Relating the story of seeing her eldest sister for the first time makes Patricia’s eyes glisten once more. For so much of her life, Patricia felt as though she was not truly related to anyone. Now she has sisters. And they are visiting her. “I just remember touching her hand and feeling flesh of my flesh,” she says. Her sister is the kindest, sweetest, and most beautiful person she has ever known.
And they share the same hands.
“They looked just like mine. I remember unfolding her hand and touching it…”
As for the sisters, they cannot believe how much she looks like their mother. Plus, Patricia’s upbringing intrigues them. “Are you going to make us a Jewish meal?” they ask.
“I’ll cook you a brisket,” she answers drolly.
Her sisters make biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Patricia cooks her famous brisket for dinner, and her youngest daughter is there for the visit. “It was just magical,” Patricia says. “Of course, my friends all came.”
She yields to enjoying these new family members, and that is the beginning of her deep relationships with her sisters, connections that enrich her life. They share laughs and spats and joys and heartaches, like all families. They are in touch all the time. Patricia’s daughters, now grown, embrace their new aunts and cousins and their mother’s unexpected family. Off at college when the first meeting occurs, her older daughter has a surprise awakening to what this means for her and her sister. She walks toward the new family photos, on display on a wooden side table. Then she hesitates and peers at her mother before she looks at the pictures. Patricia remembers her words well:
“Mom, I just want you to know this is your experience. We are so happy for you, and we think it’s so interesting, but this is not our story. It’s your story.”
Then she picks up a photo of Patricia’s brother who died in the Korean War. Her eyes widen. Huge tears roll down her cheeks. “He looks exactly like me,” she says. “How could that be?”
In that moment, her daughter realizes that this isn’t just Patricia’s story after all. Nor are the stories of other TCHS adoptees only their stories. Their children and grandchildren and those yet to be born will carry part of that legacy in the color of their eyes, in the gestures they use, and in the traditions they follow.
A face-to-face meeting with Anita will never happen for Patricia, though. By the time the sisters reunite, she has died. Patricia is relieved. “I never met my birth mother,” she says. “I did not want to meet her, and I think God knew that.”
Nonetheless, Anita’s story causes Patricia to cry as she sits in her apartment with me. Her birth mother wasn’t a bad person. She is certain of that. Anita was simply unlucky. Patricia learns from her sisters that Anita was sexually abused while working in the cotton fields at age ten. Patricia has no idea who her biological father is.
In her later years, Anita exhibited signs of dementia and murmured almost in despair to her two other daughters, when they visited her in the care facility where she ended her days, “Where’s that baby? What happened to that baby?”
They had no idea who she was talking about.
Patricia speaks softly to Anita’s picture as she tells me this part of the story, as though she and her birth mother are alone in the room: “Thank you for having the courage to give me up. You may not have known that it was your finest moment, but it was.”
The sibling circle that was broken on that day is sweet in its rebonding, decades later. The group—three sisters and their families—gather for a big reunion in a condo in the mountains of Colorado. Patricia writes a sister ceremony and gives each of them a bracelet, not unlike the ones she will later read about in Before We Were Yours. “I opened my heart up wide and let them in. They held on tight to me.”
Both of her sisters, Patricia tells me, her voice husky, have since died. As she reflects on their missed years, she pulls out a small collection of photographs. They are among her most precious belongings, items she kept while giving her daughters many of her mementos. Her face shines with joy as she holds out a picture. “I’m so happy I can show you my sisters.”
Their life together was not long enough, but Patricia feels fortunate for the time they had. Perhaps the harder burden is her regret for their rough upbringing. “My parents would have been so thrilled to have them, too…Anita was so lost. So sad. My parents would have had compassion for her.” Even in her joy, there is grief over what could have been, the opportunities lost. Then she moves forward. “I had a charmed life. I had the best parents,” she reminds both of us.
A few years ago, on a trip back to Buffalo, Patricia made sure they knew that, as well. Stopping by the cemetery where her adoptive parents lie buried, she placed a stone on their graves, in the Jewish tradition, to show she had been there. Her whispered message for them that day was the same as it is on this day, when she shares her story with me…and with the world.
“Thank you, Howard. Thank you, Larisa…thank you, thank you, thank you.”
HIDDEN ROOMS OF THE HEART
Patricia and I part with the embrace of friends who have shared heartache and emerged with hope. Her energy has waned, and I have a flight to catch. We would love to meet again in Memphis for the reunion in a few weeks, although we both know that’s probably not possible—but we refuse to dwell on that.
As I hop into an Uber to the airport, my emotions are raw. Even for those adoptees who landed in the best situations after the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, a haunting sense of being different hung in the air, a whiff of things that shouldn’t be talked about. Of unanswered questions and unspoken secrets. Of searching hearts.
My thoughts linger on Patricia as a girl, the child who found a refuge for her secrets upstairs at a friend’s house, in the room of an elderly woman who had lost a child in the war, a woman who also needed to talk. People come along when we need them and guide us on our journey. Enriching us.
Patricia has done that for me with her affection and good humor and sweet spirit. An unexpected stop at this point on my journey, she has helped me get my bearings and has renewed my faith in what will happen at the reunion ahead.
From here, I’ll make a detour to connect with an adoptee in Florida, then head home to wash clothes, repack suitcases, pick up my patient husband, and drive cross-country back to Tennessee to do a few interviews in advance of the reunion.
But before we hit the road, I’ll settle into the worn, overstuffed chair in my office, prop my feet on the ottoman, download some favorite music, and read through my notes from Patricia for encouragement and perhaps a bit of a road map for the interviews to come.
CHAPTER 8
A POLITICAL BABY
“I was a pretty little thing.”
IT’S 1933. THE GREAT DEPRESSION grips the nation. It is particularly hard on the rural South. To the already poor, it is devastating.
Beth Lee is a member of just such a family. Fifteen years old. Packed into a home with eight other children and little money, she is flattered by the attention of a man in his twenties. He’s handsome. He’s older. One thing leads to another.
She finds herself pregnant and unmarried.
On May 6, 1933, she gives birth to a baby girl, a child she is determined to keep. To give the child a surname, Beth’s brother’s best friend marries her. For nearly two years she and the baby stay in the family’s crowded home. But Beth’s father has little work, and her parents finally insist that the baby be given up for adoption.
Beth argues, but her parents overrule her.
She reluctantly hands her two-year-old daughter over to Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis.
One mother’s loss is about to become a wish fulfilled for a young couple in a small town in Tennessee. On the morning of June 2, 1935, the couple receives the phone call they have been waiting for. The Children’s Home Society has a todd
ler Tann thinks they will like. The little girl is available now.
The new mother, Geneva, would have preferred a boy. The father-to-be, Martin, a well-known member of the Tennessee State Legislature, wants a girl, and he is delighted. They jump into the car and make the 170-mile drive to Memphis that afternoon.
Martie
EAGER TO TALK WHEN I reach her on the phone, Martie Webster has only fifteen minutes. At age eighty-five when we visit, she lives in a retirement home, and an aide is coming to get her for dinner in the dining room.
But she has some important things she wants to say.
“I was born Margaret Jane,” she says. “I’ve had a good life.”
The aide stops by. “I’m on an important call,” Martie tells her, then signs off with instructions for me to call her back. “I enjoy telling the story. I think it’s right interesting. It’s a pity that everyone is gone.”
I call back at the appointed time, safely after the dinner hour.
Miss Martie is the oldest Tennessee Children’s Home Society adoptee I am making plans to interview. She’s not up to the trip to Memphis, and so we arrange for me to visit during what I’ve come to think of as my Rambling Road Trip. A few days later, she calls to say she will be having hip replacement surgery and cannot meet on the date planned. Just as disappointment settles in my stomach—she was someone I was so looking forward to meeting in person—she quickly suggests another time. Since she cannot meet on Monday, the day she will have surgery, might I come on Sunday?
On the scheduled date, I leave my Tennessee grandchildren and my husband swimming in the Nashville hotel pool and head south, struck by how the area has grown. After a grocery store stop for flowers (for Miss Martie) and a soft drink (for me), I drive to her building, a hospitable-looking place with an upstairs porch in a warmly Southern style. I ride up on the elevator with one of her neighbors and an aide who insists, in the friendliest way, on showing me to the correct door.
My hostess comes forward to greet me, pushing a small wheelchair, and expresses pleasure at the little pot of roses, then shows me around her compact space. She has lived here about a year, and it’s all the room she needs. “I was having a hard time at home,” she says, her old house too big for her to take care of anymore.
Her retirement home apartment sports intricate needlework she’s created, as well as family heirlooms. She even made the stunning—and remarkably difficult, to my eye—bird quilt on her bed. Her cross-stitched Mona Lisa smiles from a frame. The rocker and antique dresser were her adoptive mother’s. “It was hard to decide what to bring up here,” she admits. The only thing missing is her precious Yorkie, who lived in the apartment for two weeks, then went to stay with friends. “I just couldn’t take care of her.” Martie’s voice is heavy with sadness. “I’ve been to see her once.”
We sit in the living room, Martie settling into her wheelchair across from the sofa, the day before her hip surgery. A family photograph watches over us from the wall behind her as she begins to tell her story. Even at her age, it is clear that what happened at the hands of Tann remains with her each day. “I think of myself as being a caring woman. I love animals…they call me Sunshine here. I love my family,” she says, then hesitates. “I’ve always been self-conscious about my looks. I do think it’s because deep in my mind I think, ‘My mother gave me away.’ ”
With most of her life past, this delightful woman is frank but not careless with her words. So I am both surprised and sad when she remarks that she has never believed in herself. “I’ve never been a person who had the confidence I should have had. I felt beneath.” Her voice is fervent when she speaks of Tann. “I know one thing…she was a cruel woman. I never have said this about anyone, but I hope she rots in hell for what she did.”
Still, Martie believes that she was one of the fortunate ones. “I think I was very lucky to be adopted. If I had stayed in that family, I don’t think I would have turned out okay.” A few weeks before, her contradictory sentiments would have struck me as odd, but I’ve already learned that an ambivalence runs deep within many TCHS adoptees. For all the pain of the circumstances of their adoptions, they have processed enough about their backgrounds to know that if they had not been adopted, they would most likely have lived with other kinds of heartache.
Her earliest memories are of her adoptive father and days that were fun and carefree. “He took me everywhere he went when he was electioneering,” Martie says. “He loved me so much and wanted to show me off…I’m not bragging, but I was a pretty little thing then. Georgia Tann preyed on the pretty little girls and boys.” Even now, she has no idea how much money her parents paid to make her adoption happen. “I’ll wonder to my grave if they bought me.” In a tragic turn, her adoptive dad died at age thirty-four. “He was awfully young. Awfully.” Martie was not quite six at the time. “When Daddy died, I was just fixing to start to school…I don’t remember a whole lot about him, but I know he loved me a lot…I can still see him coming home with two ice cream cones, one for me and one for a friend.”
Given up by her teen mother whose family couldn’t afford to keep her, Martie is adopted by a well-to-do couple, but her adoptive father dies when she is almost six.
His death, in Nashville, was ruled a heart attack, yet she still wonders. “He took sick all of a sudden.”
She describes her frantic parents returning to the Noel Hotel, where they’re staying when the incident happens. Her mother, Geneva, sends her to the “picture show” while a physician attends to her father. “There’s not much I remember about that day at all. I remember his funeral. I don’t remember much about him. I wish I did. Mother said I went into a deep depression.”
Although Martin’s obituary mentions his “adopted daughter,” she doesn’t know that at the time. She is still too young to read. “I tell you how I found out I was adopted…there was a girl in my class in first or second grade. She called me ’dopted and said it like it was a dirty word.” Martie pauses. “We had a housekeeper named Eddie…a woman of color that I loved dearly. In fact, I thought she was my mother because she was with me more than my mother.”
At the time, they live across the street from the elementary school, and when things don’t suit Martie, she runs home. After being called ’dopted on the playground, she hurries over to Eddie, upset. The beginning of the truth comes out. “ ‘Miss Geneva won’t tell you, so I’m going to…’ she said. She sat me down and told me what ‘adopted’ was. She made it sound real pretty…I was something picked, not something you had to keep.”
Years later, Martie runs into the girl who bullied her in elementary school. That girl, now an adult woman, does not remember the teasing and is chagrined. “Why would I have done that? I adopted a boy,” she says.
The housekeeper’s words may have comforted Martie in grade school, but they do not stick. She grows up feeling never quite accepted. She has the sense that her mother regrets the adoption after Martin is gone. “Me and my adopted mother did not get along sometimes,” she says. “She was very bossy. I loved her, of course, and I think she loved me.” But she seemed domineering. “I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t her child…” Miss Martie meets my gaze with sadness.
In addition, she recalls feeling that her adoptive grandparents do not accept her because she is not their blood relative. “You’re not family,” Martie remembers her granny telling her when she was in her early teens. Even all these years later, she carries the pain of those words. “I think that hurt as much as anything in my life.”
The sense of rejection becomes a catalyst for wanting to find her birth mother. By this time, Martie is married and a mother herself. Tennessee’s adoption records are still sealed, but her adoptive mother’s second husband is a judge, and he helps her get the papers.
That’s how Martie finally learns the name of her biological mother. She calls her by h
er first name, Beth, as she settles into this part of her story. “And my other mother, ‘Mother,’ ” she adds, clarifying the difference matter-of-factly, as though everyone has two mothers. With her husband, she makes two trips to Memphis to try to find her birth family. “We just gave up. We didn’t know how to do it.”
While most TCHS adoptive parents want nothing to do with such a search, her adoptive mother, Geneva, travels to Memphis with Martie and other family members to try again. “They took the children to the zoo. Mother and I each got into a phone booth, each with a roll of dimes. I think every adoptee wants to know where they came from. Mother was all for it.” They begin to call people with her birth mother’s maiden name or married name. Finally, they track down the man whose name Martie carried before being adopted. They make contact, only the information he reveals is not what she expected.
“I was married to her, but I was not your daddy,” he tells her. The best friend of her birth mother’s brother, he’d wed Beth to give Martie a last name. Now, on this day, he once more provides assistance and leads them to her uncle. They connect, and Martie gets the information she has hungered for. “My uncle showed me a picture of my mother. I thought she was beautiful.” Then she adds, with an endearing smile, “Unfortunately, I don’t look like her.”
By the time they find Beth, in about 1961, she has remarried, and she and her husband live in Las Vegas. Martie is nearly thirty and happy to receive a response from her. “Within a week, she came to see me,” Martie recalls. Their reunion, scary and hectic, occurs at the Tennessee home of Martie’s adoptive mom, Geneva. “Mother welcomed her with open arms,” Martie says, “and let her stay the night.”
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