But how do you think that good people with quote, unquote, "good intentions" often get it wrong? You say at one point her ministry was to help these people. RASCOE: And, you know, Civil - when she meets the Williams, she's very idealistic. And she learns very quickly that one of the sisters has been put on birth control, and she hasn't even started her cycle yet. When she meets the Williams family, they are living in a shack on the back of a white man's property. Can you tell us about the Williams family? Because they're very different from Civil Townsend's family, right? The two daughters that are victimized by the clinic are Civil's patients.
RASCOE: And Civil Townsend gets caught up in this family - the Williams family. And that's why I wrote this character, Civil Townsend. I never found anything about those nurses, and I just wondered, who were they? What must it have been like to be a nurse working at that clinic and have something like this happen under your watch? I just needed to answer that question. RASCOE: And the woman who was giving the statement was a white woman? And I had read in the Montgomery Advertiser a statement by the head supervising nurse at the clinic who had originally been sued along with the clinic - she said in her defense that sterilizing the girls must have been OK because all of the nurses who worked at the clinic were Black. So I remembered reading about these two young girls, the Relf sisters, who had been sterilized without the consent of their family. So, you know, at this time, when birth control was becoming more widely available to women, it was sort of a double-edged sword for Black women because, on the one hand, it promised reproductive control and freedom, but, on the other hand, it was possibly going to be used as a form of repression and eugenics. Can you talk about that true story that inspired this novel? RASCOE: This is your third novel, and it draws upon history for its premise. And she's very excited about this job which she thinks is going to help women in her community control their reproductive lives. She's a Black, middle-class community member.
And she gets her first job at a family planning clinic in Montgomery, Ala. Civil is a recent graduate of the nursing school at Tuskegee. RASCOE: So start by telling us about your main character, Civil Townsend. Thanks for being here.ĭOLEN PERKINS-VALDEZ: The pleasure is mine. "Take My Hand" is the latest novel by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. What does it mean to help people in need, especially when those people are also the most vulnerable to being victimized by the systems meant to help them? That's the question that protagonist Civil Townsend, a Black nurse in 1970s Alabama, has to grapple with when the federally funded clinic she works for causes irreparable harm to two of her young patients.
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