The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  Of course, Georgia’s legacy deprives adoptees not only of the sense of connection Martha craved, but knowledge of their medical histories. “There are over 3000 illnesses that are passed through the genes,” I read in a book on adoption. “Regarding their own futures, adoptees can rule none out.”

  The following four adoptees spoke of their concern to the authors of The Adoption Triangle.

  “. . . I worried about my health. I had no idea what diseases I might have inherited from my biological parents. . . .”

  “I have an intense fear of dying at a young age. I wish I knew the lifespan of my biological relatives. . . .”

  Adoptees also worry about unknowingly passing on genetically based diseases to their children:

  “I am very interested in my family heritage. I feel quite deprived not knowing my true ancestry, and I feel that in the future my children have the right to know their heritages. My husband is also adopted. Thus, both of us have no lineage. . . .”

  “I have discovered that I have myoclonic epilepsy and I am very concerned about bringing any more children into the world and what I may have passed on to the children I already have. Had I known when I married that I am epileptic or that there was epilepsy in my family, I might have chosen never to have children rather than run the risk of passing it on to future generations.”

  Testifying before a legislative committee in 2006, attorney and reunited birth father Fred Greenman asked committee members to “remember what happens when you visit a new doctor. You are questioned about your family’s health history, either orally or by a questionnaire. Is your father alive? If so, what is the state of his health? If he died, how old was he? And what caused his death? The same questions for your mother and siblings. Typically, the doctor will also ask you whether any of your blood relatives had any number of specific illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, kidney disease, allergies, thyroid disease; it’s a long list.

  “Doctors don’t ask these questions out of idle curiosity. They know the answers may be crucial to both diagnosis and treatment.

  “When a typical adoptee is asked these important questions, his only answer is ‘I don’t know.’”

  Greenman cited the effect of this lack of knowledge on an adoptee in his twenties who had a “persistent stomachache for several days, which he ignored until his wife prevailed upon him to go to the hospital. The ‘stomachache’ was a coronary attack. He dropped dead on the steps to the hospital. The cardiologist concluded that his coronary weakness was probably genetic. Had he known his family history he might well still be alive.”

  Depriving adoptees of knowledge of their health histories seems particularly criminal today, when prophylactic measures are available to people who have inherited genetic variations predisposing them to serious diseases such as cancer.

  But no matter how important knowledge of their pasts is for adoptees, it is frequently denied them—a fact that they learn very young. “Some of the kids at school used to make a big production out of it . . .,” said a twelve-year-old boy interviewed for How It Feels to Be Adopted, by Jill Krementz. “They’d ask me a lot of questions like, ‘Are you adopted?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes.’ Then they’d ask me if I’d like to know who my real parents are and I’d say, ‘Sure.’ Then they’d say, ‘Well, you can’t!’ I’d ask them why and they’d tell me, ‘You’re not allowed to, that’s why.’ So that’s when I really found out about the law and the adoption records being sealed.

  “I think kids who are adopted should be allowed to know who their original parents are.”

  Sadly, relatively few of the adoptees who want to search for their pasts do so. Some are deterred by the difficulty of searching in a country with sealed records. And many are reluctant to upset their adoptive parents, who directly or indirectly often make adoptees aware that they don’t want them to search. Some adoptive parents even threaten to disown adoptees who search for their birth parents. Adoptees often delay searching until their adoptive parents have died, only to find that their birth parents are by then dead, too.

  Fortunately, increasing numbers of adoptive parents are beginning to respect their children’s needs. Understanding them requires little but thought. I recall telling a friend about Beth’s desire to find her mother. As was often the case he was hurt for me, assuming Beth’s search to be a criticism of my parenting. A relative of his, he said, had adopted two children. The girl was fine, and “had absolutely no need to search.” The boy, who needed to, rebelled, ran away, and was now estranged from his adoptive parents.

  “Beth and I have a good relationship,” I said. “She simply needs to know.” “It’s a separate issue, then,” he said.

  One reason given by adoptees for seeking their birth parents is to assure them that they are alive, happy, and accomplished. When Beth was very young, she fantasized about her mother viewing her. (Beth was not ready to see her mother herself; she would be behind a one-way mirror such as those used in police stations so that she could be viewed, but could not see her mother. Beth would be performing gymnastics.) “I want her to know how strong I am,” she said.

  Years later, I heard a similar wish from a Georgia Tann adoptee interviewed by Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. Stolen along with her sister and two brothers when she was four, Pat Schlothauer had searched for her parents as an adult, only to find they’d died. “She had no chance,” said Mike Wallace, “to show her mother and father what kind of person she grew up to be.”

  “It was really important to me,” Pat said, “to let our parents know that I turned out okay, because I felt like, as much as I have hurt, I feel like they’ve hurt, too.

  “So my gift to them would be,” she continued, fighting back tears, “I’m a very successful businesswoman, I feel, something to be proud of . . .” I was told that, during the taping, Mike Wallace’s eyes were moist, too.

  Some of the difficulties regarding adoption are inherent; a child is separated from her birth parents, parents from their child—that will always hurt. Adoptions that aren’t necessary, such as many of those arranged by Georgia Tann, and many involving her indirect victims in the 1950s and ’60s and even today, should not occur. Adoptions that are necessary should be as painless as possible. Much of the anguish of American adoptees could be alleviated by knowledge. Their right to this seems obvious. As the twelve-year-old boy interviewed for How It Feels to Be Adopted said, laws sealing adoptees’ records are “ridiculous.”

  They seem ridiculous to many who have researched the issue. But adoptees are, despite their number, a minority: few members of the general public are aware that adoption records are closed.

  “Closed? Like, ‘locked up?’” people have asked me at parties. “Didn’t that change long ago?”

  I was a novice at activism, and felt a fraud. I’d always understood my daughter’s need to search for her mother, and once I discovered Georgia Tann’s role in adoption I became even more aware of the rightness of Beth’s search. But the mind and the heart are not always in sync. Like Georgia’s clients, I feared that if my daughter found her mother I would lose her.

  But I knew Beth loved me. And I’d seen her mother in her hospital room, two days after she’d given birth: young, embarrassed, and so sad I’d had to look away. Her lawyer had told me she’d be “moving on”—as if she’d be able to forget Beth.

  And I’d tried to comfort Beth during her early childhood when she’d cried, and asked, “How can I know she loved me?”

  I knew I’d try to reunite Beth with her mother. And so I was grateful to members of a local support group, Adoption Network Cleveland, and to the thousands of other people across the country who were fighting to make such reunions possible.

  A critical battle regarding this—one I’d been following for several years—was being waged in Tennessee. By the time my daughter decided to search for her mother, in 1996, adoptees and their advocates were taking their fight to the Tennessee legislature.

  Three years earlier the Tennessee
Coalition for Adoption Reform headed by Denny Glad and adoptee Caprice East had persuaded the Tennessee governor and legislature to appoint an eleven-member commission to study the state’s adoption laws. Its most prominent member was Bob Tuke, an adoption attorney and adoptive father; Caprice East and Denny Glad were also members. The Study Commission held town meetings across Tennessee. Scores of Georgia Tann adoptees, and scores of her indirect victims, testified to their need to know their identities and pasts.

  14.

  The Beginning of the End

  As activists across the country worked to dispel Georgia Tann’s power over adoptees, Billy Hale was also shaking off her influence. He was energized by his frequent correspondence with Tennessee politicians regarding possible changes in the state’s adoption law. And he was writing poems, which, read in the order of their composition, mapped his journey from a troubled to a less-troubled man.

  His earliest writings had been inhabited by two people only:

  The shadow looms over his bed;

  He knows it’s time . . .

  (“Under the Porch”)

  Dark time drags slowly for a child in fear.

  Sleep is a place where someone finds you.

  (“Someone Listen Please”)

  “Someone Listen Please” was as bleak as his earlier poetry. But its title acknowledged the existence of someone other than abuser and victim. And in his next poems he moved further beyond, writing first of his mother, Mollie, and then of children suffering today. “A child is crying, can you help her?” he asked in one poem. In another, he wrote, “It’s up to me to make some sense of it all.”

  The first person he had reached out to had been Barbara Davidson. “He called me, and he listened,” she told me. “He understood—he’d been through the same thing.”

  They became friends, and began calling each other in the middle of the night when they couldn’t sleep. Billy had set out to help Barbara, but he was soon being helped, too.

  “One night he called me and he was upset—his memories were bothering him bad,” Barbara said. “And I told him, ‘Just pretend my hand is in yours, and I’m squeezing tight.’ Billy later said the same thing to Barbara. Separated by hundreds of miles, they never met. But “Pretend your hand is in mine,” spoken over the phone, became a comforting catch phrase: one that gave each more comfort than people who haven’t been so hurt can probably ever appreciate. Billy’s support helped Barbara cope with the flashbacks that had so disturbed her. And Barbara’s support eventually helped Billy symbolically assuage his mother Mollie’s sorrow.

  What he found saddest was her scrapbook full of clippings of rescued children, and that she’d never learned whether he had survived his abduction. After the publication of his article for the Missing Children’s Locate Center, he received letters from mothers forced to live in the same terrible limbo.

  “I relate to these women,” he told me. “They miss their children, and there’s a hole in their lives.” Anxious to help them, he joined the Locate Center, which searches for missing children and supports their families. Converting most of his trailer into an office, Billy wrote more newsletter pieces and began contributing to a cable television series regarding child safety.

  He was inspired, spending forty hours a week on volunteer work while renovating the home of the friend on whose grounds he lived. Officials for the Center appointed him field investigator for Tennessee, and later for the entire southeastern United States.

  Assisting the police and members of the FBI, Billy searched for missing children. Some were found alive. Billy was particularly elated by the location of a thirteen year old girl who’d been abducted by the leader of a youth group. Speaking later to her joyous parents, Billy felt he was giving his own mother a gift.

  Comforting parents less fortunate was difficult, but his empathy helped him do it. “Billy is a constant friend,” said the mother of a nine year old girl who was found dead. Billy wrote a poem about the child, from which her parents derived some comfort. And when they expressed interest in also doing volunteer work for the Locate Center, Billy persuaded a local businessman to give them a computer, fax machine, and printer. “Our work gives us reason to go on,” the father said.

  In 1995 Billy began feeling symptoms of the cancer that, misdiagnosed until 2000, would prove fatal in 2003. But for as long as he could, he searched for ways to help parents and children. A lifelong fan of country music, he asked singers to record personal service announcements related to missing children. Willie Nelson, Charlie Daniels, Naomi Judd, and others obliged. Billy considered his newfound sense of purpose sufficient payment. But one of his public service announcements won an international award. And there was more.

  Among the singers who had taped television spots for Billy was a young woman named Deborah Allen. When he visited her one evening in 1996 to pick up a videotape, her mother Rosetta opened the door, and Billy fell in love. Within three months, Billy and Rosetta married.

  Rosetta was a slim, dark-haired, elegant-appearing interior designer. Billy had a rougher look. “But inside, we’re soul mates,” he told me.

  “When you marry after a certain age, it’s so special,” Rosetta said in 2004. “We were inseparable. He called me ‘Precious.’ He gave me joy, and I gave him joy, too. At the end, he said, ‘The years with you have been the best years of my life.’”

  By the time Billy died his life had come full circle, from early happiness with his mother, to the abuse he had suffered while in Georgia Tann’s custody, to joy with Rosetta and the rewards he’d derived from his volunteer work.

  He had also lived to see the fruit of his and other adoption activists’ labors—a victory that had been achieved with great effort. The three thousand member Coalition for Adoption Reform led by Denny Glad and Caprice East had insisted upon helping not simply people who’d been adopted through Georgia Tann, but everyone who’d been adopted in Tennessee.

  They had known that persuading legislators to vote for a law opening original birth certificates and adoption records solely for Georgia Tann’s direct victims would be relatively easy. The state had been embarrassed by the publicity generated by my magazine article and the 60 Minutes program on Georgia Tann. The ranks of Georgia’s abettors had thinned through the years, and some younger politicians were openly critical of her crimes.

  But Coalition members knew that Georgia had hurt all adoptees— both her five thousand direct victims, and millions of indirect ones. Since adoption is regulated by the states, Coalition members could immediately address the needs of only the indirect victims who had been adopted in Tennessee. But the Coalition persuaded the Study Commission that was writing the proposed new adoption law to give as much credence to the rights of these indirect victims—the “post-1951 adoptees”—as to those who had passed through Georgia’s Home. The law would, if passed, grant both groups access to their original birth certificates and adoption records.

  Coalition members lobbied strenuously for the new law, buoyed partly by the responses they’d received from the town meetings they had held across the state. Hundreds of adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents testified to adoptees’ need for knowledge, often so movingly that they reduced their audiences to tears.

  One speaker was Eugene Calhoun, who’d undergone surgery to remove bone fragments in his spine after being beaten with a post-hole digger by the farmer Georgia Tann sold him to for $700 in 1933. Eugene had driven five hours from his home in Farmington, Missouri, to the town meeting in Jackson, Tennessee. He described being treated as a slave and denied schooling in his adoptive home, and mourning the loss of the mother Georgia stole him from.

  “You people don’t know what it’s like to be deprived of a family,” he said. “Anything you can do to see that this doesn’t happen to another child will be wonderful. Don’t let it happen to anyone like it happened to me.”

  Referring to the fact that he was still forbidden access to his original birth certificate and adoption records, he said, “
It’s heartbreaking to know that my own state where I was born won’t even recognize me. That’s what I’ve had for sixty years—no family, no parents, no nothing.”

  Georgia Tann’s indirect victims were also angry. Adoptee Caprice East described adoptees’ inability to know their birth names as “being in a witness protection program we didn’t ask to be in.”

  Co-chair of the Tennessee Coalition for Adoption Reform, Caprice lobbied strenuously for the new law, tracing and retracing the corridors of the Capitol Building in Nashville. Pushing a dolly stacked with research, she visited all 133 members of the Tennessee Senate and House of Representatives. Far from shy, she followed one legislator into the men’s room, and impressed virtually every legislator with her drive. Caprice “has worked harder on this bill than I’ve ever seen anybody work a piece of legislation, harder maybe than anybody ever in the history of Tennessee,” said Representative Joe Fowlkes.

  On May 18, 1995, the Tennessee Senate approved the new adoption law, 32 to 2. The House approved the law, 99 to 0. Then the legislators gave Caprice a standing ovation.

  Records would be opened for Georgia Tann’s direct victims, the pre 1951 adoptees, on July 1, 1995, and a year later for Georgia’s indirect victims. When the pre-1951 adoptees were granted access, one said, “It was the biggest Christmas of my life.”

  Adoptee Carolyn Godeau received more than she could ever have hoped. She had been told that her mother had died in childbirth, and upon receipt of her original birth certificate and adoption records expected, at best, to meet half-siblings or aunts and uncles. She did find those relatives—as well as Kathryn Trammell, her mother. Meeting Kathryn, she said, was “the most wonderful thing in the world. I lived with a very loving, kind, generous mother and father. . . . But knowing you have a family and roots with somebody is so important.