The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  Mollie was born in 1919 with black hair and brown eyes that mirrored those of her mother, Stella, who in turn resembled her father, whose father had been a Cherokee chief. Escaping the Trail of Tears in 1838, Mollie’s great-grandfather settled near Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. But once that area became a federal reservation hemmed in by guards and barbed wire, there was little to do but dream of the past and drink. The children of the Cherokee drifted away and intermarried.

  Growing up decades later in Jacksonville, Florida, Mollie seldom thought of her heritage, but she had beautiful high cheekbones and a reverence for nature. She was the seventh of fourteen children, born after Sadie, Ovedia, twins Robert and Mary, Virginia, and Frances, and before the seven youngest boys: twins Harrison and Henry and Frederick and Sederick, Julian, Gaylord, and Frank.

  Her paternal grandfather had sharecropped in Wisconsin, and her father, Frank, had mined coal in eastern Tennessee as a young man. By the time of Mollie’s birth, weakened by black lung disease, Frank worked as a house painter. Seeking employment, he moved his family from Florida to Ohio and then back south, where they lived in a two-room log cabin located on a hillside that afforded a panoramic view of wooded, southwestern Virginia. Stella was too overworked to note the region’s loveliness, but Mollie was entranced. She practically lived outdoors, gathering flowers and playing hide-and-seek, kick-the-can, and baseball, with a ball made of shredded rubber from inner tubes, covered by an old sock. When she grew too old to play with her corncob doll, she sat under a tree, sewing tiny doll-sized dresses.

  The children seldom attended school; Mollie had three years of education. They carried water from the spring, picked blackberries and sold them from a roadside stand, and grew corn in their small plot. They fed the chickens and gathered their eggs; Mollie and the younger boys milked the cow. But the primary reason the Moores denied their children schooling was a sense of futility.

  Mollie was practical too. She didn’t ask for store-bought clothes. She didn’t panic when a big black snake slithered through the only door of the playhouse she and Frances had made of fallen branches. She swiftly fashioned a back door. She remained calm the night four men came, reeling and swearing, to their rented house in Kentucky. It was 1932, and she was twelve. Her father was away, and her brother Robert aimed a shotgun out of the kitchen window and ordered them to leave. They refused, and Robert was forced to shoot at one man, grazing him. Meanwhile Mollie kept the younger children from hysteria. But even she grew nervous when the men returned three days later. She screamed with the others as they hid under beds while the men shot up the house. Miraculously they missed every single occupant. Still, Mollie began dreaming she was cursed.

  It was a frightening thought, and she blotted it out with her farm work and music. She had taught herself to play the guitar, and had what everyone agreed was a voice as lovely as Jeannette McDonald’s. She sat outside in the evenings, strumming her guitar and singing.

  She had always been pretty; by thirteen she was beautiful, tall and slim with glossy waist-length hair worn in a braid down her back. Several boys from the area wanted to come calling, but she didn’t want any local boys. She hoped to find the kind of man she’d never met: handsome, romantic, kind—a man who didn’t hit. She modeled herself after her brother Robert’s wife, who was pretty and patient.

  Mollie visited her sister-in-law every day, rocking her baby and singing him to sleep. When she was older she planned to have her own baby, named William Leroy, after her nephew. She wouldn’t presume he would share her interests. But if he did, she’d explain the difference between marsh and wire blue grass, and the lavenders of thyme and mountain spurge. She’d sit with him beneath persimmons and magnolias listening for the mockingbird; she’d show him tracks of the great black bear. She would never let him be lonely.

  6.

  Georgia’s Youth

  Georgia Tann was obsessed with women of Mollie’s social class. She was most interested in the frequency of their pregnancies, about which she had contradictory feelings. She was contemptuous of their fertility and privately referred to them as “cows.” Yet she envied them for their ability to give birth.

  And while Georgia felt superior to these young women she also identified with them. This connection touched the most painful part of her self. Early in my research I ascertained that Georgia had been hurt during her early years. Anxious to understand her, I drove from Memphis to her hometown of Hickory, Mississippi.

  My timing lacked felicity, for when I began the three-hundred-mile ride the temperature was close to 100 and pain from an ear infection was a constant, throbbing presence. I was scarcely outside Memphis when I crossed the state line into Mississippi, traveling south on Highway 55. It was as generic an interstate as any, so signs I was venturing into the Deep South were subtle: an intensification of heat and atmospheric closeness, roadside mud changing from Memphis’s drab brown to Mississippi’s fiery red. The vegetation became vaguely tropical: Virginia creeper, cane, buck vine, cypress, and gum. The few animals I saw were roadkill.

  Reaching the outskirts of the state capitol, I turned onto Route 20, traveling east past occasional roadside stands to Hickory, which had a population of 470—a town so tiny it didn’t appear on my road map, but lay between Jackson and Meridian. All I knew of these larger cities was that they had been near the sites in the 1960s of the murders of three Civil Rights workers and Medgar Evers of the NAACP. Much has changed since then, and I was neither on Civil Rights business nor black. But awareness that I’d be considered more an outsider here than in Memphis accompanied me, as I honed in on my tiny target, as inexorably as the pain in my ear.

  Earlier attempts to speak with Hickory natives by phone had met with mixed results. Some residents couldn’t understand my Northern speech. One man, to whom I’d repeatedly tried to explain myself, handed the phone to his wife with an exasperated, “Mabel! There’s some damn foreigner on the line!”

  And while many of the twenty-five Hickory residents with whom I spoke patiently recounted decades-old events, several male citizens refused to talk to me. Two who’d worked as handymen in Georgia’s Memphis orphanage adamantly swore they hadn’t.

  Not everyone had been straight with me in Memphis, of course. Once, as I bent to record what one of several public officials had said, I sensed him, winking at the others. As I left his office, he phoned the next person on my list.

  I never learned how he ascertained the order of my visits. I had learned that the more graciously some Memphis public figures spoke to me, the less I could rely on the truthfulness of what they said. I’d thought I hated this artificial politeness, but, dealing with Mississippians, I mourned its absence. It was as if their coarser, hotter clime had stripped them of a veneer Memphians consider essential. In Mississippi tempers were short, and feelings raw.

  “We’re a clannish group till we get to know you,” a Hickory woman had earlier told me over the phone—the time between “now” and “till” being measured in generations, not years. Being in a comparative hurry, I was delighted to discover that eighty-five-year-old Maisie thawed more quickly than did some other locals. By the end of our first conversation she had not only offered her interpretation of the moral of Georgia’s tale—which, referring to the reduced circumstances in which her heirs had been left, she expressed as, “Sin will find you out”—but offered to do some “sleuthing” for me.

  Throughout the next several weeks Maisie had called me frequently with tidbits gleaned from a local courthouse and Georgia’s former neighbors. She also sent me an article about Georgia recently written for The Meridian Star by a local reporter, who, in a phone conversation, explained why so few in Hickory would speak with me. “They resent how Mississippians have been portrayed in the national media as barefoot, watermelon seed-spitting rednecks,” she said. She said that Hickory residents felt their town was known for only one thing, spawning Georgia Tann, and that they were embarrassed.

  The reporter’s status as a local
, she emphasized, had been crucial to her inducing residents to talk to her for her piece. But she hadn’t approached the cabin of Jack Kendricks, who had served as Georgia’s mother’s chauffeur. When I asked her why—for I too wanted to speak with him in person, earlier attempts at phone conversation having been thwarted by his deafness—she said matter-of-factly, “Some folks around here shoot first, ask questions later.”

  Shoot even an insider like her? It was a sobering thought.

  Both she and Maisie stressed the importance of my having a local liaison when I visited Hickory. The reporter and I set a lunch date, after which she’d introduce me to several residents. Maisie, who eagerly awaited my trip, would be my main guide. “I have a ’72 Cadillac; we’ll meet and go rambling,” she said.

  I was looking forward to having someone to ramble with that scorching July morning as I approached Hickory, following several solitary days in Memphis. Hickory had no hotel so, as Maisie had suggested, I checked into a motel in nearby Newton, a town set upon subtle elevations, less hills than swells, and soil faded from northern Mississippi’s red to the yellow of mid state. My attempts to call Maisie and the reporter were stymied by the fact that I couldn’t make long-distance calls from my motel and that Hickory, ten miles away, was considered long-distance. Driving into Hickory, where my call to Maisie resulted in a busy signal, I decided to look around on my own.

  It seemed foolish to have arranged escorts. Hickory didn’t look sinister, but simply tired. An old lumber camp and former sawmill town, it was founded in 1815, when its forests of ash, hickory, poplar, and magnolia were virgin. The mill provided employment for most of the town’s residents, and folks considered themselves, compared to other Mississippians, fairly prosperous.

  Today, however, the mill is gone. The town’s gas station has closed, and citizens look to nearby Meridian for their needs. Hickory’s one-block center resembled a ghost town, and I was so impressed by its quiet, and so diverted by my ear pain, that I had overlooked one of its odder characteristics: there were no street signs.

  This would make finding interviewees difficult. I looked for something that resembled a city hall. A man in a rocker directed me to a temporary-appearing structure, an unpainted partition joined to a building. Entering, I found myself in a narrow passageway; on my left was a square cut in the wood—a crude window—through which I looked into a sparsely furnished office. A ceiling fan rotated desultorily; flies buzzed overhead.

  The three adults inside looked up. I asked for a street map. A heavyset man in a T-shirt asked, “What you need that for?”

  “I have to find particular houses,” I answered. He looked blank. “There are no street signs . . .” I said.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, and laughed. “The high school kids took ’em down last year, and we haven’t gotten around to putting them back.”

  “Well, may I have a map,” I asked again. I must have been the first person to make this request, for not one of the three seemed to know if a map of Hickory existed. After ten minutes the heavyset man produced what looked like the original plans for the town, but they were useless, showing few streets, and those few lacked names.

  Luckily, however, the three city hall employees knew everyone in town. I copied down such directions as, “Go three streets south, turn right at the huckleberry bush,” and, after a brief stop at what seemed a convenience store, where I bought aspirin and fruitlessly asked for over the counter ear drops, I set off to my first appointment.

  It was with a gracious older woman who lived within sight of the old Tann homestead where Georgia had been raised, and which Georgia had visited frequently throughout her life to see her widowed mother, Beulah. “I hear you tried to buy ear drops at the five and dime,” she said as she poured me iced tea.

  The store didn’t resemble a five-and-ten-cent store—it smelled of old meat—but the woman was kind, and I nodded. Less defensive than some other residents with whom I’d spoken by phone, who insisted, implausibly, that Georgia had been “pretty,” “real friendly,” and “the sweetest thing,” that they had “thought the world of her” and wished they’d “knowed her better,” my hostess made no judgments about her, but simply told me the birth and death dates of Georgia’s Hickory relatives and of how Georgia had tried unsuccessfully to persuade a local woman to send her young daughter, who had Down Syndrome, to Memphis, where Georgia said she would teach her to talk. My hostess had no idea why Georgia had wanted to teach the girl to speak, or considered herself qualified to do it.

  She was on firmer ground discussing Georgia’s Hickory homestead, which in its prime during the 1930s had been the largest and most beautiful in town, with servants’ quarters and a brick courtyard, a large wraparound porch, fountains, imported palm trees, and a room-sized, walk-in cooler that provided the only refrigeration in town.

  The palm trees and much else had been paid for by Georgia. “Folks here did wonder,” she admitted, “how she afforded it.”

  We were briefly interrupted by a man my hostess had arranged to meet me, since he had, as a teen, done errands for Georgia. “She was a boss-man, she ordered me around,” he said, but he knew little else about her.

  “Heard you tried to buy ear drops at the five and dime,” he said as he left, and my hostess and I began the short trek to Georgia’s homestead. En route we passed parched shrubbery that I viewed through a sort of haze. My companion, clad like me in lightweight cotton, looked crisp. But between the oppressive heat and my fever, which was spiking, I was slick with sweat. The sidewalk undulated upward; the ringing in my ear rose to a roar. Passing several small houses I wondered how many locals knew of my store visit, and whether, behind faded curtains, eyes watched me now as I made my dazed way.

  Georgia’s homestead was less imposing than I had imagined it, mostly because, although it was occupied, by the owner of the five and dime, it had been allowed to deteriorate: its white shingles needed paint, and its grounds were overgrown by poison ivy. I stepped gingerly, trying to imagine the courtyard with flowers and hedges blooming, the fountain spouting water, the brilliantly colored parrot Maisie had described squawking at my approach . . .

  It took more imagination than I could summon at that moment, and soon afterward I bade my hostess good-bye and drove back to the phone booth to call Maisie. She answered on the first ring.

  “Maisie, it’s Barbara, let’s ramble,” I said.

  “I’m sick,” she answered flatly.

  “What?”

  “I’m sick, I can’t see you,” she said. She wouldn’t say what she was sick with.

  “Maisie, I’m right here, I’ll bring you lemonade,” I told her.

  “I can’t do it.” She sounded scared and, suddenly, too old to press. I wished her well, said good-bye, and dialed the reporter’s work and home numbers. I couldn’t reach her. Feeling a queasiness that had nothing to do with my ear pain, I proceeded to my next appointment.

  I held great hope for this interview, which was to be with a ninety nine year-old woman whose mind, I’d been told, was as clear as glass, and who had vivid memories of Georgia, who’d been her contemporary and neighbor. I knocked on her door, which was opened by one of her sons, a large man in his sixties wearing bib overalls. He led me into the tiny, stiflingly hot living room, where a sweet-faced woman sat in a wheelchair. Crossing his arms over his chest, he stood facing me, on her right. A slightly shorter but otherwise identical-appearing brother stationed himself on her left.

  Introducing myself, I asked her a question. Her sons cut her off.

  “Georgia’s mother was the most respected woman in Hickory,” said the taller one.

  “Her daddy was a federal court judge,” said the other.

  Their comments were apropos of nothing; I hadn’t asked about Georgia’s parents.

  “The Tann home was the second one built in town—”

  “There were no streets then, only paths through the woods—”

  The room spun as I tried to extricate the sweet-appearing
old lady from her boys. But they stood firm and clamored on with such inconse quentialities as Georgia’s brother Rob liking to hunt possums.

  “Thank you,” I told the elderly lady as I rose to leave. The taller man came over and, putting his hands on my shoulders, pressed me back into my chair. “Now, Missy,” he said. “Not so fast.”

  I’m not large but I am strong and could have immediately escaped, but I sat there feeling boneless as he raved about outsiders butting in, snooping around. His brother yelled about the Civil War. “You Yankees brought the niggers down here, through underground tunnels. We used ’em, and we took the rap!”

  I looked for help to the old lady, who seemed to have lost her sweetness. Wrenching away from her son, I left, and once again called the reporter at The Meridian Star. “She’s not available,” someone told me.

  I told myself not to become paranoid. My left hand pressed to my ear to counter the pressure inside it, I drove to my next interview.

  This source lived twenty miles from Hickory, in a remote area that I realized could prove menacing. But she’d sounded friendly when she’d phoned me and, driving down twisting dirt roads in shade provided by redwoods and pines, surrounded by wood scent so sweet it almost distracted me from my ear, I felt myself relax.

  Her home was a run-down cottage that appeared to have been built at two different times, of two kinds and colors of shingles. I knocked on the screen door, and a man of about seventy appeared. He wore shorts and a stained undershirt. He carried something long.

  I’m delirious, I thought.

  “I’m here to see—” I said.

  “She doesn’t want to talk,” he answered. He raised his shotgun level with my face.

  For a moment I stopped breathing. Then I ran to my car, in which I peeled back down the dirt roads, through Hickory to Newton and then west on Route 20, on the way to the Memphis airport and freedom, away from the shotgun and poison ivy and, most draining of all, the eyes. They seemed to have stolen my self, my confidence, caused me to forget who I was.