Take My Hand

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Medicine has taught me, really taught me, to accept the things I cannot change.

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. What we didn’t know was that there would be skin left on the playground after it was all over and done with.

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. It was a tough lesson, but I’d heeded it well enough to get some of the things I wanted out of life. Like this job, for instance.

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.

Alabama. Heart of America’s Bible Belt. Home at one time to nearly half a million enslaved humans.

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. Course that doesn’t mean we didn’t have our fissures. A big one was between the educated and uneducated, the poor and the not-so-poor.

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.

“It’s likely she thought she was doing good. Syphilis was a serious illness, and these white folks came down here saying they wanted to find a cure and Tuskegee could play a role in helping them find it. I believe she trusted the federal government.”

“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.”

“Because even though regular folks didn’t know, the medical folks knew. In some respects, the government did this in plain sight. They were publishing articles in medical journals about it and everything. Either they didn’t see what was wrong with it, or nobody cared about poor colored folks down in Alabama.”

If you lived in the Deep South in the 1960s, you had very few illusions about the dangers of movement work. Folks either walked right into it or stayed clear. Some just watched from the sidelines for fear of losing their jobs or worse.

This might surprise you, but I thought we had turned a corner by the seventies. I knew racism still existed, but I was hopeful that Black Power and education would sustain us and keep it at bay. We’d been to hell and back, so the seventies had to get better.

Mississippi Appendectomy.

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

Poverty motivated a lot of the city’s crime. Despair. Racism. Lack of opportunity. We weren’t just helping these families. We were doing community work. Better to step in before things got worse. By giving the patients birth control, we were saving them from more dire choices. Mrs. Seager was right to be concerned.

“My mama always said if you open a Bible and put it out, the house will be blessed,” I told her.

I believed that both girls were virgins. But here we were inserting what could be poison into them on the off chance that one of them might become sexual.

Sometimes I think of what those plants meant to the Ralseys—the life-affirming vitality of them. The connectedness of all living things in a segregated country. To the Ralseys, we were all God’s creations—man, plant, animal. They cared for those plants in the same way they cared for their clients.

But I accepted a long time ago that I lead a life of the mind. My body and its urges are secondary. It’s easy to forget your own flesh when you are concentrated on other people’s bodies.

Now, you know how some white folks feel about Black bodies. They think we can tolerate pain better than them . . . Some of them even thought syphilis couldn’t kill us.

Even with all I knew about the cruelty of humans—the beatings, the murders, the disappearances—I had still somehow underestimated people, and the girls had paid a price for that naiveté. No wonder my car got hit. It was a lesson on the laws of physics. There are consequences in life.

We were just irregular churchgoing Christians, though I had never been the kind of Christian to pray for intercession on behalf of my own desires. I was more of the gratitude-prayer type. Thank you for this food. Thank you for my family. Thank you for the roof over my head.

When I had the abortion I asked God for something—really asked, for the first time in my life. I asked for forgiveness.

My belief that all women needed access to trained medical professionals, especially poor women, did not mean that I was without ambivalence.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability.

I can do this case precisely because I am a mama’s boy. My parents left Europe and came to this country fearing for their lives. And from the moment I was born, right here in Montgomery, they raised me to fight for what is right. It’s in my blood, Civil. And I will follow whoever did this to hell and back to see justice for those girls.”

The sister was a sister.

“We don’t separate our students in the same way as standard schools. We separate them according to a range of factors—temperament, ability, developmental goals. Our aim,” she said, “is to train them well enough to be functional adults.”

“Well, it means different things for different children. Some need help with fine motor skills. Others need speech therapy. It might even be something straightforward like learning how to share a toy or brush their teeth or hold a fork.”

We have discovered that some of our kids are smarter than the kids without challenges.”

“Sometimes love can kill you, just like hate. You love too hard and you can lose yourself in other folks’ sorrow. You hate too hard and you know the rest of that story. Take care of yourself. You can’t help others if you’re down and out. I have to remind myself of that all the time.”

“Only Jesus’s love is infinite, Miss Townsend.”

“Not all white people in Montgomery hate Black people, Civil.”

This white man still believed in the goodness of the world. I was younger than he was, but I had lost my faith the day I walked into that hospital room and found those two little girls wailing like babies. I longed to believe again. 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.

We are at the center of our own destiny. Always have been. Yes, there have been times this country has tried to destroy us. But we have not been doormats. No, ma’am. We have fought and used every resource. Lou Feldman was a resource. And I grew to love him.

“I still believe in right and wrong or else I wouldn’t be practicing law after all these years. It’s just that now I know justice is as complicated as everything else in life.”

Sister LaTarsha had explained to me that it was entirely possible that India understood more than she let on, but she was really shy, which people could misread sometimes as incomprehension given her limited verbal ability.

“Sterilization is not birth control, especially when applied to minors. It is not the same as a birth control pill. It fundamentally and forever halts the ability to conceive. Frankly, it is mayhem.

“Remember,” I said, “don’t do nothing illegal or immoral. We are nurses, not liars. And we don’t want to justify one bad deed with another. You don’t need names, just verifiable numbers of cases.”

Lou was talented and mature, so it was easy to forget sometimes that he was, in certain ways, just as naive as the rest of us.

had never known that good intentions could be just as destructive as bad ones.

“Daddy, you remember what you used to tell me when I was little? Why you named me Civil?” “Because we wanted you to be free,” he said. “The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were supposed to guarantee civil rights. But the year you were born, it was still just a hope.”

The system was not designed for poor people to win. To his credit, the judge ran a careful trial. He listened intently, never asking anyone to repeat themselves. He made a lot of notes and at the end of each day thanked everyone politely.

Sterilization was becoming a political issue in the administration. It was an election year.”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. Take things one step at a time, and eventually your argument in court will reflect that precision. Passion is good. But only when it’s focused.”

I’d always believed I was a cross product of my parents. Daddy, the cautious and conservative one. Mama, the impulsive artist. Maybe I was more than the sum of my parents.

Alicia had said she became a nurse to prove that God was real. Well, I had gone to nursing school to make a difference.

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We carried no secrets, thoughts circulating through our family with the neatness of a simple triangle, intimacy working its natural path until the answer was reached.