The Dodge Colt in Take My Hand: A Symbol of Privilege, Concealment, and Divided Loyalties

What the Dodge Colt Is and Where It Appears in the Novel

The Dodge Colt is the new car Civil Townsend receives as a graduation gift from her father after completing her nursing degree at Tuskegee in 1972. In the novel's 1973 timeline, it is the vehicle she drives to her first job at the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic. The car functions as a concrete marker of the Townsend family's class position: Civil's father is a doctor, the family lives on Centennial Hill, and the Colt is a brand-new automobile purchased for a young woman just starting her career.

The Colt appears most prominently in Chapter 3, when Civil begins work at the clinic. She parks it a block and a half away from the building to hide it, and by the end of her first day she has asked her mother to trade cars with her so she can drive the older Pinto instead. The car resurfaces decades later in the 2016 frame narrative, when Civil—now a physician in Memphis—reflects on how much she loved the Colt and mourned selling it.

Privilege Made Visible

The Colt is the novel's most direct symbol of class privilege. Civil's father is a doctor, and the car is a graduation gift—an expense that would be unthinkable for most families in the novel's world. The Williamses, by contrast, live in a single room on a white farmer's property, and Mace's truck is so unreliable that he takes the bus to work at the pickle factory. When Civil drives Mace to apply for the Dixie Court apartment in Chapter 16, she runs low on gas because, as she admits, she is