Take My Hand(98)

I look up into the sky, and I can see young Ty: watering his mama’s plants, driving me to Tuskegee, holding out a gift for me, teasing me. Ty—the kid with the long legs and ashy knees who stole my pencils in third grade, the kid who grew up into a gorgeous young man full of heart. Though I could not see it at the time, he had cared about those girls as much as I had.

And there I am, too. Twenty-three years old. Eager to prove my daddy wrong. Anxious about my mother’s illness. Longing for love. Hoping to make a mark on the world. Young Civil, smiling shakily and unsurely but with all the awareness of a future that remains to be lived.

Now I know why I came on this trip. I needed to make my peace. Ain’t nothing like peace of mind, Anne. Nothing.

As I drive north along this stretch of I-65, the sky over Alabama is cloudless and clear, as luminous as one of Mama’s paintings. I feel protected, the whole of me, in all my broken pieces under that blue. It is a wonder to behold this land, this God-filled country. My daddy hovers in it, whispering to me that it will all be fine, his thick fingers on my brow. He has always been with me, and he is with me now.

On the horizon behind me is my community—Montgomery, Centennial Hill, my friends and loved ones—all here in this place that birthed me. This is your lineage, my dear daughter, your history. More powerful than blood. The story of those sisters and what happened in Montgomery in 1973 is a history you share with people you have never even met. They are your family as much as I am your family.

You are now the age that I was then, and I hope you will benefit from the wisdom of our mistakes. This knowledge, this triumph, can, if we let it, make all of us stronger.

If we let it.





AUTHOR’S NOTE





This novel is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the real-life case of Relf v. Weinberger. In June 1973, Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Relf, sisters aged twelve and fourteen, were sterilized without their consent in Montgomery, Alabama, by a federally funded agency. Outraged by this terrible violation, their social worker, Jessie Bly, reported it to a local attorney. Eventually, the case went to federal court in Washington, DC. The lead lawyer for the plaintiffs was Joseph Levin Jr. of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This case is considered a pivotal moment in the history of reproductive injustice, as it brought to light the thousands of poor women of color across the country who had been sterilized under federally funded programs.

What was particularly shocking to me, when I first learned of this case, was that it had happened just one year after the Associated Press had revealed the story of how the federal government left hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama untreated for syphilis in a study at Tuskegee that lasted four decades. Both cases prompted national discussions about medical ethics and racism, but how could these events have been allowed to happen in plain sight? I began to ask questions about culpability and silence that contemporaneous documents in the archive could not answer.

My inability to shake these questions resulted in three years of research and, ultimately, this novel. Eager to seek more answers, I traveled to Montgomery to speak with Joseph Levin and Jessie Bly, who were so generous with their time. I am always led by my curiosity, and I found myself wondering about the nurses who worked at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic. How did they make sense of what happened on their watch? I was never able to find firsthand accounts of nurses who worked there, so I decided to imagine what it must have been like to work there at the time. Thus, I created the characters of Civil Townsend and the other nurses at the clinic.

It is important to note that Take My Hand is not a retelling of these events; instead, I have used the historical record as inspiration to imagine the emotional impact of this moment and others like it.

The moral and ethical questions I explore in Take My Hand remain salient today. In 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting revealed that between 2006 and 2010, nearly 150 women in California state prisons had been sterilized without official approval. A year later, the Associated Press reported on multiple instances of prosecutors in Nashville, Tennessee, submitting permanent birth control as part of plea deals. In 2020, a whistleblower alleged that immigrant women detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being forcibly sterilized without their consent in US detainment facilities. In fact, compulsory sterilization of “unfit” inmates of public institutions is still federally protected by a 1927 US Supreme Court ruling, Buck v. Bell.

Reproductive justice, a phrase coined by Black feminists at a conference in 1994, remains elusive for African American women who struggle to access affordable health care due to social and economic inequalities. The abortion rate for Black women is nearly five times that for white women. African American women are three to four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Furthermore, health conditions that disproportionately affect Black women, such as uterine fibroids, receive very little government research funding. 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. In a world inundated by information about these tragedies and more, I still passionately believe in the power of the novel (and its readers!) to raise the alarm, influence hearts, and impact lives.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS




First, I want to thank you—my readers—for waiting so patiently for my books. I have heard from so many of you since my first novel, Wench, was published. Your words of encouragement have kept me going more times than you know. Your passion for history inspires me. Your thirst for another book club pick motivates me. I am so indebted to you, and I want you to know that you are always foremost in my mind and heart.