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.
Symbols & Motifs
Photograph of Civil as a Baby
When Civil sees the photo of herself as a baby in her father’s office, it reminds her of the child she did not have. The sudden memory affects her viscerally; she feels a “scraping rawness” (19) in her stomach as she wonders if her baby would have looked like her.
This picture symbolizes the choices Civil did not make and the possibilities of a different, more socially acceptable life. She hides the baby picture first under the sofa and then takes it home with her, just as she hides the abortion from everyone in her life but carries it around.
There is one more reference to the picture later in the novel, when Erica finds it under her bed. Erica asks Civil if the picture is of Civil’s baby, and Civil “swallowed hard” (54) and says it is of herself. This picture, like the pain that came with Civil’s abortion, comes up unexpectedly and symbolizes the unexpected pain so many women in the novel experience around the issues of motherhood and contraception.
Erica and India’s Hair
Erica and India’s hair is symbolic of their life journey throughout the novel and the ancestral connection that all Black women share. Civil names the symbolic nature of Erica’s and India’s hair when she meets the girls the first time: “All I can say is that their hair seemed a serious thing to me that evening. Life or death. If I could clean them up, I could clean their lives up, too” (52).
When Civil decides to take the girls to her house and bathe them, she focuses on their hair. Cutting their hair without Mrs. Williams’s permission, she realizes their grandmother won’t be happy but proceeds anyway. This symbolizes her overstepping her bounds with the Williams family and her desire to mother the girls. She also finds connection through the girls’ hair—she realizes how their lives are connected to hers, and, perhaps, if she can straighten out their lives and hair, her life too will fall into place: “Parting the hair, line after line, this shared geography of scalp like an ancestral road map, bound us Black girls” (52-53).
Southern Black Vernacular
Throughout the novel, all the characters, regardless of social status and education, use a vernacular particular to Black people in the South. Civil’s father, a doctor, says, “You don’t know nothing about them people, Civil” (18); Alicia says of Mrs. Seager, “That red helmet she call hair. It ain’t moved an inch in five days” (7); Miss Pope, the librarian at Tuskegee, says, “Based on what you told me, it don’t smell right” (74); Civil’s aunt Ros says, “Mabel say you at that trial every day” (297); and Mace says, “What I’m supposed to say to them newspaper people? Half the time I can’t even understand what they be saying” (241).
This motif shows the interconnectedness of the Black community that defies the divisions that exist in Montgomery and brings people together. Civil names these differences in her own family: “On my side, we were protected by our education and jobs and ability to make noise, while poor Black folks went hungry or were humiliated by their employers who exploited the precariousness of their very existence” (267).
Speaking a common vernacular erases those differences, and the community is tied together in a subtle yet powerful way. As Civil explains to Anne, “I know you want to argue that there isn’t one Black community, that we aren’t a monolith. But back then, when we talked about the community, it was something real, something defined by shared experience” (20).
Civil’s Car Accident
When Civil leaves the hospital after finding out the girls have been sterilized, she has a car accident. The accident is not her fault, but she was distracted by her grief and anger. This accident, coming on the heels of Civil’s discovery that the girls had been violated, symbolizes an abrupt coming-of-age moment when Civil begins to doubt her well-intentioned intervention with the girls and the liberties she took with their treatment. She also learns that some decisions have consequences that can’t be reversed.
Civil realizes she does not have the control she imagines, and her view of life changes permanently. As she tells Anne, “When I say to you that what happened to those girls was the greatest hurt of my life, I am speaking the God’s honest truth” (141). This begins Part 2 of the novel, wherein Civil’s character begins a new phase, on the heels of her symbolic accident.
