The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  During the first years after leaving her adoptive home, Joy tried to ignore what her father had said about her birth family. “I locked it up,” she told me. “I closed the door.” She bore two wonderful sons, built a life so strong that the news that her adoptive grandfather had left money to every grandchild but her couldn’t touch it. “I have what I’ve worked for,” she told herself, “not what somebody gave me.”

  But she couldn’t help wondering about her parents and her older brother, Grady, whose name had been listed in her adoption papers. On June 12, 1943, she had written to Georgia Tann:

  “I was brought up completely unaware of the fact that I was an adopted child. When I married a year ago this past February they told me that I wasn’t their child. They told me that I was the child of riverboat trash who gave me away because they didn’t want me. . . .

  “Several months ago I wrote to the Juvenile Court seeking information of my parents or brother. I received an answer from the Chief Probation Officer, F. E. Bradley, advising me to contact you. He said you were the only person who could give me the desired information.

  “Miss Tann, surely there is some information you can give me concerning my parents or my brother, Grady. It is very confusing to suddenly realize that you have parents and a brother you’ve never known. . . .

  “You are the only person who can help me, Miss Tann. And I beg of you to give me any information you can that will help me find my people.”

  Georgia never answered. Joy’s attempts to obtain information through the Tennessee Department of Social Services produced no results. And whenever her sons misbehaved she reasoned that her past might be a box best left closed. But when Grady, who after years of effort had obtained a court order releasing his adoption records, contacted her in 1989, she discovered her genealogy to be no cause for shame.

  Her parents had been poor, and her father an alcoholic, but he and her mother had loved her and, after she and Grady were stolen from their houseboat in 1925, visited Georgia Tann and Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley, begging for their return. They were accompanied by other relatives: the children’s uncles and cousins and maternal grandmother, Navada, who never gave up hope of reunion with her grandchildren. She and the children’s parents had sent Georgia Tann letters protesting the children’s abduction for twenty-five years, until Georgia died. When Joy learned that her own name had originally been Navada, after her grandmother, she felt a connection she’d never felt before.

  “She was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian,” Joy told me. “Now I know where I got my strong features. She acted as mid-wife when I was born in a two room log cabin on the bank of the Sunflower River in Mississippi.” Joy, who’d long painted miniature scenes on china, had, when I last spoke with her by phone, just finished her first oil painting—a portrait of her grandmother, Navada. “I wish you could see it,” she said. “I painted her with her black hair and high, high cheekbones, looking so strong. I would have enjoyed growing up near her.”

  As is the case of most people strong enough to survive their difficulties, Joy didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time regretting something she would never have, preferring to enjoy what she could, the most important of which was spending every possible minute with her brother Grady, who was ill. She was extremely proud of him, for though he’d had a difficult childhood, experiencing several foster and adoptive placements before finding a permanent adoptive home, he hadn’t become bitter. “He is a good, good, person,” she said.

  It was an unsurprising testimonial, given not only the fact of its truth but her joy at having been found by Grady after a separation of sixty-four years. Brothers and sisters reunited after many years don’t take their relationship for granted. This was illustrated not only by Joy Barner but by adoptee Barbara Davidson, who in the 1990s told me of her reunion with her sister, whose childhood name was Mary. Barbara’s account seemed particularly moving within the context of the suffering they’d shared while in Georgia’s custody, and their agonized separation: subjects so painful fifty years after their occurrence that Barbara related them not in linear fashion, but in stream-of-consciousness bursts.

  “It was a horrendous thing that Georgia did and only God can help her, I don’t know if even God can help her . . .” Barbara was talking, I realized, not only of Georgia’s cruelty in parting her from Mary, but in sexually abusing both girls while they were in her custody.

  Several people had informed me of Georgia’s sexual abuse of children. Among the mail I received in response to my Good Housekeeping article on Georgia Tann had been a letter from a fifty-four-year-old man who later told me and another reporter about abuse he and his twin brother had suffered in Memphis in the 1940s.

  The twins had been less than eight years old. “We remember being in a big bed, stripped naked; Georgia Tann and some other people were there reaching for us and kissing us and touching us where we shouldn’t be touched,” one brother told a reporter for The Daily Pantagraph.

  Taken from their mother at age five, the twins had been placed in the Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage in Nashville, and then sent to a California adoptive couple. The adoptive mother frequently beat them, often with the cord from an electric iron. The boys ran away, were found and sent to Memphis, where they were put in the Porter Home and Leath Orphanage. The twins later saw a page of its record book that read “Miss Tann wants these twin boys to have institutional training” before being adopted again.

  Like other residents, they were viewed every Sunday by prospective adoptive parents, and they were eventually selected by a kind farming couple. But, haunted by memories of separation from their mother, they searched for and in 1987 found her and their two sisters. It was a happy reunion, but did not fully satisfy their need for connection to their past. When I last spoke with them, they were hoping to write a book about their experience with Georgia Tann.

  Barbara Davidson and her older sister Mary were abandoned by their mother to Georgia Tann in 1942 and housed in an orphanage that Georgia visited frequently.

  Raised until the ages of five and seven by an alcoholic mother so neglectful they had to rummage through neighbors’ garbage cans for food, Barbara and Mary had always been close; their devotion intensified when they entered Georgia Tann’s custody. “Mary was all I had,” Barbara said. “She slept near me at night but it was still frightening; the beds creaked and the floors were cold, so cold, and I would cry for a blanket but no one would give me a blanket.”

  Rules were strict at the orphanage, Barbara told me, and punishments were illogically applied. Children were denied access to bathrooms at night, but were beaten for wetting their beds. Mary was beaten twice most evenings—once as a warning, and later as punishment. She and other malefactors—children attempting to sneak a drink of water—were caught by women, and occasionally men. “I remember them patrolling, checking our beds—shining a light in our faces—they carried big black flashlights,” Barbara told me, nervously. “One night a woman pulled me out of bed by the hair and beat me and beat me—she said I stole a lemon gumdrop and I said I didn’t do it. Mary said I didn’t either, but the woman hit me in the head, hit me in the head, and hung me in a closet . . .”

  Locking residents in closets, I would learn from many other adoptees, was the staff ’s most frequently used punishment. Barbara and other children were bound with rope around their wrists and suspended by the ropes from coat racks, their feet barely touching the floor. It was while she was bound, Barbara said, that Georgia Tann molested her. “She ran her hands all over me and played with me, that stuff. She said if I cried out she’d hit me in the head.”

  Georgia Tann assaulted Barbara’s sister Mary in the closet, also, and in a bathroom, once using a wooden spoon. “She squatted over me, gouging me,” Mary said. “She seemed like a giant. She was sadistic, evil. I thought of her as the devil.”

  Another adoptee was five years old when assaulted by Georgia in a bedroom. “Yes, sexual abuse at the hands of Georgia Tann w
as very true and it was presented as your favor,” she said. She recalled the bedroom in which she was assaulted as frilly, “a gorgeous room. I remember the shock of the room, so overwhelming and beautiful. I remember being told to come sit in her lap . . .

  “I keep trying to block it all out but it keeps coming . . . It’s caused me a lot of problems. You won’t find,” she said, “a whole lot of healthy adults who went through there.”

  The objects of Georgia’s molestation were little girls, but boys in her custody also suffered abuse, usually from male caretakers. Since I spoke with a relatively small percentage of victims I was unable to determine the incidence of abuse, but it seemed high: judging from his own experience, one adoptee said matter-of-factly, “Back then, every boy in an orphanage got molested.” I don’t really know if Georgia Tann’s children suffered more molestation than they would have, then, in any children’s institution. (But if Georgia had not stolen many of them, they would not have been institutionalized.)

  Residents of orphanages and reformatories have always been vulnerable to pedophiles, and while offenders are still too seldom punished, there is at least recognition today of the existence of child sexual abuse. Such awareness was lacking during the twenty-six years of Georgia’s operation in Memphis.

  “People didn’t talk about child physical or sexual abuse—it was in the closet all over the nation.” A physician told me this—a man I greatly respected for having tried diligently but futilely to stop Georgia in the 1940s. Like many elderly Memphians, he asked me not to use his name in this book, and refused to discuss why he had, since the 1970s, worked with abused children. Perhaps he was unaware that what he couldn’t prevent in the 1940s had motivated him since then; it’s possible it had not. But he spoke eloquently on the subject of mistreated children, telling me that until the publication in 1961 of a study titled “The Battered Child Syndrome,” which he described as “a sensation; it woke us all up,” physicians assumed that the children they saw whose bones repeatedly broke were simply clumsy.

  There was even less awareness, the Memphis doctor said, of sexual abuse than physical abuse of children. And if there was little general recognition of such abuse, I thought, there would be even less among citizens trained by Crump not to notice anything at all. Dr. Clifton Wooley—another pediatrician who was more courageous than the average Memphian of the 1940s—told me of his attempt to obtain help for a year-old baby whose arm had been broken by his mother.

  “It was swollen in the middle of the shaft, between the wrist and elbow; the mother’s neighbor told me the mother had broken the child’s arm because he wouldn’t eat his pablum.

  “I went to the Juvenile Court, the police department, every agency I could think of—I could get no one to look into the case. I could get no one to pay attention. Things were really lax in those days.”

  When I asked him if he believed Memphis authorities would be even more reluctant to investigate a woman who, unlike the abusive mother, was known to have Crump’s protection, he assented. That greater laxity, I determined from speaking with adoptees who while in Georgia Tann’s custody were physically or sexually abused in orphanages, foster homes, and adoptive homes, was extended to any adult with whom she dealt. Judging from descriptions of their boldness, they were well aware of their immunity to punishment.

  “I saw it with my own two eyes—no doubt about that—attendants, yard guys taking boys out into the woods. That was just everyday, normal activity—we thought that was life.”

  I must have betrayed some shock, for the man who said this asked, “What are you doing, living in the Dark Ages?”

  His name was Randall Gookin, and he lived in Senatobia, Mississippi; the sense of self he communicated through the phone lines—one I would have found strong in any person—seemed particularly remarkable once I had learned of his past.

  Born in Memphis to irresponsible parents in 1937, he was cared for by his grandparents until age four, when his grandmother died and his grandfather married a woman who refused to raise him. His grandfather took him to Georgia Tann, who boarded him at a Tennessee orphanage. It was there that he witnessed the abuse he described to me. Like many of the men who spoke of such things he said that he himself hadn’t been abused; the reason wasn’t what I heard most frequently—that he fought too hard—but “because of my nature. I was rowdy, dammit, mean and ugly. . . . I’m a harelip, have a cleft palate, I was the ugly duckling of the family and the ugly duckling of the orphanage.

  “Oh, [but] I had pictures taken of me lots of times—it ain’t nothing.”

  “Pictures in which you were dressed, or undressed?” I asked.

  “Both, yeah, sure, we all had to pose—somebody would line us up naked or pose us in the shower.”

  The physical features he believed spared him from outright rape may also have prevented his being sold by Georgia Tann. But like other children in her custody he was subject to what he called inspections. “People would come in and look at us like we were dadburned animals in the zoo. A lot of times we were told, ‘We want you to meet someone, we may have you a new mamma and papa and we want to see how you get along’—I heard that so damn many times I got sick of it.

  “’Course, nobody never wanted me.

  “Bear in mind, though, when you get old enough to work, then people want you. They’d say, ‘Oh, you’re a strong little fella.’” He served in nine different foster homes, beginning when he was eight.

  “I waxed floors, washed dishes, vacuumed, mowed lawns, fed the cows, cleaned out barns—I was a little servant. No one ever came to check on me. I was beat with rosebushes, rubber hoses, razor strops, two-by-fours . . .”

  The birth children in the foster homes were often as cruel as their parents, he said. “They’d say, ‘You’re not our brother. You’re just here to work, and we don’t have to.’ I was with one family that had a truck patch out on James Road during tomato picking time, their boys and I were supposed to pick tomatoes. They wouldn’t work and I had to fill up their baskets. I got mad and threw a whole bunch of tomatoes at them—ruined them—and the father beat me with a garden hose. I said, ‘I’ll fix him,’ and unhitched the trailer of tomatoes so it rolled down the road and turned over and squashed everything and he beat me again and I ran away.”

  He was caught, however, sent back to Georgia Tann, re-placed and placed again until he ran away for good at fifteen. His grandfather got him a job in construction, which he kept for nine years. Visiting an uncle at age sixteen, he fell in love with a girl from a nearby farm. They married three years later, and, when I spoke with him, he and his wife had recently celebrated their thirty-sixth wedding anniversary.

  His years in an orphanage and foster care had, he said, left two marks, one of which he considered a realistic—and some might consider unduly pessimistic—view of the foster care system. He was sure that children in foster care in the 1990s were being treated as badly as he was.

  When I ventured that conditions might have improved, he said, as if in pity, “You don’t know nothing. People don’t take these kids because they love them. There oughta be a way to put little cameras on foster kids and see what really happens to them.”

  Well, I told him, I understand one legacy of having been involved with Georgia—what’s the other?

  His laugh rang through my phone’s earpiece. “Strength.”

  He must have sensed my skepticism because he chuckled again.

  “You have no—” he started over, with patience. “Could you believe me if I told you that being raised in an ugly duckling world and being punished and made to work like a slave made a person out of me—it gave me a lot of determination to fight and do better for myself—I think I learned a lot. I sure as hell don’t think kids should be mistreated but it made me independent, made me work for what I want.”

  I had heard similar protestations, what I’d always considered rationalizations, from other adoptees. One man appended a description of his punishment for refusing to eat breakfast
in a Tennessee orphanage—“I got five right across the face”—with “You might think it was brutal but it got my attention; I choked the food down.”

  He strains to persuade himself, I thought, that his suffering had meaning. I was inclined to think this too of Randall Gookin, but his tone almost convinced me of his words. That suffering could fortify a person had always seemed implausible, but I wanted to believe it; I recorded with more than usual care what he offered as proof of how strong his fires had forged him.

  “I traveled around a lot on my first job but when the kids were old enough for school, I promised my wife, we’ll settle in one place. In 1962 I bought sixty acres in Senatobia, farmed them and also began working in a factory—I’ve been supervisor now in three different ones. I have two of the most wonderful daughters in the world—they’re grown and settled now, but they live to come home. I have a wonderful wife, four beautiful grandkids, a family. We’re closer than close, as close as dirt is to the earth.”

  The next time I heard from Billy Hale, I couldn’t help contrasting his situation with Randall Gookin’s. Billy was lonely, I knew, in his trailer and at work, renovating a mansion for a friend who was usually away on business.

  But he was making efforts both to connect with his old world and make a new life. He spoke frequently with his adult children, and was thinking of buying some land near Kingsport and building a house. He had run an ad in the personals column and made dates with three women.

  He was accepting, finally, that his mother Mollie was dead, and was searching for something constructive to do with his memories of pain and loss. He sent me poems with such titles as, “The Closet,” “Who Am I?” and “Why Me, Lord?” Several had been published in an anthology. It didn’t seem to be enough. But now, he told me with enthusiasm he hadn’t evinced before, he was writing an article about his abduction and molestation for the Missing Children’s Bulletin, which is published by the Missing Children’s Locate Center. In that his story concerned, he wrote, “not the stereotypical type of slime that lurks around playgrounds and public toilets, waiting for the chance to steal and rape children, but a woman of some standing in her community,” and that such supposedly respectable molesters still operate today, his tale would serve, he hoped, as a caution. Conscious of his duty as reporter, he had planned to write dispassionately. But from the beginning he risked the first person. “My biggest fear,” he wrote, “was being murdered.”