By Maria Bregman
There is a particular strain of modern historical fiction that offers its readers a terrible comfort. It takes a monumental injustice, an atrocity from the annals of the past, and softens its edges with the balm of ‘nuance’. It assures us that history is a messy business, that good people can find themselves on the wrong side of it, that systems are complex, and that good intentions can, alas, go awry. This is the literature of absolution. It allows us to look into the abyss, shudder politely, and walk away feeling wiser, more empathetic, and entirely un-implicated. Dolen Perkins-Valdes’s powerful novel, Take My Hand, has been widely praised for precisely this kind of complexity. This praise is a profound, and dangerous, misreading of her work.
Take My Hand is not a gentle exploration of moral grey areas. It is a furious and meticulously drawn indictment of a specific, enduring political technology: the weaponization of ‘help’. The novel’s subject is the forced sterilization of poor, Black girls in America’s Deep South in the 1970s, a policy enacted not by snarling monsters in white hoods, but by social workers and nurses operating under the progressive banners of ‘family planning’ and ‘public health’. Perkins-Valdes’s true, radical achievement is not to show us that good people can do bad things. It is to show us how a system designed for racial control can recruit good people to operate its machinery, convincing them all the while that they are driving an engine of progress.
This is not a story about good intentions gone wrong. It is a story about a horrifying intention that has perfected the art of looking good.
A Clinic of Good Intentions
The novel unfolds through the eyes of Civil Townsend, a young, idealistic Black nurse who, in 1973, takes a job at a family planning clinic in Montgomery, Alabama. She is a picture of hope and aspiration, a believer in the power of education and medicine to uplift her community. Her first assignment is to administer birth control injections to two sisters, India and Erica, aged just eleven and thirteen. Civil is appalled, but her horror is directed at what she perceives to be the family’s poverty and ignorance. Her instinct, her driving motivation, is to help. She will be their protector, their advocate, their big sister. She will save them.
It is this very impulse – the compassionate, educated, liberal desire to intervene for someone’s ‘own good’ – that the novel identifies as the system’s most potent weapon. Civil does not see herself as an agent of a eugenics programme. She sees herself as a soldier in the war on poverty. The novel’s genius is to draw a clean, bright line from the unapologetic eugenicists of the 1920s to the well-meaning social planners of the 1970s, revealing them not as opposites, but as cousins who simply learned to speak more politely. The language changed from ‘racial purity’ to ‘social welfare’, but the targets remained the same: the poor, the uneducated, the Black.
I once spent a summer volunteering for a well-funded charity aimed at ‘empowering’ marginalised youth. We had mission statements and impact reports. We spoke a fluent dialect of acronyms and progressive jargon. Yet, on the ground, the work often felt like a process of managing, containing, and pathologizing the very people we claimed to be helping, sanding down their inconvenient edges so they might fit more neatly into the world as it was. We were, with the best of intentions, agents of social control. Reading Civil’s story felt like an unnerving echo of that experience. Her journey is not about discovering that the world is a wicked place; it is the far more terrifying discovery that her own goodness has been co-opted to serve that wickedness.
The Body as Evidence
Of course, a charitable reading – the one the book’s champions prefer – is to focus on the novel’s humanism. It is to note, correctly, that Perkins-Valdes refuses to paint her characters in monolithic strokes. The white doctors and nurses are not all cackling villains. The girls’ father, Mace, is a figure of immense complexity: a loving, broken, proud, and flawed man, a rare portrait of Black masculinity that defies easy categorisation. The book, this argument goes, is a testament to the tangled mess of human motivations and the tragedy of miscommunication.
This is to mistake the foliage for the root. The true horror, which Perkins-Valdes renders with devastating quiet, is not the work of snarling villains, but of cheerful bureaucrats. The evil is not anomalous; it is banal. And its banality is the entire point. A system of oppression is at its most efficient not when it is run by sadists, but when it is run by people who believe they are on the side of the angels. The novel asks a deeply uncomfortable political question: what if the greatest injustices are perpetrated not in moments of hate, but in moments of misapplied love, of a ‘help’ that is predicated on the idea that some people’s lives, and their reproductive futures, are problems to be solved?
It is rotten work.
Perkins-Valdes provides a “wildcard” analogy for this process in the very idea of a clinic. A clinic is supposed to be a place of healing. But under this regime, it becomes a site of political hygiene, a place where the social body is ‘cleansed’ of its undesirable elements. It’s like the introduction of an invasive species to control a pest, which then proceeds to destroy the entire ecosystem. The clinic, a tool of progress, becomes an instrument of eradication, and its medicine becomes a poison.
The novel is a searing reminder that for a woman, particularly a Black woman, the phrase ‘my body, my choice’ was never an abstract slogan about identity. It was, and is, a declaration of war against a history that has always viewed her body as a site for public policy, a resource to be managed, or a threat to be neutralised.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but the novel seems to argue that true justice begins not with trying to understand the perpetrator’s complex motives, but with the simple, radical act of believing the victim’s testimony. It begins when the statistical abstraction of ‘thousands of women’ becomes the concrete, undeniable reality of two little girls.
The story is a tragedy, but it is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a political ideology that cloaks itself in the language of care. Take My Hand is not asking for our pity. It is demanding our vigilance. The title’s plea ceases to be a simple offer of comfort. It becomes a challenge, a demand, and perhaps even a warning.
