Anger and hurt surge through her. Helen writes back, seeking clarification of these discrepancies. Her birth certificate says her parents were married, and she needs to know the details. “After all this time it just seems cruel that I can’t know facts and information regarding my own history,” she argues. “Could you please also tell me what actual leads, records, addresses, etc., you pursued in searching for my birth mother…If you know of any other ways that I can get my records opened up to me or whom I can ask for help, I will be eternally grateful.” Her plea yields no additional information.
When Tennessee’s records are officially opened a few years later, Helen pens a note on a pretty piece of paper. The message echoes that of many TCHS adoptees: “After waiting 52 years, I can now finally request by law that which was mine—my birthright.”
A return letter hints at the besieged atmosphere within the Tennessee Department of Human Services, where employees are dealing with a scandal they must now resolve, decades after it occurred. To a hurting adoptee, the delay is a fresh injustice. The state’s answer stings. “The requests will be processed in the order in which they are received. We will advise you when we are prepared to do this.”
Six months later, Helen receives another letter that says she must pay one hundred fifty dollars to determine her eligibility for the service. That is, she must prove again that she is a TCHS adoptee and pay for her information. There is a fee of fifty dollars for each additional record that is opened. And to add insult to injury, in addition to the fee, there will be a charge of twenty-five cents per page for copying.
She pays the money and waits. Another month passes, then two. Finally, Helen’s sealed records arrive. An enclosed message strikes a more compassionate tone:
Having access to your adoption records will evoke many emotions for you. Should you wish to talk with others who may have experienced similar feelings, you may wish to know about Adoption Support Groups across the state who can be a resource to you.
But as Helen reads the records, she does not see a desperate unwed mother. She feels instead a surge of hurt that her birth mother did not find a way to keep her. Until the end of her life, at age sixty-five, Helen remains angry about what happened to her as a baby. “I really believe that when she was taken away—from the time my mom stopped seeing her birth mom,” her daughter Sandra says, “it imprinted on her and absolutely injured her, and it scarred her for life. She passed that on to her kids.”
When Sandra digs through Helen’s paperwork after reading Before We Were Yours, she discovers a letter written by her mother. The words are heartbreaking—“I now, after fifty-five years of being alive, finally know who my parents are.” Although she learned their names, she never tried to locate them. She died bitter that they had let her go.
With no answers about what happened to Anna or Joseph, the questions that remain are now the burden of a third generation, eager to search for resolutions to worries about health and biology. “I started thinking, man, I’d really love to know about my mother’s family’s health,” Sandra says. “I wish I knew who I took after.” The hunt for relatives is compelling. “After so many years,” she remarks, “I’d grown used to the fact that I had no family other than my sisters.”
Sandra is continuing the search her mother put a halt to. She has delved into newspaper files and used Ancestry.com. She is chasing leads and finding scraps of information here and there. She believes that Anna, her biological grandmother, never married and died at age sixty. Sandra searches for those who knew her or who might have been related by blood. “I’m not going to give it up,” Sandra says. “I’m going to keep at it.”
She does this in honor of her mother and wishes she could offer her some final words: “Oh, Mama, you’re loved. You were always loved.”
IN BLACK AND WHITE
Sandra’s story of her mother’s adoption, of her grandmother’s tragic separation from her little girl, is hard for me to hear and impossible for me to set aside. It’s heartbreaking to see in black and white, in the old typewritten documents, a life discussed in clinical terms, a child assigned value because of her looks, because of her marketability. And the desperation of a single mother—that’s hard, too.
I add Helen’s tale to our growing research stack. Starting with an empty backpack, I have begun to amass documents and old photos. I am already coming to dread the sight of correspondence signed in Tann’s unmistakable spidery script. Her letters are typed on cute stationery featuring drawings of children, but they strike an ominous tone. The combination makes my stomach churn.
Some people say that boxes of papers were burned as soon as Tann died, that others desperate to hide their complicity in her crimes got rid of whatever information they could. Some still hint that adoptee records remain stored in Tennessee attics. People don’t know what to do with them but can’t quite bear to destroy them. Maybe they’ll surface one day.
Lisa and I hope so. So many families are still out there, asking questions those documents might answer.
Each day I can spend only so much time poring over the records adoptees have sent to me, trying to make out faded type, looking at that spidery signature in letter after letter, imagining what parents on each side of the adoption were feeling. I pick up another file and begin to ponder the story ahead.
It is not my eyes that bother me, as I read these papers.
It is my heart.
CHAPTER 4
CLUES FROM A HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE CLASS
“We’ve been expecting this call for years.”
NORA RUTH MILLER IS AN Ohio schoolteacher and pastor’s daughter who picks up and moves to Michigan during World War II to help the war effort by working at an ammunition plant.
The adventure suits her lively spirit but goes in a direction she has not planned. She is twenty-six when she gets pregnant by the plant manager, who is in his forties.
He does not want to marry her. She does not want to marry him.
So Nora goes back home to Ohio and tells her mother and an aunt. Everybody agrees that Nora’s preacher father does not need to know. The stigma placed on out-of-wedlock babies is gigantic, society’s judgments harsh. It’s one of several realities that feed Georgia Tann’s adoption machine.
Nora is sent to Memphis to stay with her aunt, the mother of a one-year-old, until the birth of the baby. The story they tell others—including Nora’s dad—is that she is going to Tennessee to help with her aunt’s child.
For the last couple of months of her pregnancy, Nora lives in a home for unwed mothers, and she gives birth to a daughter on April 18, 1944. She does not want to give up the baby, but she knows of no way of keeping her.
The infant is sent to Georgia Tann’s Receiving Home in Memphis, then taken to Nashville and kept at the TCHS home there for several weeks. The reason TCHS gives for moving the baby from Memphis is that a child cannot be put up for adoption in the city where she is born. Yet this is inconsistent with Tann’s usual practices. Children born in Memphis are routinely kept there after adoption. The reason Nora’s baby is sent to Nashville will remain forever a mystery.
Not far away, the Nelsons, eager adoptive parents, receive the message they’ve been waiting for. Their daughter has been delivered to the Nashville orphanage. Housewife Louise and accountant Doyle are ecstatic, but they are not allowed to pick her up right away. Instead, Louise is permitted to visit the infant for six weeks at the orphanage.
Diane is born in Memphis but moved to an orphanage in Nashville. Her adoptive mother comes to visit her there until she can be taken home.
Then the baby, whom they name Linda Diane, moves to her new home.
Where her adoptive parents are keeping another secret.
But all secrets have a way of surfacing, eventually.
Diane
“MY PARENTS NEVER TOLD ME I was adopted.”
; Those words come from Linda Diane Page, age seventy-four when we speak.
Diane, who shed the Linda in high school because she had too many classmates with the name, won’t be with us in Memphis, so she tells me her story in a conversation filled with startling details. Although she speaks with the intellect of the retired engineer she is, I hear a chord of melancholy in her words.
“I think my birth mother never saw me,” she says. “She thought if she saw me, she wouldn’t be able to give me up…She wanted to keep me, but she didn’t want to marry my father. She didn’t see any way to keep me without marrying.”
The book club at the Christian church Diane attends in Nashville has chosen Lisa’s book Before We Were Yours for an upcoming discussion. “A couple of my good friends in that book club know my whole story,” she says. However, Diane is not sure how she feels about discussing it with the group.
“I’ve never tried to keep it from anyone…I don’t deny it, but I don’t go around telling it.” She hesitates. “My adoptive parents gave me a good life. I was a spoiled brat. I went to dancing lessons and had the prettiest clothes and went to Vanderbilt.”
When her name appeared on a short list of adoptees passed along to me by one of the reunion planners, I got in touch, explained our effort to document TCHS stories, and pledged not to intrude if she did not want to be interviewed. It took her a few days to get back to me. First, she checked with her daughters. “When you emailed me, I talked to all three of them because I knew it would affect them, too,” she says.
Their response surprised her. They, like her, are interested in knowing more about the background behind her history. Behind their history.
* * *
—
SECRETS HOVER IN DIANE’S young mind as she grows up, mysteries waiting to be figured out. Something’s off, though she doesn’t know what.
At puberty, she decides that maybe she is not Louise and Doyle’s child but their grandchild, because they are so much older than the parents of her peers. “I thought that for a while…I felt like I had been watching a movie but could only see the center of the screen. There was so much more going on that I didn’t see.”
At about age fifteen, she makes her discovery in a high school biology class in Nashville, when she realizes that because she and her parents don’t share certain genetic traits she cannot be their biological daughter. The age of her parents continues to provoke her curiosity, too. Her parents are always vague about how old they are. In general, they are friends with her friends’ grandparents. “I was raised an only child. My parents were older,” she says.
She has an idea that something is intentionally being hidden, because of her mother’s reticence to speak of certain topics. “There was some inkling…things my mother wouldn’t talk to me about.” Her curiosity leads her into an argument with her mother. “I had a baby book,” she recalls. “I never paid much attention to it.” But she does now. “I knew my birth certificate was in there, so I went to look at it.” Then she confronts her mother. “Have you ever been to Memphis?”
“No, I’ve never been to Memphis.”
“Why does my birth certificate say I was born in Memphis?”
Her mother shuts her down.
As Diane’s adoptive mother gets older, her health wanes, which raises questions about Diane’s family medical history. Now married and with children, Diane has a daughter with emerging health issues, and she has questions. She needs answers. Growing up, she was close to four of her second cousins. She puts her long-held question to the mother of one of them. Am I adopted?
The woman hedges. “As far as I know, you’re not adopted.”
But a cousin, in his forties, comes to Diane with the truth: “I’ve always known you were adopted. My family promised not to tell.”
An adoptive aunt and uncle lived near the orphanage in Nashville, and their children often played with children at the home. “My aunt and uncle knew about this,” Diane says, recounting details of the secrets. “My older cousin told me that my mother and grandmother came there to visit me in the orphanage several times and brought clothes that my mother made for me. Then I was released to them when I was a couple months old.”
Her adoptive father, Doyle, who lied about his age in order to help facilitate Diane’s adoption, has died by the time she learns that she is adopted. “Everybody said Daddy wanted to tell me,” she recounts. “I told my mother, ‘I wish you had let me know.’ ”
“I didn’t want you to think that there was anything wrong with you and that somebody gave you up,” her mother, Louise, explains. In the days of Tann, that is a common answer from loving adoptive mothers who want the adoption never to be mentioned, of mothers who are well aware of the shadow that hovers over adoption in this era and want to pretend that the baby is theirs, or of mothers afraid that their child will choose the other mother if the truth comes out.
Diane’s adoptive father, shown here, wants to tell her she is adopted, but her new mother resists.
Diane does not like the secrets. She gets on the waiting list for the Tennessee records in the 1990s; only it takes months. “When Tennessee opened the records,” she says, “I got in line. I had my turn. I wanted them as soon as I could get them. What I really wanted to know was any genetic material.”
Among the details she finds is that her birth mother, Nora, married a couple of years after Diane’s birth but was unable to have more children. Sadly, she died before Diane started searching for her, but she had been on a quest to find the daughter she had not wanted to give up. That fact brings a lighter note to Diane’s voice. “She looked for me, according to my cousin,” Diane says.
Later, Diane meets her great-aunt, Zelda, with whom her mother lived while she was pregnant. “Tennessee gave me birth information, and I just got on the Internet and started looking. I called and said, ‘I don’t want to cause any trouble, but you have a niece, Nora, right? I think she might be my mother.’ ”
Zelda, close to eighty at the time, responded right away. “We’ve been expecting this call for years.”
With evident affection for her great-aunt, Diane describes the encounter: “We talked for a few minutes, but I knew it was a shock.” Diane stayed in touch with Zelda and her husband, and Zelda mailed pictures of her birth mother. “They lived in Florida, and their daughter called, and they invited me down. My husband and I just got in the car and went. They are really nice people.”
As with many TCHS adoptees, details of the meeting are still vivid years later. They met at a restaurant right off the interstate, and then the newfound relatives invited Diane and her husband to their home.
Not until Diane returned did she tell her children about the trip, and she eventually took, as she puts it, “all the family we had” to visit.
Now each of Diane’s daughters has the desire to dig deeper. “The girls would like to find out more about my father, as to why my mother didn’t like him…I doubt that anyone in his family knew I existed,” she says. That, however, is a door she has not wanted to open.
Confirmation of her adoption, though, brought clues out into the open and helped Diane understand many things. One of her daughters, she says with a chuckle, marches to the beat of a different drummer than others in the family. Her personality always confounded Diane and her husband, also an engineer. “Who in the family is she like?” they would ask. “Where did she get those genes?”
Likely from Nora.
“Evidently my birth mother did what she wanted to do. And my daughter was glad to know there was someone like her. She was delighted to find out where it all came from.”
In a sweet closing of the circle, her daughter names a child Nora. “I kind of liked the idea,” Diane says.
They all would love to have known Nora.
But perhaps in the unique ways of mothers and daughters
, of names handed down, and independent streaks, and the courage to march to different drummers, they already do and always will.
WHAT’S IN A NAME
One of my favorite questions to ask people in interviews is how they got their names. Names carry power, love, a glimpse into history—and almost always a story.
In my family, Ross is a popular name. It comes not from some lofty forefather but is in honor of a hired hand on my grandparents’ farm on a dirt road in Arkansas. Ross. The middle name of my father, my oldest brother, his son, a first cousin, and his son. I even gave that name to the hero in one of my novels.
My name would have been Grace, but my mother married a Pace…and she didn’t think the rhyme would do me any favors. Instead, my seven-year-old brother named me Judy Ann, which immediately dates me to the 1940s or 1950s. To this day, I ask, Who lets a seven-year-old name their child?
Lisa’s parents argued over her name. “I was almost Stacia and called Stacy,” she says. “It feels completely different. What would life be like with that name?”
One of the saddest things in getting to know adoptees is how each of them was given a name at birth—sometimes a treasured family name—and then renamed when they were adopted. One Memphis judge argued that they be allowed to keep their given names—but Georgia Tann prevailed. New names made it harder to trace adoptions and perpetuated the idea that the child had no past.
How tender it is that Diane’s granddaughter Nora carries the name of her long-lost great-grandmother. The name honors her. Remembers her.
With the reunion three weeks away, I’m eager to hear the stories of the names I’ve only seen in emails. Something special is bubbling up here.
Before and After Page 4