Before and After

by Judy Christie

  Sitting with me at our quiet library table, William shakes his head. “I’m okay now, but the whole thing has been kind of painful to me,” he says. The political and financial game that was played in Memphis hit his family square in the heart. His deep feelings go beyond his own family, however. He wants the horror to be publicized for other families and is still shocked by the idea that so many people were willing to ignore such a corrupt system.

  “I assume my real grandparents were unusual in finding my mother,” he says. “It is hard to believe that sort of thing went on.” William’s submerged outrage is almost palpable, but he hopes that something good came out of the family’s pain. Perhaps his grandparents gave courage to other families, inspiring them to look for their children and to challenge TCHS.

  Maybe by talking about this now, he’s doing his part to take up arms in the battle his grandparents Roscoe and Ella fought to the last of their resources. And maybe a grandson’s efforts to share their story can help prevent this sort of tragic situation from ever happening again.

  NEWLY EXTRAORDINARY

  Strangers regularly come up to me in the town where I grew up and exclaim, “You must be related to…” They proceed to name one of my three brothers or a nephew. A former newspaper colleague ran into my middle brother at church recently and immediately pegged him as one of my kinfolks. I’ve been asked so many times if my nephew is my son, I’ve quit counting.

  We are genetically stamped, and that resemblance, complete with my father’s nose, is something I’ve never thought too much about.

  Lisa, too, favors her brothers. When they are together, they speak alike, walk alike, gesture the same ways.

  After this weekend, we will never again take those blessings for granted. Lisa and I have been given the chance to imagine what it’s like to spend your life wondering who you look like, searching faces in crowds thinking, “Does anybody here look like me?” Never to attend a big holiday meal surrounded by people who share your hair, eyes, build, mannerisms. Never to have an aging aunt say, “You look just like your father.”

  These everyday things don’t always seem that valuable. They even go unnoticed in the moment. Until you come face-to-face with someone who doesn’t have the luxury of such a connection. Then the ordinary takes on new meaning. It becomes a gift to be appreciated and treasured.

  Never again to be seen in quite the same way.

  * * *

  —

  When I said yes to Lisa’s invitation to capture these real-life stories, I did not expect to learn a lesson at every turn, but I should have known better. Each of these families has been changed by the way they encountered Georgia Tann. Each brings a lesson.

  And another lesson lies just ahead.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE NIGHT ALL THE BABIES DIED

  “I didn’t understand the agony they were going through.”

  THE YOUNG MOTHER-TO-BE GOES INTO labor in the middle of the day. Her husband is at work, and a telephone is not available. He cannot be reached until the end of his shift. A neighbor takes Josie Henderson, not quite twenty-one, to the maternity ward at the hospital in Memphis. Another neighbor stays with their toddler daughter.

  Excited about her new child, Josie gives birth to a baby boy late that afternoon. The eager father, Noah, arrives at the hospital that evening, after work. He admires the new arrival through the nursery window. The baby is crying, strong and healthy. Their first son.

  Josie is still in the maternity ward the next morning, foggy from the lingering effects of the anesthetics, when the hospital officials deliver devastating news.

  Their newborn son has died overnight.

  She overhears the other mothers also being told that their babies died during the night. She’s confused, disoriented. Grieving. In shock. Unsure of herself in the moment. She and her husband do not have money for a funeral. They have no idea how to handle the logistics of the tragedy. The paperwork and the details are confusing for two young parents, each only able to obtain an eighth-grade education before going to work.

  Unimaginable grief rushes in. Life turns upside down.

  Workers at the hospital tell the new mother that the hospital will handle everything and take care of the body. All she has to do is sign.

  Stanley

  WHEN HE ENTERS THE HOOKS Library for the afternoon gathering of adoptees, it is clear that he is not sure he should have come. And yet it seems he could not be anywhere else.

  Perhaps only a deathbed promise to his mother could have gotten him here. Or maybe his deep love for the brother he never met. With his hair and mustache both gray and his car keys on a lanyard around his neck, he looks tentative yet determined in this wood-paneled room filled with information about Tann and TCHS. Now retired and living in Arkansas, Stanley Henderson is seventy-two when he drives to one of the book events on Lisa’s All Arkansas speaking tour. Today he drove nearly the same route his parents took when his brother was born and then, shortly afterward, he thinks, was stolen from the hospital maternity ward.

  He wants to believe that his brother, who would be seventy-eight now, is still alive. Out there somewhere. For years he has carried his brother’s name and birth date, DAVID CLINTON HENDERSON, AUGUST 31, 1939, on a piece of paper in his wallet. “I wanted to make sure I never forgot it,” he tells me as we find a place together at a quiet table. I turn to a fresh page in my spiral notebook and begin taking notes.

  Stanley has no idea what his brother’s adopted name might be, nor where he might have been taken as a baby, or where he might be living now. The baby who was born David Clinton could be living two blocks from this library or two thousand miles away. Stanley has no way of knowing, and so he’s come here to this gathering, to see if there’s a way to find out. Anything he hasn’t tried yet. “I’m going to tell you the truth,” he says. “I have just about given up hope. I have run into so many dead ends.”

  * * *

  —

  BABY DAVID IS BORN in John Gaston Hospital, itself a character in this family’s heartbreaking story. An impressive building financed in part by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, the hospital was the birthplace of many babies appropriated into Tann’s system.

  The building is demolished in 1990 to make room for a modern regional health center. Ironically, it is wiped off the face of Memphis about the time that Denny Glad and her volunteer corps finally succeed in forcing the state to open its adoption records and a large number of TCHS babies renew their searches for their history and medical records.

  But for David’s grieving family, there are no records to be found. It is as if their son never existed at all. And yet the more his mother’s memory clears and the family’s grief subsides, the more things don’t make sense. How could multiple mothers in the same ward receive the same news? How could all the babies born in the hospital that night—with at least three mothers in the delivery ward on the day Josie remembers, and maybe more—have died so quickly?

  The questions haunt the family.

  Through the days that follow, they put clues together and conclude that their son has been stolen—along with other babies in the nursery that night. They never believe that the baby died. Only they don’t know what to do about it. They have never heard of Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. They are unaware of Tann’s frequent appropriation of newborns by the easiest, cruelest possible method: simply telling birth mothers that their babies were stillborn or died shortly after delivery.

  Even though Josie and Noah know nothing about the powers at work in and around Memphis, they believe to their core that someone took their baby boy. They are certain of it.

  But life moves on, and they must, too.

  The day after baby David’s birth and disappearance, Adolf Hitler mobilizes his plan to invade Poland. The start of World War II causes U.S. fact
ories to be retooled for war efforts. Women enter the workforce in large numbers. The couple moves from rural Arkansas to Los Angeles to work for Lockheed Aircraft. Josie installs running lights on the wings of B-17s. Noah works on the assembly line.

  Near the end of the war, production slows, and the Hendersons move to West Memphis, Arkansas, to be near relatives. Upon their return to the area, they hear about Tann.

  To them, the news confirms what they have long believed, that their son was stolen. They do not talk about it, though. For years, they hold this bitter secret inside themselves. It affects their lives in varied ways. They have other children, but they never get over the loss of their first son. “They just couldn’t bring themselves to tell me about it,” Stanley says. He’s emotional as we sit at the library table together. It’s hard for him to talk about this family tragedy, which predates his birth by several years. “I wish I could have helped.”

  When Josie becomes pregnant with Stanley, their next child after David, the lost baby, she refuses to go to the hospital. Terrified of what could happen, in September 1945, she gives birth at home, where it’s safe. Growing up, Stanley always knows that there is something unusual about his birth. Not until decades later does he learn why his mother insisted that he be born at home.

  “I knew my mother had had a baby…I didn’t know much else. I grew up not knowing about this because she didn’t talk about it. One time I tried to ask her,” he recalls. “They didn’t want to talk about it,” he says again, his voice mournful.

  That conversation—or the lack of it—hurt him as well as his parents. What goes unspoken between them that day continues to hover around the edges of various conversations for years. Every once in a while, it elbows in. When Stanley’s own son is born in the late 1960s, family members sit in a hospital waiting room, excited and anxious about the birth. “I hope everything goes well,” one person says.

  “This always goes well,” another replies.

  Noah, Stanley’s father, speaks, his voice somber: “You don’t know. Strange things can happen.”

  Stanley is puzzled by the remark, by the sense of foreboding it brings into the room. “The strange way he worded it…it has stuck with me my whole life.”

  In later years, Josie is diagnosed with breast cancer. When she becomes seriously ill, small details about her firstborn son trickle out. “The more I learned, the more I felt guilty,” Stanley says. Yet he was afraid to reopen old wounds. Now he wishes he had. “I didn’t understand the agony they were going through. Just imagine. She’s twenty years old, and this authority figure in the hospital tells her to sign papers.”

  In the 1990s, Stanley’s family, like so many others, sees a television news piece on efforts to open Tennessee’s adoption records. “I contacted these ladies,” he says. “They were swamped after 60 Minutes.” He continues his search on his own, and then, just three days before his mother’s death, she tells him that his big brother was not named at the hospital but after they came home.

  Stanley is stricken to realize that all this time he has been using the wrong name in his search. He knows his brother as David, but that almost certainly would not have been his name when he was given to a new family.

  As Stanley’s mother prepares to die, she talks more. “She wanted David to know he was not given up. He was wanted and loved,” Stanley says. He promises his mother on her deathbed that he will never stop looking for David. “For the first time in my life, she talked the way I wish she had.” He doesn’t blame his mother, though. As a young man, he admits ruefully, he was more interested in things like his 1956 Chevrolet.

  In the news, Stanley hears about a serial killer identified by DNA on the West Coast. His hopes are renewed. DNA provides a new avenue that could lead him to his brother. His sister submits her DNA to a national database, and he studies her results, which include relatives they know, and this gives Stanley confidence in the test’s accuracy. It also names cousins known and unknown. The test does not, however, give them their brother. Another hope ends in a dead end.

  For a few years, he gives up. “I dropped the ball on that promise I made to my mother,” he admits. “It was just too hard.” In 2017, though, he comes across the novel Before We Were Yours, and the topic catches his attention. He downloads the book and reads about the river rat family whose children are stolen from their shantyboat at Mud Island. “It magnified for me the agony my parents must have been going through,” he says. He recalls driving by Mud Island on the Mississippi River in Memphis when he was a young man. “I remember us making fun of shantyboats then. I wouldn’t do that now.”

  The telling of the story in the novel stirs within him some measure of optimism. He visits Lisa’s website and sees that she will be in a small town less than an hour from his home as part of her All Arkansas tour. He gets into his car and drives over before he can talk himself out of it.

  This is Lisa’s last stop before Memphis, and Stanley approaches her with earnest words. “Could you sign the book in memory of David Clinton,” he asks. As she signs the novel, he forces out the words: “That’s my brother who was stolen by Georgia Tann.” His eyes film with a haze of tears. He cannot hide his emotion when she looks up, but then again, there’s no reason to. She knows the devastation left in Tann’s wake. She urges him to come to the adoptee reunion, happening in just a few days.

  He is reluctant. “I’ve heard about it,” he says. “I emailed a lady…but that’s just for TCHS adoptees and their families.”

  “It’s for anyone connected to the TCHS adoptions,” Lisa reassures him. “To tell the stories, but also to share resources and ideas that could help.”

  After leaving the book event, Stanley is at war with himself. Should he go? Talking about his brother is not something he has done through the years. He has never even fully told the story to his children, and he has not told anyone else except his pastor at the church he attends. Nonetheless, courage propels him. He is a quiet man of honor and faith, and his promise weighs on him.

  When participants at the TCHS reunion are invited to the front to speak, Stanley is overcome with emotion and declines to join them. But the stories of the others grip him. They are adoptees who’ve followed trails to find answers about their pasts. He is still wondering if there is any trail to follow. And yet he must try. He is especially moved to hear the story from a man who never knew why his mother gave him up. Was that man’s mother coerced into signing papers while she was still under anesthetic? Could she, like Stanley’s parents, have mourned and agonized over unanswered questions for years?

  He chokes up again later as he discusses this with me during a phone call. On his drive home from the Saturday afternoon gathering, he admits, he kicked himself for not having spoken up at the library, for not telling his family’s story. “I wish I would’ve kept my emotions under check.”

  But in some moments, the loss and the pain are too deep for words.

  And that promise he made to his mother on her deathbed—that he wouldn’t stop looking? He won’t. The stories of others have given him at least a small measure of hope.

  Maybe his brother is out there. “Maybe someone will find him,” he says.

  Maybe someday he’ll have a reunion of his own.

  WHAT IF?

  The story Stanley told, about searching for his brother stolen at birth, hits me hard, in part because he is so like my older brothers: lean, plainspoken, and down to earth. I can imagine the two of them coming into the Memphis library, hesitant but committed. We are rural Arkansas natives, similar in many ways to the people I meet through this reunion. How would my family’s life have been different if one of my beloved brothers had disappeared at birth? The idea shakes me.

  Stanley tells me that one of his main reasons for talking with Lisa and me is to encourage families to do a DNA test. “If you know of anyone, please use the DNA test,” he says.
“The way I look at it, this DNA is my only hope. My biggest request for anyone ever adopted through the Tennessee Children’s Home Society would be: Do the DNA test.”

  It’s not a new message in these stories, and I myself have seen its vital role in the hands of teenage Josh, James and Brigette, and genealogist Linda, who helped James track down his birth relatives. This devoted genealogy sleuth has made a life’s mission of tracing families, volunteering hours each week to extract information from records and enter it into a computer. The interest in family history has increased dramatically, thanks in large part to new technology. “All over the world, they just have that desire to know their roots,” she says.

  The words raise questions for me, make me wonder if my family might have secrets. My husband is a West Tennessee native. Could he have relatives caught up in the TCHS scandal?

  He and I order DNA kits and submit them, which feels way more personal than I expected. No surprises pop up on my side, but my husband finds a few relatives he has never heard of, including an unknown first cousin in Memphis.

  We begin our own search, wondering what mysteries might be hiding behind the name.

  * * *

  —

  A group of sisters, the daughters of a child stolen from her front yard and put up for adoption by TCHS, have joined us for the weekend and added an entirely different perspective to the reunion. They are my last planned interviews, and I wonder briefly how I will keep pace with all four of them when we sit down together. But they have been engaged, enlightening participants this weekend, so I suspect they’ll show me mercy if I have to ask them to slow down.