by Lisa Wingate
Would I trade the son I bore for a different son, for more children, for a daughter to comfort me in my old age? Would I give up the husbands I loved and buried, the music, the symphonies, the lights of Hollywood, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who live far distant but have my eyes?
I ponder this as I sit on the wooden bench, Judy’s hand in mine, the two of us quietly sharing yet another Sisters’ Day. Here in the gardens at Magnolia Manor, we’re able to have Sisters’ Day anytime we like. It is as easy as leaving my room, and walking to the next hall, and telling the attendant, “I believe I’ll take my dear friend Judy out for a little stroll. Oh yes, of course, I’ll be certain she’s delivered safely back to the Memory Care Unit. You know I always do.”
Sometimes, my sister and I laugh over our clever ruse. “We’re really sisters, not friends,” I remind her. “But don’t tell them. It’s our secret.”
“I won’t tell.” She smiles in her sweet way. “But sisters are friends as well. Sisters are special friends.”
We recall our many Sisters’ Day adventures from years past, and she begs me to share what I remember of Queenie and Briny and our life on the river. I tell her of days and seasons with Camellia, and Lark, and Fern, and Gabion, and Silas, and Old Zede. I speak of quiet backwaters and rushing currents, the midsummer ballet of dragonflies and winter ice floes that allowed men to walk over water. Together, we travel the living river. We turn our faces to the sunlight and fly time and time again home to Kingdom Arcadia.
Other days, my sister knows me not at all other than as a neighbor here in this old manor house. But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present as a pulse.
“Aren’t they so very sweet?” Judy points to the young couple strolling the garden paths near Manor Lake, hand in hand. They make a lovely picture together.
I pat Judy’s arm gently. “That is your granddaughter. I imagine she’s come here to visit with you. And she’s brought her beau along. He’s a looker, that one. I told her the first time I saw them together, he was a keeper. I recognize a spark when I see it.”
“Oh, of course, my granddaughter.” Judy pretends to have known it all along. Some days she would have, but not on this particular day. “And her beau.” She squints toward the garden path. “I’m having trouble calling up the names just now. My silly mind, you know.”
“Avery.”
“Oh yes…Avery.”
“And Trent.”
“We knew a Trent Turner once, didn’t we? He was a dear man. He sold the cottage lots adjacent to the Edisto place, I think.”
“Yes, he did. That is his grandson coming up the walk with Avery.”
“Well, do tell.” Judy waves enthusiastically, and Avery waves in response. Then she and her beau disappear momentarily behind the arbor. They don’t come out as quickly as they might.
Judy presses a hand over her mouth, chuckling. “Oh my.”
“Indeed.” I remember lost loves and loves that never were. “We Fosses have always been an impassioned lot. I don’t suppose that will ever change.”
“I don’t believe it ever should,” Judy agrees, and we fall together in the sweet embrace of sisters, laughing at our own secrets.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
As you close these pages, perhaps you’re wondering, How much of this story is true? That question is, in some ways, difficult to answer. If you’d like to dig more deeply into the real-life history of baby farms, orphanages, changes in adoption, Georgia Tann, and the scandal surrounding the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, you’ll find excellent information in Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children by Viviana A. Zelizer (1985), Babies for Sale: The Tennessee Children’s Home Adoption Scandal by Linda Tollett Austin (1993), Alone in the World: Orphans and Orphanages in America by Catherine Reef (2005), and The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Bisantz Raymond (2007), which also contains interviews with several of Georgia Tann’s victims. For a view of the scandal as it broke, see the original Report to Governor Gordon Browning on Shelby County Branch, Tennessee Children’s Home Society (1951), which is available through the public library system. There are also many newspaper and magazine articles available about the scandal as it happened and about the reunions of birth families in later years, as well as coverage in episodes of 60 Minutes, Unsolved Mysteries, and Investigation Discovery’s Deadly Women. All of these sources were invaluable to me as research materials.
The Foss children and the Arcadia were formed from the dust of imagination and the muddy waters of the Mississippi River. Though Rill and her siblings exist only in these pages, their experiences mirror those reported by children who were taken from their families from the 1920s through 1950.
The true story of Georgia Tann and the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society is a bizarre and sad paradox. There is little doubt that the organization rescued many children from deplorable, dangerous circumstances, or simply accepted children who were unwanted and placed them in loving homes. There is also little doubt that countless children were taken from loving parents without cause or due process and never seen again by their desperately grieving biological families. Survivor accounts bear out that empty-armed birth mothers pined for their missing children for decades and that many of those children were placed in holding facilities where they were neglected, molested, abused, and treated as objects.
Single mothers, indigent parents, women in mental wards, and those seeking help through welfare services and maternity clinics were particular targets. Birth mothers were duped into signing paperwork while under postpartum sedation, were told that turning over temporary custody was necessary to secure medical treatment for their children, or were often simply informed that their babies had died. Children who lived through stints in the home’s custody––those who were old enough to have memories of their prior lives––reported having been whisked from front porches, from roadsides while walking to school, and, yes, from houseboats on the river. Essentially, if you were poor and you lived, stayed, or stopped over in the proximity of Memphis, your children were at risk.
Blonds like the Foss siblings were particularly popular in Georgia Tann’s system and were often targeted by “spotters” who worked in medical facilities and public aid clinics. Average residents of the city, while unaware of her methods, were not unaware of her work. For years, citizens watched for newspaper advertisements bearing photos of adorable babies and children, underscored by captions like “Yours For the Asking,” “Want a Real, Live Christmas Present?” and “George Wants to Play Catch, But He Needs a Daddy.” Georgia Tann was heralded as the “Mother of Modern Adoption” and was even consulted by Eleanor Roosevelt on matters of child welfare.
To the general public, Tann was simply a matronly, well-meaning woman who devoted her life to rescuing children in need. Her celebration of children adopted by wealthy, well-known families helped to popularize the idea of adoption in general and dispel the widespread belief that orphaned children were undesirable and inherently damaged. Georgia’s high-profile list included political figures such as New York governor Herbert Lehman and Hollywood celebrities such as Joan Crawford and June Allyson and her husband, Dick Powell. Former staff members of Tann’s orphanage in Memphis whispered of as many as seven babies at a time being spirited away under cover of darkness for transportation to “foster homes” in California, New York, and other states. In reality, these children were often being shipped off to profitable out-of-state adoptions in which Tann pocketed the lion’s share of the exorbitant delivery fees. When interviewed about her methods, Georgia unabashedly extolled the virtues of removing children from lowly parents who could not possibly raise them properly and placing them with people of “high type.”
From a modern perspective, it’s hard to imagine how Georgia Tann and her network managed to
operate largely unchecked for decades or where she found workers willing to turn a blind eye to the inhumane treatment of children in the organization’s group homes and in unlicensed boarding facilities, like the one where Rill and her siblings land, yet it happened. At one point, the U.S. Children’s Bureau sent an investigator to Memphis to probe the city’s soaring infant mortality rate. In a four-month period in 1945, a dysentery epidemic had caused the deaths of forty to fifty children under the care of Georgia’s facility, despite the efforts of a doctor who volunteered medical services there. Georgia, however, insisted that only two children had been lost. Under pressure, the state legislature passed a law mandating the licensing of every children’s boarding home in Tennessee. The newly passed legislation included a subsection providing an exemption for all boarding homes employed by Georgia Tann’s agency.
While Mrs. Murphy and her home in the story are fictional, Rill’s experiences there were inspired by those reported by survivors. There were also many who, due to abuse, neglect, illness, or inadequate medical attention, did not live to tell their stories. They are the silent victims of an unregulated system fueled by greed and financial opportunity. Estimates as to the number of children who may have simply vanished under Georgia Tann’s management range as high as five hundred. Thousands more disappeared into adoptions for profit in which names, birth dates, and birth records were altered to prevent biological families from finding their children.
One would assume, given these awful statistics, that Georgia Tann’s reign would have eventually ended amid a firestorm of public revelations, police inquiries, and legal action. If Before We Were Yours were entirely fictional, that’s how I would have written its end, with scenes of swift and certain justice. Sadly, this was not the case. Georgia’s many years in the adoption business did not draw to a close until 1950. At a press conference that September, Governor Gordon Browning skirted the heartbreaking human tragedy of it all and instead discussed the money––Miss Tann, he reported, had benefited illegally to the tune of $1 million (equivalent to roughly $10 million today) while employed by the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. Despite the revelation of her crimes, Tann was, by then, beyond the reach of legal action. Within days of the press conference, she succumbed to uterine cancer and died at home in her own bed. A newspaper exposé ran opposite her obituary on the front page of the local paper. Her children’s home was closed and an investigator appointed, but he soon found himself stymied by powerful people with secrets, reputations, and, in some cases, adoptions to preserve.
While the closing of the home gave grieving birth families reason to hope, that hope was quickly snatched from them. Legislators and political power brokers passed laws legalizing even the most questionable of her adoptions and sealing the records. Of the twenty-two wards remaining in Tann’s care at the time of her death, only two—who had already been rejected by their adopted families—were returned to their birth parents. Thousands of birth families would never know what became of their children. The general public sentiment was that, having been given over from poverty to privilege, the children were better off where they were, no matter the circumstances of their adoptions.
While some adoptees, separated siblings, and birth families were able to find one another through pieced-together memories, documents spirited from courthouse files, and the assistance of private investigators, Georgia Tann’s records would not finally be opened to her victims until 1995. For many birth parents and adoptees, who grieved their losses throughout their lifetimes, that was simply too late. For others, it was the beginning of long-delayed family reunions and the opportunity to finally tell their own stories.
If there is one overarching lesson to be learned from the Foss children and from the true-life story of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, it is that babies and children, no matter what corner of the world they hail from, are not commodities, or objects, or blank slates, as Georgia Tann so often represented her wards; they are human beings with histories, and needs, and hopes, and dreams of their own.
For the hundreds who vanished
and for the thousands who didn’t.
May your stories
not be forgotten.
For those who help today’s orphans
find forever homes.
May you always know the value
of your work
and your love.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Story people are a bit like real people—no matter where their humble beginnings may lie, their journeys are shaped by family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and all manner of acquaintances. Some encourage them, some guide them, some offer them unconditional love, some teach them, some challenge them to be their best. This story, like most stories, owes its existence to a village of unique and generous individuals.
First and foremost, I am thankful to my family for supporting me through all these writing years, even when it meant late nights, crazy schedules, and foraging for whatever was left in the kitchen. Particular thanks this year goes to my eldest son for falling in love and finally adding a girl to the family. Not only is a wedding a great distraction from editing, writing, rewriting, and editing some more, but now at long last I have someone who doesn’t mind riding to book events with me and talking all the way there and back.
Thank you to my mother for being my official assistant, and also a fabulous first reader. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a helper who will tell you when your hair or your last chapter needs a little spiffing up. Thank you to my sweet mother-in-law for helping with address lists and for loving my grown-too-soon boys, and to Paw-paw for making sure that the next generation of Wingates knows how to tell a great tale around the dinner table. Thanks also to relatives and friends far and near for loving me and helping me and hosting me as I travel. You’re the best.
I’m grateful to special friends-who-are-like-family, especially Ed Stevens for research help and constant encouragement, and Steve and Rosemary Fitts for hosting us on Edisto Island. If there’s a better place to go for a research trip, I haven’t been there yet. Thanks also to the fabulous team who help with early readings and tour plans: Duane Davis, Mary Davis, Virginia Rush, and last but not least, my wonderful Aunt Sandy, who has a great sense of plotlines and an equally great sense of humor. To Kathie Bennett and Susan Zurenda of Magic Time Literary, thank you for having planned great book tours in the past, for jumping behind this book from its earliest stages, and for working with gusto to bring it to the world.
On the publishing side, I am forever in debt to my fabulous agent, Elisabeth Weed, for encouraging me to write the book and then working expertly to make sure it found just the right publishing home. Thank you to editor extraordinaire Susanna Porter for pushing me to deepen the experiences of the Foss children and Avery’s journey into her family’s hidden past. Thank you to the fabulous publishing team behind this book: Kara Welsh, Kim Hovey, Jennifer Hershey, Scott Shannon, Susan Corcoran, Melanie DeNardo, Kristin Fassler, Debbie Aroff, Lynn Andreozzi, Toby Ernst, Beth Pearson, and Emily Hartley. There are no words to express how much I appreciate each of you and your bringing this story to the market with such tender loving care. Loads of gratitude are also due to the teams in art, design, production, marketing, publicity, and sales. Thank you for contributing your incredible talents. Without your work, stories would literally sit on shelves undiscovered and unread. You connect books to readers, and in doing that, you connect people to one another. If books can change the world, those of you who help bring them to the world are the change agents.
Lastly, I’m grateful to the many readers who have shared past journeys with me and are now sharing this one. I treasure you. I treasure the time we spend together through story. Thank you for picking up this book. Thank you for recommending my past books to friends, suggesting them to book clubs, and taking time to send little notes of encouragement my way via email, Facebook, and Twitter. I’m indebted to all of you who read these stories and also to the booksellers who sell them with
such devotion. As Mr. Rogers once said, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
You, my friends, are the helpers.
And for that, I am most grateful.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LISA WINGATE is a former journalist, an inspirational speaker, and the bestselling author of more than twenty novels. Her work has won or been nominated for many awards, including the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize, the Oklahoma Book Award, the Carol Award, the Christy Award, and the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award. Wingate lives in the Ouachita Mountains of southwest Arkansas.
lisawingate.com
Facebook.com/LisaWingateAuthorPage
@LisaWingate
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