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.

The first thing that hit me was the odor. Urine. Body funk. Dog. All mixed with the stench of something salty stewing in a pot.

Up close, she looked older than her sixty-two years, but she was still a good-looking woman with a bronze complexion and high cheekbones. Her eyes were hazel, but they had lost their glow; the surrounding whites were dark and yellow-tinged.

“Erica, you got to change the pad every few hours. You can’t just leave it all day long. If you heavy, you change it more often. You understand what I’m saying?”

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.

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

“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.

And though I did everything to put out of my mind that painful day of lying on a bed in a strange woman’s house, I could not forget. It wasn’t so much that I regretted it. I never doubted it was the right decision for me. It was that I had been raised to believe that such a thing was a sin. And that kind of upbringing was hard to shake.

The Roe v. Wade decision had come down on a Monday in January of 1973, and I remember the afternoon newspapers sold out as word spread. I watched my daddy sit down in his chair and silently read, shake his head and then leave the paper on the coffee table.

Surely Daddy understood that women needed a trustworthy place. Some women traveled to New York to have the procedure, but that was too far for most of us. Make no mistake about it, that ruling was a big deal.

When we arrived, the nun met us in the front lobby and introduced herself as Sister LaTarsha. I could not believe my eyes. The sister was a sister.

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

You can’t help others if you’re down and out. I have to remind myself of that all the time.”

I remember thinking that I could not believe they hadn’t taught us about it in high school. How could they leave something like that out? When we got to that unit in my college world history class, I’d sat in the library just staring into space. The horror of the events was overwhelming.

“Alright, alright.” Mace was right. I needed to accept that they were not a case for me to fix. I had never known that good intentions could be just as destructive as bad ones.

He wrapped his arms around my neck and almost knocked my chair over, our clumsiness reminding me of just how young and clueless we all were. 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.

The power of art to speak to you sometimes lay in its unwillingness to be penned into one thing. It was the kind of argument that had always made me look at Mama and think: She cannot be penned into one thing, either. As for me, I craved order and rationality. I needed to understand. Not understanding was knocking me clear off my feet.

Right here in Montgomery, Alabama, justice had prevailed. It baffled me how hatred and goodness could coexist. The world was an enigma. My country was an enigma. Still, she was mine. And I loved every square inch of her.

“Move on?” I didn’t understand her words. How did one move on from family? Didn’t she understand that family was so much more than blood? It was shared experience and history and pain. Those girls were as much my family now as they were hers.

The judge scrutinizes you more closely if you’re poor. Disabled. Unmarried. I am still just as aware as ever that there is work to be done in this world.

As she smiles at me before leaving the room, I lean back in my chair. I have not seen them in decades, but these women are my family and I am theirs. I was struggling with how I would make up for lost time, but now I know the time was not lost at all. It is just passed. Thankfully, there is more of it. Not as much as I would have liked. But more.

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.

My hope is that this novel will provoke discussions about culpability in a society that still deems poor, Black, and disabled as categories unfit for motherhood.

Dorothy E. Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body, has been a pivotal voice in the history of scholarship on reproductive justice. I am indebted to her work and that of so many others.