Take My Hand

In 2016, Dr. Civil Townsend is preparing to retire and drives back to her hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, ready at last to tell her adult daughter about the year that shaped her. In 1973, Civil is a fresh Tuskegee nursing graduate who takes a job at a federally funded family-planning clinic serving poor Black women. When her rounds bring her to a one-room cabin, she finds that two of her assigned patients, Erica and India, are only eleven and thirteen. What happens to the sisters at the clinic sends Civil into a fight that reaches the courts and the conscience of the country. Drawing on the real Relf v. Weinberger case, Perkins-Valdez alternates the older Civil's reckoning with the younger Civil's outrage, tracing how a single injustice echoes across a life.