Excerpt from Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In March 1973, nine months after graduation, I landed my first job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic. On the day I started, two other newly hired nurses, Val and Alicia, began with me, the three of us like soldiers showing up for duty. Hair straightened. Uniforms starched. Shoes polished. Caps squared. Child, you couldn't tell us nothing.

Our supervisor was a tall woman by the name of Linda Seager. I swear that woman had three eyes. Nothing escaped her notice. Despite her stone face, a part of me couldn't help but admire her. After all, she was a white woman working in a clinic serving poor Black women. Trying to do the right thing. And doing that kind of work required a certain level of commitment.

"Congratulations. You are now official employees of the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic."

And with that, the training was over. One week. A fifty-page orientation manual, half of which concerned cleaning the rooms and the toilet, and keeping the supply closet organized. We had spent three days just going over that part. Long enough to question if we'd been hired as maids or nurses. On day four, we finally covered charting patients and protocol. When the more experienced nurses noticed our downcast expressions in the break room, they promised to help us in our first few weeks. We were in this together.

As we dispersed, Mrs. Seager pointed a finger at me. "Civil."

"Yes, Mrs. Seager?"

She pointed to my fingernails with a frown, then retreated to her office. I held up a hand. They did need a clipping. I hid my hands in my pockets.

The three of us new hires squeezed into the break room and removed our purses from the shelf. One of the nurses nudged me gently with an elbow. She'd introduced herself earlier in the week as Alicia Downs. She was about my age, born and raised in a small town up near Huntsville. I'd known girls like her at Tuskegee, pie-faced country girls whose wide-eyed innocence contrasted my more citified self.

"I don't think it's real," she said.

"What?"

She pointed to her own head. "That red helmet she call hair. It ain't moved an inch in five days."

"Look like a spaceship," I whispered. Alicia covered her mouth with a hand, and I caught a glimpse of something. She'd been putting on an act all week in front of Mrs. Seager. Alicia might have been country, but she was far from timid.

"I bet if you poked a finger in it, you'd draw back a nub," she said.

The other nurse glanced at us, and I rearranged my face. Val Brinson was older than me and Alicia by at least a decade.

"You crazy, Alicia Downs," I told her as we walked outside. "She might have heard you."

"You look at your file yet?"

I took a yellow envelope from my bag. I had been assigned one off-site case: two young girls. Nothing in the case jumped out at me other than wondering what on earth an eleven-year-old would need with birth control. According to the file, she and her sister had received their first shot three months ago and were due for the next one.

"You got anybody interesting?" she asked.

I wanted to tell her that was a dumb question. This wasn't a talent search. Alicia had been trained as a nurse at Good Samaritan in Selma. She was pretty in a plain way, and there was a ready smile beneath her features. At one point, Mrs. Seager had asked, What do you find so funny, Miss Downs? and Alicia had answered, Nothing, ma'am. I just felt a sneeze coming on. Then her face had gone dull and blank. Mrs. Seager glared at her for a moment before continuing with her instructions on how to properly clean a bathroom toilet in a medical facility.

"Not really." I didn't know how much I was allowed to reveal about my cases. Mrs. Seager hadn't said much of anything about privacy. "Two school-age girls on birth control shots."

"Well, I've got a woman with six kids."

"Six?"

"You heard right."

"Well, you better make it over there quick before it's seven."

Excerpted from Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Copyright © 2022 by Dolen Perkins-Valdez. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.