Even if I’d been born there, I thought confusedly, I would never have been accepted. I wouldn’t have quilted or canned well enough. I would have read too much.
A siren shrilled behind me. I pulled over to the shoulder, where I was ticketed for driving eighty-seven miles an hour. I drove more slowly afterward, of course, but it wasn’t until I landed in Cleveland, Ohio, where I then lived, that I felt competent, in control. The person, I thought, I had long ago made myself. Someone who would ask whatever questions she wanted, and, if she chose, never again enter a five and dime.
Recovery of my sense of control had been contingent upon leaving Hickory. Over the next months I realized that Georgia had, to an infinitely greater extent than I, been robbed of choice in her hometown. It was her desire for autonomy that drove her to sell children.
Few watching Georgia grow up, however, would have ascertained her frustration. She seemed charmed. Her mother, Beulah Yates Tann, was from a prominent Philadelphia, Mississippi, family whose roots stretched back to frontier times. Georgia’s father, George C. Tann, had an even more distinguished lineage: his grandfather had served under William Henry Harrison at the Battle of Tippecanoe, and his father was a Confederate war hero. George himself was the most educated man in the county, an aficionado of classical literature and judge of the Mississippi Second Chancery District Court.
But while George was respected he wasn’t well liked, for he was arrogant, argumentative, and domineering. He was also, recalled a former neighbor, “a womanizer. Oh, me! He’d go out of town to see women, or have them come right to his office in broad daylight. I don’t know how Beulah stood it.”
Setting a pattern Georgia would follow, he was an emotionally cold person who evinced little affection for children but became known for finding homes for orphans. Social work would not be Georgia’s first choice of career; her father’s child-placing work was even less intentional. The poor, rural Mississippi of the nineteenth century lacked a centralized agency responsible for homeless children, and chancery court judges like George were charged with their care. The scarcity of orphanages often forced magistrates to send children to workhouses or state asylums, and as insensitive as George was, he was apparently frustrated by his lack of options.
“I wish I had a judge, a schoolteacher and a good, far-seeing minister to sit as a committee and help me decide what should be done with these children,” he frequently told his young daughter. Her earliest memory was of him “always bringing children home with him” for temporary care.
Georgia’s second cousin told me that Judge Tann kept and adopted one of these children, who grew up as Rob Roy Tann. Rob was born three years before Georgia, in 1888. Other relatives claimed that Rob was not adopted, but born to George and Beulah. Since Mississippi doesn’t keep birth records from before 1912, and the state’s adoption records are sealed, I couldn’t verify Rob’s origins.
But Georgia was named after both of her parents—her given name was Beulah George. The fact that Rob wasn’t given his father’s name suggests that Rob joined the family after his younger sister’s birth. Another possibility is that Rob was adopted before Georgia was born, but that George didn’t want to give his name to an adopted child.
Whatever Rob’s origins, he was different from George, Beulah, and Georgia. He was thin; they were heavyset. “And Rob was a gentleman,” an elderly Hickory man who’d operated the town’s service station told me. “I thought a lot more of him than the others.”
Rob was also physically weaker than his sister, prone to ear infections and mysterious fevers. While serving in World War I, he suffered what was then called shell shock and for the rest of his life suffered from tremors. He died of tuberculosis at age forty-six. A former neighbor recalled him lying on his mother’s porch during his last summer. “Every time she wiped his brow, he thanked her,” she said.
Rob may have been his mother’s favorite. Georgia was her daddy’s child. With her wide brow and unusually low-set ears, she resembled him. She was even more like him inside: imperious, brilliant, a natural leader.
Perhaps it was inevitable that two such similar people would clash. One reason for their conflict may have been George’s discomfort over Georgia’s sexual orientation. It’s impossible to discern how much either understood about it during her childhood. Homosexuality was seldom spoken of then in the South, and the word “lesbian” was virtually unknown. But both sexes had clearly demarcated roles, and Georgia never conformed to the image of Southern womanhood. Big-boned and broad-shouldered, with a blunt, masculine manner, she occasionally appeared in public in flannel shirts and trousers, unacceptable clothing for women. She wore her hair severely pulled back, and as an adult sometimes had it cut as short as a man’s. She evinced no interest in marriage.
And unlike most other girls of her time Georgia wanted to pursue a career, the masculine-seeming profession of law. George wanted her to become a concert pianist. Conflicts between parents and children are sometimes of little consequence. That the disagreement within the Tann household led to so much can be partly attributed to the tenacity of the characters involved. George was known for his iron will, while Georgia possessed an extraordinarily strong personality and drive. Under any circumstance, she would have made a mark, and, had her early life been easier, she might have accomplished much good. But she became so preoccupied with self-protection as to become selfish, narcissistic. Georgia lacked empathy. This made her dangerous.
Georgia was little more than a baby when she began suffering the insults that would shape her future and those of millions of others. She was an active child who loved to run and play. George, however, forced her to spend long hours in the parlor, practicing the piano. “I was glued on a piano stool at five, and I didn’t entirely get away from a piano until I was grown,” she told a friend, Memphis reporter Ada Gilkey, in 1935. But although Georgia despised playing the piano, she played it, hopeful that compliance would earn her something she desperately wanted. “All the time,” she said, “I wanted to be a lawyer. . . .”
The main route to becoming a lawyer in the South during the early 1900s was to “read law” with an established attorney. “[A]nd I read law with my father and passed the state bar examination in Mississippi, but he wouldn’t let me practice because it ‘wasn’t the usual thing’ [for a woman] and I was the only girl in the family.”
Her father’s refusal to let her practice the law he’d taught her may have been the ultimate frustration, but Georgia had probably long resented submitting to George. It was not her nature to be compliant. Arrogant, condescending, so confident that if she hadn’t actually become famous she would have been grandiose, Georgia would control everyone in her life but George. And while she was unable to defy him by practicing law, she searched hard for an alternate profession.
Had Georgia been born much before 1891, she would have had almost no choice of profession at all. Women were considered intellectually inferior, fit only for marriage and bearing children. Even women who wished to remain single often married, since they had no way of supporting themselves. Some married, homosexual women found solace in “romantic friendships,” passionate, loving and often sexual relationships with other women. It wasn’t widely recognized until the twentieth century that women could be homosexual, and romantic friendships were sentimentalized and considered ennobling. Both heterosexual and homosexual women were often forced to channel their intellectual drives into activities like gardening or needlepoint.
Georgia and other independent-minded young women would expand their options through education in women’s colleges. The first such school was Mt. Holyoke College, established in Massachusetts in 1837. Martha Washington College in Abingdon, Virginia, from which Georgia would graduate, opened in 1860. By 1880 forty thousand women, representing one-third of the university student population of the United States, were enrolled in 153 colleges and universities.
A large number would remain single. A study cited by Lillian Faderman in Odd Girls and Twil
ight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America, found that 50 percent of female college graduates between 1880 and 1900 were unmarried, compared to 10 percent of American women in general. It’s unclear how many college graduates remained single out of choice, and how many were simply considered too educated to be suitable wives. But women’s colleges provided welcome refuge for young women like Georgia, who desired autonomy. For the first time in history, large numbers of women lived and learned together, heady with the excitement of pioneering and anxious to work at a profession.
Georgia’s experiences in college must also have assured her that she could have a personal life that didn’t involve marriage. Many female professors lived in “Boston Marriages,” domestic and often love partnerships with other women. They wore rings and called each other “Sister.” Georgia would follow both of these practices with her partner, Ann Atwood Hollinsworth.
As a college student, Georgia would probably also have been aware of loving relationships between female students. What were considered “crushes” between girls at women’s colleges were ubiquitous, and had many names: rave; spoon; pash (for “passion”); smash; gonazo (“gone on”); flame. Crushes between young women were so accepted that all female dances were held at Smith and Vassar during the early twentieth century. Students attended in pairs, with one partner dressed in a feminine manner, the other in male attire.
I don’t know if Georgia had a love relationship during college, but she graduated with no apparent inclination toward marriage. To support herself she needed a job in one of the two acceptable careers for women: teaching and social work.
Georgia majored in music, and after graduating in 1913 taught school briefly in Columbus, Mississippi. But she lacked the requisite patience for teaching, and may well have considered it an old-fashioned profession.
Social work, however, was in its infancy. Georgia was also familiar with social work, having long practiced a form of it herself. Charity work was a refuge during her adolescence, perhaps providing an excuse for her absence from local parties and dances. While other girls primped for them, she donned starched, long-sleeved blouses and skirts that swept the floor, and visited the local poor.
Georgia may have been motivated in part by altruism. But at an early age she began depersonalizing the adults and children she helped. This depersonalization was encouraged both by the Southern culture, which deprecated poor whites, and Georgia’s increasing self-absorption. But even empathetic people sometimes become callous to protect themselves from pain. And although Georgia may never have been particularly empathetic, she was affected by her encounter with a drugged baby.
The child’s mother was addicted to morphine, a major ingredient of cough medicine sold over the counter. During the early twentieth century, authorities often sent drug abusers to insane asylums as punishment, and when Georgia was very young, a Mississippi sheriff institutionalized this mother, along with several of her children.
“Hours later,” Georgia told Memphis reporter Ada Gilkey, “the mother cried out something about her baby as the effects of the dope began to wear off. Officials at the institution called my father about it. The whole family had retired, but we got up and drove into the country. And there, under a pile of filthy rags in a corner of a shack, we found a pitiful baby which had evidently been given a little of the dope.”
The Tanns brought the baby home. Georgia nursed the baby and, quite possibly, grew attached to it. But eventually it and the other children were sent to an orphanage.
This incident, Georgia said in 1935, first informed her of the plight of young, neglected children. The experience may also have encouraged her to avoid further emotional involvement with a child. For a woman who would work for decades in adoption, and who took great pride in her placements, Georgia seemed curiously immune to children’s charms. “She had no favorites among the babies” in the Home, her former employee, May Hindman, told me. “She was businesslike and treated them all the same.” Georgia’s two grandchildren, who live in California and Texas, said that she had been emotionally cold even to their mother, June, the daughter Georgia adopted in the 1920s.
“My mother promised to raise us very differently from how Georgia had raised her,” Georgia’s granddaughter Vicci told me ten years after June’s death. “She said Georgia was a cold fish—she gave her material things, and nothing else.” When June began to menstruate, she ran to Georgia in the middle of the night, terrified that she was dying. “Georgia turned her over to the maid and went back to sleep. The maids raised her,” said Vicci. “I don’t know why Georgia bothered to adopt her.”
The reason would become clear in time. It would involve her father, the most influential person in her life. Georgia’s feelings toward him were a mix of love and hate, of wanting to prove herself to him and to defy him. The incident involving the drugged baby was a prototype of her relationship with George, evoking admiration for his stature in the community, and, quite possibly, rage at him for ultimately institutionalizing the baby.
Georgia’s experience with the drugged infant also affected something of greater significance than her relationship with her father: her treatment of poor, white, often single mothers. Some of the disdain Georgia felt toward them was probably related to class differences. But the incompetence of the drugged baby’s mother may have made Georgia feel justified in her contempt.
Utterly unappreciative of ambiguity, she considered the world to be inhabited by two, widely divergent types. Poor people, including the single mothers she called “cows,” were bad; wealthy people, whom she described as “of the higher type,” were good. Some of this obtuseness may have been simulated, meant to excuse her crimes. But Georgia would argue, and would seem to believe, that poor people were incapable of proper parenting. Their children needed rescue. Georgia would save them, by seizing them and placing them for adoption.
An incident that occurred when, according to Memphis reporter Ada Gilkey, Georgia was a mere “slip” of a girl may have further inclined her toward social work—and also taught her how to wreak mild revenge on her father. A policeman who knew of her work with the poor asked for her help. An infant had been left in a basket on a doorstep, and the policeman didn’t know how to care for it.
Georgia traveled with the baby and the policeman in the patrol car to the Meridian courthouse, where the child would be declared legally abandoned. As she emerged from the Black Maria, or paddy wagon, with the infant in her arms she met her father and several attorneys from New York. Embarrassed, George gulped, “Gentlemen, this is my daughter.”
“Laughing introductions were made, and in the years that followed Judge Tann was to ‘get used to’ most anything where his daughter was concerned,” Ada Gilkey reported in 1935. Georgia, she wrote, would never forget the expression on George’s face, or how he’d fought to maintain his composure.
Around 1906, when Georgia would have been fifteen, she arranged her first adoption, of two children she found huddled in a corner of her father’s courtroom. He had placed them “in the protection of” the Mississippi Children’s Home Society, which, like other orphanages of the time, would have been more likely to warehouse them or place them in foster care than to arrange their adoption. Within three weeks, however, Georgia persuaded a respected Mississippi couple to adopt the five year old boy and his three-year-old sister.
Georgia discussed this placement with Ada Gilkey in 1935. The article that ran in the Memphis Press-Scimitar didn’t reveal how the children had become separated from their birth parents. But Georgia’s description of the family is telling, indicative of the attitudes that would inform her business, and that she would incorporate into the institution of adoption. “The father was a man of intelligence but of a mean disposition that was always getting him into trouble,” Georgia said. “The mother was from an ‘ordinary,’ poor family. The children were sweet, attractive in appearance. The girl now has a degree in music. The boy has finished his law degree and begun his practice. Each
was given an opportunity—and made the most of it.”
Referring to this incident in 1946, a Memphis reporter wrote, “Miss Tann had found her life’s work.”
Georgia certainly did find her vocation early, although it’s impossible to know whether her realization of it was triggered by these first adoptions, rather than by the rescue of the drugged baby, the ride in the Black Maria with the abandoned infant, or an incident lost to history. Her father’s work and her environment would have constantly reminded her of the needs of homeless children.
“When I was growing up, there were orphanages all over the South,” attorney and former investigator Robert Taylor told me. The attorney who after Georgia’s death vainly tried to conduct a thorough investigation into her black market dealings, Taylor was born in Tennessee in 1915, almost the same year Georgia began her earliest professional social work.
Finding adoptive homes for institutionalized orphans could have kept Georgia busy for decades. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t be satisfied with merely finding homes for homeless children—she’d become obsessed with finding adoptive homes for children who already had homes. She would acquire these children through kidnapping or deceit, and if she saved them from anything it was poverty.
Georgia considered poverty the worst possible condition. “It was her upbringing; she was from a very snobbish family that looked down on people in those shanty houses who got their hands dirty for a living,” Andre Bond of Biloxi, Mississippi, told me.
Georgia felt she was taking children from “trashy people and elevating the children,” Christine Nilan of Nashville said. Christine had been adopted through Georgia by a cultured, educated family whom Georgia frequently visited. “It was as if she thought, ‘There’s something that doesn’t belong over here; I’ll put it over there,’” Christine told me.
Georgia often boasted about having placed children with “high type” adoptive parents, and she expected grieving birth parents to be comforted by this fact. When a young mother begged for the return of the three children Georgia had stolen in 1939, Georgia told her that her appropriation of them was for their welfare, that they’d receive “good homes [and] splendid educations.” Georgia’s attorney, Abe Waldauer, a cultured, educated adoptive parent himself, also equated affluence with happiness. In a May 1935 letter to a Mississippi lawyer representing a father who was protesting Georgia’s placement of his child for adoption, Waldauer wrote, “The child is fortunately placed in a home capable of lavishing every affection and advantage which wealth can give.”
The Baby Thief Page 5