CHAPTER 18
FOUR SISTERS
“I’m the child of a stolen baby.”
NELDA SUE IS PLAYING IN the yard of the family’s riverbank shack with her twin sister, her younger brother, and two younger sisters when Georgia Tann’s big, beautiful black car drives up. The window rolls down.
Do the kids want to go for a ride?
Of course they do.
Children of searing poverty, they climb in, dazzled by such luxury. Nelda and her twin are six, although their ages will be in dispute for the rest of their lives. The middle sister is four or five. Their brother is three. The baby girl is not even a toddler.
Their mother has been beaten up during a domestic dispute and has landed in the hospital. Worried that they don’t have anyone to look out for them, she signs papers that she believes will put the children safely into foster care until she’s well. She’s unaware that the kindly people who have promised to help her have instead put her on the target list. Nelda Sue’s mother has already lost her children; she just doesn’t know it yet. Days later, when she asks for them, she’s told she cannot have them back, that they have already been given new homes.
Desperate, she finds her way to the orphanage and stands outside the fence for days. Finally, she sees one of her daughters. The child asks to go home with her. But the fence is too high, and the orphanage personnel will not open the gate.
There’s nothing she can do. Her children are already destined for other places.
Vivian, Paula, Elinor, and Kate
NELDA’S DAUGHTERS KNOW—HAVE ALWAYS known—that as a child their mother was stolen from a shanty on the banks of the Mississippi River.
Her story, and its effect on their lives, is what has brought them here today.
Accomplished and thoughtful women, they gather with Lisa and me in our hospitality suite—the hotel meeting room with its round folding tables and sturdy chairs, grocery store flowers, and lukewarm bottled water.
I settle in at a table in the corner with these four lovely women who are all about my age. I, who have no sisters, try to imagine what it must be like to be one of four. That they are all here together is improbable. That they came as a group to open themselves to the experiences of this weekend feels almost inevitable. A long and, at times, excruciating history propels Vivian Morrison, Paula Kennedy, Elinor Harris, and Kate Price to our equally improbable reunion.
They’ve come for many reasons. Understanding, the sharing of a story, another step in a hard-won battle to discover new compassion for their mother, and kindness for themselves.
They also seek peace for her, the final resolution of a life that was never quite settled. Her ashes accompany them to Tennessee. “I had always made a promise to my mother that I would bring her back, so she was coming with us,” says Kate, who, at fifty-nine, is the youngest sister.
They begin by telling me the story of what happened to young Nelda Sue.
* * *
—
AFTER A SHORT STAY at TCHS in Memphis, Nelda and her twin are put on a train to Philadelphia with a TCHS employee. The girls are told their siblings will arrive on the next train and meet them there.
But they never come.
A cheerful woman, a schoolteacher named Doris Harris, greets the two little girls. “I’m your new mommy,” she says.
“Oh, no you’re not,” Nelda replies. “You’re not my mommy.”
Nelda Sue’s name is tweaked to Nelda Suzanne. Her last name changes, too, of course. As reluctantly as she takes on the new name, she takes on her new adoptive home and parents. A lifetime of fighting, resentment, and uncertainty follows. Although her twin seems to accept their changed circumstances, perhaps with some degree of resignation, Nelda refuses.
Nelda is taken from her river shanty home and relocated by train to Philadelphia.
She is old enough to remember her life before adoption—how Tann’s car took her away, how she helped with diapers and running and fetching at the orphanage before she was adopted. How she had a brother and sisters. And a mother.
The family is separated for decades, and Nelda’s life is full of confusion, anger, and rebellion, as well as a sense of shame that she will pass along, in a variety of ways, to her children.
She is always to wonder what life would have been like if they had not been stolen.
As a teenager, Nelda follows the path of many troubled youths and starts her own family early. She becomes pregnant with Vivian when she is only fifteen and marries the sixteen-year-old father. By the time she’s in her early twenties, she has four daughters and a son…and no ability to mother them. She and her husband fight constantly and are soon divorced. The siblings’ father disappears from their lives, not to resurface until they’re adults.
The growing-up years are volatile for the children. Nelda continually threatens suicide and often seems threatened by her own children. “She wanted to keep us at her emotional level,” Vivian says.
In one of her darker periods, Nelda resorts to placing the children in an orphanage. She takes them out, puts them in again. “We were institutionalized at her hands,” Vivian explains. “All of these things we excused and forgave and excused and forgave.”
Nelda is an intelligent woman, but she does not follow through on treatment or therapy for her mental health problems. As a defense mechanism, she sabotages relationships. If she does not let people close to her, the logic goes, she won’t be hurt. “She just didn’t have any confidence in herself at all,” Paula says.
Georgia Tann’s evil legacy passes down through generations, as these five children of an angry adoptee stolen from her yard, know all too well.
Occasionally she would hit her children in anger, with a belt or a hairbrush, or smack them on the fanny. Meanwhile, the siblings take on parenting roles, sometimes parenting their mother, sometimes one another. Vivian says, “I felt very maternal with my sisters.”
Tragically, their brother dies by suicide at age thirty-four, unable to surmount issues that ranged from drug and alcohol abuse to business problems. “My mother modeled that that was the way out of pain,” Vivian says. “My first feeling was ‘At least now he’s at peace.’ ”
As the youngest, Kate was the closest to their mother and speaks more gently about her. “My mother had a lot of issues,” she says. “She was ill for a very long time…She had to bring five children up on her own, so she was a hard worker. She was very smart.”
If there is one thing these sisters learned from Nelda, it is that they did not want to pass this trauma on to the next generation. They yearned to do better with their own children. “I saw my mother early on as a model to be opposite to,” Vivian says.
“I learned to take care of my children and grandchildren and hold them close,” Paula adds. Her daughter loved her grandmother Nelda. “If anyone loved my mother, it was her grandchildren,” she says. “They didn’t have the history with her. She didn’t hurt them the way she hurt us.”
Kate agrees: “She spent a lot of time being a grandmother, which she loved.”
For Elinor, the second to youngest, the journey was harder. “I did what my mother did. I got pregnant at sixteen, but I made a different choice than my mother.” Knowing that she was not capable of raising a child at that young age, Elinor planned to give her baby up for adoption. Her mother, though, wanted to raise the baby, and she took Elinor to a rare counseling session in an attempt to convince her to keep the child.
“I made that choice,” Elinor says; she wanted to spare her child an upbringing similar to her own. “I put her up for adoption, which was very painful.” Thirty years later she was reunited with that daughter, who was herself a new mother by then. “We have a really beautiful relationship,” Elinor tells me.
She and her daughter have come full circle: beauty from ashes, joy from
pain, healing from heartbreak, strength from suffering. In so many ways, that is the story of these four strong women, left to deal with the aftermath of that long-ago ride in Tann’s black limousine.
A small packet of tissues makes its way around the table. We make ample use of them as the sisters recount this story of three generations having been handed an heirloom no one wants. “It’s part of the healing process,” says Vivian, sixty-five when we meet. “Our mother talked about this all the time…Till the day she died, she was miserable and angry about this.”
“She always felt lost without her family,” Kate says. “She remembered them.”
Since reading the novel, they have researched their mother’s family history more and begun to talk about it publicly. Although they’re now spread apart, in Florida, Arkansas, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, their individual stories are similar.
They open themselves in vulnerable ways as they talk, often seeming to fit a missing piece into their puzzle as we visit. “We still are clearly working through the trauma,” Elinor, sixty, says.
“This has been an opportunity for all of us to be together,” Paula, sixty-two, points out. “We don’t often do that.” She looks around the table: four sisters together, just like the four sisters in Lisa’s novel. Paula remembers her mother once more: “I think she would have gotten great joy out of us coming to Memphis.”
The sisters are alike in many ways—earnest, smart, introspective, respectful of one another, clearly affected by their upbringing. And surprisingly, there’s something else they share: yoga. Each of them came to her own version of yoga as a girl, using it to escape a chaotic home life. “As individuals, I think we each found yoga to be extremely therapeutic,” Vivian says. “I remember doing stretches that I had no idea were yoga.” Three of the sisters teach yoga, and two travel to teach it around the world.
They have been close throughout the years, though with the tense periods that often accompany relationships between sisters. They’ve always looked for ways to heal. From the time they learned to talk, they rehashed Nelda’s stories, trying to make sense of her. “We commiserated forever,” Vivian says. “My mother was a real challenge. She was a difficult person to get along with.”
And much of that difficulty must be laid at Georgia Tann’s doorstep. The trauma she set in motion affected multiple generations. Now it is a still-open wound slowly being stitched together by an understanding and acceptance of what happened, and by knowing this has happened to other families, too. Theirs is not the only family. Not by a long shot.
“Reading the book touched me so much,” Paula says. “I had so much more compassion for my mother…I wanted to find out more.”
She is the first one to have come across Before We Were Yours. She describes how it happened.
* * *
—
PAULA AND A GROUP of friends get together monthly at one another’s houses to discuss a book. They are looking for a new read and notice Before We Were Yours on the New York Times bestseller list. As someone reads the description, Paula gasps, “Oh my gosh! This is the story of my mother.”
Her friends are shocked.
When Paula gets home, she calls Vivian. “My book club is reading this book,” she says. “It’s all about what happened to Mom.”
Reading the novel is an emotional experience for Paula. “When I finished it, I felt drained,” she says. “It was like a revelation coming over me. This is what really happened.” Her book club is stunned. “They just cannot believe it happened and that they know someone who’s been through this.”
Vivian, busy with her work as a yoga teacher and other activities in Florida, more or less forgets the book after Paula tells her about it…until former first lady Laura Bush, one of her yoga students who has become a close friend, mentions Before We Were Yours to her. Years earlier, the first lady heard bits and pieces of Vivian’s story and was fascinated by it. She even insisted that Vivian share the story with the former president. “Tell George your story,” she said.
Vivian hesitated. “It was so rare that I told the story. Thinking about it so much is really recent.” She remembers that former president George W. Bush listened politely. “Laura was pivotal over the next few years in encouraging me to voice it more and more,” she says. Vivian’s story becomes an intimate bit of knowledge the two share, a building block of their friendship. In early 2018, Laura is leaving Florida for Texas and says, almost offhandedly, “You know, that book is on the New York Times bestseller list. I’m going to get it.”
“Then I will, too,” Vivian agrees.
She contacts Lisa before she reads the novel. In the email, she explains the basics of her mother’s story and a hint of the generational suffering that is the unwanted legacy shared by so many of the families affected by Tann’s adoption business. She thanks Lisa for bringing the TCHS history into the open. “I am the daughter of one of the stolen children, and my life and the lives of my siblings were very much impacted by my mother’s experience in Tennessee,” she writes in the email.
Then she reads the novel. “It was my mother’s story,” she recounts with no small degree of amazement. “I mean, my mother’s story.”
She repeats those words to her own book club after they read the novel. She has read articles and seen the TV movie Stolen Babies. But after reading the novel, she can only wonder, How could this possibly happen?
Others echo her sentiments. They are equally appalled that such a thing could be allowed to go on…and for decades.
In May—with the reunion planned for early June—Vivian receives the email about the gathering. She is in the middle of plans surrounding her son’s college graduation and is not sure she can make it happen. Still, she sends emails to her sisters and an uncle and tells them she is going.
Her first call is from Paula. Then Kate. Elinor texts, not planning to attend. But then she decides she wants to visit with her sisters. She is the one most conflicted about coming to Memphis. “I had mixed feelings,” she says. “Out of my three sisters, I’ve been the least interested in the actual history. I had to go through a process to decide. I felt very grateful that I had made the decision.”
Despite work, expenses, and logistical challenges, the sisters make it happen. Paula, who doesn’t trust easily, and Kate fly out of Philadelphia together—the same city that Nelda arrived in by train all those years ago. “I was excited.” Paula pauses. “I was a little apprehensive.” When they land, she thinks, We’re here. This is going to help me.
And here in the midst of our weekend, they’re finding out that it has.
“I felt guilt and responsibility and shame, as if my family were so much worse than anyone else’s,” Vivian admits. As she tells her story—more often and in more depth than she ever has before—she begins to feel the effect. “It’s interesting that I’m sharing that without tears,” she says. “How healing it is to tell that story without guilt and shame.”
Kate started reading Before We Were Yours the day Vivian told her about it. “It is a part of our history,” she points out.
For Elinor, the novel initiated a deeper understanding of what their mother suffered. “I think that all of us had a tremendous amount of shame because of how unstable our mother was,” she says, growing somber at the thought.
Paula sums up what each of her sisters has said in her own words, at one point or another during our conversation: “I didn’t understand what she went through. She wasn’t easy to live with, so I didn’t want to know what she went through.” She considers her words, and then, decisively, she adds, “I wish Mother were here—to know that people are trying to know more about it.”
* * *
—
THE WEEKEND CONTAINS ONE more emotional tribute to Nelda; it takes place prior to our visit at the hotel. On their first evening in Tennessee, the sisters head to the
Mississippi River. Down on the riverbank, so similar to the place where their mother was stolen all those years ago, they say a prayer together.
At first, Paula is not interested in being part of the river ceremony. But then her feelings change. “It wasn’t really until I was there, and we did it,” she reflects, “that I felt it was the best place for her. Her roots were there. She was back home.”
“This was really what she wanted,” Kate says. “I feel like I brought her home, and that made me happy.”
Elinor climbs down to the water’s edge, carrying the small urn containing their mother’s ashes. This detail does not pass unnoticed by her siblings, since she was, perhaps, the sister most often in conflict with Nelda. As she opens the container and lets her mother’s ashes float into the air and the water, she forgives her, and asks for her forgiveness. “I really felt at peace that I was able to do that,” she says when we talk back at the hotel. “I feel like I understood before she died that the hatred and conflict weren’t personal. She was just afraid of life and everyone.”
“You’re back home,” Elinor murmurs. They have brought their mother full circle.
THE LESSON OF FORGIVENESS
Despite the heaviness of the sisters’ story, I don’t leave the conference room emotionally spent. I come away from my conversation with these four women feeling hopeful.
The reunion is doing unexpectedly good things—not just for the attendees but for everyone it touches. Connections are formed. Friendships made. I hear details being shared with the hotel staff at the desk, with other guests, with people at book talks and gatherings.
We are moving toward the final events of our time together, which include a Sunday morning trip to the historic cemetery to pay tribute to those who died at the hands of people entrusted to care for them, babies whose lives were lost at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis.
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