The Hymn 'Take My Hand, Precious Lord' as a Symbol in Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

What the Hymn Is and Where It Appears

“Take My Hand, Precious Lord” is a gospel hymn that gives Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s novel its title. The book opens with an epigraph recording Martin Luther King Jr.’s reported final words, spoken on April 4, 1968—the day he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. In the epigraph, King addresses a man named Ben and instructs him to play the hymn at the meeting scheduled for that evening, asking that it be played “real pretty.” The epigraph contains no other content; it functions as a brief opening that precedes the first full narrative chapter.

The hymn’s placement at the very front of the book does several things at once. It situates the narrative within the civil rights movement and the period following King’s death. It also establishes a tonal register of faith and spiritual resilience that carries through the novel. The title itself—Take My Hand—invites readers to hear the hymn’s opening plea as a frame for the story that follows.

The Epigraph: A Final Request

The epigraph’s date carries enormous historical weight. April 4, 1968, was the day King was assassinated in Memphis. By recording King’s request that the hymn be played “real pretty” at the meeting that evening, the epigraph captures a moment of profound vulnerability and hope. King’s reported last words are not a political statement or a call to action; they are a request for music, for comfort, for something beautiful in the face of danger.

This detail matters for how the novel frames its own story. The novel is set primarily in 1973, five years after King’s death, in Montgomery, Alabama—the city where the civil rights movement’s bus boycott began. The epigraph connects the novel’s fictional events to a real historical moment of loss and resilience. The hymn that King requested becomes a symbol of the movement’s spiritual foundation: the faith that sustained activists through violence, intimidation, and institutional betrayal.

The Hymn as Personal Faith

The hymn’s promise—that God will take the believer’s hand and lead them through hardship—resonates with Civil Townsend’s own spiritual journey. In Chapter 24, Civil reflects on her religious upbringing. Her family were “irregular churchgoing Christians,” attending services mainly on Easter, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. She describes herself as a “gratitude-prayer type,” someone who thanked God for food, family, and shelter rather than asking for intercession.

That changes when she has an abortion. For the first time in her life, Civil asks God for something: forgiveness. She reflects that she never doubted the abortion was the right decision, but she had been raised to believe such a thing was a sin, and that kind of upbringing was hard to shake. The emotional pendulum between guilt and anger takes months to level out. After the sisters’ surgery—the sterilization that should never have happened—Civil experiences the same pendulum swing. When her mother invites her to church in July 1973, Civil agrees because she has unfinished business in that place of worship.

In church, Civil finds something the hymn’s title promises: a hand to hold. She describes Black churches in Montgomery as more than buildings, more than houses of worship. They captured the community’s collective activism and organized its frustrations. The church is grounding for her mother, who finds stability and calm there. For Civil, sitting in church with her mother, she can momentarily forget that the girls are at home recovering from a surgery that never should have happened. She can listen to the music and hum along with the hymn, finding solace in the notion that God knew how much burden they could bear. That first Sunday, she is overcome by a moment of peace she wants to last forever.

This passage connects the hymn’s symbolic meaning to the novel’s central concerns. The hymn represents the possibility of comfort in the face of institutional violence. It offers a framework for bearing burdens that should not be borne alone. But the peace Civil finds is temporary—she wants it to last forever, which implies it does not.

The Hymn and Collective Action

The hymn’s symbolism extends beyond individual comfort to collective struggle. In Chapter 34, after the nurses have begun investigating the sterilization cases, Val asks to lead a prayer. The eight nurses join hands and close their eyes. Civil, who admits her respect for Val had diminished over time, is moved by the power of the older woman’s prayer and the conviction behind it. She imagines that anyone seeing through the blinds that night would have seen eight grieving nurses joined together in a fight they believed was just.

This moment echoes the epigraph’s image of a meeting where a hymn would be played. King’s request for “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” was for a meeting—a gathering of people engaged in collective struggle. The nurses’ prayer circle is a similar gathering: people joined together, seeking strength from a shared faith tradition, preparing to act. The hymn’s title becomes a description of what these moments do: they take each other’s hands.

The connection between the hymn and collective action is also present in Civil’s description of Black churches in Montgomery. These churches did not merely provide comfort; they organized frustration and captured activism. The hymn, in this context, is not just a private consolation but a public resource—a way of sustaining a community under pressure.

How the Hymn’s Meaning Changes

The hymn’s meaning shifts across the novel’s registers. In the epigraph, it is a historical artifact: King’s final request, a detail preserved in the record of his assassination. It carries the weight of a movement’s loss and the poignancy of a man asking for something beautiful on the day of his death.

In the novel’s fictional world, the hymn’s promise of divine guidance takes on a more complicated cast. The characters who need God’s hand most—Erica and India Williams, their grandmother, the poor Black women of Montgomery—are betrayed by the institutions that were supposed to care for them. The federally funded agency that sterilizes the sisters without consent is the same kind of institution that, in the novel’s historical context, had recently been exposed in the Tuskegee syphilis study. The hymn’s promise that God will lead the believer through hardship does not prevent the hardship from happening.

Civil’s own faith is tested by what she witnesses. She asks God for forgiveness after her abortion and experiences guilt and anger in equal measure. After the sisters’ surgery, she swings between the same emotions. The hymn’s comfort is real but partial. It helps Civil bear her burden; it does not remove the burden.

The Author’s Note extends this tension into the present. Perkins-Valdez writes that reproductive justice remains elusive for African American women and cites later sterilization cases in California prisons, Nashville plea deals, and ICE detainment facilities. The hymn’s promise of divine guidance has not been matched by institutional justice. The novel’s title, then, carries an ironic undertone: the hand that is offered is not always the hand that is needed.

Character and Theme Connections

The hymn connects most directly to Civil Townsend’s arc. Her journey from a young nurse who believes she can help within the system to a woman who recognizes the system’s failures is mirrored in her faith journey. She begins as a gratitude-prayer type, someone who does not ask for much. She learns to ask—for forgiveness, for peace, for the strength to act. The hymn’s plea, “Take my hand,” becomes her own.

The Williams family represents the other side of the hymn’s promise. The girls’ grandmother, Mrs. Williams, tells Civil that “they can always take it away” and that nobody ever taught Civil what they can take. Her fear is that nothing is truly hers—not her home, not her grandchildren, not her agency. The hymn’s promise of a divine hand that holds and protects stands in stark contrast to a world where hands take.

The novel’s themes of reproductive injustice and coerced sterilization, medical racism and the legacy of Tuskegee, and poverty, illiteracy, and institutional vulnerability are all connected to the hymn’s symbolism. The hymn represents the spiritual resilience that sustains people through these injustices, but it also raises the question of why such resilience should be necessary. The novel does not answer that question; it holds the tension. Guilt, memory, and the long reckoning with complicity also resonate with the hymn’s promise of forgiveness and peace, while the ethics of care and the limits of good intentions surface in Civil’s struggle to reconcile her role as a caregiver with the harm done under her watch.

Study Questions

1. Why does the novel open with Martin Luther King Jr.’s reported last words requesting “Take My Hand, Precious Lord”?

The epigraph establishes the novel’s historical and spiritual context. King’s request for the hymn on the day of his assassination connects the fictional story of the Williams sisters to the real history of the civil rights movement and its losses. The hymn’s promise of divine guidance frames the novel’s exploration of faith, resilience, and institutional betrayal. The epigraph also gives the novel its title, inviting readers to hear the hymn’s plea as a frame for the entire narrative.

2. How does Civil Townsend’s relationship to faith change over the course of the novel?

Civil begins as a “gratitude-prayer type” who does not ask God for intercession. Her abortion forces her to ask for forgiveness for the first time, and she experiences a pendulum of guilt and anger. After the sisters’ sterilization, she returns to church with her mother and finds a moment of peace in the music and the community. Her faith becomes a resource for bearing burdens, but the peace she finds is temporary. The novel suggests that faith can sustain but not resolve the moral and emotional weight of what she has witnessed.

3. What role does the church play in the novel’s depiction of Black community life?

Civil describes Black churches in Montgomery as more than buildings or houses of worship: they captured the community’s collective activism and organized its frustrations. The church is a place of both personal comfort and collective organization. It grounds Civil’s mother, provides Civil with a moment of peace, and connects individual faith to the broader struggle for justice. The nurses’ prayer circle in Chapter 34 extends this pattern, showing faith as a resource for collective action.

4. How does the hymn’s promise of divine guidance interact with the novel’s depiction of institutional failure?

The hymn promises that God will take the believer’s hand and lead them through hardship. The novel depicts institutions—the federally funded agency that sterilizes the sisters, the medical establishment implicated in the Tuskegee study—that fail the people they are supposed to serve. The hymn’s comfort is real but partial: it helps Civil bear her burden, but it does not prevent the burden from existing. The novel holds this tension, suggesting that spiritual resilience and institutional justice are both necessary and neither is sufficient alone.