The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  Several other babies, “normal in every way,” were placed for adoption. So were the three Irwin sisters, whose automatic responses to social workers’ questions—“Yes ma’am, we want homes of our own, even if we have to be separated”—bespoke an absolute lack of hope. Georgia had placed their three younger sisters, but Patricia, Wanda, and Geneva had been considered too old for adoption, and had been destined for a reformatory. They had endured troubles before entering Georgia’s network, such as their father’s desertion of the family and their mother’s slow, painful death. They owned one item apiece, a rough cotton dress, and the oldest sister, Geneva, was wracked by guilt over not having kept the band of six young girls together. Vallie Miller was able, however, to place the three oldest in an adoptive home.

  But that was all the state did. No one investigated the welfare of the rest of Georgia’s five thousand adoptees, who were left stranded across the country. This was despite the fact that not a single child had been legally adopted.

  Georgia had violated the laws of Tennessee and other states, and federal laws against kidnapping. But several politicians and legislators had adopted through her, and, anxious both to keep their children and to appease worried constituents, they quickly passed a law retroactively legalizing all of her illegal placements.

  The legislation violated logic, and people with influence ignored it when they wished. Neither adoptees nor birth parents had influence. But several adoptive fathers who had divorced refused to support their children, because, they argued, their adoptions had been illegal. Some adoptive couples who were dissatisfied with their children sought to have the adoptions annulled.

  In contrast, adoptees seeking their birth names were denied them because such information was forbidden to adoptees, and, Tennessee lawmakers insisted, their adoptions had been legal. Yet one of these same adoptees was later denied a substantial inheritance because she was an adoptee, not a “blood heir.”

  The law that legalized illegal adoptions might have been struck down, if it had been challenged in an unbiased court. But birth parents lacked the financial resources with which to fight it.

  And Georgia, forgotten by all but her victims, sanitized by the legalization of her crimes, disappeared from history. I didn’t originally appreciate how her escape had affected the institution of adoption and children born as late as 2007. But I understood how it had hurt some of her direct victims, such as the five siblings who’d been seized on their way home from school and sold to five families. Only the oldest, an adolescent who’d been sent to a reformatory because he wasn’t intelligent enough to satisfy his adoptive parents, ever returned home.

  I also learned of a nine-year-old girl named Peggy who protested vigorously after being taken from her mother. “I became a stutterer, a bed wetter, a perpetual screamer,” she told a Memphis reporter in 1987. “I made life miserable for everyone.”

  She was sent back to Georgia, who shuttled her among eight different foster homes. Deemed incorrigible, she was returned to her mother, but continued to grieve for her four brothers and sisters, who remained in California and New York.

  Many of the hundreds of adoptees I would eventually speak with were, like Peggy, driven almost to breakdown. When Georgia Tann died, Elizabeth Huber was thirteen, and experiencing an identity crisis more severe than the average adolescent’s. She had arrived in California eight years earlier, ill with pneumonia and traumatized by the death of her mother. Georgia hadn’t told Elizabeth of her impending adoption, but had simply flown her to Los Angeles, where she was picked up by her new parents in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel.

  Georgia represented her children as blank slates, and Elizabeth’s adoptive mother was persuaded. She greeted her by telling her she was a new person named “Carol,” and giving her a doll.

  Surprised and confused, the child named the doll Elizabeth. It was the nicest toy she’d ever owned, but she hated it. Her anger was compounded by her adoptive mother’s dismissal of her grief over separation from her younger brother. When she talked of things they’d done together, her adoptive mother said, “Those things never happened. You’re ‘Carol.’”

  “I knew Elizabeth would never be accepted there,” she said over lunch one day in 1992 near her home in the Pacific Northwest. Articulate and intelligent, she was a former model. But her poise and mental equilibrium hadn’t come easily. She’d only survived, she said, by refusing to be ruled by the past.

  “When I was first adopted, I was terrified,” she said. She didn’t know who “Carol” was or how she should act. Almost overnight she’d gone from a shack in the hills, where she was the second youngest of fourteen children, sleeping on the floor and eating orange peels for breakfast, “to this affluent home. I began talking to myself in the mirror—no one else would listen to me.” She also consciously assumed moods. “When I’d go to a birthday party I’d wear a birthday party mood. But on other days I didn’t know who to be.”

  Her confusion deepened, and as a young adult she consulted a therapist, who, suspecting a link between adoption and her difficulties regarding identity, suggested she take back her old name.

  Fearful of offending her adoptive parents, she resisted his advice for twenty years. But when she reclaimed her name in 1982 she finally found some peace. Two years later she realized a long-held dream— reunion with her beloved younger brother and other relatives. “I got off the plane in Nashville and my relatives were there—all the women had orchids,” she said. For the first time in forty years, she felt like she belonged.

  Soon after meeting Elizabeth, I spoke with another adoptee Georgia had wronged. At age six Barbara Davidson was adopted by a man who sexually abused her. Her adoptive mother seemed oblivious, and Barbara didn’t tell her. “I knew what he was doing was wrong,” she said. “But I thought it was all my fault.” She was also accustomed to molestation, having earlier been abused by a man in a boarding home in which Georgia had placed her, and also by Georgia herself.

  When she spoke to me Barbara was deeply depressed. Without benefit of therapy, which she was afraid to seek because she feared that psychiatrists would doubt her stories, she struggled to believe she hadn’t deserved her past. “I was only a baby,” she told me, crying.

  Elizabeth lived in Oregon, Barbara lived in Texas, and, speaking shortly afterward with adoptees in almost every other state, I realized how pervasive Georgia’s reach had been. The epicenter, of course, was Memphis, where, visiting the courthouse archives, I’d see people with worn, worried faces, studying old docket books for mention of relatives stolen by Georgia. The genealogy department of the Memphis Main Library bustled with searchers. Some spoke of quests of forty years.

  “Help me,” some asked upon learning I was a reporter. Aware of my inability to help them search, I recalled the words of an elderly Memphis attorney I had interviewed, with some difficulty: “I understand your sense of outrage, but what is the point of writing this book? The world is full of wrongs for which there are no remedies.”

  It’s true, of course, that nothing can compensate a mother and child who will never know each other’s touch or hear each other’s voice, or erase Barbara Davidson’s memories of sexual abuse. But I also recalled Barbara’s words, the first time we spoke. It was an emotional, disturbing conversation, for Barbara told me things she had never even told her husband, and as she did, her voice regressed to that of the terrified six year old she’d been. She was furious with Georgia, but Georgia was dead. When she learned that Georgia’s sole surviving long-time employee still asserted Georgia’s innocence, she exclaimed, “May God have mercy on that worker’s soul. She has no right to take the truth to her grave. If she would say, ‘Yes, Georgia did sell and hurt children,’ that would help so many people. If she would just admit Georgia was wrong, in God’s name she was wrong . . .

  “I wake at night,” she told me, “and I still feel the ropes around my wrists.”

  Having conducted largely fruitless interviews with that employee, a woman in he
r eighties named May Hindman, I knew she would never oblige Barbara. But I believed that Barbara and other adoptees could achieve some satisfaction by forcing Tennessee officials to admit they’d been wronged. More helpful than an apology would be access to the adoption records they had long been fighting for. My article about Georgia Tann, published in Good Housekeeping in March 1991, had aided their efforts.

  But the article that had helped some adoptees was greatly troubling others. One of the most troubled was Billy Hale.

  3.

  Billy

  I met Billy Hale through a classified newspaper ad I placed shortly after my first Memphis visit, which, because of old-time residents’ defensiveness, had yielded little information about Georgia Tann. The ad read, “If you have knowledge of Georgia Tann or the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society please contact . . .”

  I received little response from ads I ran in major newspapers on the East and West Coasts. Few of the thousands of adoptees Georgia placed in New York and Los Angeles sought information about her in those publications. But they and other Georgia Tann adoptees who sought reunion with their families considered the classified sections of the Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi newspapers—where I also ran ads—to be lifelines. I was contacted by more than 900 people, including a man who had recently discovered papers related to Georgia’s business that had long been believed destroyed.

  Other responses were emotional in nature. Elderly women wondered if I was the daughter Georgia had stolen. I referred them to a Memphis search expert, a woman named Denny Glad, but felt terrible for raising hopes that might never be met. Most calls, thankfully, were from adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, social workers, nurses, doctors, and others who simply wished to discuss their experiences with Georgia. They sent me correspondence from her, birth certificates and hospital records, and described heartbreaking letters in which birth parents pleaded for their children’s return.

  Almost everyone I spoke with referred me to others, and so I learned of Billy. Over the next few years he would undergo several changes, but when I met him he was fifty-three and living in Portland, Oregon; his hair was short and his voice was sad. He told me he had always been sad, though not so sad as now, and believed the reason stemmed from his early childhood. But his adoptive parents had told him his memories were wrong: his mother had relinquished him at birth, representatives of Georgia’s agency had said.

  Bruce and Gertrude Hale loved Billy, and raised him first on a farm near Nashville in a stone house surrounded by mountains, and then in a century-old mansion in Murfreesboro that had briefly served as the capitol of the Confederacy. Painted white with green trim, the house had six bedrooms, seven fireplaces, and three porches. On summer nights Billy would sleep on one of the porches, surrounded by stars, the sounds of frogs, katydids, and crickets, and scent from the giant magnolia out front, said to be the second largest of its variety in the South.

  It was the perfect home for a child, flanked on three sides by water and bordered by tall trees from which he swung and plunged into Stone River. He and his adoptive father built a boat they sailed on a nearby lake; Billy navigated coves and hollows and beneath apple trees that stood in the water, catching blue gill and crappie and catfish and bass.

  But despite his loving adoptive parents and comfortable surroundings, Billy was always troubled. On his first day of school he grew hysterical, crying, clutching at Gertrude’s legs. She couldn’t leave the classroom that day; it took two weeks before she could return home during school hours. Billy was terrified of using public restrooms and undressing in front of others; Gertrude obtained permission for him to shower privately.

  Billy’s memories of his earliest childhood days included having been driven, crying, in a limousine with two black-garbed women and a tearstained little girl. He also recalled having been told he was part Cherokee, but, as the Hales patiently explained, neither that nor the car ride had occurred.

  Billy felt guilty, though his parents assured him he had done nothing wrong. He empathized with anything small and weak. When he turned thirteen his father took him hunting. Billy knew he had to shoot a squirrel, but afterward felt so terrible he tried to bring it back to life. At twenty-four he married a shy, slender young woman who seldom smiled, out of embarrassment over a crooked front tooth, which he quickly helped her to have fixed. He soon had two beautiful children and steady employment as a telephone repairman.

  But he suffered, as he had since childhood, from seemingly motiveless rages. When his daughter sassed him he punched a hole in the living room wall; he later broke down a door. He recognized the incongruity of both dreading and ensuring the breakup of his family, but he was unable to change its course.

  When his wife divorced him, Billy broke down, and after spending three months in a psychiatric hospital begged for another chance. But his rages continued, and six years after their remarriage they divorced again.

  So scrupulous by nature that he separated the nails in his small workshop by both size and color, Billy became obsessive, inventorying each square of sandpaper, bolt, and screw. With his wife gone, and his adoptive parents now dead, he felt rootless. Desperate to fix himself in time and space, he wrote his autobiography, intermixing accounts of his grammar school grades and detailed, hand-drawn maps of his childhood homes with such pleas as, “Reader, learn from my mistakes. I love you, and look forward to meeting you in the next life.”

  In the 1980s he met an attractive, red-haired woman named Della and, charged with the possibility of again having a family, entered into a third marriage. Then in 1992 he watched a television program that would change his life.

  Ten months after publication of my Good Housekeeping article about Georgia Tann, CBS’s 60 Minutes had produced a segment about her. Billy had missed the original airing. But as he pulled out of his driveway on a Sunday evening six months later, on July 23, 1992, he was hailed by a neighbor, who told him that CBS was rebroadcasting the piece.

  Returning his car to the garage, Billy climbed the stairs to his second-floor family room and inserted a blank tape in the VCR. The segment began with the bare facts, reported by Mike Wallace: Georgia had stolen children from the poor and sold them to the rich, and the state had done nothing to help her victims. “They simply closed the book [containing the adoption records] and hid it away. From shame? From cover-up?” Wallace asked search expert Denny Glad.

  “As much as anything, to keep from having to admit that it ever happened,” she said.

  Billy continued watching the program, relatively relaxed. Having read my article, he was familiar with Georgia’s story, which he had believed didn’t directly concern him. Born five hundred miles from Memphis, he had, he assumed, spent his time as ward of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in its orphanage in Nashville, site of the agency’s headquarters. He didn’t realize that Georgia, who wielded more power than anyone else in the statewide organization, regularly scouted children at the Nashville orphanage.

  But when he saw a picture of the exterior of Georgia’s Home, Billy was transfixed. “Della, I know that house. I know what’s in that house,” he said.

  All night he remained on the green couch in the family room, replaying the video, suffering the flashbacks that had been triggered by the picture of the Home. He flashed on Georgia Tann, enraged; on a craggy-faced man in overalls who had huge hands; on a slim, beautiful woman with long black hair.

  He went to work the next day, but was too nervous to function. Returning home, he watched the video again and again. This was the beginning of Billy’s obsession with Georgia. For the next five years he would think of little else. He would leave his job. His marriage would end. All this was in the future when I met Billy two weeks after he’d watched the 60 Minutes episode, but I didn’t have to be clairvoyant to see it.

  Della, exhausted, went to bed early the first night of my visit. I sat in the kitchen with Billy, contemplating what my article and the 60 Minutes piece that followed i
t had wrought: a middle-aged man led to recall things he might be better off forgetting, now driven to remembering more, his mind spiraling back and back and back.

  “Don’t get lost in there,” I begged him; Della had said the same thing. But he felt he couldn’t go forward with his life until he dealt with his past. With the help of Denny Glad and support of a therapist he had begun a search for his mother, the results of which he offered to share with me.

  I had little to give in return. And when, thinking of the slim, dark haired woman of his memory, Billy asked, “Where were the courts, the police? Didn’t anyone care?” I was mute. But I eventually discovered the chain of events that had encouraged Memphians to allow Georgia to hurt, ultimately, millions of people. The chain began with a natural disaster that occurred thirteen years before her birth.

  4.

  The Plague

  The disaster that would aid Georgia was a plague that struck in 1878, devastating a city that had previously seemed blessed. Established in 1819, Memphis was strategically located on the Mississippi River, the great inland sea of nineteenth-century commerce. Covered by forests of tall trees, luxuriant vines, and brilliantly hued flowers, Memphis resembled the fantastic landscapes of Henri Rousseau, and was blessed with the fertile soil for which the Mississippi Delta was famous.

  To Memphis came independent-minded planters, entrepreneurs, river pilots, and merchants. Members of aristocratic families provided the leadership of this providential mix. Memphis became a major hub of transportation and was on its way to becoming the largest inland cotton market in the world.

  The city emerged from the Civil War relatively unscathed, having fallen, gently and with little bloodshed, after an hour-long battle fought on water. Trading in wartime contraband added to the wealth of the citizenry. Their town attracted thousands of immigrants from countries like Germany and Ireland, and became the fastest growing city in the land.