The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  The worst abuse occurred in a boarding home to which Georgia Tann sent him upon his arrival in Memphis. Billy didn’t know the location of the house, but, judging from the frequency with which Georgia visited, he believed it was near her Home on Poplar Avenue. It housed twelve children and was owned by a thin woman with white hair. A handyman lived in the basement. He was big-boned, and wore overalls, and smoked constantly. His name was Peterson, Billy recalled.

  The other children warned Billy to stay away from Peterson, and he hoped to. But when he was playing in the yard several days later he fell into a puddle, and the white-haired lady told him to stay on the porch until he dried. Underneath the porch was an entrance leading to the basement, and Peterson came out and up to Billy. “Come with me,” he said.

  Billy tried to dodge his big hands, but the man got him. He carried him to the basement.

  Decades later, Billy could still see the room—a washing machine stood against one wall, a furnace against another; behind the furnace was a door. The man unlocked it and pushed it open. The room was small and dark; the bed sheets were dirty and he laid Billy on them. He unbuttoned his overalls. “Don’t you cry,” he told Billy. “I’ll kill you if you do.”

  This was the first of dozens of rapes that so tore Billy’s flesh that by the time he was adopted a year later he was at times incontinent, and was eventually forced to undergo surgical repair.

  Billy tried to explain how he bore the abuse. “In my head, I built a safe room,” he said. “It had thick walls and no windows and big locks on the door. I went in there whenever he touched me and it was like I couldn’t feel, like I was just watching a movie involving some other boy.”

  For the rest of his life, Billy had stored his painful memories—of his mother Mollie, of being stolen and hurt—in the safe room. Only recently had he considered letting them out, and he’d reached that decision by default, through realizing that despite his locks they had been seeping through cracks, provoking rages and behaviors unworthy of Mollie’s son.

  He had related his past to the members of his survivor-of-sex-abuse support group: “I’ve drained them of all the help they can give me.

  “Maybe”—I believed he was thinking now of his newsletter article— “it’s my turn to help.”

  Through the centuries there have been countless adults who have abused children, but there are apparently only so many abusive techniques. I realized the archetypal nature of certain punishments before I began my Georgia Tann project, after Good Housekeeping published an article I’d written about a young girl who had survived what could well have been fatal abuse. As was often the case when I wrote about people who had suffered hardship, reader response was considerable. Elderly nuns wrote that they had prayed all night for the girl. And several readers sent news clips regarding children in their area who had recently been abused; reading, I was struck by the similarities between their torture and that of the subject of my story. So many of them had been burned, as had she, by cigarettes and scalding water, irons, stove coils. Some had been almost drowned. They had been starved, and imprisoned—in bedrooms, basements, closets; they’d been tethered—to sinks, bedposts, railings; they were forced to stand naked outside in the snow. They had been punished for bedwetting, sneaking food, and, most frequently, general “badness,” the exact nature of which was so seldom specified they must have believed it was in their very being. As a result of their torture, many had died.

  I don’t know exactly whom Georgia killed, other than the forty to fifty babies who perished in her Home during the winter of 1945; four more babies and “many” others mentioned in a letter of complaint written to the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare; the infant who died one week after reaching her New Jersey adoptive home; premature twins who, taken too early from the hospital, died one day after arriving at their boarding home; and the babies left unattended in the broiling sun. It is hard to think of how many must have died. The stories of survivors, alone, are overwhelming.

  Of course it’s impossible even to gauge the extent of survivors’ suffering. Barbara Davidson, who was molested both by Georgia Tann and by her adoptive father, was frequently hit while in Georgia’s custody. “The women hit us on the scalp so no one could see the bruises,” she told me. She was so traumatized by this that as an adult she had to be anesthetized to undergo simple procedures like teeth cleaning. She and other adoptees who’d been locked in closets suffered from claustrophobia.

  And over and over during my research I spoke with adoptees who were afraid to immerse their heads under water, or to sit in bathtubs— legacies of bathing methods used in a Memphis orphanage Georgia sent them to. Joe Pannell told me of witnessing one of these techniques in 1945, when he was ten.

  “Some of the workers had a bad habit of ducking kids underwater and holding them down,” he said. Younger children were the workers’ most frequent targets, so Joe and another ten-year-old orphanage resident, whose younger sister was also a resident, frequently monitored the little girl’s baths.

  “And one day we saw a woman holding Gus’s sister Barbara Jean underwater,” Joe told me. He and Gus shoved the woman and grabbed the little girl. “She was just about drowned,” Joe said.

  Years after that rescue, he and Barbara Jean married. Speaking with Joe on a day when other interviewees had told me terribly sad stories, I felt revived—more so than was justified. Yet the fortification I took from speaking with him helped me perceive how the next adoptee I spoke with, who was as troubled as any I knew, managed to keep going.

  “The bathtubs were some of the most frightening things,” Barbara Davidson said. “We’d have to stand in the hallway, naked, boys and girls together. ‘Stand in a straight line,’ the woman in front would say, and we’d be shaking, seeing the steam coming out from those tubs, the water was hot, so hot, scalding . . .”

  In response to my observation that her caretakers must have been sadistic she said quickly, “I can’t believe they enjoyed hurting us. They used the water to keep us in control.”

  She wanted to believe this, wanted to protect herself from realizing she’d been in the hands of people devoid of moral centers; I would have, too, in her place. However, not having been one Georgia’s victims, I could both applaud Barbara’s struggle to keep from falling into the abyss and sense how hard she had to work to avoid it.

  And Barbara was one of the lucky ones. She had survived. The insight her words provided into the amount of energy she and other adoptees expend each day making sense of, repressing the past deepened my appreciation of the truth of what they had believed for decades: something good must come from this mess.

  Must come, despite the fact that it will never compensate adoptees for the loss of capacity for sexual pleasure occasioned by repeated sexual abuse. Or their having been hung from coatracks by ropes tied around their wrists, or dangled down laundry chutes.

  Nothing will assuage the hunger spasms suffered by infants delivered to their adoptive homes feverish and dehydrated, or by older children who were also underfed while in Georgia’s care. During the two years that Heidi Naylor spent in Georgia’s network she was fed little but cold oatmeal. When she was adopted at age seven, she had crooked legs caused by rickets, and scars on her back and buttocks from having been whipped with a switch fashioned from a rosebush.

  Two of Heidi’s younger siblings, Arthur East and Judy Young, who remained in Memphis a year longer than she, were also malnourished. “I was so hungry I’d sneak into the kitchen and swipe cabbage and lettuce—it was the only food they didn’t lock up,” Arthur said. He shared his bounty with three-year-old Judy, of whom he was particularly protective because of her muteness: since her first day in Georgia Tann’s custody, the toddler had refused to talk. Even after her adoption, with Arthur—she refused to part from him, so that the couple from Oxford, Mississippi, who wanted one child ended up with two—Judy was silent for a year.

  Barbara Davidson’s sister Mary was so underfed by some of the foster mothers Ge
orgia Tann placed her with that at age seven she still fit in a highchair. One boarding mother, angry that Mary had tasted the butter she was churning, made her sit in the highchair for two days, without eating. Finally the woman gave her a pail containing mashed potatoes, chicken, biscuits, and gravy, and told her to feed it to the dog. Instead, Mary ate the food herself, and was beaten.

  During Joe Pannell’s years in a Memphis orphanage, he and other children were frequently put on two-week-long fasts of bread and water. During that time “we’d be brought into the cafeteria to watch the other children eat, but not be able to eat ourselves,” Joe told me. The workers, he said, wanted to demonstrate “how cruel they could treat you.”

  Abuse like this “makes you know you’re a nothing. It makes you a nothing. And that stays with you all your life.”

  Another of Georgia’s cruelties that will never be assuaged was her callous separation of siblings. Heidi Naylor, who entered Georgia’s network at age five with her four siblings, ages two to six, told me that later being separated from them had been more painful than had been any other abuse she’d suffered while in Georgia Tann’s custody.

  For a time, all five children were housed in the same orphanage. But in October of 1948 Heidi and her older sister, Virginia, were abruptly flown to California.

  “I remember it all,” Heidi told me, “the plane, and the Biltmore Hotel [in Los Angeles].” She, Virginia, and three other children were taken to a hotel room by one of Georgia’s workers, Alma Walton. None of the children knew they were going to be adopted.

  “And all of a sudden—with no preliminary—I was taken to an elevator and told I would never see my sister again: ‘That was good-bye to your sister,’ Alma Walton said.”

  Heidi was taken to the lobby, which was full of waiting adoptive parents. Alma Walton pointed out one couple. “And she just nonchalantly said, ‘Oh, that will be your sister’s parents,’” Heidi told me. “Then she pointed to another couple and said, ‘Oh, they’ll be yours.’”

  Heidi mourned the loss of her sisters and brother, and when she turned twenty-one she began looking for them. “But the records were as tight as drums,” she told a reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal in 1980. “It was like hitting your head against a brick wall.”

  It took over thirty years, but she was eventually reunited with Virginia and their three younger siblings, Arthur East, Judy Young, and Susan Trotter.

  Older siblings of children seized by Georgia Tann were sometimes tortured by grief for decades. Cleveland Panell was fifteen when he lost his four-year-old sister, Shirley Ann. Their mother had died on February 16, 1942, prompting the newspaper headline “Mother Dies: Leaves Eight Children.”

  “Two days after she was buried there was a knock on the door,” Cleveland told me. “It was a social worker”—she worked for the Department of Public Welfare, he said, “and under the table for Georgia Tann.

  “‘Are you taking care of your brothers and sisters?’ she asked me. ‘Oh you’re such a good boy.’ She patted me on the head.

  “Now it was eight in the morning and we were very poor. I had just made oatmeal for everybody. Of course the beds weren’t made, and the oatmeal pan was in the sink.

  “And on that little pretence she filled out a report: ‘House unkempt, dishes in the sink.’ And the court took my sister away from my father. Judge Kelley turned her over to Georgia Tann.”

  Cleveland went to see Georgia, begging for Shirley Ann’s return. “And Georgia Tann was pampering me to death. She said, ‘Look at the life your sister’s going to have. Don’t worry, I’ll always let you know where she’s at.’ And they put my sister temporarily in a little building on Chelsea Avenue. I called Georgia Tann up and said, ‘I want to see my sister.’

  “She said okay. She took me over there and I visited for half an hour, and then Georgia said we had to go. They had to pull my sister away from me. I mean absolutely she was screaming.”

  When Cleveland asked to see Shirley Ann the next week, Georgia told him she had a bad cold and couldn’t take him. “The following week it was, ‘Oh, she went shopping,’ and after that ‘Blah-blah-blah,’ and the next thing you know I never saw my sister again.”

  For the next thirty-seven years Cleveland searched for Shirley Ann, calling the police and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, writing letters to the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare, sometimes working as late as 2:00 A.M. He spent his annual two-week vacations driving from his home in Fall River, Massachusetts, to the Memphis City Hall, where he pored through old records. In 1975 he visited the Department of Vital Statistics in Nashville, where he spoke with a worker who, like the Memphis City Hall employees, said she couldn’t give him information about his sister, because she’d been adopted.

  “I broke down and started crying. It was a big public building and a crowd gathered. And I said, ‘Don’t you tell me I don’t have a sister named Shirley Ann. I was there—she was born at home and I was there!’”

  He apologized to the worker afterward and returned home. Several months later the woman sent him a letter: “Somewhere in the future if I can help you, I will.”

  “That gave me hope,” he told me. He sent the worker Christmas cards for four years—he always sent the same card, which had a religious theme.

  “A lot of the family said, ‘Why don’t you give up? She’s probably dead by now. She’s probably forgotten you,’” he told me. “I said, ‘If she’s alive I want her to know she has a brother that’s been looking for her for thirty-seven years.’”

  And in 1979 the Vital Statistics employee wrote him, “I could lose my job, I could lose everything by giving you this information: your sister was adopted by a Hollywood couple in April of 1942.”

  Cleveland and his wife immediately drove from New England to California, “right to the door of the L.A. Times to put an ad in the paper. I had a little picture of my sister and put it next to the ad—it was 1-inch by 2-inch, and it ran on Mother’s Day, May 13, 1979.”

  Georgia Tann had sent large numbers of children to Los Angeles. By 1979 many had long been searching for their families, and “I got a lot of calls from women, crying, saying, ‘That’s me in that picture!’”

  None of the women were Shirley Ann. But the ad also attracted the attention of two other Georgia Tann adoptees who were skilled in searching. Soon he was on the phone with the sister he hadn’t seen in almost forty years, and who, he discovered, had also been looking for him.

  But she was confused by his name, “Cleveland”—she recalled him by his nickname, “Cleebo.” She cried for five minutes when she realized who he was. “And don’t I have these other brothers, and a sister: Thomas, Roscoe, Charles, Elmer, Richard, Thelma?”

  “Honey, it’s ‘Velma,’” he told her. Her recall was remarkable, considering the fact that she’d been only four when stolen.

  Shirley Ann, who when young had resembled the child star Shirley Temple, had been raised in mansions by a Hollywood actor and his wife who liked to show her off. She told Cleveland they’d given her everything. “Everything but love.”

  Georgia splintered so many families and caused so much pain. She forced some robbed mothers to bear the agony of seeing their children marketed in the newspaper. Adoptee Barbara Savin’s mother kept the clipping advertising her baby daughter all of her life, always hoping for reunion with her, but she died before Barbara could find her.

  The practices of Georgia and her helpers seemed designed to inflict the greatest possible psychological damage. When Barbara Davidson was six years old, she found a kitten and brought it to her bed. “The women saw it and they drowned it in a rain barrel and they made me watch,” she said. “And they said, ‘Absolutely no animals are allowed, absolutely no animals.’

  “Then they put my hand in the water, oh God, my hand in the water and made me touch that tiny body . . .”

  The adoptees I spoke with agreed about what the state of Tennessee should do as compensation for having allowed Georgia to operate for
twenty-six years. They wanted information that would help them find their lost relatives. One of the more vocal proponents was Roger Cleghorne, who while in Georgia’s custody endured beatings with switches he himself was forced to fashion from tree branches. One broke while he was being beaten with it, and he was struck with terror. “I thought I’d be killed,” he told me in 1993. Seeking not deletion of or even compensation for his past, but reconnection to it, he had searched for years for his sister Glenna—unsuccessfully—with no help from the state of Tennessee.

  When I spoke with Barbara Davidson, she had long been reunited with her sister Mary, from whom Georgia Tann had separated her fifty years earlier. “The last time we were together as children we were in a big room with tile on the floor and we must have known what was coming because we were clinging and crying,” Barbara said. “They wanted to take Mary away. Two women came in and they couldn’t get us apart so they drug Mary out of the room by the hair on her head. Mary had such beautiful long blond hair and one of the women just wrapped it around her hand, wrapped it around her hand like a rope and dragged Mary away and she was screaming and I was screaming, ‘Mary, come back, don’t leave me, come back,’ but she never came back.”

  They remained apart for the next forty-four years, during which Barbara had to deal not only with sexual abuse at the hands of a foster parent and her adoptive father but with what had become of her nature. “I was surprised my adoptive mother didn’t send me back,” she said. “When I left Memphis I was hateful, mean—I did terrible things to my new brother, hit him every time he turned around. He’d go up and down the alleys digging in trash cans for something pretty to bring me and I’d throw it at him. I pushed him down when he was rollerskating and I broke his glasses.