CHAPTER 5
IT’S ALL IN THE DNA
“At first I thought it was probably a mistake.”
A YOUNG WOMAN WHO CALLS HERSELF Vera Mae brings an infant into a pharmacy in a small town in West Tennessee. She tells the pharmacist she can’t afford to keep the baby and wonders if he knows anyone who wants it. The child’s name is John Stephen.
In a nearby town, Dorothy and Bill Gibson yearn for a baby. Somehow—the details remain unclear—they connect with the desperate young woman who is offering the unthinkable. Perhaps Dorothy and Bill are in the pharmacy that day and hear the offer themselves. Perhaps the pharmacist knows of their plight and contacts them with the news that they can become parents, almost instantly, if they’ll hurry over.
They pick up their new son and rename him Glenn. His date of birth is listed as September 4, 1934, although no one knows exactly how old he is when he is offered up to anyone in the market for a baby.
Ten years later, Vera Mae, overdue to give birth, makes an uncomfortable seventy-mile trip to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis for prenatal care. It’s clear that her plans for this baby go beyond those she made for little John Stephen. This baby will not be handed off in a drugstore.
On April 17, 1944, four days after Vera Mae arrives in Memphis, Theresa Celeste is born at St. Joseph’s, a Catholic hospital that no longer exists today. Only four days later, the tiny Tennessee newborn is headed to an out-of-state home with the blessing of TCHS, escorted by one of Georgia Tann’s colleagues.
The new parents, Sarah and Carl Kipling, living in New York City, have an inside connection with the orphanage, as many TCHS adoptive parents do. Carl’s mother, a nursery school teacher in Alabama, is friends with a social worker at TCHS. She tells them about Georgia Tann, who is known to circumvent rules in the placement of children…for the right price.
In a letter of application to Tann, Sarah asks for a healthy baby of sturdy stock. She also acknowledges a potential problem: “You will note that we are of different faiths, but this has had no effect on our happiness. We are prepared to give a child the proper religious training, in the Jewish faith because that is my religion, and my husband is in accord on the subject. However, the child’s previous religious background doesn’t concern us at all.”
It doesn’t concern TCHS, either. The orphanage happily accepts a thousand dollars—equivalent to about fourteen thousand dollars today—in exchange for Theresa Celeste. Tann writes the Kiplings about “our procedure in placing children in other states” and explains that “the child will be placed in your home on a probationary basis for the first year, during which time she may be returned if not entirely satisfactory.” Tann lies and tells Sarah and Carl that the infant’s birth mother is a young girl who can’t keep the baby. The reality is that the mother is in her late thirties with four children at home and three already given up for adoption. The couple, like so many TCHS adoptive parents, knows none of this. They are over the moon about their sweet new daughter, whom they rename Bess Ellen. They gush with tender joy at their good fortune.
“We are very anxious to adopt an infant baby girl in good health.”
—LETTER FROM BESS’S ADOPTIVE MOTHER TO GEORGIA TANN, DECEMBER 11, 1943
But their family is now part of a tangled secret that will keep brothers and sisters apart for decades.
* * *
—
WHEN THE WOMAN WHO called herself Vera Mae—her real name is Elsie Clara—hands over her infant son in a drugstore, she begins a pattern of giving up children. A total of four children will eventually be put up for adoption, and the next three, after John Stephen, all go to Georgia Tann at TCHS: a daughter, born in 1938; another son, born in 1940; and finally, Theresa Celeste, in 1944. These four full brothers and sisters are dispersed throughout the country. Three half brothers and a half sister remain with Elsie Clara. An infant sibling dies. The family farms for a living, but they are very poor.
Four children given up.
Four children kept.
The children who were adopted will later question whether the family made a business of selling babies to Tann.
Perhaps when Elsie Clara first walked into that pharmacy and announced that she had a baby to hand off, she popped up on Tann’s radar. Was John Stephen the first of her babies that TCHS caught wind of? Was the family put on Tann’s watch list? Or was Elsie Clara offered a deal, a bargain struck for the purchase of future children? Whatever the mother’s motivation may have been, a family of siblings is separated.
It will take a near miracle, with an assist from DNA and a determined teenager, to bring them back together.
Bess
WHEN I CONNECT WITH BESS Winters, seventy-four at the time, the adoptee reunion planning is under way. She wants to come to Memphis, where so much damage was done to her family. But as a retired licensed practical nurse living in upstate New York, she watches her budget and cannot afford the trip. She is eager, though, to talk about her years-long passionate struggle to find a sister and two brothers.
Despite having lived a privileged life in her adoptive home, her childhood filled with Broadway plays, a trip to Cuba before Castro came into power, a visit to California, a train trip through the Rocky Mountains—“We went everywhere,” she says—she would have traded all of that for her siblings. “I would have given my right arm to live with my brothers and sisters.”
“Everyone exclaims over her sunny disposition and her ready smile…I am sure it is not only her parents’ prejudice when I say that she is a remarkable child…May we thank you again for the happiness you have been instrumental in giving us.”
—LETTER FROM BESS’S ADOPTIVE MOTHER TO GEORGIA TANN, OCTOBER 24, 1944
Hers is a captivating tale of triumph against what seems like the greatest of odds. And it is a reminder of how Tann and TCHS affected not only the adoptees but generations to come. “I just feel that this woman Georgia Tann committed so many crimes,” Bess says when we chat on the phone.
She is charming and intense and speaks of her birth siblings with excitement and love, their connection a rare blessing at this stage of life. “I have all my paperwork out,” she tells me. Days later, a manila envelope stuffed with her information arrives in my mailbox. It is full of not only photocopies but also original documents. As I slowly remove each piece from the large packet, I feel humbled by her trust—and saddened by what I read. Letters from her adoptive mother to Tann. An adoption decree. An ad Bess once placed in a Nashville newspaper, trying to find her siblings.
The ad never produced any leads. Years would go by before clues would come in a different way. Bess’s siblings, doled out one by one at Tann’s whim, will remain separated for almost a lifetime until TCHS records are opened. Then there is still one more brother they do not know about.
Chills run down my arms as she shares the story in a long telephone visit. She read Before We Were Yours, and the picture on the cover reminded her of herself and her sister. When the sisters get together in the novel, she says, “it was like Lisa was writing about our family, too. Georgia Tann…she was a terrible person. She separated families.”
As a child, of course Bess has no way of knowing the strange path her family journey will take. Its beginning is preserved in the large envelope of documents she mails to me. Letters from Tann are included, often with instructions—such as to send Tann one hundred forty-eight dollars to cover transportation and travel expenses to prepare for Bess’s placement. “Please make check to Miss Georgia Tann and mark it ‘Transportation,’ ” Tann writes in 1944. The amount would be about twenty-two hundred dollars today.
Bess’s new mother, Sarah, like many other adoptive mothers, writes Tann regularly, lengthy letters in elegant handwriting. Her delight in her baby daughter rises from the pages like a pleasing perfume. “She is considered beautiful by everyone so that we feel tha
t we aren’t too prejudiced. Again, thank you for her. We surely do love her and will be good to her.”
However, Sarah’s correspondence also prods for legal documents, a vein of anxiety and suspicion underlying her communications to Tann. “We have never received any legal papers consummating her adoption—are they essential? If so, should we take any steps that we haven’t taken?”
Another letter gives insight into the trauma of World War II, coupled with the need for a mother to know more about the child she has adopted. The letter opens with thanks for “our wonderful baby. She is so sweet and good; we are certainly very fortunate.” It shifts then to news of a house call from their pediatrician and asks for information for the doctor about tests done at birth.
I would appreciate greatly if you would send the information for him. Then, too, if you could send some proof of her birth or some papers concerning her, so that I can get her a ration book. It is impossible to get one at my local board without a birth certificate, hospital record or something to prove that she is here and is mine. Her evaporated milk requires red points, and when she gets vegetables I’ll need the blue ones.
Tann responds with the needed information, and Sarah promptly writes back: “I have already procured her ration books.” When Tann receives that letter, she scrawls on the bottom of the page, to an unknown office worker: “Please acknowledge and tell them I’m out of city on vacation but to please let us here [sic] from baby.”
The reassurances about a Jewish upbringing for Bess, spelled out in that other note from Sarah to Tann, do not come to fruition. The couple, not particularly religious, celebrates Christian and Jewish holidays, and Bess becomes a Catholic as a young adult.
But Tann has much bigger concerns than religious preferences. In December 1944, she contacts the Kiplings and tells them she anticipates changes in Tennessee’s adoption laws. “We feel it might be advisable for those who have children in their homes not yet adopted to complete these adoptions at an early date,” she writes.
She goes on to say that, of course, they should do so only if they “are fully satisfied that the baby you now have in your home is the one for you.” The plan to finalize the adoption can be carried out by a TCHS worker, who will travel to New York, Tann says, because the Tennessee court understands “this war emergency and difficult time of traveling with children.” Then Tann requests $160.68, about $2,300 today, for expenses, with the check made out to her personally and marked “For transportation and court costs.” The Kiplings work with Tann to finalize the adoption, never going to Tennessee or to court in New York.
Bess is only five or six when she asks her mother if she was adopted. “I was a curious child. All my cousins had black hair,” she says.
“No,” her mother tells her.
She persists and asks if her mother is sure—because, she points out, she doesn’t look like anyone else in the family.
Her mother capitulates: “Yes, you were adopted.”
Bess becomes terribly upset, so her mother backpedals and says she was just teasing: “No, you weren’t adopted.”
The conversation illustrates the confusion of Bess’s upbringing, a life filled with many material blessings but also laced with secrets and unanswered questions. She will not learn parts of the truth until she is in her thirties, and she will be middle-aged before she encounters other surprising pieces of information. “I did,” Bess tells me, “have a sense that something was…I don’t know what you’d call it…” Her voice trails off.
She and her parents live in New York City until Bess is six, then move to their second home, an eighty-five-acre farm in White Plains with a cottage and a main house, a beautiful albeit remote and sometimes isolating place for a little girl. “We had a lake, and I had horses,” she relates. “It was happy, but it was lonely.” So she makes up siblings. “I had two dolls. One was a boy and one was a girl. I used to pretend they were my brother and sister.”
Though Bess doesn’t know she is adopted, she is aware that she was born in Memphis, and her inquisitiveness grows as she grows. “Why were you in Tennessee?”
“We were just passing through.”
And that is that…until Bess is thirty-eight years old and an odd family drama unfolds. “I got a letter in the mail from the Department of Vital Statistics about my adoption,” she says. The adoption that her mother had denied to her. Her adoptive parents are long since divorced at that point, and her father has remarried. Without her permission, Bess explains, an older family member wrote to the state of Tennessee claiming to be Bess and asking for information; hence the surprise letter in Bess’s mailbox. “When I got that letter, it was such a shock. I had lived a lie. I wasn’t who I thought I was.”
She confronts her parents. Her father is apologetic. Her mother is upset.
“My mother said she couldn’t face the fact that she didn’t give birth to me.” Bess remembers being told that her adoptive father had had the mumps and could not have children. The scenes that take place are familiar to other TCHS adoptees who lived with a sense of something not being quite right and with mothers who so badly wanted the child to be theirs and no one else’s. Bess is quite close to her aunt, her mother’s sister, but this woman, too, has kept the secret. When the truth comes out, the aunt insists to Bess’s adoptive mother, “I told you that you should have told her.”
Bess doesn’t hold the secrecy against her aunt, but it still hurts. “The first couple of months, it affected me emotionally. I was sad. I was questioning. My aunts and uncles knew.”
Does she still resent the collective silence? “Oh, no, no, no, no.” She went to therapy and worked through it. “I didn’t hold it against my mother, either. It doesn’t matter. It’s over. I just hold it against Georgia Tann…”
However, with this news, the secrets of Bess’s birth are just beginning to be exposed. “I knew I was born in Tennessee, and my heart was always down there. I always thought about Tennessee…I always thought I was a Southerner. It was a very strange thing, my affinity for Tennessee,” she says.
When she begins to dig into her biological roots, she consoles her adoptive mother by telling her, “I’m not looking for a mother. I’m looking for my sister.” Her search is tedious and frustrating. Her birth mother used a variety of names on the adoption paperwork. In convoluted family records, her name is sometimes Valeria, and the last names vary. “It’s all mixed up,” Bess says.
Her birth father, Thomas, was forty-four and had two boys from a previous marriage, and he and Elsie Clara lived together in a small town in West Tennessee. Thomas was a hard worker. “They stayed there. They got married after giving away babies.” Or—the question lingers—were they selling them?
When Bess starts looking for her family, Tennessee’s adoption laws have not yet been changed. The records are sealed. Bess writes the state of Tennessee and finally finds a judge who will open her file. In the papers, she discovers the names of one biological brother and sister and learns more about her history. Methodical about her quest, she joins the ALMA Society, a nonprofit organization that helps people connect with their birth families. She writes down every step she takes and keeps a large file of letters. “I searched counties,” she says. “I knew they were out there because they were in my papers.”
Then she makes a discovery.
An older brother named Jim.
“I screamed across the street, ‘I found my brother!’ ” she says. “I located him in Arizona and called him on his birthday. He was home sick with a cold. He was very happy…I think he was stunned.”
Before she and Jim meet, Bess tracks down her sister, Susan, in Nashville, by calling the sister’s adoptive mother. “She said, ‘I can’t believe it! She’s always wanted a sister.’ ” Susan’s adoptive mother instantly dubs Bess her second daughter. Again Bess rushes outside. She tells me, “When I found her,
I screamed, ‘I found my sister!’ ”
An activist for open adoption records, Bess writes a letter to the editor of her local newspaper and contacts the governor’s office. “I finally was able to find my biological family,” she says. “Thank God it wasn’t New York, because I couldn’t get any information.” Her words during our interview come faster and with more heat: “I wanted the state to know that it’s not a bad thing to have an open state for records. Once you reach a certain age, I think you should be able to have your records open.”
Bess’s three daughters chip in for a trip to Tennessee to reunite her with her sister, Susan.
“We got on a plane, and we flew down to Nashville,” her daughter Emily says. “We’re not big spenders, but when it’s something important like this, we find the money.”
The first meeting in the Nashville airport is as full of emotion and drama as any movie scene. Bess, thirty-eight at the time, wears a shirt that says I FOUND MY SISTER. Susan, forty-two, has a shirt that says HERE I AM. “It was like we were walking in slow motion, and no one else was around,” Bess says. “We went into each other’s arms. I didn’t hear a thing except I heard her whisper, ‘I love you.’ She and I are exactly alike.” The two sisters ultimately find their biological mother, through a reluctant half sister living in Tennessee. “She really wasn’t that welcoming,” Bess admits.
When they meet for a larger reunion, her birth family says they did not know that anything was going on with other children. No one remembers Elsie Clara being pregnant. The reluctant half sister, who was sixteen when Bess was born, doesn’t say anything when they first arrive at her house.
But she does something curious. She immediately walks across the room and checks a strange little bump of cartilage on Bess’s ear, an identifying mark since birth. Had she known all these years that she had a little sister?
Before and After Page 5