Before and After

by Judy Christie

  These include Robert Terrell, a businessman adopted for seven dollars and delivered to the back door of a rural Arkansas house—giving him a life he insists he would not change. And his daughter Heather Spencer who wants to know her family’s medical history and more about what is hidden.

  And Stanley Henderson, who is still, in his early seventies, searching for a brother the family believes was stolen by Georgia Tann. He told the story to Lisa only days ago, on the last stop of her Arkansas tour. He was tentative and intense about his infant brother, in tears as he described what happened.

  The encounters in neighboring Arkansas bolster Lisa’s expectations for the weekend. For me, most of the names represent strangers on a quest for information or restoration, and I cannot wait to hear their stories in their words.

  Another lifelong Arkansan will also join us this weekend: my first cousin Cindy Self, retired from mail carrying in the Mississippi Delta and a passionate professional photographer. In our childhood, she roped me into getting on the back of a horse with her and flying over ditches on her family farm, and shamed me into jumping off river bluffs into murky water.

  This weekend I have roped her into photographing and videoing events and individuals with the promise of little pay, a free hotel room, and sandwiches on the run—along with a plea for maximum flexibility. “Have I mentioned that we do not exactly know what will happen and when?” I ask her. A photographer’s nightmare. Her husband, Doug, a retired U.S. Coast Guard officer, will join her, holding cameras and lighting equipment and patiently driving her to Elmwood Cemetery a day early to check out the morning light. Meanwhile, I’ll be using our conference room and my hotel suite to do interviews with various attendees.

  Unexpectedly, the publisher of Before We Were Yours has also assigned a video crew to capture this historic occasion. The crew will arrive on Saturday for interviews and meet us at the cemetery Sunday morning to visit the TCHS memorial marker. That adds another layer of logistics and hatches a few more butterflies.

  As we mill around the hotel, we discover a flaw in the agenda: no official kickoff has been planned. Why didn’t we think of a registration area to say hello? Instead, we will simply dive into our group activities tomorrow, starting with a large afternoon gathering for the public at Kirby Pines, with the hope that we will meet reunion-goers there, not knowing who will show or if they will want to speak up.

  “All you can do is jump in and see where it goes,” Lisa said a few days ago.

  Connie, whom we only know through the email that brought us to this moment and the harried chats that followed, is the first adoptee to arrive, and hers will be the first reunion interview I do. She is such an integral part of the weekend, and I know that her story will be one of both heartache and resilience. Lisa and I each let out a breath when we see her smiling face.

  Then we all jump off the cliff together.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE ONLY HOME SHE KNOWS

  “We’ve been looking for you for forty years.”

  THE YOUNG MOTHER AND SOLDIER father are the parents of a three-year-old son, but their home is far from stable and secure.

  As is the case with many young men in the 1940s, the father returns from military action with more than souvenirs from the other side of the world. He brings a condition then called battle fatigue or shell shock. Not until years later will it be known as post-traumatic stress disorder. The couple divorces not long after the soldier’s return.

  The wife, Lydia Marie, is educated and from a well-off family, but most women in this era are encouraged to find a husband rather than a job. Although she becomes engaged to another man, her new relationship is complicated. Likely still drawn to the love of her past, Lydia falls into a short affair, rumored to be with her ex-husband. Still, she marries her fiancé, Arthur Dillard, hoping to form a new family for herself and her preschool-age son.

  But turmoil soon breaks out. She is pregnant, and, given the timing, her new husband claims he is not the father of the baby. Furious and unwilling to accept yet another stepchild, he contacts the Tennessee Children’s Home Society to arrange for the baby to be given away or sold. He even makes plans to pay for a worker to pick the newborn up when the time comes. To hide the pregnancy from family and neighbors, the errant bride is shipped out of state to deliver the baby in secret and be done with it. The practice is not uncommon, though most such mothers-to-be are unmarried.

  Tiny Mary Joan, born in July 1950, is taken from her mother when she is a week old. In the arms of a Tann helper, the infant travels to Memphis. A bassinet at the Main Receiving Home awaits, a holding space that won’t be needed for long. Tann’s plans for this fair-haired newborn have long been in the works, and they are about to come to fruition.

  The new parents, Janice and Roy Wilson, arrive to pick up their daughter with a load of their own baggage. Other agencies have turned them down. At ages forty and forty-two, they are too old for a conventional adoption and are dealing with an emotional crisis. Janice is severely depressed over the recent crib death of their six-month-old child.

  They know that a baby can be procured through Georgia Tann. Quickly.

  They have the money to make the arrangements.

  They pick up Mary Joan and drive to their home on the other side of Memphis. She will spend the first ten years of her life in this city, her name changed to Connie Christine. They pay Tann approximately seven hundred fifty dollars, well beyond the legal price of a standard adoption.

  Janice and Roy, with all of their flaws, become baby Connie’s true mom and dad. She also gains an eleven-year-old sister, Shelly, who becomes the love of her life, a constant in a sea of uncertainty. A caseworker’s report later notes that Shelly seems to feel that Connie is especially hers, mothering her and making over her. “She actually does more for her than Janice does,” the worker writes. “Connie, on the other hand, seems to be just as crazy about Shelly.”

  The couple is eager to repair their family. This tiny baby, like so many of Tann’s charges, arrives in her new home with a job to do. A problem to fix.

  The repairs this couple needs are more than any child could handle.

  Connie

  A RETIREE WITH MULTIPLE HOMES, a large group of friends, and a precious dog, Connie has a full life—but a TCHS-sized gap remains in her heart. Her commitment to bringing adoptees together reflects her need to meet others like her, to help them, and to grow from the experience.

  She enters a room with the presence of a woman who knows what she wants—but her confidence conceals how deeply affected she still is by the circumstances that brought her into the world in July 1950. And the turmoil that followed.

  When Connie and I meet in the hotel lobby, she has flown in from the West Coast on a red-eye and hopped out of bed before dawn to appear on a morning Memphis television program with Lisa. And she looks wonderful. She appears younger than I expected, an attractive woman with stylish blond hair and tanned skin. Her clothes are resort casual. Although we have spoken on the phone and emailed to prepare for this visit, we approach each other as curious strangers. Outgoing and yet cautious, she suggests that we meet for lunch at a nearby restaurant to do our interview. We’ll have a couple of hours before we head back to the hotel for more work on the weekend’s logistics.

  At the restaurant, she chats up the waiter and listens intently to his story. Her smile is engaging. When Connie was a toddler, a social worker came to the Wilsons’ home to do an assessment before the adoption was finalized. The worker gushed about the toddler’s personality, looks, and intelligence. As Connie talks, those traits, weathered somewhat by decades of pain and uncertainty, still shine. But a fear of abandonment, a need for approval, and a life spent as an overachiever fill her story. She has struggled to please anyone and everyone and to somehow find her place. She tells me, “I just felt different. You don’t fit…and people don’t understand.”
r />   A life built on other people’s secrets brings that on.

  “I always knew I was adopted,” she continues. “I was told my biological parents had been killed in a car accident.”

  Janice, her adoptive mother, comes from a wealthy family in Washington, D.C. Her great-grandfather was President Abraham Lincoln’s bodyguard. “Though not,” Connie informs me with a smile, “on duty the day Lincoln was killed.”

  Roy, her adoptive father, owns a struggling plumbing business, then takes a job as a plumbing salesman.

  Connie has barely landed in their arms before the cracks in their relationship widen. They argue over money, and their baby suffers again from a mother’s indiscretion. “My mom ended up having an affair during the adoption process,” she says.

  Only two months old when the public scandal about TCHS erupts, Connie has secured her place as one of the youngest of the TCHS adoptees. No more children will be subjected to a Tann adoption. The TCHS Memphis orphanage is shut down. Over the coming months, child welfare workers are sent to the homes of those awaiting finalized adoptions, making assessments of where children have been placed. For Connie, the visit comes when she is twenty-two months old. A detailed report to a judge paints a picture of a tumultuous home but leaves no doubt that Connie is an exceptionally bright and pretty child:

  Although this is a house which we would never have selected for placement of a child, we feel that since Connie has been there since she was two weeks old and this is the only home that she knows, and her development has been good, it would be to the child’s best interest to allow the adoption to be consummated.

  From a caseworker’s notes about Connie: “She is a very pleasant child and plays all the time and seldom cries.”

  As soon as the adoption is final, Janice remarries—and, once more, Connie finds herself in a situation where the new husband doesn’t want the children. Over the next few years, Connie and her older sister, Shelly, who has taken on the role of mother, are tossed around among relatives. When Connie’s adoptive father, Roy, remarries, more heartbreak follows. “I loved my daddy so much,” she says. “I was the apple of his eye.” But at age six, after witnessing a fight between her dad and her stepmom, she grabs a paper bag, puts her PJs in it, goes into another room to call a taxi, and heads to her mother’s house. In her precocious way, she tells them, “I can’t live like this anymore.”

  Janice is deeply in love with her current husband, but she is guilt-ridden over abandoning her daughters and leaves him so she can keep Connie and Shelly. She eventually remarries yet again. “Dad married two women. Mom married four men,” Connie says. “And then they finally got back together.”

  At her home in California, Connie keeps a photograph of herself and her dad, Roy, on her desk, a casual shot taken at a fair in Memphis when she was seven. She also displays a photo of the couple, who, in spite of everything, and flawed though they might have been, will always be her parents.

  A hard worker, Connie starts her first job at age fourteen; she works every summer and after school, struggling to pay expenses in her uncertain life. At nineteen, she becomes a flight attendant, moving into management by her early twenties. She does not take vacations or go out to eat. Unlike some TCHS adoptees, Connie does not fantasize about her birth parents. “I was so busy trying to survive,” she says. “I always had to save every single penny because I didn’t want to be poor ever again…I never thought I would have anything permanent in my life. I got those survival skills way back then.” She moves from place to place, never having a real home.

  Connie, one of the last adoptees from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, and her adoptive father at the Memphis Fair in 1957.

  Even while listening to Connie tell me about her successful career, I sense the underlying melancholy she feels about her young years. She sighs. “I always knew I didn’t fit. I was super hyper. My IQ tests were very high.” Her voice turns pensive. “I never did get to college.” In young adulthood, tragedy leads to a new sense of urgency. When she is twenty-four, her adoptive mother dies. When she is twenty-nine, her husband of five years dies of a heart attack while playing tennis. A year to the day later, her adoptive father dies. With Janice and Roy gone, her older sister, Shelly, reveals family secrets about Connie’s adoption through TCHS and contradicts the story Connie has been told. Her birth parents were not killed in a car wreck; the story is messier.

  Connie’s desire to know her birth-family history escalates.

  A niece dies shortly after this, followed by the death of Shelly, the sister Connie calls her rock. “You learn how to survive, and you don’t let the little things get to you,” she says. “You know you’ll get through anything, pretty much. You also learn not to stay in bad situations, and you learn how to take care of yourself.” During this difficult period, she strengthens herself through therapy. “I have sought counseling off and on my entire life,” she says.

  Her therapist is the one who pushes her to work on her deeper issues. “Your real problem is your adoption,” she tells Connie. “You’ve carried pain with you your whole life.”

  Connie has no way to know it yet, but the pain and loss that began when she was adopted are not only hers. In a nearby city, and yet a world away, her birth mother, Lydia, battles the torment of having given her daughter up. She struggles with questions that linger when a mother sends a child into the world with no further contact. When Lydia remarries, she does not tell her husband about her brief second marriage, or the daughter she surrendered. At holidays, Connie will learn much later, her biological mother voices veiled guilt to family members.

  “You just don’t know what I’ve done,” she would say.

  * * *

  —

  THE DEATHS OF SO many close to Connie forge a strong desire within her to learn her medical history, but frustration follows. Her voice is tinged with anger as she discusses it: “I couldn’t find any of my records…It wasn’t that I was looking for a family, but I really wanted to know if I had cancer in my blood or heart disease in my genetics.”

  Then she sees a news program about TCHS.

  “Sixty Minutes is how I found my family,” she says. Through the program in the early 1990s, she learns of a woman named Denny Glad, who embarked on a mission to help TCHS adoptees find their birth families. While the state’s adoption records were still under lock and key, unavailable to those searching for their hidden pasts, Denny traveled to courthouses throughout Tennessee with a cadre of volunteers; they tediously sifted through years of public court dockets to compile information not easily available to adoptees. Along the way, she was reportedly offered access to the records of a judge who had died, and, through these, she found more names of Tann children. Denny and others meticulously recorded names and dates on index cards, a pre-Internet system that made information accessible when adoptees turned to her for help. She eventually successfully crusaded to have the state’s adoption records opened.

  After seeing the TV show, Connie makes contact with Denny, and it is this remarkable advocate who finds accurate information about Connie’s past. When Connie opens the package of information that arrives at her home on her fortieth birthday, she learns, as she feared, that her biological mother died young.

  But not from an illness. She choked on a piece of meat at age fifty. Connie will never meet her.

  The records lead Connie to another relative, an aunt in Mississippi, her mother’s sister—the companion who lived out of state with Connie’s mother during the birth. “I finally mustered the courage to call her sister, who held me at birth and knew exactly who I was,” Connie says.

  When they speak, the aunt’s words are beautiful and yet devastating: “Honey, let me stop you right there. We’ve been looking for you for forty years.”

  Connie’s aunt tells her that her birth grandparents, who lived in Te
nnessee, took apples to the orphanage for the children living there for years after Connie was given up. In a gut-wrenching twist, she learns that her birth mother had moved to the Northeast, close to Connie’s home as an adult. Her brother, Graham, just a toddler all those years ago when her mother fled to give birth in secrecy, also lived not far from her. But the family reconnection will be rocky. “We can’t tell your brother,” the aunt says. “No one knows except me.”

  Finally, the aunt tells her son, Wes, who as a preschooler had also been with them at the time of Connie’s birth. Wes insists that Connie’s brother, Graham, be told. Connie reunites with Graham in the early 1990s while she’s in New York City for a job interview. He is also headed into the city, and they meet at six o’clock at the iconic Rainbow Room. “He walked in the door and I knew immediately it was my brother. I’d never seen anyone who looked like me. When I met my brother, it was like a tiny piece of a jigsaw puzzle.”

  The similarities are uncanny. “It was wonderful and yet surreal to finally see someone who looked like me, who was like me. We shared similar physical qualities, the same ethics, similar taste in music, wine, sports, and countless other things. He’d grown up on the East Coast and I on the West Coast.” Although geography separated their upbringing, they landed in the same region in middle adulthood and are much alike in temperament as well, happy and energetic. Their relationship gels with his advice about the job she’s going for. “He is always like a big brother and helps me make life decisions,” she says. “Rumor has it that I have the same father as my brother. Who knows? We have never done the DNA.”

  She and her aunt also get to know each other. “She had a huge family reunion when it was no longer a secret,” Connie says. “Ultimately, we had a very good relationship.” She gushes about members of her birth family, but like many adoptees, those relationships bear the wounds of lives long separated. She and Graham stay in touch; because they live once more on different coasts, however, they do not see each other regularly. Now Connie hangs on to dear friends, including a group from her junior high days. She mourns girlfriends who are starting to pass away. Although she dates regularly, she has no plans to remarry. “I never think anything’s going to last,” she says.