“I don’t know what eventually turned me around, but I realized my adoptive mother loved me. By the time I was ten I started smoothing out, caring more about people and what I was supposed to do . . .”
The years during which the sisters were separated took Mary, who was never adopted, through foster homes and, as she grew older, the Tennessee Industrial Home and the Tullahoma Reform School, from which she escaped three times, only to be caught, returned, and punished.
She was discharged at eighteen, and, wearing the clothes she had worn when she’d been admitted five years earlier, hitchhiked to Chattanooga, where she found work in a beauty shop. She, like Barbara, eventually married and raised a family; the sisters were forty-four and forty-six years old when they reunited in 1986.
“The first time I saw Mary again was at the airport and it was wonderful, wonderful,” Barbara told me. “We went to my house and talked about our pasts, lay across the bed and looked at each other’s photo albums. We told each other things no one else will ever know; we laughed and we cried. We looked at each other’s clothes and asked, ‘What size shoe do you wear?’—stupid things sisters should have been doing all these years and we did it in one night, but it was a wonderful, wonderful night. At 4 A.M. my husband woke up and said, ‘Aren’t you two girls asleep yet?’ like we were a couple of thirteen-year-old kids. It was great, it was really, really great. It was the most wonderful night of my life.”
When I began talking to the two sisters in the 1990s, they spoke with each other frequently. But their renewed closeness had not exempted them from problems regarding their pasts. Barbara, quieter and more reserved than her older sister, had particular difficulty. “I talked to no one about what happened,” she told me. “I wanted to get on with my life. I didn’t want to go backward. I thought I’d been through too much already—I didn’t need to remember. But I was wrong.
“Eleven years ago I started having flashbacks—it was horrible. For decades I’d been levelheaded and now I fell apart. They’d come at me, flash in front of me, and I’d see myself as a child. Sometimes they’d come out of nowhere, other times they’d have a trigger . . .
“One day I was in a store and a woman grabbed her little boy by the hair and lifted his feet off the floor and hit him so hard—that was me all over again; Georgia’s women didn’t hit us when we were on the floor, they had to have us up in the air; it went all through me. I dropped my groceries and I looked that mother in the eye and I was crying and I said, ‘Don’t hit him. Don’t you dare hit him.’ It made her stop. I guess I had a look on me like I would have killed her.
“I’m only letting myself remember some things,” she said. “There’s lots more that wants to come out. A lot of people say it would help to talk about it. But I don’t have anyone to talk to about it.”
“Not even,” I asked, “your sister, your husband?”
“I can’t bother Mary with it—her past was harder than mine.” As for her husband, she’d told him some things, but out of embarrassment or shame could not get out the rest. Psychiatrists, she feared, wouldn’t believe her stories.
And for the first time I realized there had been a consequence of the passage of the 1951 law legalizing Georgia Tann’s illegal adoptions that was almost as harmful as the continued separation of adoptees from their kin. By covering up the scandal, legislators had denied its magnitude, even its very existence. And if Georgia’s crimes had been unimportant enough to ignore, adoptees must have felt, how insignificant must be the pain they had caused? Did this account for the stoicism I’d sensed in so many of Georgia’s adoptees? Was it fear of being considered exaggerators that caused some to justify abuse: to say—as had the former orphanage resident who’d gotten “five across the face” for refusing his breakfast—“[I]t got my attention; I choked the food down”?
I feared that Barbara Davidson was ashamed, that she believed she was weak.
Remedying this, I thought, would require the same change as would the reunification of separated family members: the release of adoptees’ original birth certificates and adoption records. This would be no panacea for adoptees seeking reunion, since the information in Georgia’s records was often false. But the opening of Tennessee’s adoption records would be an admission that they should never have been closed. A terrible wrong has been done to you, it would state; you have a right to be angry and sad.
By the 1990s, Georgia’s victims’ fight for access to their original birth certificates and adoption records was led by the Tennessee Coalition for Adoption Reform, a three-thousand-member group headed by Memphis search expert Denny Glad and adoptee Caprice East. (Caprice, who’d been born after Georgia’s death and hadn’t been directly affected by her, was nevertheless appalled by her crimes.) One of my informants regarding possible changes in Tennessee adoption law was Billy Hale, who sent me copies of letters he’d written to the governor and other elected officials, pressing for legislative change.
The next time Billy called he spoke of having attended several committee meetings chaired by Denny Glad. He sounded animated, strong; our former roles seemed reversed, for I had just spoken with Barbara Davidson, who had cried, and I sounded sad.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. I explained how I, having never undergone experiences such as Barbara’s, couldn’t adequately talk to her, and that she didn’t want to bother her sister Mary who, having never been chosen by an adoptive family, had been worse off than she.
Billy asked for her number.
It doesn’t comfort adoptees like Billy and Barbara to know that Georgia Tann was never happy. She was unhappy despite the approximately $1 million she made from her black-market business, and all that it bought her: cars; furs; homes in Memphis’s best residential section; several rental properties; a tourist court; two hundred acres of timberland; a vacation home in Biloxi, Mississippi; and a small motel in California. And from 1938 to 1943 she owned Tannwood, a seven-acre rural estate on the border between Memphis and Mississippi. Tannwood had cedar, persimmon, magnolia, and dozens of other kinds of trees, as well as hollows, hills, and greenery enclosed paths upon which she and Ann rode their horses every morning.
Tannwood was the setting of the only photograph I’ve ever seen in which Georgia, dressed in a plaid shirt and trousers and astride her horse, looks comfortable. But she couldn’t relax, even at Tannwood. Instead of using the farm as a respite, she worked it. With the precision with which she spoke on matters unrelated to her Home, she told a Memphis reporter of canning 1,815 jars of strawberries, grapes, peaches, pears, plums, apples, figs, blackberries, butter beans, string beans, corn, okra, peppers, peas, beets, pimentos, tomatoes, and squash.
She tended and named every one of her twelve hens, twenty-three turkeys, twenty-six ducks, forty-two guineas, five calves, four hogs, three horses, and two dogs. She even found time to force parenthood on one of her animals, slipping newborn ducklings beneath a sleeping and infertile duck named Mrs. Goo Goo, who woke to find herself the mother of quintuplets.
Georgia’s obsession with manipulating human families—and frustration at her inability to control every one—may have contributed to her chronic bad temper. “She became high strung and blew off steam at the slightest excuse,” said a Memphis taxi driver in 1950. Her most frequent targets were birth parents and the reform-minded social workers she called “that bunch.” Her anger also affected adoptees and, occasionally, even her clients. While she fawned over most adoptive parents, particularly those of great wealth and social prominence, she hounded others, extorting large “donations.”
“She terrified people,” said former social worker Mildred Stoves, whose friend had adopted through Georgia. “He was a teacher and didn’t make much money, and Georgia would ask for $2,000, $3,000. His wife would tell me, ‘Miss Tann’s threatening us; the threat is veiled, but . . . ’”
With the stakes this high, Mildred assured me, adoptive parents “scraped up what they could.”
Mildred’s friends were fortunate in bei
ng able to satisfy Georgia’s demands. When another couple was unable to pay the $1,500 she demanded of them, she took back their adopted child.
Georgia’s withholding of medical information about her children also hurt adoptive parents—and the children. In 1949 a pediatrician at Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville spoke of several “tragedies that could have been prevented” if the adoptive parents “had had full social and medical information before them at the time of the adoptions.
“One concerned a child who had been irreparably damaged in eyes, heart and mind by a case of German measles which his mother had during pregnancy. . . .”
He told of another case regarding the adoptive placement of four children, all born to the same mother. “As fast as the children were born, there was someone [Georgia Tann] taking the children out of her hands and handling adoptions of them,” he said. “She [the mother] had syphilis at the time the last child was born—and that child was adopted by a clergyman, who knew nothing of the background.”
Georgia also sometimes reneged on her promises to prospective clients. In March of 1947 Mrs. W. A. Hachmeister of Memphis arrived at the Home to pick up the infant girl she’d been promised, only to discover that Georgia had changed her mind about the placement. It was to have been an unusually open adoption for the time: the baby’s mother had chosen Mrs. Hachmeister and her husband as adoptive parents. Georgia had also agreed to this, two months before the baby’s birth.
Once the child was born, however, Georgia refused to let Mrs. Hachmeister adopt her; Georgia’s purported reason was that Mrs. Hachmeister and the baby’s mother were of different religions. It was an odd justification, considering the many non-Jewish children Georgia placed with Jewish clients, but she felt no need for logic, or kindness.
She ignored Mrs. Hachmeister as she pled for the baby, promising to have her baptized and raised in the Catholic religion of her birth. Georgia kept the infant. Shortly afterward, the child “was removed from the Home to the Methodist Hospital, where she expired, death resulting from dysentery evidently contracted at the Home,” Mrs. Hachmeister wrote to her attorney in 1949. “[T]his little soul’s physical form lies in a nameless grave, a symbol of sacrifice.”
Georgia’s cruelty extended even to her own family members, whom she played off against each other by giving her current favorite expensive gifts. She caused such jealousy between her adopted daughter June and her partner Ann that years later June refused to let her son and daughter play with children who, although unrelated to Ann, happened to bear her surname, Hollinsworth.
Georgia was cruel to June even on the occasion of her marriage, to a man Georgia didn’t like. Georgia boycotted the wedding and, during June’s honeymoon, destroyed the clothing she’d left at home.
Georgia was a successful businesswoman, but she wasn’t emotionally steady. In 1928 she suffered such a nervous upset that, wrote Ann, “she can’t attend to business matters.” In 1933 and 1934, Ann described Georgia as “near a nervous breakdown” and “almost to the breaking point.” Georgia herself told a Memphis reporter that in 1941 she had been “tired, worn out, on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” She dealt with this by buying Tannwood.
June’s daughter Vicci Finn described another way in which her grandmother dealt with tension. Temporarily leaving the running of her Home to her attorney and several of her workers, “Georgia would disappear into her house with Ann for a few weeks and emerge as if everything was all right.” Vicci also said that Georgia could be very impulsive.
“On the spur of the moment she would just take off for Cuba. My mother and father [June’s second husband, whom Georgia liked] wouldn’t even know she was gone. Georgia would call and say, ‘Get down here right now, drop everything—I want you to come down and keep me company. Let’s go swimming, let’s party, let’s gamble.’”
Georgia’s ability to summon the energy to be so vicious and lively seems particularly remarkable considering her physical problems, which besides severe arthritis and a limp caused by a car accident, included heart attacks suffered in 1941 and 1943. In 1945 doctors at the Mayo Clinic diagnosed her with cancer. She refused surgery, and until her death in 1950 relied upon narcotics for pain.
Georgia had other difficulties as well, for not even Crump could stop the letters of complaint about her that poured in from all over the country. Georgia and her attorney received angry letters from lawyers in Mississippi, Maryland, Missouri, Arkansas, Alabama, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California. Many demanded information about the children Georgia planned to place with their clients.
Abe Waldauer dealt with these complaints by threatening Georgia’s cancellation of the proposed adoption, at which point most prospective adoptive parents probably muzzled their lawyers. Fighting with the Tennessee legislature took more muscle. By 1945, Georgia’s practices were widely criticized by ethical social workers and others in Tennessee, and a bill that would have required her to assess the qualifications of adoptive parents reached the legislature. Georgia worked furiously, blackmailing clients into sending telegrams opposing the bill, and using her political contacts, particularly her attorney. Without the knowledge of the bill’s sponsor, Abe Waldauer gathered a quorum of Crump-appointed legislators to a secret meeting held before the state senate’s regular session, and had the bill defeated.
In 1947 Tennessee adoption reformers drafted a bill authorizing the State Welfare Department to investigate adoption proceedings. Again utilizing their Crump connections, Georgia and Abe had the bill buried in committee.
Georgia’s biggest legislative challenge occurred in 1949. By then the adoption reform group included Judge Samuel Bates and the Memphis pediatricians who three years earlier had complained about Georgia; members of the clergy; and civic groups like the Junior League and the League of Women Voters. Some adoptive parents were also involved, motivated in part by her blackmailing of them. Adoptive father Jesse Jackson, a Memphis florist, told a reporter in 1950, “I found that I was being used by Miss Tann as a tool. I finally told her I was through being used in such fashion.” He described how Georgia would address a telegram to state legislators, urging them to vote against adoption reform, and “demand” that it be sent over his signature. “She used many other [adoptive] parents in the same way until they rebelled as I did,” he said.
Even more threatening to Georgia was the fact that Boss Crump had lost his statewide power with the 1948 election of political outsiders Gordon Browning and Estes Kefauver as governor and senator. Georgia worked furiously, bribing a pivotal legislator with the gift of two adopted children and getting the support of as many adoptive parents as possible.
But after twenty-four years of suffering under Georgia Tann, Mem phians were fed up. During heated legislative fighting in Nashville the former Children’s Bureau social worker who’d objected to Georgia’s adoption methods in 1925 but who, because of Georgia’s stranglehold on Tennessee adoptions, had later been forced to adopt through her, gave a speech supporting adoption reform. Afterward she walked into the capitol lobby, where she saw Georgia Tann and Georgia Robinson, superintendent of the Porter Home and Leath Orphanage, in tense conversation.
“I hope you understand how I felt,” the adoptive mother said.
“I certainly do understand how you felt,” Georgia Tann retorted. Then in a hostile tone she added, “I think you ought to know that I recently had a letter from the mother of your child.”
The adoptive mother considered this a threat to tell her son’s mother where he was living. Like most adoptive parents of the time she didn’t want her child to meet the mother who’d borne him, and she burst into tears.
The reform bill passed both houses anyway, inspiring Georgia and her attorney to a desperate move. The pro- and anti-reform camps had agreed upon an amendment excluding the bill’s second paragraph, which had nothing to do with Georgia Tann. The amendment directed the “striking [of] the entire second paragraph of section 5.” Secretly gaining ac
cess to the bill’s rough draft, Abe Waldauer inserted a carat between “second” and “paragraph,” added the words “and third,” and then crowded an “s” at the end of “paragraph.” The amendment now directed the exclusion of not only the second paragraph but the third one, which contained the reform measures aimed at curbing Georgia. The governor signed the botched bill, and it became law.
It would be Georgia’s last success, and she must have known it. For while Crump maintained control of Memphis until his death in 1954, his influence in the state capitol had lessened. In 1950 three prominent Memphis adoptive fathers complained to Governor Gordon Browning about Georgia’s blackmailing of them, and that fall he determined to close down her Home.
No hero, he apparently meant to delay announcement of Georgia’s crimes until after her death, and dealt with her in response to the complaints, not of long-suffering adoptees and birth parents, but of adoptive parents who had, in the main, profited from her. Browning so hamstrung investigator Robert Taylor as to ensure the superficiality of the idealistic young attorney’s probe. Georgia, of course, may not have anticipated the shallowness of the investigation of her crimes. And the prospect of even the most cursory inspection would have appalled her.
Death may have been a relief; it was certainly at hand. Increasingly debilitated by cancer, she was confined to her bed by August 12, 1950, and attended by a nurse. For the past few years, knowing death was near, she had spent money madly, on cars, furs, and the refurbishing of her residences. She sent her daughter June and her husband on trips all over the country, urging them to stay in the most elegant hotels.
Her last purchases, made a month later, were strictly utilitarian: syringes, catheters, a hospital bed. At the end, she left her home on Stonewall Court only for medical treatment, including almost daily trips by ambulance between August 29 and September 7 for X-ray treatments to the pelvis. On September 11 she was too ill to make the trip.
The Baby Thief Page 18