71 pages • 2 hours read
Dolen Perkins-ValdezTake My Hand
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
“Othering” and the Savior Complex
One of the primary themes in Take My Hand is Civil’s desire to save people and unequal power dynamic needed for her to maintain her role as a savior. Civil’s decision to become a nurse and work at the Montgomery clinic fulfills that desire, and her subsequent actions with the Williams family illustrate the complex motivations behind her savior tendencies.
Civil chooses to be a nurse instead of a doctor because, “Medicine was a land of hierarchy, and nurses were closer to the ground. I was going to help uplift the race, and this clinic job would be the perfect platform for it” (12). She also feels a sense of purpose to “ease the burdens of poverty. Stamp it with both feet” (6).
Mrs. Seager represents this theme in her role at the clinic. She tells Civil: “Our mission [at the clinic] is to help poor people who cannot help themselves” (11). As the story plays out, and as Civil becomes more aware of the atrocities the clinic performs in the name of saving their patients, she still embraces her savior role. Race plays into her distinction between herself and Mrs. Seager; Civil believes Mrs. Seager’s policies are racist, but she does not see her own classism in her attitude toward the Williamses.
This attitude is evident after Civil finds out the girls have been sterilized: “Maybe it was for the best. India had speech problems. It would have been difficult for her to care for a baby. The family was poor, with little prospects. Bringing a baby into that life would have been a tragedy” (148). Though she quickly ends this train of thought, she does not stop trying to save the girls.
While Civil does not understand the destructive nature of the savior role she embodies, others in her life gently remind her that the Williamses are not a project. Her mother reminds her to “figure out a way to [help Mace] without shaming him” (93), and her father, cautions her to remember these are people’s lives she is toying with. Ironically, he has been instrumental in conditioning Civil to see them as “other,” illustrated in his instructions to not go into the Williamses’ house when she goes to see them: “Daddy treated patients from every station of life, even tending to those who could not pay. But he had no desire to go out into the neighborhoods, no desire to get his fingernails dirty and experience their discomfort” (17).
It is only near the end of the novel that Civil acknowledges the agency Mace holds: “Daddy was right: Mace was real. A grown man, a father, a son. I had no right to play around in his life” (304). This growth is the main resolution to the conflict inherent in Civil’s savior behavior. She learns the people she is helping do not need a savior, and that they have been helping her without her realizing it.
Systemic Racism in the US Healthcare System
Take My Hand conveys the extent of systemic racism in the US healthcare system. The novel explores the once-widespread practice of forced sterilization through the lives of its characters and references the Tuskegee syphilis experiments of the mid-20th century. The novel is built on the historical fact that hundreds of thousands of mostly poor women of color were sterilized in federally funded programs, and even more were coerced into consenting under threat of losing their government benefits or though the withholding of medical treatment.
At first, Civil is not equipped to deal with this system, as she has both naiveté and privilege. She has grown up with a doctor father who treats Black patients from all economic and social levels, and this experience sheltered her from the systemic racism so prevalent in the healthcare system. This all changes with her job at the clinic, where she witnesses women and girls coerced into taking birth control and getting tubal ligations. As she and the other nurses at the clinic begin to investigate the clinic’s practices, they find out that 11 girls have been sterilized besides Erica and India. Present-day Civil remembers when she realized how widespread the racism in the healthcare system was:
When I arrive in Jackson I’m not just thinking of Evers, I’m also thinking of Fannie Lou Hamer and her use of the phrase Mississippi Appendectomy. I didn’t even learn about that phrase until I got to medical school and was under the mentorship of a Black female. As soon as I heard it, I felt a sharp pain in my body. Hamer had been sterilized without her permission in 1961, and the procedure was so common, women had labeled it (79).
One of the clearest voices in condemning systemic racism in the healthcare system is Miss Pope, the university librarian who mentored Civil and accompanied her to her abortion. Like an archetypal wise woman, she appears in the novel just as Civil, Ty, and Alicia are falling from innocence. They are trying to find out the truth about Depo-Provera, and she tells them, “‘I can’t tell y’all much about Depo. But what I got for you is the history of medical experimentation on Black folks. And all the articles I could find on the syphilis experiment right here in our backyard’” (74).
Civil has been conditioned by the system and wonders if the end justifies the means: “I still believed in the mission of the clinic. Women needed access to reliable birth control and information about their reproductive health. And I did not believe in minors becoming pregnant under any circumstances” (120). This consideration the healthcare system holds—that Black women’s bodies are a liability—runs through the novel. Civil learns one horrifying truth after another and gradually comes to her experience of having an unregulated abortion as part of the same system that denies other Black women bodily autonomy.
While the atrocities brought about by the systemic racism of the US healthcare system are overwhelming to the younger Civil, Civil’s decision to become an OB/GYN shows that she has risen above her fears and is battling that systemic racism through her own practice.
Poverty, Racism, and Classism in the Post-Jim Crow South
Throughout Take My Hand, its characters are affected by the poverty, racism, and classism in the post-Jim Crow South. Although Civil is relatively sheltered from racism because of her family’s affluence and status in the community, she cannot escape its effects completely. Ty, like Civil, enjoys the privilege that comes with status and affluence but still must deal with a racist world. Alicia is educated but does not come from an affluent family, limiting her choices in ways Civil’s and Ty’s are not, and the Williams family suffers from the effects of the trifecta of poverty, racism, and low social standing. The novel highlights that, to varying degrees, Black people face challenges their white fellow citizens in the post-Jim Crow South do not.
Civil admits her naiveté when she tells Anne, “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” (78-79). Civil had reason to be hopeful in the 1970s, with the gains from the civil rights movement a decade earlier. But even in her youth, Civil understands the dangers of racism. She fears for Lou because he is a white man helping poor Black people: “It’s not that I think you hate us. It’s that this risk you’re taking is real. […] Montgomery has come a long way, but race relations in this city still ain’t no county fair” (193).
Another example of Civil’s and Ty’s encounters with racism is when they take a trip with Ty’s family. They must plan ahead to find places to use the restroom because many gas stations would not let Black people use their facilities, or the facilities they were allowed to use were in terrible conditions.
Alicia, while educated and having a good job at the clinic, faces challenges that her class status creates. She does not come from privilege and thereby does not have the choice to quit her job for moral reasons, as Civil can. When Civil chastises her for continuing to work at the clinic with the people who were responsible for taking the girls to be sterilized, Alicia responds, “I told you I need this job,” (200). Alicia improves her class status through marriage, and her children do not suffer the same limitations she did.
The Williams family is the most affected by the conditions in a post-Jim Crow South. They are poor, and Mace’s white employer finds him expendable. They are marginalized by a system that only regards white people or people with wealth as having value. Mrs. Seager implies that Mace might sexually molest his daughters and that the girls will get pregnant when they move from their isolated shack to the city. Their poverty keeps them on the fringes of society until Civil intervenes and brings them into society.
