He knocked on the door, and instead of the expected maid Georgia herself appeared. She looked unusual: instead of her habitual tailored clothing she wore something white and diaphanous; it looked like a nightgown. She led him to her bedroom. The bed coverings were also white.
Nervously he approached where she directed: toward an upper bed corner, where a tiny mound was surrounded by pillows and draped with a coverlet. She raised an end, and there was a newborn baby girl. His baby, he realized. And Georgia’s? That is what he believed she was pretending . . . “This baby is perfect in every way,” she said. He received her and swiftly left.
I learned about another of Georgia’s stranger acts from a 1950s news article entitled, “Marriage Racket Laid to Miss Tann: Expectant Mothers Brought to Arkansas to Marry ‘Unknowns.’” A court official in Marion, Arkansas, reported that Georgia had during the 1940s frequently been driven with pregnant women to the court clerk’s office in Crittendon County, twelve miles from Memphis. Outside, Georgia would meet with one of an ever-changing assortment of shiftless-looking young men. She’d then usher the man and woman inside, where they would be married by a justice of the peace. Georgia would pocket the marriage certificate, send the young man on his way with a payment of $20, and return to Memphis with the pregnant young woman.
Why? Reproved by the Arkansas court official, Georgia had explained that she wanted to give a name to the unborn child. But Georgia, who routinely falsified children’s histories, hardly needed to arrange bogus marriages in order to declare a child legitimate.
I believe that Georgia arranged sham weddings in order to vicariously experience what she couldn’t have. Georgia wanted everything: most obviously the power that was usually accessible only to men, but that she achieved through her adoption business. Her father’s thwarting of her legal ambitions was the important theme of her life. She bested him, becoming more prominent in her field than he ever was in his. She maintained control of her daughter, as he had of her. She was, a Mem phian hinted to me, a womanizer, betraying Ann with another woman.
But it wasn’t enough. Georgia was a woman unable to directly partake of the traditional source of female power: marriage and the bearing of children. Her adoption business helped her here too, allowing her to hover outside delivery rooms, hear a newborn’s first cry, and swiftly bundle the baby away. She could say, as if she had had much to do with it, “This child is 100 percent normal and healthy.”
Then this essentially cold woman could dispense with all responsibilities by giving “her” baby away. On to the next birth and adoption.
In formulating a business that served both her pathological needs and her desire for power, Georgia was nothing if not resourceful. Her selfishness, energy, and connections made it impossible for any targeted family to stay intact. But the quality that made her most dangerous was her gift for self-promotion. It enabled her to further revolutionize and corrupt adoptive practice by robbing birth parents she would never even meet.
In the centuries before Georgia began her business, single mothers of all races were both allowed and expected to raise their children. Georgia inverted this custom in Memphis almost overnight, regarding white mothers and white babies. (Neither she nor most other adoption workers of her time tried to place nonwhite children for adoption, the theory being until recently that there was no market for nonwhite children.) And she lost little time in nationally publicizing her justifications for removing white children from poor homes. Through speeches and in syndicated newspaper articles, she extolled the cultural and educational benefits enjoyed by adopted children.
Social workers more altruistic than she were soon persuaded that the “best interest” of poor, illegitimate children was adoption. These benefits came to be considered so great, and their absence so punitive, that single mothers who wanted to keep their babies were considered selfish. And while it was usually only Georgia and her later imitators who literally stole such children, social workers throughout the country began urging single women to relinquish their babies, supposedly out of love for them.
Struck down were the laws that in some states mandated that single mothers breastfeed their babies for six months. Enacted before adoption had become popular, the laws were meant to encourage the mothers to become emotionally attached to their babies and to want to raise them, rather than send them to orphanages funded by the public. Once these mothers’ babies became marketable commodities, however, officials wanted to separate the two, rather than to keep them together.
By the late 1930s single mothers were not only being prevented from bonding with their babies, but often even from seeing them. Mothers were sometimes blindfolded during labor. Some social workers urged pregnant young women to sign forms allowing doctors to circumcise their child, if it turned out to be a boy, so that the workers could keep mothers uninformed even of their baby’s gender.
By the time adoption became nationally popular in the mid-1940s the reversal was complete, and for the first time in history, white single mothers were expected to surrender their babies for adoption. That relinquishment was endorsed by leaders of such reputable organizations as the Child Welfare League of America, the American Public Welfare Association, The Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and most psychiatrists and psychologists led dissenting social scientist Clark Vincent to predict a future in which the newborns of all white single mothers would be seized by the state. “Such a policy would not be enacted or labeled overtly as ‘punishment.’ Rather, it would be implemented under such pressures and labels as ‘scientific finding,’ ‘the best interest of the child,’ ‘rehabilitation goals for the unwed mother’ and the ‘stability of family and society.’”
This scenario had actually been advocated five years earlier by Georgia Tann client Pearl Buck, who had asked Georgia to collaborate on a book about adoption. Georgia dictated only two chapters before dying of cancer; her exposure as baby seller apparently discouraged Buck from using them in her book. But the author continued to share Georgia’s attitude toward single mothers, and in a 1955 article for Woman’s Home Companion Buck advocated legislation forcing them to surrender their babies for adoption.
Such a law was never passed. But the social pressure on single mothers was so great that, reluctantly and with great pain, they began relinquishing their children en masse. By the 1950s, 90 percent of white maternity home residents surrendered their children for adoption.
To virtually everyone but birth parents and adoptees, adoption came to be seen as the perfect solution for infertility. The availability of contraceptives and abortion would eventually be considered threats to this solution. But in the 1940s and ’50s, when, partially because of social unrest associated with World War II, more single women became pregnant annually than ever before, sources of supply for the adoptive market seemed assured—if never, according to some particularly avid proponents of adoption, sufficient. Some suggested setting up baby breeding farms. Supposedly, they were joking. But the sentiment that impelled this suggestion was prevalent enough to cause sociologist Leontine Young to decry the view of unmarried mothers as “mere breeding machines, a means to an end.”
Georgia Tann’s popularization of adoption did more than rob single mothers of their children; it isolated many women during their pregnancies. This was another reversal, since throughout the years when young mothers were expected to keep their babies, the new mothers’ parents, who anticipated helping their daughters in their new roles, had allowed them to wait out their pregnancies at home.
But as adoption became more common, prospective grandparents who expected their daughters to relinquish their babies became reluctant to let their neighbors know that the young women were “in trouble.” Increasingly they hid their daughters in homes for unwed mothers.
Maternity homes had existed since the early nineteenth century in the urban, eastern part of this country, and since the 1870s in most of the rest. Originally established by Evangelical reformers to rehabilitate prostitutes and other “f
allen women,” the institutions housed them and their babies for as long as two years, during which the mothers were instructed in childcare, a trade, and religion. Most facilities met their costs through charitable donations.
But after 1935 rising rates of single pregnancies resulted in the building of more maternity homes than most communities could finance, and residents were forced to pay for their confinement by cooking, laundering, and scrubbing floors, sometimes for as long as six months after giving birth.
The young women’s maternity home stays were painful for reasons other than the hard work that was often required. They were allowed no contact with friends or boyfriends, and often made to use fictitious names. When they went into labor they were sometimes tied down and forbidden anesthesia.
These young women did not publicly protest, but many recorded their feelings in journals written during their pregnancies. One entry, included in Wake Up Little Susie, a book about single pregnancy in America between 1945 and 1965, describes the panic of missing a period when single pregnancy was such cause for shame.
“Two weeks went by. They dragged at a snail’s pace. Day was joined to day like links in a heavy chain which coiled around me and dragged wherever I walked. . . . I lifted heavy weights. I jumped from the height of the table to the floor until I didn’t have the strength to climb back on the table again. At night I sat in hot mustard baths and slept with my head pounding from the effects of quinine. I drank tansy tea and swallowed capsules of turpentine until all I wanted to do was retch out my insides and die. I thought of dying. With all my heart I wanted to die. . . .
“When I didn’t come around during the second month, I was desperate. My face became gaunt and haggard. My eyes sank deep into their sockets. My clothes were always damp with sweat. ‘I’ll kill myself,’ I would murmur into the darkness at night. ‘I’ll take poison and kill myself.’”
Georgia probably never knew this young woman. But she exploited the despair of many like her, enticing her victims with such classified newspaper advertisements as, “Young women in trouble, call Miss Georgia Tann.” She and her workers frequently visited doctors in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and other states, offering their pregnant, single patients free room, board, and medical care for the duration of their pregnancies.
She allowed the young women anesthesia during childbirth. She exempted them even from singing hymns—boarding them in private homes whose owners cared less about saving their souls than collecting the $40 per boarder Georgia paid them each month.
Georgia didn’t spell out the terms of her bargain. She often told young women they would have a month after their deliveries during which to decide whether they would keep their babies. Some pregnant women chose names for their unborn children, only to awaken from anesthesia to learn that their babies had been stillborn, or were on their way to adoptive homes, courtesy of papers the mothers had been made to sign while drugged.
Other young women, who understood what free lodging, labor, and delivery would cost them, acquiesced out of financial desperation only. There were probably still others who, feeling trapped and unprepared to parent, initially accepted Georgia’s coercion, her relieving them of the responsibility of choice. (These were the young women so many Hickory residents had insisted to me that Georgia had helped.)
There are areas grayer than any I want to visit, and one of them is here. I avoided it when I first realized Georgia’s role in uniting the children who were languishing on baby farms with the infertile adults who, because of the babies’ supposed genetic taint, were afraid to adopt them. Avoidance of more nuance than I could countenance had led me to ignore why these children had been languishing in institutions in the first place. The time before Georgia, when mothers had not only been allowed but legally enjoined to raise their children, had been less Utopian than I had wanted to believe. Poor, overwhelmed, pregnant with their seventh or eighth child, some had seen no recourse but to give their infants to baby farmers. They wanted, needed, a better option.
Georgia’s clients were generally more humane than baby farmers. The institution she created and popularized filled a need. Her selfish motives resulted in some good.
But Georgia had no right to steal children, or to sell them, or to place for adoption children whose parents wanted to raise them. And she didn’t treat the institution of adoption with the care that it deserved. How many even of the young women originally grateful for the option of relinquishing their children later regretted capitulation motivated by what they would have considered their weakness? How many of them suffered from lack of support in determining what they really wanted to do?
“Giving up my baby has been the bitter regret of my life,” Ann Cardell said in 1975, when she was sixty-three. Age eighty-five and lost to Alzheimer’s by the time I learned of her, she was revealed to me through the words of the child she had surrendered to Georgia for adoption. A Maryland psychiatrist named Gordon S. Livingston, he easily evoked the fragility of the moment when the two first saw each other after thirty-seven years. Ann herself appeared fragile, fine-boned, slender; her hands shook as she passed him a cup of tea. But as she spoke Gordon became most aware of her intense self-discipline, evinced by her carefully modulated voice and, even more, by the mechanism she had employed to bear his absence all those years.
She was the only child of a Vicksburg, Mississippi, farming couple who had sacrificed for her education. She had never married.
“Your father,” she told Gordon, “was the only man I ever loved.” She was twenty-six when she met him, and working as a teacher. “He was a wonderful dancer,” she said. She didn’t seem bitter that he’d abandoned her when he learned of her pregnancy.
“I went to Memphis to have you,” she said. “I couldn’t shame my parents.” She had hoped that the woman who boarded her during her pregnancy would be able to adopt him, but Georgia sent him to a Chicago doctor and his wife.
Back home in Mississippi, Ann regretted her decision, becoming gaunt and depressed before finally discovering a way of coping with her loss. She pretended she hadn’t lost Gordon. She kept him with her in her mind: watched him grow from infant to toddler to boy.
“By 1944 you were six and starting first grade, the very grade I was teaching,” she told Gordon, he wrote in an article for Reader’s Digest. “I couldn’t wait for school to start. I saw you in every child’s face. When I administered IQ tests I hoped the boy with the highest score was you. When I comforted a crying, defeated child, I feared he might be you.
“You grew so quickly that year,” she said. “You were aggressive and vulnerable, cocky and easily wounded. I learned you needed an atmosphere of tolerance and love. I tried to give it to you by giving it to all those children.
“It was an illusion, of course, but I half believed it, and when I said goodbye to that class in the spring, I felt sick with guilt. It was as if I was abandoning you for the second time.
“Then, the following winter, I learned the third grade teacher was retiring. I immediately petitioned the school board for a transfer, and I got it. I would be your teacher again, this time, when you were eight.
“That year, as I watched you mature, I was proud you were becoming your own person, and I felt selfish for trying to hold on to you. At the end of the year, I stopped imagining you were with me. But I always wanted you back. I prayed that one day I would meet you as a man . . .”
“I just sat there, immobilized by my own emotions,” Gordon told me. “Slowly she held out her arms and, for the first time in thirty-seven years, we touched.”
I was contacted by few mothers who had relinquished babies to Georgia—most, perhaps still burdened by guilt and shame, refrained from responding to my classified ads. I learned of Ruby Burdette as I had Ann Cardell, through her relinquished son. Memphian Solon Freeman found his mother, also of Memphis, through an ad in the classified section of the local newspaper. He was glad he took the initiative; Ruby told him that though she had wanted to, she would never
have searched— she feared disrupting his relationship with his adoptive parents.
Reunion has done nothing of the sort, Solon told me. “My adoptive mother and my birth mother get along really well—they go out to eat together all the time—and my daughters love both their grandmothers.”
Solon himself sees Ruby almost daily, sometimes helping her with a project that she initiated to give some meaning to her loss. She calls it the Love Home.
It’s a small maternity home, operated out of Ruby and her husband’s house: when I spoke with her she had cared for 109 young women. “It all began when I watched a movie on unwed pregnancy,” she told me. “The Lord laid it on my heart that I needed to help young girls in the trouble I’d been in.”
Ruby’s maternity home is as different as she can make it from the one Georgia put her in. “My girls get good food; Georgia’s women gave us nothing but peanut butter and oatmeal,” she said. She charges nothing for her services, relying entirely upon church donations. And Ruby’s young women face no pressure to relinquish their babies; most elect to keep them.
“I feel like I’m completing a circle,” Ruby said.
11.
Georgia’s Children
How we crave arrangement. Often, overwhelmed by the incalculable sadness Georgia had engendered, aware of the many of her direct victims who wished to speak with other birth parents or adoptees, and to form a support group, I would refrain from returning that day’s transcribed interviews to their separate folders, leaving them instead in a companionable pile. Then, reaching for a fresh legal pad, I’d list concrete facts about Georgia’s story. They would seem so orderly, so neat, so irrelevant.
“I understand your sense of outrage,” an elderly Memphis attorney had told me. “But what is the point of writing this book?”
And so blessedly often, as I rooted through the arrangements I’d effected upon the information stored in folders and in my brain for answers that were never where I thought I’d find them, I’d hear from someone who had imposed upon her life patterns more meaningful than any I could create: Ruby Burdette, who had completed a circle with her Love Home; adoptee Heidi Naylor, who had loved and cared for over sixty foster children. Another adoptee, Mary Margolis of St. Louis, Missouri, had begun speaking to small groups about her family’s dissolution.
The Baby Thief Page 13