Before and After

by Judy Christie

  Forgiveness has been much mentioned during the last few days, yet I find it hard to forgive Tann and equally hard to forgive those who helped her in courtrooms, on country roads, and in boardinghouses where desperate young women needed help.

  I hope that had I been there, I would have had the courage to use my journalism skills to shine the light of truth on the situation. But that lets me off the hook too easily. In my life today, I have the same responsibility: to speak out when wrong is done. We all do.

  We have to pay attention, raise our voices, have compassion, do good.

  Because I’m about to visit a place that shows what happens when no one insists loudly enough that something is very wrong.

  PART FOUR

  The Reckoning

  Their final peace a blessing.

  —FROM THE MONUMENT TO CHILDREN WHO DIED AT THE HANDS OF THE TENNESSEE CHILDREN’S HOME SOCIETY

  CHAPTER 19

  A HISTORIC CEMETERY AND FINAL PEACE

  “I could be right there under that tree.”

  A DRAMATIC SPAN BRIDGE LEADS INTO historic Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.

  One moment you are on an industrial city street; the next you’re looking out at the final resting places of some of the most famous and infamous citizens of Tennessee. The scene is a mixture of park and graveyard, framed by fifteen hundred majestic oaks, magnolias, and other ancient trees.

  On this summer Sunday, everything feels symbolic. Sacred, even.

  A bridge. The perfect metaphor for what has happened this weekend in our lives. The past and the present have become, in some way, connected. This final day is intended for those two afternoon book talks that set this entire plan into motion less than three months ago, but today is also for reflection, for wrapping up…and for saying goodbye in more ways than one. Only a train in the distance interrupts the quiet as we arrive at the cemetery early in the morning to pay a visit before the schedule becomes too chaotic. Even the birds sound politely subdued as we enter. The sky is Tennessee summer blue with the occasional cotton-white cloud. Sun-dappled leaves shadow the path we seek.

  The historical Elmwood Cemetery is a reminder that while many TCHS adoptees have died, their lives have mattered. “Our stories live on,” says Lisa Wingate, speaking at the cemetery during the reunion ceremony.

  The past greets us here, prepared to stir up memories, questions, emotions. All the players in the strange saga of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society are represented in some way.

  Among those buried beneath these stones are crooked politicians and wealthy patrons who allowed Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home Society to prosper from the lives of innocent children. Tann herself is not here; she was buried in central Mississippi, her native state. I’m glad she is far from this day. She cannot lay her hands on it.

  We are here to remember those better than she. The spirits we seek belong to angels.

  An Elmwood Cemetery lane winds its way past both elaborate and simple headstones. The graveyard was founded in 1852 way out in the countryside, to give people a pastoral place where they could retreat from the hustle and bustle of city life. In more than a century, the city has crept near, but the original idea of a gardenlike setting remains. Approximately eighty thousand people are buried here in this historic nonprofit cemetery, safe under the watchful eyes of executive director Kim Bearden, who has run it for the past twenty years.

  We are here to see only one grave. A resting place that cradles many lives and represents many more.

  Nineteen babies registered by Tann as having died in the care of TCHS lie here, their deaths recorded between September 17, 1923, and December 10, 1949. Only nineteen of the five hundred estimated to have died in the care of her system of unregulated boardinghouses and the notorious Receiving Home on Poplar Avenue are remembered here. The monument on the TCHS lot was erected just three years ago, after a historian discovered the communal plot in the cemetery’s record books. He pointed out the shame of the graves having gone unmarked for decades, the children, once more, forgotten. The cemetery raised donations to pay for a proper marker.

  Under the spreading arms of a nearby magnolia tree, this piece of earth feels hallowed.

  Lisa, three of our adoptees, and I emerge from our cars. The almost-citrus scent of large white magnolia blossoms hangs in the air as we pause, our eyes on the piece of stone that says so much. A carved marble angel watches over this piece of land.

  The words chiseled into the stone bring a chill on a hot day:

  THE TENNESSEE CHILDREN’S HOME SOCIETY

  AN INFAMOUS HISTORY. A TRAGIC LEGACY.

  SEPTEMBER 17, 1923–DECEMBER 10, 1949

  IN MEMORY OF THE 19 CHILDREN WHO FINALLY REST HERE. UNMARKED IF NOT UNKNOWN.

  AND OF ALL THE HUNDREDS WHO DIED UNDER THE COLD, HARD HAND OF THE TENNESSEE CHILDREN’S HOME SOCIETY. THEIR FINAL RESTING PLACE UNKNOWN. THEIR FINAL PEACE A BLESSING.

  THE HARD LESSON OF THEIR FATE CHANGED ADOPTION PROCEDURE AND LAW NATIONWIDE.

  Tears pool in the eyes of the adoptees. Lisa and I are shaken, and I hang back. Photographer Cindy, her husband, and a two-person video crew here to capture this moment have turned solemn. The three adoptees and Lisa clasp hands and approach the marker, which sits among other graves on a small rise, not all that noticeable unless you are looking for it.

  They read the words softly. Touch the stone. Exhale. They quietly ask the familiar question, the same one I’m thinking: How could this have happened?

  The why and the how of it, as always.

  After a few moments, they speak, haltingly, fervently.

  “There but for the grace of God go I,” Janie says softly, perhaps remembering lying in Tann’s main Receiving Home at three and a half years old, a malnourished little blond girl given juice and a vitamin and left to survive a bout with tonsillitis…or not.

  Patricia, whom I interviewed in Georgia, joins us on FaceTime. Even four hundred miles away, she is moved, and she speaks of the ancient magnolia tree over the monument. “It’s so sheltering and protecting,” she says. Perhaps she, too, is considering the deplorable condition she was in when she was delivered to that kitchen in New York City and she pulled herself onto the pant leg of her new father…and into his heart. Things could have gone much differently. “All they didn’t get when they were alive,” she continues. Even from such a distance, she shares the intensity of our feelings in this sacred place.

  Connie, who set this gathering in motion, is tearful. “It has been my dream to get together,” she says. When she sent that first email ten months ago, asking about a reunion, how could she have known we would wind up in this spot on this day? How could anyone have known?

  “Thank God you’re all here,” Lisa says. She doesn’t mean here, now, in this place. She means here, at all. In this world. Any one of these incredible, vibrant women could be among those tiny victims. Another life unrealized.

  All those children. Hundreds of tragically short lives. All that potential. Just…gone.

  The realities of what happened at TCHS are hard to contemplate, but they are necessary to revisit. The history we deny is the history we are most likely to repeat.

  Each of the women places a white rose on the marker.

  Although the clock has not yet reached ten, the air hangs heavy. The emotions and the steamy humidity sap our energy. The core group shares some final thoughts, a few people touch the stone again, and then we depart, leaving behind a wish that echoes the last words on the reverse side of the stone.

  That all children will be loved.

  Lillian, who lives across town, prepares to make her own pilgrimage to the memorial in a few hours. Even though she has lived not far from here her entire life, she has never visited it before, never seen this monument to babies who, like herself, lay sick and untended in TCHS cribs but found no champion to rescu
e them.

  When she arrived in the early afternoon, with a friend and a cemetery docent, the sight hit her hard, she tells me a little while later in the cemetery chapel. Were it not for Viola and Harold, who rescued a seriously ill infant girl, she quite likely could have been buried here. Or somewhere else, anonymously. Her emotions pour forth as she, a survivor, describes paying her respects to those who did not survive. She reflects on her life and Tann and the scandal. As she stood at the graveside, the reality was painful.

  But there is grace. Hers was a life that was spared. A good life, and she has passed along that good to others.

  When Lillian left the plot, she proceeded uphill to the beautiful Lord’s Chapel, with its soaring, arched glass windows. The sun had shifted in the sky, and massive trees shaded the graves beyond.

  Now the mood inside the small space vibrates with the anticipation of the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd, the enthusiasm of executive director Kim, and the newfound camaraderie of a group of adoptees who didn’t know one another forty-eight hours ago. Now they sit in the front row together, chatting, linked by memories of days long past and their fresh friendships, while I stand in the back and watch in awe.

  Kim introduces Lisa to the volunteer who first discovered the unmarked TCHS graves and campaigned for a monument. While I wait for the program to start, a member of the cemetery staff takes me over to look at plot maps that show who is buried in the grave, children known only by their first names. Kim also connects me with Shirley Farnsworth of Memphis, who donated most of the money for the marker. She did it in memory of her daughter, Cynthia, who died at birth in 1963. “It took me a long time to be able to do something to honor my child,” she says. “After all those years, it was something to do for my baby and those babies.”

  An angel sits atop the monument dedicated to children who died while in the care of Georgia Tann.

  A journalist from the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the local daily newspaper, shows up and stakes out a spot near me in the back of the crowded room. “We didn’t even advertise this event,” Kim says. “So many of you were so interested in the book…That’s the power of this story.”

  Lisa stands to start things off. “This whole front row is filled with adoptees from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society,” she says. “This is the crazy reality of what happened here in Memphis. Money and power made things happen. Why didn’t people say something? We all have to be that person who is there, who speaks up. Be that one person for one person.”

  She talks about her novel, reads a selection from Rill’s story, but then she cuts her planned remarks short and looks at the group of adoptees in front of her. This day in this place is about them. She invites them to turn their chairs around and speak if they would like to.

  The crowd’s energy sizzles as it leans in to hear comments from Connie, James, Lillian, and Janie. The stories told haltingly on Friday at Kirby Pines now come more easily, with a smattering of jokes and an oddly lighthearted moment when they compare their adoption prices. The conversation, though sad, shows the power of claiming their truth and of finding a tribe of people who know what it means to have come through TCHS. This is, in many ways, a moment of triumph.

  When James mentions that he will meet blood relatives in an hour, he falters. The weekend has been so full and so meaningful for him. His daughter, Brigette, stands and tearfully looks toward Lisa, then moves nearer to her father.

  “Seeing the plot here really hit me hard,” she says. “He was in the care of the Georgia Tann home as a preemie.” She has steered this journey through many hard moments. “I’m not sure why it’s taken us so long,” she says, “but I believe things have come together for a reason.”

  Brigette recalls her dad, who started looking for his family when she was one year old, telling her when she was a girl about Tann and the sale of babies. Now the story has come to life. “I think there’s a feeling in all of us to want to know our roots,” she says. “We want to know our history and what led up to us.”

  Questions pour forth. The members of the audience shift even closer to the edges of their seats.

  Lillian, a Memphian like most in the crowd, grabs their attention when she quietly sums up the horrors of TCHS. “I could be right there under that tree,” she says as she looks out the window toward the grave, which lies just down the hill.

  A hush falls over the room, a stark realization. The truth can, at times, be both sharp-edged and beautiful. As the program ends, the crowd stays. A book club lines up to take a photograph with Lisa. The reporter interviews Lillian. Two women, seated near the front, catch my eye, and I speak to them. The daughters of an adoptee, a man now eighty-one and in poor health, they learned much about their father’s history after reading Before We Were Yours. They knew he was adopted in Memphis but did not know the details. “We need to find out where you came from,” they told him.

  Their adoptive grandmother had informed them that their father came from a wealthy family. “Granddaddy didn’t like to talk about it,” one sister says. “If you mentioned the word orphanage, Granddaddy would get mad.”

  After reading the novel, they wrote for their father’s adoption paperwork, which arrived at Thanksgiving time, five months after Before We Were Yours came out. The sisters did not open the packet of papers; instead, they gave it to their ailing father. “These are your adoption papers,” they said to him. Their father tore into the envelope, and together they read his birth name. “Daddy,” one daughter said, “that was your name.”

  He was born in May 1936 and adopted two days later, given one name at birth and another by his new parents. His birth mother was sixteen, and his biological grandmother wanted to keep him. His father was twenty-one or twenty-two and did not want anything more to do with the girl or the baby.

  I introduce the sisters to Lisa, and they visit, and then they and I step outside the chapel, where they spread photographs on a stone bench. The crowd swirls around us, but we are in a bubble underneath a tree, lost in the past.

  The details are familiar and yet different, achingly sad. After the teen mother gave up her son, she wrote Tann and asked how her “friend” was and if Tann thought he might be returned. In a surprisingly reassuring typewritten letter, Tann replied, “Our little friend is doing beautifully. He has a lovely home and the people are devoted to him.” This exchange, a teenager wondering about her baby, using the code “little friend,” hoping he is well and loved, is hard for me to process.

  The sisters are not inclined to attempt to connect with other relatives. “They probably don’t know anything about Daddy,” one says. “We don’t want to disrupt their families.” Then she continues: “I do want to find out about his mother. I want to know if she had more children.”

  Her sister jumps in: “I’d like to know if she had a good life.”

  Their father’s memory is failing, they tell me, and this new information flits in and out of his mind. He asks them, “What was my real name again?”

  The women believe adoption was right for their father and gave him loving parents. “Daddy was so fortunate. They worshipped the ground he walked on,” one of his daughters says. Then she pauses, her next words forced out: “I don’t want Daddy to be forgotten.”

  This is the message Lisa has emphasized throughout the weekend. “The saddest thing is when our stories die with us,” she says. “People so often say to me, ‘I wish we’d written the family stories down.’ ”

  Afternoon light shines through the floor-to-roof clear glass windows of the chapel, illuminating them. A hawk circles, gliding above the ghosts of the cemetery.

  The sight feels like a benediction to the weekend.

  Our emotions rise like the Mississippi River after a torrential rain as we prepare to part. Hugs and phone numbers and promises to visit are exchanged.

  Despite two dozen reasons why the reunion should not have worked,
we have come together, and we have been changed. The adoptees have embraced a shared past. They’ve talked with others like them, some for the first time. They’ve vented their anger at what the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, under Tann’s dictatorship, did to their lives, the families of their generation, and those yet to come.

  Their stories, remarkable and chilling, have spread out like the limbs of the most expansive oak in this graceful cemetery. They’ve been told to residents of a retirement home and exchanged in the hospitality suite and over wine in individual rooms, at the library, in a bookstore, at the cemetery, and in the chapel.

  These people are so much more than survivors, as we described them in the weeks before we met them, when our unlikely plans wavered into existence. These people are heroes. They own a piece of history. They have children and grandchildren and enough happy memories to shove Tann and TCHS to the side. This weekend, they triumphed and told their stories, in their own voices. Those stories have power. They connect people. They heal. They teach in the telling. In the listening, in the writing, and in the reading.

  Lillian’s revelation hangs in the air around us: “Georgia Tann had left me to die, but I’m seventy-one years old, and I’m still here.” Still here. This small group of an unlikely club is still here.

  “I never expected to bring together people who lived this story,” Lisa says. “This weekend has been a completely unexpected thing. These stories matter.”

  CHAPTER 20

  AFTERWARD

  We need to be given peace and freed of the misery that comes from not knowing, and allowed to live with the truth before we pass from this world.

  —LETTER FROM A TENNESSEE CHILDREN’S HOME SOCIETY ADOPTEE TO HER UNKNOWN BIRTH FAMILY