With the records open, any requests to the state of Tennessee must come from Robert himself. Still telling his children that he does not care about knowing, for their benefit he participates in this new search. In 1993, Heather and her siblings obtain the materials the state of Tennessee offers, information that does not reveal the identity of his birth family. “Then we just kind of stopped,” she says. “We felt like our digging into it was making him sad. I was stepping on toes, and it wasn’t worth it.”
In 2005, when her grandmother Muriel dies, Heather says, “We kind of talked about it,” but she and her sister-in-law, who has a PhD in history, cannot find information during this brief new search. The state says it looks as though both of the birth parents are deceased. Their names aren’t in the current census.
Robert’s second wife has him submit DNA through Ancestry.com and 23andMe. “I supposedly have a lot of cousins,” he says. “I’ve never corresponded with them.” He has not met any members of his birth family.
But after settling into the adoptee occasion in Memphis, sharing stories, and making a few new acquaintances, Robert is much more relaxed. He speaks with Heather about his adoption and his boyhood. He tells her about a woman who was shunned in his small Arkansas town because she had an illegitimate child. She could not come to town, and the little boy was not allowed to attend school. He tries to help Heather understand. In those days, the worst thing in the world was to be illegitimate.
His adoptive mother told him that he came from a large family and that they couldn’t take care of him. Was he born to an unmarried mother? They do not know.
They may never know.
Then again, there are his children, whom Robert loves so, including Heather, who might have inherited a bit of her father’s personality. Her tenacity never quite wanes. “There are so many points of interest,” she tells me with conviction, “that keep bringing me back to look.”
FAMILY “BIBLES”
That faux-leather bank portfolio, the keeping place of the disparate clues to Robert’s biological history and mysterious adoption, is a potent symbol, I’ve come to realize. Everyone who shows up at our Saturday afternoon gathering for adoptees and families has their own version of it. Lillian has her tote bag full of records. Connie has her binder. Janie has her wheelie crate. Brigette carries a notebook straining against the reams of information about the family members she has finally uncovered for her father, James.
A manila folder here. A display board there. An old shoebox.
A plastic tote with a snap-on lid.
The attendees place these items with care on the library’s stately antique wooden tables. Our reunion group is meeting in the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, in the Memphis and Shelby County Room on the third floor, the space that houses the official archival collection of materials about Georgia Tann and the eventual demise of her empire.
But these adoptee “bibles” are a smaller, more personal type of archive. They’re filled with decades-old records and details of what has often been an excruciating search, bits and pieces of a poignant heritage in plastic sleeves: black-and-white photos of adoption day; the only picture of birth parents; a newspaper clipping about Tann’s misdeeds; records from TCHS, retrieved from the state of Tennessee at a cost; original birth certificates; court filings; sometimes letters to and from Tann herself.
Scraps of paper here, letters there, tell of the anguish that adoptive parents go through as they deal with Georgia Tann. This article raises fear in Robert’s mother’s heart that he will be taken away from her.
Some adoptees have added brief typewritten histories, maybe a page or two, showing time lines and milestones. Others have charted each step they’ve taken to make the Rubik’s Cube of their lives come together. During the reunion, attendees spread out the contents and explain how they found this or came across that. They are eager to help one another locate whatever is available and to learn of new resources.
These adoptee “bibles” are a unique kind of family treasure, and their contents have been hard won.
* * *
—
As adoptees and their families wander among the library tables and display boards, a hum of emotion rolls through the room. The Random House film crew is interviewing Connie and Lisa over by a wall of windows. Cousin Cindy is scurrying around the room capturing each person with her camera, then turning to photograph documents that I will use later in researching their stories. James stands before a photo of Tann on an easel and playfully pretends to poke it with his cane. Janie offers insights to four sisters who have come here in an effort to understand their adoptee mother’s story better.
This room, as my Grandma Brosette would have said, is working alive, and it takes me a moment to identify what I’m seeing. It’s empathy. These reunion attendees understand one another’s journeys like no one else can, and they feel for one other. It’s like being in a foreign country and running into a dear friend from your high school.
I notice a newcomer clutching his file, and I head his way. I know that whatever his story is, it will be something I want to hear.
CHAPTER 16
THE COURT CASE
“They were good to her…but they also wanted someone to help around the house.”
CROPS FAIL ON THE FORTY-ACRE farm in north Georgia in the summer of 1923. Roscoe Tuggle, a desperate father, has to earn more money, so he leaves home in search of work and finds a job in a steel mill in Beach Bottom, West Virginia, firing a stationary boiler engine for sixty-seven cents an hour.
His wife, Ella, and their three young children stay behind, anxiously awaiting word from him, with enough corn for them and the livestock for a limited amount of time. Roscoe sends money for a while, but then his correspondence grows scarce. Finally Ella receives a $100 money order from her husband. She sells the mules, cows, and chickens and packs up the children, spending the money to travel to Maryville, on the far east side of Tennessee, where she has a relative.
In the small town, she struggles to support her family. She has run out of money, and with no resources and no sign of Roscoe, she leaves the kids in the care of the Blount County Industrial Home, planning to find news of their father and come back for them. She takes a job as a cook in a nearby camp and pays their board. The paperwork she has to sign, though, in order to keep them there, has a devastating word at the top, one she does not adequately understand. Surrender.
She thinks she’s leaving the kids temporarily.
The Tennessee Children’s Home Society decides otherwise.
Within weeks, on November 22, 1923, an unsigned letter from the TCHS superintendent’s secretary is sent to the Industrial Home, asking for more information about one of the children. “The child is a good risk,” the Blount County home official writes on the paperwork. A postscript typed at the bottom reads:
The children are beginning to get acquainted with us and the teacher in the school has complimented them very much; they are, we think, very sweet children, and all very pretty.
Roscoe eventually has the money to send for his family, and he finds Ella; but when they try to reclaim their children, they learn that they have been taken. Confused and with money tight and communications difficult, they are not sure what to do. He and Ella, their relationship reportedly rocky, settle in West Virginia without the three kids, establish a new home of sorts, and have two more children. Nevertheless, they are determined to find their other kids.
Roscoe and Ella manage to save up—not easy to do—and eventually strike out for the TCHS Nashville office, but the employees there will not tell them where the children are. Desperate, they use every penny they have to hire a well-respected Nashville attorney, paying him five hundred dollars—about seventy-five hundred dollars now—a huge sum for them. Mentioned in the court papers is the surprise of the officials at the steel mill where Roscoe works that he’d go a
s far as spending that kind of money on an attorney to get his children back.
An extraordinary legal battle gets under way, a rare attempt to take on TCHS and Tann very early in her career.
The stricken couple spends four years—and money they can ill afford—trying to find their kids. They are poor Southerners and not well educated, the kind of people who cannot ordinarily wage such a battle. But they want their children. Amazingly, against the greatest of odds, they succeed in locating two of the three, something Tann went to great lengths to prevent from happening. Only they are told that they cannot have those two children back. Their third child is never found.
William
WILLIAM TIMMONS EASES INTO THE library on the Saturday afternoon of the reunion. He joins the group at the oak tables, bringing information of his own and a story about a pursuit of justice. His mother was one of the three siblings taken from what their mother intended to be a temporary stay in the Blount County Industrial Home and placed in adoptions by TCHS. The papers William carries are devastating—in particular, the documents from the lawsuit his biological grandparents filed while fighting to recover their children.
Now age seventy-two and the father of two grown daughters, William says he hopes the story of Tann’s misdeeds will be publicized as much as possible. “I’m not sure people are aware this went on for thirty years,” he tells me as we move to one of the library tables out of the way. With a trim beard, wire-framed glasses, and blue jeans, he looks like the custom-furniture builder and contractor he is, as he shares his family’s tragic story in quiet but urgent tones. He has been shaken by what happened, and it has affected his life in myriad ways. He is a paradox: he wants people to know and yet is resigned to the past.
He offers to let me review his personal collection of evidence, then mail it back. I am afraid to take the originals of something so precious. I scrounge in my purse for change to make copies, fumble with the library copier, and do the best I can, William looking over my shoulder.
“A lot of people still feel this way, that people who are poor deserve to be…but they’re just people,” William says, visibly angry about this injustice visited upon his family—and others like them—two generations ago. “Evil stuff.”
The documents and William tell the story of a little girl caught in the crossfire of poverty, greed, and a system that favored money over biology.
* * *
—
MAUDE IS SEVEN YEARS OLD when her mother drops her off at the home, thinking it’ll be for only a little while. Maude is at a cute age, but she’s already too old to be a favorite for adoption. “Most people, they want a baby,” William remarks as we leaf through the records together.
So Maude is placed with a foster family in Memphis, and her name is changed to Margie. Her younger brother, Larry, age five, is sent to a different Memphis household and named Caleb. For about four years, Ella and Roscoe search and search and, in what seems like a miracle, Roscoe finds both of them. He cannot find the youngest, Estelle, age three.
As Ella and Roscoe expend every resource they have to get their children back, the tragic drama plays out in the courts in Tennessee. Legal papers and newspaper stories paint a wrenching picture, the struggle of a poor family pitted against an all-powerful machine. The articles and testimony smear their names, the details spelled out in letters to court officials and a lengthy, sloppily typed “Story Sheet” dated May 16, 1927, and compiled by TCHS for its orphanage files.
The Story Sheet plays up Roscoe and Ella’s marital problems, the hostile involvement of Roscoe’s mill employers, and the poor condition of their house in West Virginia.
The house is composed of two rooms, window in each end—over the window was brown paper. No out house except a half built and half finished garage, a broken down Ford car with three wheels and a badly torn top was the car referred to in [Mr. Tuggle’s] statement that he would take the children to and from school in.
While Roscoe maintains that his wife was forced to sign the papers surrendering the children, his boss and others at the mill, who are increasingly involved in the case, call that claim ridiculous. Documents recount the boss saying that if Roscoe will give up bothering the children in their present homes and take care of the two children born “since the other children were deserted,” he and the other men at the mill will stand by Roscoe. If, however, the father persists in disturbing the children, he will never receive assistance. The paperwork builds, taking in a roster of people who either do not know the Tuggles well or are on the mill’s payroll but still are asked to give depositions. A justice of the peace writes a letter saying that the depositions will have to be scheduled around his full-time work…at the steel mill.
Despite the obstacles, Roscoe, thirty-three, reunites with his children, a heartbreaking event captured in the Memphis Evening Appeal newspaper right after it occurred.
Coverage in the Memphis Evening Appeal describes the battle for the Tuggle children.
“Brother, do you remember me?” Maude, now eleven and called Margie, asks while hugging her brother, now called Caleb and nine years old.
The bewildered boy shakes his head.
Roscoe, a muscular steelworker, picks up the child. “Sonny, do you remember me? I’m your father, boy.”
The boy again shakes his head, frightened. Then he cries. Roscoe puts his son down and says, “I…I guess I have sought them these four years for nothing. He don’t remember me, and the courts won’t give them to me.”
The court, however, has not ruled yet, so Roscoe fights on. Both Maude’s foster mother and Larry’s new parents say they will give the children back to Roscoe if the court rules they must. But Roscoe has already picked up on hints. Too much power rests on the other side of the argument, too much money and influence. Their children are never coming home.
The court provides justification in its comments. The judge describes Ella as a misguided mother who gave her children away and who associated with improper people, although Roscoe maintains again that she did not know the ramifications of the paper she was forced to sign at the Industrial Home. When the ruling is handed down, it contains pages of typewritten, old-fashioned legalese. The judge laments having to rule in a domestic matter and cites Roscoe’s rights as a husband and father. Then he decrees that the two children cannot go home with their birth parents and will stay where they are.
The court agrees with Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society—that children are better off in homes where they can have nicer clothes, better surroundings, and parents with means. “Could they not be shaped into children who fit in the new environments where they landed?” the judge writes. “Should I, under these circumstances, take these children from homes of culture and refinement, where I am satisfied they are cared for and given proper educational training?”
But Roscoe and Ella simply cannot give up. They continue the fight, hoping to use their suit as a test case. Although the judge takes the case under advisement, by now the family’s resources are depleted. With next to no money, growing worries about confusing little Maude and Larry further, and the inability to even locate their third child, they finally concede the inevitable. The couple’s attorney delivers a simple and chilling message to the court: “Mr. Tuggle has decided not to fight the case further.”
That single, brief, complicated encounter with their birth family during the original court case is the last one little Maude and Larry will ever have.
Larry/Caleb remains in a home with a family that has one biological child. That presents complications further along, an issue that finds space in Tann’s paperwork some years later, when she weighs in on young Caleb’s situation in a letter to Fannie B. Elrod, then state superintendent of TCHS in Nashville. In the letter, Tann remarks that something has bobbed up with the Tuggle son. The man who took him wants to change the boy’s last name but
not officially adopt him—to keep him from eventually sharing property and financial inheritances with the family’s natural child.
“It is hard for me to conceive of people who have had two children all of their lives and do not care enough about them to want them to share in their finances as well as in other ways,” Tann complains. “It makes you feel like telling him that we did not ask him to take the children or to spend anything on them.”
Maude/Margie lives with her long-term foster parents, described as a prominent family, until she marries. “They were good to her and loved her,” William tells me, “but they also wanted someone to help around the house…They were probably better than some of the adoptive parents.” By the time William is in his twenties, he knows there is something strange about the family’s situation. His mother’s brothers are a good deal older than she is, and everyone refers to them as his “uncles,” but he knows he isn’t related to them. “No one talked about it very much,” he says.
Then a cousin mails him a packet of family material, including the lawsuit. His family’s hidden history leaps from the pages. Over the years, he has contemplated the matter a great deal but has not searched for other relatives. About ten years ago, he and his cousin heard a story about how the Tuggles’ lost younger daughter, Estelle, was adopted in California by a car dealer after Tann took her from the Industrial Home. “Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know,” he says. He does not see much point in requesting records from the state of Tennessee.
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