Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Take My Hand is a beautiful study in what history feels like to the people involved when it’s still just the present. Take My Hand is a wonderful examination of being human and all the complications and emotions that entails. I do love a good psychological dissection, but it broke me. I wish it were made up. Technically the book is fiction. Perkins-Valdez took a real thing that happened and made up characters in order to think about what it would have been like for them. But I wish this were not our history. I wish people did not force sterilizations on women and children. I wish we weren’t so horrible to each other.
At the end of the back of the book description, Perkins-Valdez wrote: “Because history repeats what we don’t remember.” It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking book, but it left me wondering: How does knowing our history keep us from repeating it? The US government is still sterilizing women against their will today. We know what life without legal abortion was like, yet, here we are again. Is it as simple as the spiral analogy? That life moves in a spiral, but each time we return to a pervious place, it is a little different, hopefully better? An upward climb in circular motion towards the goals of justice and equality? But what if those are not the prevailing goals?
My son watches a lot of YouTube videos about Star Wars but also history. At eleven, he knows, and taught us, the underlying legal argument that was used to implement the Emancipation Proclamation. He knows more details about the big events and wars than many historians and knows about wars and conflicts I’d never heard of (Emu War, Pig War, Toledo War). Right now his interests are the facts and dates, but we help him to see how they fit into a bigger picture and the impact on the real people who lived through the often terrifying things he’s learning about. And we talk about current events with him. He is learning and knows more history than I did by the time I graduated college. But is his, and his generation’s, knowing going to change anything?
Simone de Beauvoir wrote in Second Sex, “the present incorporates the past, and in the past all history was made by males.” If we, or our children, learn and acknowledge a history in which women and people of color existed and were important, could we disincorporate the male dominance and horrors visited upon us by them from the present?
Ben Tumin of Skipped History said he doesn't envision history and time as a spiral, but more “like a five year old’s doodling,” and pointed me to Dr. Brian Jones, the inaugural director of the Center for Educators and Schools of The New York Public Library and author of The Tuskegee Student Uprising: a History. In an interview with Tumin, Dr. Jones said:
Until we make a more fundamental change, I think we're going to feel like we’re stuck in an endless cycle; that we’re fighting the same battles over and over and over again—because there's some truth to that. Until we destroy the institutional supports and edifices of white supremacy, we're going to keep finding grassroots, armed white supremacist groups; we're going to keep seeing manifestations of inequality in education; we’re going to keep stamping out one kind of power structure only for further injustice to arise someplace else.
I think Dr. Jones nailed it. Philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is salient, but also easily over-simplified. Knowing our history is not enough. We need to rectify it. A few books about the history of female journalists have come out in the last few years. They start with the first female “stunt reporters” and reveal the excuses male editors and publishers used to reject would be writers and editors and pay the few they did hire less than their male counterparts. It was an intentional choice to pay women journalists less. Same with teachers. (Probably all the other “female” professions, but those are the two that I’ve read direct histories of.) Today, we bemoan the pay inequity as if it was some sort of situational accident. “Women have babies, take time off work.” Those are just the excuses companies use to perpetuate exploitation. But until someone makes the intentional choice to catch women up and pay us equally and institutionalize it, women will forever be left behind. The same is true for civil rights. The first step was/is changing the laws, but we must go back and make up for the damage we did as well. Give Native tribes the water they have the rights to, but have been denied, return the bodies of their stollen murdered children, pay restitution for slavery, massacre, sterilizations, and other sanctioned violence. Or we will continue to wreck havoc on each other, continue to see “further injustices arise someplace else.”
The people who say the ignorant are doomed to repeat history, are the people who care. The people who read stories like Take My Hand and are moved by it. The people who think these histories should not be repeated. But not everyone agrees. And so we need our activists to stop the damage being done now, to fight our modern fights, but we also need our history buffs, our writers, our thinkers, to fight for acknowledgement of our past harm, for restitution and repair. When harming each other becomes too expensive, when we all feel the shame of our past deeds, it will be easier to dismantle the systems built on them. And finally, we will be saved from rather than doomed by history.
Back of the Book:
Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a profoundly moving novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible wrong done to her patients, from the New York Times bestselling author of Wench.
Montgomery, Alabama 1973. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil Townsend has big plans to make a difference, especially in her African American community. At the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, she intends to help women make their own choices for their lives and bodies.
But when her first week on the job takes her down a dusty country road to a worn down one-room cabin, she’s shocked to learn that her new patients are children—just 11 and 13 years old. Neither of the Williams sisters has even kissed a boy, but they are poor and Black and for those handling the family’s welfare benefits that’s reason enough to have the girls on birth control. As Civil grapples with her role, she takes India, Erica and their family into her heart. Until one day, she arrives at the door to learn the unthinkable has happened and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.
Decades later, with her daughter grown and a long career in her wake, Dr. Civil Townsend is ready to retire, to find her peace and to leave the past behind. But there are people and stories that refuse to be forgotten.That must not be forgotten.
Because history repeats what we don’t remember.