Before and After

by Judy Christie

  Lisa, on and off the road, and in the middle of a family relocation back to her home state, answers Connie’s question about a visit:

  09/15/17 AT 10:35 P.M.

  Hi Connie,

  I would love to set up a time to talk with you and yes, I’d love to work out a time to get together, hear about your memories…and also look through the rest of your records. I’ve heard so many wonderful stories of family reunions since starting on this project, and, of course, some sad stories as well.

  I will email after things settle down around mid-October and we’ll set up a time to talk!

  Warmly,

  Lisa

  September rushes into October. Life in the Wingate household tumbles end over end. The eldest son has recently married, and a new daughter-in-law joins the family. Lisa’s youngest son has graduated from college, landed an engineering job, and is navigating the world of housing, insurance forms, and employment paperwork. There’s motherly advice to give, and pots, pans, furniture, and pillows to sort for a fledgling apartment. And the son is not the only one headed to a new nest. A moving van travels to a fixer-upper house in Texas, where Lisa’s husband has started a new teaching job. The Wingate stint in temporary lodging in a loft space over a coffee shop is drawing to a close.

  Before We Were Yours has catapulted into readers’ hands, propelled by word of mouth, through reader-to-reader and book-club-to-book-club recommendations. Not only has the novel affected adoptees and family members hungry to know more, it grabs book lovers around the world as it is published in foreign-language editions in thirty-five countries. The abuse of children, sadly, isn’t just an American issue, but one that travels across cultural boundaries.

  While chaos is reigning in Lisa’s world, Connie experiences a new world of her own. One she never anticipated. In Anthem, Arizona, the book-club discussion of Before We Were Yours begins enthusiastically—and continues for three and a half hours. Readers fling questions at her, curious, angry at what happened, inspired by her courage. Then an unexpected question comes. “One gal said, ‘Have you ever considered doing a reunion?’ ” Connie recalls. Of course she has considered it. She yearns for it. At the book club, this idea that has resided in her heart floats about the room, out in the open for everyone to see.

  When she returns home, she emails Lisa with an update. And another question:

  10/18/17 AT 11:16 A.M.

  Dear Lisa,

  I was invited to join my old book club to discuss Before We Were Yours and my own experience with Georgia Tann…Everyone was so interested in your characters and the true story of those who were separated.

  Would you ever be interested in doing a reunion with these victims? I was a senior vice president of a company and did a lot of event planning. I would be happy to help put something together, if you are in the least bit interested?

  Your book really pushed me to dive back into the history of my past.

  Best wishes,

  Connie

  Wrapping up a leg of the book tour and touched by these true stories, Lisa is increasingly drawn to the idea of a reunion. These adoptees—survivors really—deserve something. But what? The logistics seem daunting. With the death of adoption rights champion Denny Glad, a Memphis resident who helped connect adoptees like Connie with their birth families, and the end of Tennessee’s Right to Know project, which fought to open Tennessee’s adoption records for decades, finally succeeding in 1995, there is no clearinghouse for TCHS adoptees and family members. No convenient place to go with unanswered questions. Nowhere to compare paperwork, share stories, meet others drawn into this aging group of survivors.

  Lisa, unable to shut the reunion door, gets back in touch:

  10/19/17 AT 10:10 P.M.

  Dear Connie,

  I love your idea of doing some sort of reunion gathering of victims. These stories should be validated and shared. Thank you for offering to help. It sounds like you have just the right expertise for this sort of thing.

  In the meantime, I’m cataloging stories and contacts as I hear from people who are connected to TCHS.

  Warmly,

  Lisa

  Nudges for a reunion come in trickles…and then a torrent.

  Before We Were Yours is chosen as the “If All Arkansas Read the Same Book” selection for 2018. Lisa will tour the state in the spring. That’s Arkansas, next door to Tennessee. Just across the river from Memphis. Another invitation for Lisa arrives. Another tie to Memphis:

  10/05/17 AT 12:42 P.M.

  Hello Lisa,

  I hope this email finds you well. I’m the executive director of historic Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, TN, where nineteen children are buried who died while living with Georgia Tann. Recently we erected a beautiful memorial stone in memory of the children resting in Elmwood.

  Do you ever come to Memphis, and if so, would you be at all interested in a book reading/signing/selling event here? Elmwood is a nonprofit organization that provides support to the community of Memphis in many ways, one of which is history-based learning opportunities.

  I hope to hear from you.

  Warm Regards,

  Kim Bearden

  Lisa’s thoughts whirl as she accepts the invitation to speak at Elmwood Cemetery, in the Lord’s Chapel, just up the hill from the plot memorializing nineteen of the children who died under Tann’s watch. Could this place—this sad yet holy place—be where those who survived finally come together?

  A possible reunion schedule shuffles and shifts, but the stories continue. A steady stream of TCHS adoptees and family members show up at Lisa’s appearances through late fall and winter and into the harbinger days of spring. They carry yellowed letters and documents from old file folders, including sales pitches, of a sort, written by Tann as she marketed “orphans” to prospective parents.

  Take him and try him for a month. If you find him satisfactory, we can pair him up with another, similar offering…

  …a lively two-year-old boy. We’ll have to wait a couple weeks for you to meet him. The little fellow has suffered a bump to his cheek after a fall from the swing…

  The contents of these carefully preserved files emphasize the realness of these children, these families, the longing to have their experiences substantiated. At a book festival near Atlanta, Georgia, an audience member asks Lisa why families didn’t track down their kidnapped little ones and insist on taking them back. “There were so many reasons,” Lisa explains. “With her political alliances in Memphis, Georgia Tann was almost untouchable. She preyed on single mothers, indigent families, poor people who didn’t have the resources to fight her. She altered paperwork to make children harder to find and to make them suitable to fill orders, the way she thought of adoption transactions. Ages and birth histories were changed.”

  Lisa elaborates on some of the subterfuge: “Children of sharecroppers were portrayed instead as the offspring of intelligent, beautiful college girls who slipped up with a med-student boyfriend and couldn’t keep the baby or died in a tragic car wreck. Jewish families who wanted to adopt babies of Jewish heritage got Jewish babies. The baby might have been a Tennessee Baptist dirt-poor farm kid one day, and the next, he or she was of educated, well-to-do Jewish descent.”

  As the Q&A ends, a woman in the audience raises her hand and tentatively half-stands as she speaks into the pass-around microphone: “I was one of the Jewish babies.”

  The room erupts in a collective gasp.

  After the event, Lisa and the woman, Patricia Forster, talk for a few minutes. Patricia tells a brief version of her story. They exchange contact information, and Lisa carries the memory with her to a book event in Florida, where a woman named Amy tells of her parents adopting a five-year-old sister for her from TCHS. The child was delivered to the back door in a big black limousine, typical of Tann’s style. The recollection remai
ns vivid for Amy.

  As spring arrives with its too-brief beauty, plans for Lisa’s Arkansas tour fall into place. Overwhelmed, she talks herself out of the idea of a reunion. Then she’s back in. Out again. Your schedule is already packed. Overloaded, in fact. You need to prepare for this trip!

  Writers don’t plan reunions.

  This is too far out of your wheelhouse.

  Let it go.

  She’s nervous about logistics—petrified, actually. She has another novel to write. And yet these true stories won’t leave her alone. They’re an unexpected real-life sequel to Before We Were Yours…and they matter. These stories pursue her. They keep arriving, in more emails. They erode her decision the way the Mississippi River eats away at sandbars and banks to let the water flow.

  The final nudge comes in the form of emails from two more survivors—a woman who managed to attend her birth mother’s funeral and finally saw people who looked like her and another woman, abandoned on the courthouse steps in small-town Tennessee, who recalls the orphanage and Tann herself. It’s early March. Time is short until Lisa’s June appearance in Memphis, the logical place for a reunion, if there is to be one.

  It’s now or never. She emails Connie:

  3/7/18 AT 10:18 P.M.

  Hi Connie,

  The thought of bringing TCHS survivors together has been on my mind…One event stood out as a good possibility for gathering survivors. June 10th, I’ll be doing a speaking event for the historic Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.

  I’ve already heard from two survivors who hope to come, but being as this event is in Memphis and tied to the history of TCHS, it makes sense as a time and place for a gathering of survivors, perhaps with something additional just for the survivors after the public event.

  After you’ve had time to ponder this a bit, I’d love to know your thoughts.

  Warmly,

  Lisa

  Connie does not need to ponder. In the wee hours, she replies.

  3/8/18 AT 3:11 A.M.

  I’m in and will do whatever you need to help!

  Connie

  She’s too excited to sleep. At 3:22, she adds:

  More to follow! It’s 3 a.m. here, but I wanted you to know how excited I am to participate, help organize, etc.!

  The answers await Lisa when she makes it to her inbox the next day. She dashes off an email while packing for another book-tour trip:

  Hi Connie,

  Wonderful! Thank you for being a driving force behind this idea of a survivor’s gathering. I think (and have known for a while) this is an important part of the story. The true stories are as varied and unique as the children were when they were taken to the TCHS receiving home and of course the effects of those stories carry down through generations of children, grandchildren and greats.

  It will be a full-circle moment, to be sure.

  Lisa

  Lisa certainly hopes so, although her excitement is mixed with trepidation and a stomach-churning dose of skepticism.

  Will TCHS adoptees, most now in their seventies and eighties, trust a group of strangers and be willing to engage with outsiders? Do they want to delve into memories, many of which are distressing or long submerged?

  Far away in California, Connie believes they will.

  That, like her, they must.

  CHAPTER 2

  IN THEIR OWN VOICES

  “It is a joy to be able to ‘reunite’ you.”

  THE IDEA OF A REUNION has wings, just as Connie has dreamed. As Lisa has hoped it would, but feared it might not. The long-distance introductions of a tiny core group of adoptees begin.

  Fact has met fiction, and the real stories are compelling, bittersweet, intensely personal, and part of history. “You create these fictional people, and you send them out into the world,” Lisa tells a book group. “And the craziest thing is they come back home, tugging real people by the hand with them.”

  She connects Connie of California with a small circle of other women, and she gets to know them more in depth herself. Skype chats, email exchanges, and FaceTime conversations ensue. She sends an update when the core group of survivors grows from three to four.

  4/11/19 AT 8:39 P.M.

  Core group, meet Janie!

  Janie came to the main receiving home on Poplar at 3½ years old and has memories of being there. She’s one of the few with memories of the place.

  All of you reconnected with siblings and birth families later in life, so there are stories there, as well.

  I’ll leave you all to get to know each other.

  Warmly,

  Lisa

  Excitement grows as the new member is welcomed. Women with no memory of the infamous orphanage gain what they never imagined: a generous person who describes the place where their worlds were altered forever. Friendships deepen. “I’ve embarked on another journey…one I’d imagined many times but thought might never become reality,” Connie writes, moved by discovering that she and other TCHS survivors “share so many emotions: the sense of never fitting in, the need to achieve, the need to prove ourselves, the fear of being abandoned.”

  Plans chug along, but hiccups, including the lack of a clear number of guests, keep them from being finalized. Venues are investigated and a few hotel rooms are booked, although a central meeting location and the weekend’s format remain hazy. A wrinkle arises in the form of a note from Kim, the executive director at Elmwood Cemetery. Lisa’s Sunday event in June is full and has a waiting list. Might Lisa consider a second talk? Lisa agrees, happy to have another event that adoptees might attend. Updated and as-close-to-official-as-possible emails are sent to all TCHS adoptees and family members known to Lisa and the core group.

  Before We Were Yours has been out ten months when Lisa writes in an email:

  It is a joy to be able to “reunite” you.

  While the schedule solidifies, Lisa and Connie busy themselves planning a separate weekend event limited to adoptees and their families. They reserve the stately Memphis and Shelby County Room at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, which lies just down Poplar Avenue from the site of the turn-of-the-century mansion that housed Tann’s Memphis Receiving Home for children. The very mansion that adoptee Janie Brand describes via email and FaceTime to her new friends on the planning committee.

  The library houses archives of historical information related to Tann’s tenure in the city’s adoption market. Newspaper clippings, photographs, information about court cases, and decades of TCHS advertising pamphlets bearing the cherublike faces of Tann’s young so-called inventory are waiting to be pulled from dusty file cabinets for reunion attendees.

  Just after the email invitations go out, a follow-up message from Kim at the cemetery presents a new conundrum. Tickets for the second Sunday afternoon book talk have sold out within twenty-four hours. It’s terrific news. But what do we do now? Lisa and Connie wonder. Without room for reunion-goers, another speaking event with ample space is needed to round out the weekend. A mild form of panic hits Lisa. June is the season of weddings and graduations. It’s also less than two months away. Will there be any place available?

  And she can’t shake another idea, a more complicated one.

  If this gathering is actually happening, true-life stories will be shared. These pieces of history should not be left to fade after June comes and goes. The voices of these stalwart survivors should somehow be preserved. For decades, these women and men have carried a strange history, one their families often did not wish to speak of—one involving adoption, a taboo topic in earlier eras, and ties to an epic scandal that was front-page news when it broke in 1950.

  Tann too often overshadowed the stories of the lives that unfolded in her wake. Even during the 1990s, when the opening of Tennessee’s adoption records led to many birth-family reunions, the national television c
overage gave Tann a starring role.

  She was a powerful and even, to some, enthralling villain.

  But she is definitely not the victor.

  This reunion is for her victims, many of whom have felt pressure to remain quiet about their pasts. Family stresses, the salacious nature of the Georgia Tann scandal, the fears of hurting adoptive parents’ feelings, and even just the worries over upsetting life as it is have silenced them over the years. These survivors deserve to be heard, and not just on this one weekend, but for the future. Their stories should be documented by someone who can ask questions not only with skill but with compassion.

  The TCHS reunion project needs a documentarian, a gumshoe reporter.

  Lisa knows who she wants: longtime friend, author, and veteran journalist Judy Christie.

  Judy

  JUDY CHRISTIE HERE. WHEN THE phone rings, I’m looking forward to my regular long-distance lunch visit with good friend Lisa. She and I first connected through a book festival ten years ago. We have a lot in common. We have been writers since childhood, we’re both married to amazing public school science teachers, and we’re girls who grew up in families filled with brothers. We love to laugh and have fun.

  We are also type A, usually busy, and committed to meeting deadlines. Give us a project to brainstorm and step aside. We throw out ideas with abandon. We are curious about what goes on around us, and most of all, we each want to tell meaningful stories in this fractured world of ours.

  As a book columnist for a newspaper in Louisiana, I’d received an early copy of Before We Were Yours and told readers, two months before it was released, that this would be a book they’d hear a lot about. “Take note,” I wrote in my Shreveport Times column in April 2017, “this may be the best book of the year. Every now and then a novel comes along that sweeps me off my reading feet. Before We Were Yours, by Lisa Wingate, is such a book.”