by Lisa Wingate
Over the course of three decades, children under the care of TCHS are reported to have disappeared en masse, their paperwork often vanishing along with them, leaving no record of their lives. If biological family members came looking for information or petitioned the courts, they were simply told that the children had been adopted and the records were sealed.
Operating under the protection of Boss Crump, Memphis’s notorious political kingpin, Georgia Tann’s network was seemingly untouchable.
The remainder of the article gives details about the brokering of children to wealthy parents and Hollywood celebrities, the grieving birth families left behind, the allegations of physical and sexual abuse. The last lines are a quote from a man who runs a website called The Lost Lambs.
“The Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society had scouts everywhere—at social services offices, at rural medical clinics, in poor neighborhoods and shacktowns. Babies were often given to social workers and officials who might stand in Tann’s way. Adoptive parents were sometimes blackmailed for more money, threatened with having their adopted children taken from them. Georgia Tann cultivated the protection of Boss Crump and the family court system. Ultimately, she enjoyed the freedom to alter lives at her discretion. She played God and seemingly had no regrets. In the end, Georgia Tann died of cancer before she could be forced to answer charges. Powerful people wanted to see the case closed, and so it was.”
“This is…” I pause to search for a word. I’m about to say incredible, but it isn’t the right term. “Appalling. It’s hard to imagine that something like this could happen, and on such a large scale…for years.”
“TCHS wasn’t forced to close until 1950.” Clearly, Trent shares my mix of horror, astonishment, and rage. Mary Sykes’s story of touching her dying sister makes me think of my nieces and nephews and the bonds they have with their siblings. Courtney used to climb into the triplets’ cribs and fall asleep with them if she heard them crying at night.
“I just can’t…I can’t imagine.” I’ve prosecuted abuse cases and corruption cases, but this is so large-scale. Dozens and dozens of people must have known what was happening. “How could everyone have just ignored this?”
It dawns on me then. I have family from Tennessee. They were political, influential. They held various state, judicial, and federal offices. Were they aware of this? Did they turn a blind eye to it? Was that the reason Grandma Judy involved herself with Trent Turner, Sr.? Was she trying to right the family wrongs?
Maybe she didn’t want it to come out that her family had cooperated with these monstrous acts, perhaps even supported them?
The blood drains from my head, and I reach out to steady myself on the wall. My cheeks feel cold despite the warmth of the summer day.
Trent’s face offers concern as he stands poised to open the door. “You’re sure?”
He doesn’t look any more certain than I am. We’re like two kids trying to dare ourselves into forbidden territory. Is he hoping I’ll change my mind and spare both of us whatever details await?
“The truth always comes out sooner or later. I’m of the belief that you’re better off knowing about it first.” But even as I say it, I wonder. My entire life, I’ve been so certain that we were above reproach. That our family was an open book. Maybe that was naïve of me. What if, all these years, I’ve been wrong?
Trent looks down at his shoes, kicks a loose shell off the porch decking. It bounces against a red toy tractor that looks particularly poignant at this moment. “I’m afraid what I’m going to find out in here is that my grandfather’s adoption was something like the ones in that article where it mentions giving kids to government officials to keep them quiet. My granddad’s adoptive father was a Memphis police sergeant. They weren’t the kind of people who would’ve had a bunch of money to fund an expensive adoption….” He trails off as if he doesn’t want to put any more words to the story, but in his eyes there’s a mirror of my own fear. Do we carry the guilt from the sins of past generations? If so, can we bear the weight of that burden?
Trent opens the door and, perhaps, the mystery.
Inside, the cottage is low-roofed and shadow-filled. The white plank walls are crackled and faded, and window glass hangs crooked in the wooden frames. The air smells of dust and mildew and something else that takes a moment to register. Pipe tobacco. The odor instantly reminds me of my Grandpa Stafford. His office at the Lagniappe house always held this scent and still does.
Trent flips on the light, and the bulb flickers stubbornly in a Deco-era fixture that is out of step with the rest of the place.
We move into the tiny one-room structure. It contains a large desk that looks as if it could have been bought at a library sale, two file cabinets, a small wooden table, and a couple odd chairs. An old, black rotary phone still sits on the desktop. There’s a canister of wooden pencils, a stapler, a three-hole punch, an ashtray that hasn’t been cleaned, a gooseneck desk lamp, an electric typewriter in faded olive green. Shelves along the back wall sag under their load of stacked file folders, aging binders, loose papers, magazines, and books.
Trent sighs, running a hand through his hair. He seems too big for this small space. His head is only about six inches from the rafters, which I see now are hand-hewn with notches in them, most likely salvaged shipwreck timbers.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
He shakes his head, then shrugs, indicating a hat, a vintage umbrella with a dragon carved into the handle, and a pair of blue boat shoes. All three wait by the coat hooks, seemingly in hopes of their owner returning. “It feels like he’s here, you know? He smelled like this place most of the time.”
Trent opens the blinds, illuminating the bulletin boards that line the walls.
“Look,” I whisper, dust catching in my throat.
There are literally dozens of photos, some bearing the bold colors of modern photography, some in the washed-out hues of old Polaroids, some in shades of black and gray with white frames around the edges bearing dates: July 1941, December 1936, April 1952…
Trent and I stand side by side, staring at the wall, each lost in our own thoughts, awed and horrified at once. I take in images—children’s faces juxtaposed with adult faces. The resemblances are evident. These are mothers and fathers and kids, presumably birth families who were separated from one another. The children’s pictures now hang next to more recent photos of the adults they became.
I look into the eyes of a beautiful woman, her smile vibrant, her hip jutting out as she rests a baby on it. An oversized dress and an apron hang loose on her frame, making her seem like a child playing dress-up. She couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen.
What could you tell me? I wonder. What happened to you?
Beside me, Trent thumbs a few of the photos. There are even more underneath them, images layered over images. Trent Senior was thorough in his work.
“There’s nothing on the backs,” Trent observes. “I guess that’s why he didn’t worry about asking me to take care of these. You wouldn’t be able to tell who they were unless you knew already.”
Sadness tinges my thoughts, but it’s a vague feeling. My attention is focused on a photo of four women, standing arm in arm on a beach. Even though the picture is black-and-white, I imagine the bright colors of their sixties-era sundresses and broad-brimmed hats. I can see the golden glint of sunlight on their long blond curls.
One of the women is my grandmother. She’s holding her hat in place. The dragonfly bracelet dangles from her wrist.
The other three women bear a resemblance to my grandmother. Same blond curls, same pale eyes, probably blue. They could easily be relatives, yet I don’t recognize any of them.
Each wears a dragonfly bracelet that matches my grandmother’s.
In the background, just out of focus, little boys squat by the tide line, their knees poking upward as they labor over buckets and sand towers.
Is one of them my father?
I reach for t
he photo, and Trent stretches up to take it down for me. When he pulls the thumbtack, something small and white falls, drifting like a kite losing the wind. It’s familiar even before I bend to pick it up.
A larger version of it rests in a pearlescent frame in May Crandall’s nursing home room.
A voice disturbs the air, but I’m so focused I almost don’t realize I’m the one who’s speaking. “I’ve seen this photo before.”
CHAPTER 18
Rill
The house is black as pitch inside. There’s no lights left burning, and the curtains block the moon outside the bedroom windows. Around me, kids rustle in their beds and whimper and grind their teeth in their sleep. After all that time trapped in the basement by myself, it’s a comfort to be with anybody, but, truth is, this is no safe place. These girls tell tales. They say Riggs comes at night sometimes and gets whoever he wants—mostly the little kids he can carry easy.
I’m too big to carry. I hope. But I don’t want to find out.
Quiet as a shadow, I slide from under my blanket and tiptoe across the floor. I already walked it real careful before getting into my new bed tonight. I know where the squeaky boards are. I know how many steps it is to the door, how many to the stairs, the safest way past the parlor room off the kitchen where the workers will be dozing off in their chairs. James told me all about going downstairs to the kitchen at night to steal Mrs. Murphy’s tea cakes. I know just how he got away with it.
But all the things James had figured out didn’t save him in the end, so I need to be careful about sneaking out to tell Silas I’m waiting here for Fern to get back. Soon’s she does, I’ll grab her up, and we’ll slip off in the dark, and Silas will take us home to the river, and all the terrible times will finally be over.
What if Briny and Queenie don’t want me back after what I’ve done? Maybe they’ll hate me as much as I hate myself. Maybe they’ll look at the skinny, sad girl I am now and see someone nobody wants.
I shush my mind, because your mind can ruin you if you let it. I have to pay attention, to do everything right so I don’t get caught.
It’s not as hard as I thought it would be. I’m down the back stairs in no time. A small circle of light seeps from the room off the kitchen. Someone’s snoring loud inside. Near the door, a pair of feet in heavy white shoes is flopped outward like moth wings. I don’t even look to see whose they are. I just slip around the wall by the stove, staying in the shadow like James talked about. My toes test each new floorboard, real careful. The ragged hem of my nightgown catches on the oven’s rough iron surface. I imagine it making noise, but really it doesn’t.
The screen door in the washroom squeaks a little when I tug it open. I stop, hold my breath, stretch my ears toward the house, listen.
There’s nothing.
Soft as a whisper, I go on out. The porch boards are wet with dew, just like the deck of the Arcadia. Overhead, katydids and crickets give the sky a heartbeat, and a million stars shine like far-off campfires. The half-moon hangs heavy, rocking on its back. Its twin rides the ripples in the rain barrel as I pass.
All of a sudden, I’m home again. I’m wrapped in the blanket of night and stars. The blanket is part of me, and I am part of it. No one can touch me. No one can tell one of us from the other.
Bullfrogs croak, and dark birds call as I run across the yard, the thin white gown skimming my legs, light as milkweed silk. Near the back fence, I cling close to the holly bushes, give a whippoorwill’s call.
An echo answers. I smile and breathe in the sweet, heavy smell of jasmine and hurry toward the sound, pushing my way along the big boys’ tunnel until I’m there at the fence. Silas is on the other side. In the moon shadows, I can’t see his face, only the outline of his applejack hat and his knobby legs bent up like a frog’s. He reaches through the bars for me.
“Let’s go,” he whispers, then locks on to one of the bars like he means to pull it loose with his bare hands. “I cut this one most of the way through. It oughta…”
Grabbing his hand, I stop him. If he opens the hole, the big boys will see it in the morning when they come to their hideout. “I can’t.” Everything inside me screams, Go! Run! “I can’t leave yet. Fern’s coming back. The people who took her don’t want her anymore. I have to wait till tomorrow night, so I can bring her with me.”
“You gotta get away now. I’ll come back here for Fern.”
Doubts dart through my mind, skittering this way and that. “No. Once they know I’m gone, once they see the hole in the fence, we’ll never get her out of here. I can sneak away again tomorrow night. And there’s another little boy, Stevie. He’s from the river too. I can’t just leave him here.” How am I gonna manage it? I know where Stevie sleeps, but getting him from the toddler room and bringing Fern and not letting anyone see us…
It doesn’t seem possible.
Even so, Silas being here makes me sure of myself. It makes me brave. I feel like I can do anything. I’ll find a way. I can’t leave Fern or Stevie here. They belong to the river. They belong to us. Mrs. Murphy and Miss Tann stole enough from me already. I want it back. I want to be Rill Foss again.
Before this is over, I’ll find all my sisters and my baby brother and bring them home to the Arcadia. That’s what I’ll do.
Silas reaches out, and his long, thin arms circle me. I lean toward him, and his cap tumbles off. His forehead rests against my cheek, his raven’s-wing hair tickling my face.
“I don’t want you to go back in there.” He slides a hand over my hair, soft and careful. My heart speeds up.
It’s all I can do not to bust through the fence right now. “It’s only one more day.”
“I’ll be here tomorrow night,” Silas promises.
He kisses me on the cheek. Something new shivers through me, and I close my eyes hard against the feeling.
Leaving him there is as hard as anything I ever did in my life. As I crawl off, he packs mud on the bars so nobody’ll see the fresh cuts in the metal. If one of the big boys happens to lean against the fence while they’re in their tunnel, I hope it doesn’t break.
I’m back to the house and up the stairs without even breathing again, it feels like. At the top, I check the hall and listen for sounds before starting around the railing where we line up for our baths. There’s nothing but moon shadows from the stairway window and sleep noises. One of the little kids talks in his dreams. I freeze, but then he goes quiet just as quick.
Only fifteen more steps and I’ll be back in my room again. I’ve made it. Nobody will know where I went. Tomorrow, it’ll be even easier now that I’ve done it once. James was right. It’s not that tough to get away with things here, if you’re smart.
I can fool all of them. The idea swells inside me. It makes me feel like I took something from them, something they stole that was mine. Power. I’ve got power now. When we’re safe on the Arcadia, the river carrying us far away from here, I’ll forget all about this place. I’ll never tell anybody what happened here. It’ll be like it never happened at all.
A bad dream with bad people in it.
I’m so caught in the idea, I step wrong. A floorboard creaks under my foot. I hold back a gasp, look down, then decide the best thing I can do is hurry on in case one of the workers shows up. If I’m in the bed, they won’t have any way to know who was—
I almost don’t see Mr. Riggs till I’m right on top of him. He’s coming out of the toddler room. He stumbles back, and so do I. His shoulder hits the wall, and he whispers, “Ooof.”
I turn to rush off, but he grabs me by a fistful of nightgown and hair. His big hand clamps over my mouth and nose. I smell sweat and whiskey, tobacco and coal ash. He bends my head back so far, I think, He’ll snap my neck right here. He’ll snap my neck and drop me down the stairs and say I fell. That’s how it ends….
I strain my eyes to see him. He looks around, tries to decide where he can take me. I can’t let him get me to the basement. If he does, I’m dead. I know it. Fern wil
l come back tomorrow, and I won’t be here.
Checking the stairs, he wobbles on his feet. His boot comes down hard over my toe, and stars shoot across my eyes, and I moan. He clamps his hand harder, cutting off my air. I hear my backbone crack. I twist and push and try to get free, but he only crushes me tighter against him, lifting me off my feet and dragging me down the hall into the shadows by the bathroom door. His fingers fumble for the handle to open it. I whimper and struggle and pull until finally he growls low in his throat and pins me to the wall so he can get at the door. His belly crushes my chest, and blackness circles around my eyes, and my lungs choke for air.
His face comes close to my ear. “Y-you and me can b-b-be friends. I can git ya p-peppermints and c-c-cookies. Anythin’ y-you want. We can b-b-be best friends.” He rubs his cheek along my chin and my shoulder, his whiskers scrubbing hard as he smells my hair, then sticks his face in around the neck of my nighty. “Y-you smell like out-outside. Y-you b-been meetin’ one of the b-big boys down there? Y-you got a b-boyfriend again?”
His voice seems like it’s coming from far off, echoing the way foghorns do on the river’s cold mornings. My knees buckle. My feet go prickly and numb. I can’t feel the wall or him. My ribs jerk like a fish’s gills when it’s hanging on the stringer.
I see sparkle fairies. They dance wild in the dark.
No! I tell myself. No! But there’s nothing left to fight with. My body’s gone. Maybe I’ll suffocate and die. I hope so.
Just as quick, he lets loose of me, and cool rushes in where his body was, and a breath pours into my belly. I slide down the wall and land in a pile, dizzy, blinking and trying to push off the floor.
“Mr. Riggs?” The sharp voice of a worker comes from the stairway. “What are you doing up here at this hour?”