This photo of Janie was taken on her adoption day. Movie stars, politicians, and other celebrities are part of Janie’s childhood in Pulaski, Tennessee, and Key West, Florida.
A well-connected, politically active woman, Cecelia was born in New Orleans to a physician and his wife. She lived a glamorous life, including a stint as a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl. Janie’s adoptive father, Frank, is a Princeton graduate from a wealthy family. “I grew up with certain expectations and social attitudes,” Janie says.
For a year after she leaves the orphanage, she lives with her parents in Pulaski, Tennessee. Her adoptive mother corresponds frequently with Tann, relaying what an adorable child Janie is and how much she loves her. Enclosed with letters are photographs, a standard practice for new moms eager to keep Tann happy. Those photos are used by Tann to market her services; she sends newsletters to prospective parents with information about the number of children TCHS “cared for” and the “happy homes” they found for those children.
When news breaks of Governor Browning’s investigation into Tann in early September 1950, Cecelia immediately writes to the governor. His response is prompt and demonstrates her political connections. Ironically, it is dated the day after Georgia Tann died. “I did not act without knowing the facts in the case to a large extent,” he says. “The matter was thrown at me, and the well-established proof that an individual was profiting personally from the operation of this Home seemed revolting to me…The flagrant betrayal of the trust in connection with the disposition of many babies could not go unheeded.”
Browning cites the duplication of charges to adoptive parents and other benefits that went to the personal account of “an individual” instead of to TCHS. “Under no circumstances could I permit the continuation of a rank fraud,” he writes. He also reassures Cecelia that the TCHS matter will not affect Janie’s adoption. “She is a beautiful and adorable child. I see no reason why it should in any way touch her.” He then promises Cecelia that he will do all in his power to see that foster parents waiting to finalize adoptions are not disturbed further “than to advise them of their misplaced confidence in one individual.” He signs the letter, “With my warmest personal regards, I am sincerely your friend.”
Janie’s adoption is finalized, but as soon as that occurs, her parents separate. She and her mother move to Key West, Florida.
When she describes those next eight years, her face lights up. They are good ones. “I was an easy child. Not rebellious. Friendly.” Cecelia is more like a grandmother to her and changes her life for the better, taking her away from what if to what might be, as Janie gratefully tells it.
For the first time, Janie’s days are calm seas of certainty, predictability, reliability. Hope. Cecelia opens the world to her, another example of the difference one person can make. “She told me I could be anything I wanted.” She exposes her daughter to famous people and elite functions, like a party for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who visit Key West on a Florida trip.
Cecelia is Janie’s encourager, her stability.
Until she passes away when Janie is about to turn twelve. The girl is abandoned once more. The certainty is gone. The what ifs return. The preteen’s whole life somersaults. Her adoptive father has remarried, and Janie must move back to his home in Tennessee. She has known Frank only from a distance, as a man who visited occasionally and brought a gift or two. His financial fortunes have turned since then. The home she’s going to is humble. She must adjust to living in it with this virtual stranger and a stepmother.
Eleven months later, her adoptive father dies. “I had no real living relatives that I knew of,” she says. With no place else to go, she stays with her stepmother, a far from ideal situation. “Those were tough years,” Janie confides. “You always feel like you have a hole in your heart…You don’t look like anyone else.” Yet another impact on her life: “I would never date a boy who was adopted. I was afraid he might be my brother.”
Now a mother of two children and a devoted grandmother, Janie has been divorced and remarried and is happy in her current phase of life, but she ponders whether her adoption affected her relationships through the years. “You always have the abandonment issues,” she says with an attitude that is a mixture of realistic and sad.
For our meeting, Janie has brought along a story board full of photographs that detail her history. For her sake, I’d planned to keep our visit in the suite private, but other adoptees gather around us, eager to hear what Janie has to say, so we move chairs back and make room for them. Janie doesn’t mind. With her reddish-blond hair, diminutive stature, and neighborly smile, she’s a quiet woman of iron, made stronger, rather than having been destroyed, by the struggles in her early life.
Her take on her story is a positive one. Since the release of Before We Were Yours, she’s been finding herself telling it more and more. She settles in to share the trail of events that have brought her to this moment. That’s one thing all the participants here have in common. Each has a story of some random circumstance that ended up being the first step.
Janie finds out about the novel after seeing a brief mention of TCHS in another novel and writing to the author, Kathryn Cushman. Kathryn responds, saying she has always been interested in TCHS. She tells Janie about Before We Were Yours.
“I got the book from the library. I read about three chapters and said, ‘I want this book,’ and headed to the bookstore…This is my life. Everything in here…she captured it. I’m a hard critic because I lived it. I know how it was in real life…I started telling everyone about it. It’s my story,” she says again. “I wasn’t a shantyboat kid, but I was a river rat.”
A friend invites her to a discussion of the novel, her first experience with a book club. “I’d never attended a book club…it was very moving,” she says. The club members think the historical novel is complete fiction, but Janie helps them understand that it is based on a true story. “This really happened,” she stresses. “Let me tell you something…” she says to the group. And her story unfolds.
Speaking about her background helps others process their own experiences. “It’s pulling things out of people and setting them free,” she says. “Sometimes when you do something like this, it’s sort of a pay-it-forward.” Other book clubs hear about Janie and invite her to discussions about the novel, and over the coming months she speaks to more than a dozen groups. Then she sees that Lisa will be in Nashville in May and emails her, eager to share her story, so similar to the one in the book. She meets Lisa at a Nashville hotel; Janie pulls along her wheelie crate packed with scrapbooks full of adoption documents, printed emails from adoptee leader Denny Glad, yellowed TCHS brochures, cheery sales letters from Georgia Tann, adoption photos, birth-family photos.
The history of a life. And the history of many lives.
In the hotel, author and reader sit together, sift through the papers, talk about personal history, the histories of other adoptees, the upcoming reunion. Lisa is so caught up in the true-life story that so closely mirrors her novel that time zips by, and Janie warns that they’d better head for the bookstore hosting Lisa’s talk that night. Though it’s only ten miles away, Nashville’s traffic is legendary.
Lisa never even moves her rental car from the hotel. She skates off with Janie, who drives like a ninja. After nearly an hour, they squeal into the bookstore parking lot with only five minutes to spare. Janie’s daughter, Karen, comes from work nearby and meets them, eager to take in this part of her mother’s history.
Other adoptees turn up in the audience as well: A woman whose adoptive parents were let into a hospital room with three babies in it and told they could pick one. A man who’s spent his life trying to write the story of his adoption and his search but can’t seem to distill it into the form he wants. He arrives with an armload of materials.
After the book event, Lisa, Janie, and Karen
share a late-night dinner. They talk more about the history, about the connections of the next generation, why these stories should be told…but also about book clubs and parenthood.
Three weeks later, Janie is repeating her story again—at our reunion in Memphis, this time to me and to other adoptees and next-generation attendees who want to better connect with the legacy that is part of their family dynamics. She points to a photograph on her poster board. “This was made the day I was adopted,” she says. We are captivated as she continues. I can see why she keeps getting requests from book clubs, inviting her to join in their discussions of the novel. “I’m coming wide open on this,” Janie says. “It’s so exciting.”
It’s then that I realize that this strong, upbeat woman has been a work in progress. Getting here has taken time—and has required her to overcome her fear of opening the Pandora’s box of the past. She is sensitive to the fact that not everyone’s desire to find a biological family will match hers. “Everybody doesn’t have that need to know,” she stresses to the other adoptees and family members gathered around us now. “If my adopted mother and father had lived, I would not have pushed.”
She explains that after her adoptive parents’ deaths, she felt unmoored, needed to reconnect with blood relatives and to search for the brothers she last saw in Tann’s limousine. “I was always looking for someone to feel close to,” she explains. Then she tells us about those brown paper bags—the one she carried as a three-year-old girl, and another one that would ultimately change her life, years later, reconnecting her with her birth family. “A little angel was on my shoulder that day,” she says.
Telling this part of her story causes tears to rim her eyes.
In midlife, she signs up for a writing class taught by a retired teacher in Alabama. Students are instructed to bring something to write about, hidden in a brown paper sack.
Janie can’t decide what object to take.
When it’s time to walk out the door, she picks up one of Georgia Tann’s Christmas books, a kind of catalog in which she pitched children to be adopted as holiday gifts. This is a subject about which Janie has something to say. But the writing teacher has a surprise in store for the class. Instead of writing about their own items, students are instructed to exchange the sacks. A male classmate receives Janie’s—and has not a clue what it is or what to do with it.
He holds it up with a question.
The teacher is stunned. “Who brought this?” she asks abruptly.
Janie tentatively raises her hand.
“Where did you get it?”
“I’m adopted out of that home,” she admits with trepidation.
The teacher, as it turns out, is also a Tann baby and one of the people who went to court with advocate Denny Glad to insist that Tennessee open its adoption records. She helps Janie connect with Denny and her volunteers. Although Janie had already obtained some of her records, Denny finds more. “The information she helped me get ended up answering questions I didn’t know I even had,” Janie says. “There was a lot of info there. I don’t regret knowing. It’s the story of my DNA, who I am.”
Three weeks after they connect long-distance, Janie drives to Memphis to meet Denny. This hero of so many adoptees is ill and on oxygen, but it is clear to Janie that she is a powerhouse. They share a meal at a restaurant in a suburb and instantly bond. “I wanted to meet her and thank her in person,” Janie says. “I learned a lesson long ago: Never hesitate. I think it comes from my adoptive mother dying so young. It was really nice to meet someone who worked so hard on our behalf. She saw a need and saw a way to fill it.”
The pair continue their long-distance friendship and exchange lengthy emails for nearly seven years, full of the history of TCHS, Denny’s efforts to locate birth families, and everyday details about things like the hassles of Christmas shopping and vacation travel plans. Janie keeps a file of all of their letters. “Her answers to me were wonderful. She had a tremendous impact on people. She was the push to get the identifying information.”
Denny’s commitment to helping adoptees resonates in the emails she and Janie share. “The need for truth can be so compelling,” she writes. “I think it must be that need that overcomes all else.” The official letterhead for Tennessee’s Right to Know organization bears that one word: TRUTH.
And more truth is ahead for Janie. The answers to other long-standing questions come after another twist. At the time, Janie is doing temporary work, her assignments arranged by an employment agency. She is sent to Catholic Social Services, a charitable organization that helps people in need. The woman she works for arranges adoptions and listens to Janie’s ongoing quest to find the brothers taken away all those years ago in Tann’s big black limousine. “I’ve looked all my life,” Janie says. Her boss tells her that the laws have changed, that Janie can contact the state of Tennessee and ask for additional information about her family.
She takes the steps required to learn more. Then the state of Tennessee writes to say they’ve found her mother. Janie hesitates, thinking it through. “The things I remembered about my mother, I was not sure I wanted to know this woman…I really wasn’t looking for her, but I wanted to find my brothers.” With misgivings, she places the call to her birth mother, Eula, who lives in rural West Tennessee. Maybe she will know where the two boys are.
The call doesn’t initiate a happy mother-daughter relationship. “It was okay,” Janie says quietly. “She was not who I was looking for.” Her message to the woman who gave birth to her, then left her on the courthouse steps: “I maybe can get over it, but I’m not saying what you did was all right.”
Even so, Janie and her husband drive to Tennessee to visit during the Christmas holidays, to see the world that would have been her life. A crowd has gathered on the front porch of Eula’s house, and Janie can hardly force herself from the car. “I just sat there and looked at it and thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do this.’ A lot of family members were sitting there that day. They didn’t quite understand that I didn’t want anything…I walked into this house with all this chaos.” Most of the family had not known what happened to the three children way back when. “We just disappeared,” Janie says.
Tsunami-sized culture shock roils over her as she sees Eula, and even today she sounds somewhat bewildered as she recalls the in-person encounter: “I never knew I was going to be meeting a group. You could tell that my mother wasn’t sentimental. I asked her if she thought about us. She said, ‘I figured there was no point, so I didn’t.’ ”
Janie pauses.
Adoptees and family members in the conference room with us nod and wipe eyes. It’s the response most adoptees fear when contemplating a birth-family reunion, the polar opposite of the dream: I always loved you. I missed you. I thought about you every birthday all these years.
All listen intently, their body language urging Janie to continue. But she steps away from her story to give a word of advice to the others in the room still looking for family members: “I strongly recommend one-on-one reunions.”
Then she returns to her narrative about that brief holiday meeting with her birth family.
The day she sees Eula does yield a couple of special blessings. Amid the confusion, a farmer comes up on his tractor and asks her why she is there. When she tells him, he says, “I remember you. I remember when you were born. I knew your father.” The visiting farmer was the owner of the sharecropper house where Janie lived. He owns it, still. She can come see it, if she likes.
Late in the visit, a red-haired aunt quietly pulls her aside. Janie has had the feeling several times that the woman wanted to tell her something—and it involves the man Janie has always believed was her biological father. “Horace wasn’t your father,” the aunt says. “I have a picture of your real father.” Yet another shock.
For the first time, Janie learns that she does not carry
the DNA of the man she remembers with such horror. Her birth father, a sharecropper, was shot on the banks of the Mississippi River in a gambling fight when Janie was just fourteen months old, too young to remember him. Her aunt gives her a grainy photograph of her father, the two little boys, and Eula, roundly pregnant with Janie. A family picture, posed by a photographer at a fair.
Janie can’t help but wonder that day what she might have had in common with her birth dad. Later, she finds an old newspaper article and learns more about his death. In her birth mother, she sees mannerisms that are similar to her own. They’ve even decorated their houses with some of the same color schemes. Yet there is no emotional connection there, no joyful coming together. “I chose not to have a relationship with her,” Janie explains. “She knew what she did, and I knew what she did.”
Instead, Janie turns her focus on the search for her brothers. She learns that the boys were adopted by a general contractor and his wife in Hollywood and offered a good life, even getting to play on the MGM Studios lot. “They had it all,” she says. “They had a swimming pool—these poor little boys who didn’t have shoes before.”
She finds out about their flight to California in the middle of the night, a common practice for Tann’s operation. A babysitter took several children to the Fairmont lobby, to hand them over individually to their adoptive parents, people they had never met before. It was a favorite exchange point of Tann’s. Continuing to search, Janie believes she has tracked down one brother, Henry, the one who protected her as a child. She attempts to contact the man she hopes will turn out to be him, and he calls back. His message on her answering machine thrills her: “I’m so glad to hear from you. I’m your brother.” When they talk, joy enwraps her. “I remember you,” Henry teases. “You were the little wet spot in the bed.”
Janie’s expression is tender when she speaks of finding her brothers, but the wound in her heart has not gone away. She reestablished a strong relationship with Henry, one they maintained until his death. “We got to spend twenty great years together,” she says. “It was a wonderful twenty years.” She points to a photograph on her display board. “This is us, after we got back together, sitting on those same courthouse steps.” Her other brother, Mack, who barely spoke during his first year after being abandoned, struggled with health issues as an adult and moved away from California. She has once more lost touch with him. She mourns the suffering all of them went though, as well as their separation. And she gives thanks for the answers to the mysteries that shadowed her for so long.
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