She tells of traveling to Nashville after finding her family, to thank the Tennessee Department of Human Services for helping her with her records. The two part-time employees in charge of adoption information are delighted. “We never get to meet the adoptees we helped,” they tell her. Through DNA testing, more recently, she has connected with other cousins and is touched by these new relationships. Her comment echoes what I’ve heard so many TCHS adoptees say: “It was the first time I ever had seen anyone who looked like me.” Janie goes on to say that for years she didn’t feel the need to explore DNA results. “Then I did it and found two cousins…I said, ‘Let’s talk.’ We’re still in the beginning phase.”
Her biological mother never expressed regret for what she did, even after Janie and her brothers reconnected with her. “She not only threw us away once. She’d thrown us away again,” Janie says with anger.
But the bad memories mix with the good.
“I was not stolen,” she declares. “Our mother just didn’t want us. She was very, very poor. She left us on the courthouse steps, and I remember that…I’m sure it was a good thing I was adopted. I would’ve been twelve years old and pregnant if I had stayed.” Her adoptive mother, in her life for only nine short years, saved her in so many ways and helped mold her into the woman she has become. “She always told me I was selected,” Janie remembers. “She did everything she could to make me feel good about myself.”
It is not the what ifs that fuel Janie now. She knows who she is. She tells her story to encourage others. She loves the children she gave birth to and raised, and the grandchildren who came next. She is also willing to keep exploring, to keep widening her circle of love.
Because who knows what yet may be waiting.
LATE ARRIVALS
When Robert walks into our Memphis hotel late in the evening, I am sitting with Lisa on a small sofa in the reception area. We are catching our breath after the day’s emotional afternoon and equally emotional dinner at Kirby Pines.
A big man, Robert wears a stylish hat that is a cross between a fedora and a Stetson. His hair is gray underneath, and he exudes the confidence that has made him a successful insurance agent back in northwestern Arkansas. He’s the kind of guy who probably can’t walk a half block in his small town without greeting somebody he knows.
I make eye contact with him, the awkward glance of strangers looking for familiarity, wondering if they should know each other. Are you here for the same reason I’m here? the glance says.
Before he can move through the lobby, Lisa recognizes him and calls out. Only a little more than two weeks ago, she met him at a book festival in Arkansas and urged him to venture over to the reunion. When his daughter Heather had seen that Lisa would be speaking at the book festival, she’d encouraged her dad to read Before We Were Yours. With his history, she’d thought, it would interest him.
As he read the book, something shifted deep within him. “I think this really happened,” he mused about the plot. Given his history, it felt real to him.
While the novel might have been the starting point for this unlikely trip, Heather is the true reason Robert is here, camping out in an unfamiliar hotel. She persuaded him to come, and he’s here, steeling himself to jump into Saturday’s activities.
Because it matters so much to Heather.
CHAPTER 15
SEVEN-DOLLAR BABY
“My mother worried about them coming and taking me away.”
MURIEL AND CHESTER TERRELL ARE small-town folks in Washington County, Arkansas, salt-of-the-earth people. They always have food on the table, but the Great Depression has hit them hard. Money is tight. And yet, in 1936, they await a small miracle.
A very small miracle.
It is delivered to the back door of their house in a gleaming black car driven by a chauffeur. A woman in a nurse’s uniform carries a bundle, the son they have longed for. Their baby, they are told, is just four weeks old. The name given to him at birth is Don Adley.
The adoption fee is seven dollars. Although that may not sound like much, it is a stretch for baby Don’s new parents—about one hundred twenty-five dollars in today’s terms. If the price had been any higher, they do not know what they would have done.
What’s odd is that it isn’t more. At the time, seven dollars is the official rate for an in-state Tennessee adoption. But the Terrells live out of state. And regardless of where the new parents live, healthy newborn boys command much more than the official rate from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. Extravagant fees for transportation and staff are eagerly forked over to Tann personally by yearning couples desperate to make their dreams come true. Favors are called in, and political and social connections utilized.
Checks providing generous donations to Georgia Tann’s Memphis Receiving Home are written without hesitation, sometimes for years after the fact. Generally, Tann’s customers are of the class that can easily afford it. Folks like Muriel and Chester don’t typically get a baby delivered to their door three hundred miles from Memphis for that rate. Did they know someone with a tie to the orphanage? Did a benefactor subsidize their payment? Or was Don born before greed completely swamped Tann’s transactions?
This bargain price will be a mystery, although not the only one, that will follow the innocent child, renamed Robert by his adoptive parents, throughout his life.
Robert
ROBERT TERRELL IS FULL OF reservations as he and his daughter drive to Memphis. His mixed emotions are making Heather feel as if she is forcing him to go—nonetheless, she is excited.
He insists on one thing: he will get back to northern Arkansas in time for the Razorbacks’ playoff baseball game. He may let his daughter drag him to the informal Tennessee Children’s Home Society adoptee reunion, but priorities are still priorities. He is not going to stay long in Memphis. After all, he’s never cared about tracking down his birth family. His adoptive mother and father were his mom and dad. They were good people. They loved him and raised him up right. That’s all he needs to know.
His daughter, however, wants to find out more. She’s the one who first sent off for his birth records, twenty years ago.
A world of love rests in his decision to make the trip. He’d do anything for Heather.
Even this.
He is a “Georgia Tann baby,” but his adoption and the history of his birth do not mean a darn thing to him. Or so he insists. “I didn’t need to know. The only parents I’ve ever known were the parents who adopted me. I was adopted when I was four weeks old, to my knowledge. They gave me food, shelter, education, and love. I’m eighty-two years old and paid for. My mother said they delivered me to Springdale in a limousine.”
Robert is comfortable in his own skin—and yet he is a contradiction of sorts. In spite of his sometimes blustery demeanor, he looks as though he could just as easily lean in and offer a bear hug. He is a hardworking man who still puts in full days at his insurance office, happy to offer customer service outside normal business hours. He does not want any surprises at this point in life. On the other hand, he loves his three children, and their questions propelled him to make this trip.
At age fifty-five, Heather is a striking woman, a mother, family caregiver, and book lover who has spent more than two decades looking for information about her father’s birth family. Her smile is genuine. “He never wanted to find his birth parents, but he is open to it for us,” she says, when we finally have time to talk.
* * *
—
LIKE MANY OTHER FAMILIES in the 1960s, Robert’s adoptive parents maintain a combination root cellar and storm and bomb shelter. His mother keeps his adoption documents there in a faux-leather bank portfolio, instead of putting them in the safe-deposit box. Before her death, she anoints her granddaughter Heather to take charge of the records. “I want you to have them,” she says. “You be the caretaker of t
hese. You keep them safe.”
So Heather does. She still has the portfolio, and she still keeps the papers in it. “My grandmother was uncomfortable with all of us finding out more about my father’s adoption, but she knew the medical information was important.”
The portfolio is with Heather on this trip. And on this night in Memphis, where his journey started, Robert looks at his adoption records for the first time—including letters from Tann, kept for all those years by his adoptive mother, and then by Heather. He studies the papers with her by his side in their reunion hotel suite. “All of those adoption papers, he had never even looked at,” she says. The comment is startling and reminds me of how each adoptee approaches his or her mysteries differently.
As Robert examines the material, he becomes upset. “That kind of explains things; she was overly protective,” he says of his adoptive mother.
Later Heather tells me the same thing about her grandmother. “She was just so protective of my dad.”
* * *
—
ROBERT IS AN ONLY child who, with his parents, bounces among nine or ten houses in Springdale, Arkansas, during his childhood. He is much loved by the good-hearted couple. “They doted on me. I’m spoiled,” he says with perhaps a hint of sheepishness as he and Heather tell me about his life.
Although he knows the name he was given at birth, the details of his birth date are confusing, even mysterious. “I’m not sure that birth certificate’s right,” he says. “We kind of suspect Georgia doctored that up or had it doctored.”
Robert’s adoptive mother, joyful in this photograph, worries that the Tann scandal will cause her son’s adoption to be declared illegal.
His adoptive parents contacted TCHS months before they received him. A letter, signed by Tann, is written on February 6, 1936, addressed to the eager parents-to-be. “We regret our inability to fill all the applications we had for children during the Christmas holidays. We were deluged with letters and for this reason, we have been delayed in answering yours,” Tann explains.
Then, in May 1936, Tann produces a child, writing about little Don: “We have a baby boy we believe you will be interested in, and the Worker has to make a visit to your home before a placement can be made. We ask that you send transportation to the amount of fourteen dollars, bus fare and incidentals. She will bring the baby to you and if you are entirely satisfied, we leave the baby. If not, the Worker will return him to the organization.”
The letter is typed on TCHS letterhead with an old-fashioned silhouette illustration of a woman holding an infant in the air while two girls play nearby. But the content is not so heartwarming. Once more a child is treated as a commodity by Tann—a product, in this case, to be transported out of state.
At some point, the transaction for the boy shifts from bus to limo, though, and from fourteen dollars to seven. A home visit is not made. All part of the mystery. A hint that someone of influence might be pulling strings, though Robert and Heather have no idea who that could’ve been.
Robert is unsure how his parents connected with Tann. His mother, who had a miscarriage before the adoption, grew up in Helena, Arkansas, not quite seventy miles from Memphis. Since Memphis was the nearest big city for folks in Helena, it was not uncommon for them to travel across the state line for services. Could someone there have told his mother about TCHS?
His adoptive mother tells young Robert early on that he is adopted. Again, she is protecting him. She doesn’t want him to hear it from someone else. Beyond that, the subject is not discussed. “I don’t remember talking about it,” he says. His father, a produce buyer, never speaks of it at all.
“I never felt ‘less than,’ ” Robert insists. Yet when he proposes to his first wife, Heather’s mother, he feels obliged to put his history on the table for consideration, explaining, “You might not want to marry me because I’m adopted.” The unknown in their backgrounds looms large for Tann’s former wards.
I’ve begun to notice an abundance of hints that point to the anxiety that has lingered for decades within families affected by Tann—both from mothers who gave up children and from mothers, like Robert’s, who took them in and fell in love with them. Among all of the heart-wrenching records I’ve seen, one that affects me the most is a yellowed seventy-year-old newspaper clipping that Robert’s mother saved, carefully folded up in her paperwork.
Robert, adopted in small-town Arkansas and thankful to grow up there, avoids finding out about his birth family for years so as not to hurt his adoptive mother.
That brittle 1950 article reminds me of clippings I found after my own mother’s death when I was in college. All sorts of articles had been stuck in her Bible or a cookbook or in the small metal file box that held our family papers. But Robert’s adoptive mother’s keepsakes convey her fear, all these years later, in underlined passages about the investigation into Tann and questions about the legality of Tann adoptions. The article proclaims in its headline that legislation may be needed to clarify the Memphis TCHS adoptions, and some may prove to be illegal. As I hold this article, Muriel’s distress is palpable, even decades later.
Although she did not talk to Robert about the adoption, she certainly was thinking about it. Wondering about it. Agonizing over it. But until he sees the yellowed newspaper clipping while he and Heather are in Memphis, he does not realize the extent of her fear. “I’m sure she was scared they’d come and get me,” he says, his perspective fine-tuned by the benefit of decades of hindsight.
Robert is fourteen at the time the scandal breaks, a happy teenager doing what teens do. His parents are terrified that their greatest fear—that this boy they’ve raised as their own could be taken away—is about to be realized. In desperation, they hire a lawyer they can scarcely afford to make certain the adoption is legal.
A series of typewritten letters from their Fayetteville, Arkansas, attorney gives a glimpse of yet more havoc wreaked by Tann. A letter dated November 1950 to the “Tennessee State Welfare Department” says, “I am taking this opportunity to write you in connection with all the trouble that you are having with the adoptions from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.” The lawyer goes on to say that he represents Robert’s parents. “Their main purpose in contacting us is to ascertain if the adoption of the above referred child was legal, and if it was not, what must they do.”
The response would frighten any adoptive parent: “Should your adoption of your son prove in any way to be illegal, then you will be notified as to what steps must be taken…”
Robert’s folks will not get the response they crave for six agonizing months. Finally, their attorney receives a letter from Lena Martin, by now state superintendent of TCHS in Nashville. “We believe,” she writes, “from a review of our records, you may assure your clients there appears to be no reason for them to be concerned about the legality of this adoption.”
Reading the letter, I imagine Muriel’s trembling hands holding it, her eyes closing in gratitude.
“He had no idea that all of this was going on, that they had hired an attorney,” Heather tells me, with Robert’s files spread out on a hotel conference table in front of us. “Georgia Tann was always kind of a hero in his mythology; that was because she was a hero to his mother.”
Some of those feelings remain. “I’m not mad at Georgia Tann,” Robert says. “If she hadn’t done what she did for me, I could be in jail. I’m not bragging, but I’ve done pretty well. I’m blessed. I’m eighty-two years old. It don’t mean a damn.”
Yet there have always been questions surrounding Robert’s adoption. Information comes in odd ways, trickling in here and there over the decades. Heather reads a magazine article about Tann in the 1980s and becomes interested in finding more information. Once again, Muriel has the same reaction. “It really upset my mother,” Robert admits. “She didn’t like it.” Nevertheless,
her grandchildren are intent on learning more, particularly about their medical history. They search for information and accumulate quite a lot.
Heather’s mother is interested for a different reason. She’s into astrology and wants to know the time of day her husband was born. Perhaps this will help her understand his personality better—but his birth certificate is incomplete. She can’t find the information she needs.
“We had to get a court order to get my birth certificate from the state of Tennessee,” Robert tells me. The birth certificate reveals discrepancies. Was he born on May 5 or August 31? But Robert doesn’t want to further upset his mother, so he backs off. “In some ways she felt threatened,” he says, and the information was not important enough for him to push her. “It wasn’t going to change anything…I didn’t need to know.”
When Heather’s daughter is born, in 1990, Heather sees a news report about Tennessee’s right-to-know legislation, which requires the state to provide records to adoptees. She works to find out more but does not tell her grandmother. She also turns to Denny Glad, who is mentioned in the news report. In several conversations, Heather finds Denny delightful and helpful, although Denny doubts that Robert was a stolen baby, because he was born in the mid-1930s, before Tann’s criminal ways had escalated.
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