Take My Hand

Ty, Alicia, and Civil drive to Tuskegee to meet with Miss Pope, the university librarian and the first feminist intellectual Civil has met: Miss Pope introduced Civil to feminism, and Civil went to her for help when she found out she was pregnant. Miss Pope is an activist and well-educated in the South’s history of oppressing and exploiting Black Americans. She acknowledges that Black women, herself included, were complicit in allowing the Tuskegee syphilis experiments to continue because they trusted the government. She explains that the medical establishment believes Black people can tolerate pain better and that syphilis cannot kill them; she calls the experiments a “laboratory game with Black bodies” (76).

Civil realizes this is exactly the kind of thinking driving the Depo-Provera injections.

Arriving in Jackson, Civil thinks about Medgar Evers and how his 1963 murder marked the end of her childhood. She recalls the leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement and the tragedy of Fannie Lou Hamer’s forced sterilization in 1961; Hamer coined the phrase “Mississippi appendectomy” to refer to the practice because it was so common among poor Black women.

Arriving at Alicia’s middle-class home, Civil notes that Alicia is living “The Southern American Dream” (79).