ON THE WEEKEND WHEN WE gather, the Memphis streets symbolize the New South. The boll weevil has been largely eradicated. The shantyboats that peopled the riverbanks in the time of Before We Were Yours have long since faded from existence, victims of waterway legislation, multimillion-dollar lock-and-dam systems, and modern economics. Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation were overturned in the 1960s, and the city’s population is nearly two-thirds African American. Landmarks such as Graceland, Elvis Presley’s former home; the National Civil Rights Museum; historic Beale Street, with its blues music; and the Memphis Pyramid draw tourists by the tens of thousands. Beyond that, Tennessee has some of the most stringent adoption laws in the country, and throughout the country, adoption has lost the stigma it held for past generations. Georgia Tann has been dead for nearly seventy years.
Connie
CONNIE TRAVELS TO THE AIRPORT late on Sunday afternoon after the TCHS reunion she’d imagined for so long has ended. She’s headed back to the West Coast. Triumphant.
She did it.
“Have you ever considered doing a reunion?” that one reader asked her at a book club.
Connie responded, reached out to Lisa, and did a hundred things, from inviting attendees to negotiating room rates, to make it happen. She flew in late at night and got up early. She visited in person with others like her and helped make guests feel welcome.
Her idea gave something important to those from whom Tann took so much: not just the chance to speak their stories out loud but proof that people are interested in hearing what they have to say, that strangers care about this long-ago miscarriage of justice.
Connie has smiled much during the gathering, and she has shed tears. “This was so important to me personally,” she affirms as we say goodbye.
Two other adoptees, friends now, take her to catch her flight. All three of them cry as they hug farewell. “We spent this wonderful weekend together,” Connie says. “I was very sad to be leaving that group.”
She chooses her words carefully, remembering the sweet moments as she tells me about all this when we talk later on the phone. “Getting everyone together and watching them deal with it, living it…comparing their prices…” We laugh together. We recall the teasing about how much each adoptee cost—dark humor, but humor nonetheless. The jokes cover deep emotions. “It’s been healing, but it was also like having a jack-in-the-box jump out,” she says. Now it will probably not go back in. Light shines on their stories, chases the shadows from dark places.
Connie tells me about sitting down at the airport bar and ordering a glass of wine, waiting for her flight out of Memphis. She is torn between the need to connect and a raw urge to be alone when two women sit beside her. They strike up a conversation, and Connie shares a few details about the weekend. It turns out that one of the women’s aunts was adopted through TCHS.
Of course.
Countless families have a connection to the horror of Tann and those who let her operate until 1950, the year Connie was born. This is a story that doesn’t have an ending. It never will. For thousands of families, tens of thousands of lives, it will always be part of their history.
When Connie settles into her airplane seat, she is exhausted. Departing Memphis is almost as hard as coming there was. “My biggest regret leaving was that I wanted to have more time with these people…I still think of those four girls,” she says of the sisters who brought their mother’s ashes to the river. “Those four girls are so lucky to have each other.”
Back at home, Connie talks to her therapist about the reunion. The counselor exclaims, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to you!”
* * *
—
CONNIE IS NOT ALONE in her tangled mix of post-reunion elation and fatigue.
Janie
BACK IN ALABAMA, JANIE UNPACKS her car, then lies down.
The gathering was fulfilling and exhausting. “It closed up sections in me where there had been holes,” she confides. “It was very cleansing…A lot of things that other adoptees said touched me. I think we all made a bond…we all reached out.”
She felt close to the others. “It was interesting to me and meaningful to share similar stories,” she says. In small groups, they spent time considering where they would be if they hadn’t been adopted. “It’s interesting looking at the way our lives turned out.”
She also uncovered an unexpected theme: “Something I learned this weekend that I don’t think I would have ever learned was how many adoptees went into rough homes. So many homes had alcoholism or not a happy marriage or couldn’t legally adopt…When we were sitting around talking, I kept hearing this same dysfunction. The more I hear, the more I realize that I’m not the only one…If I hadn’t gone to Memphis for the reunion, I wouldn’t have put this together.”
She has overcome much to get to this place, and her response is simple: “Life takes care of us.”
Lillian
THE ENTIRE WEEKEND TOUCHED LILLIAN. “I felt an instant bond with these strangers,” she says. Her story appears on the front page of the Memphis newspaper on the Monday after the cemetery event. “I’ve had a lot of reactions from friends and neighbors and more requests from book clubs,” she says. She even heard from the half sister she found when she was fifty.
Stanley
A CONFUSING AND UPSETTING DEVELOPMENT slams Stanley after the reunion. A cousin finally locates a death certificate for Stanley’s newborn brother, and he does not know what to make of it. “I wanted to let you know sooner,” he says when I reach out to him, “but I just didn’t know how to find the words…This whole thing still raises more questions for me. The date on the certificate was about six days later than my mother was told that the baby died.”
His parents were not given the baby’s body, and there is no record of a burial. Others in the OB ward were told their babies had died, too, so were death certificates falsified and meted out over a period of days?
Perhaps in the future, Stanley will find more answers, more peace. Maybe his brother, David, if he is alive, will submit his DNA for testing, and the family will be reunited.
Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. The refrain is haunting.
Robert and Heather
FOR HEATHER AND HER FATHER, Robert, that seven-dollar baby delivered by limousine to rural Arkansas, the reunion is followed by a different kind of surprise.
“Just this week,” Heather says when we chat a couple of months after meeting in Memphis, “Arkansas has opened its adoption records.” So Heather’s twenty-plus-year search for her family history will continue. She will do more research and see who they might discover out there. “It’s a very strange feeling. We could find out they were very good people. There’s a fear of the unknown.”
That fear of the unknown likely drove Arkansas’s reluctance to make certain records available to adult adoptees, and that fear is in part why many other states restrict access to records, allowing only nonidentifying information, if any. Even obtaining something as basic as an adoptee’s original birth certificate requires a court order in some states. But my TCHS interviews have shown me that a large number of adoptees hunger for their personal information, and their medical history in particular. Birth parents may feel differently, however, and laws generally allow birth parents to decide whether they want to connect with their biological children and whether that contact must be made through an intermediary.
I was not surprised to learn that since Missouri, another of Tennessee’s neighbors, opened its records in 2016, the state’s residents have battled a long waiting list to access their original birth certificates.
How things have changed since Denny Glad and her volunteers tirelessly traveled to small-town courthouses to write information on index cards. Nowadays, tenacious TCHS adoptees are finding birth-family connections with the help of popular and easy DNA tests, the Internet, an
d the reach of social media sites such as Facebook.
Whatever Heather and Robert find in the records, the reunion moved them ahead on their journey. “It was kind of like being a member of a strange club. It was genuine, and it was safe,” Heather says. “I just appreciate it and enjoyed meeting the people and hearing their stories…I’d love to hear more stories.”
James and Brigette
THROUGHOUT THE REUNION, JAMES, HIS wife, Millie, and their daughter, Brigette, are excited and a little tense about their first meeting with members of James’s birth family. The rest of us share their emotions and wonder what will happen after they leave us at the cemetery on that Sunday afternoon. James is such a sweet soul, and none of us can bear to think that he might be hurt by relatives who do not know him. Still, given the way the TCHS reunion has gone, we feel hopeful as they leave us to travel to the restaurant chosen as the site for their family meeting.
Such an event was unthinkable about a year and a half before the reunion, until James decided to have his DNA analyzed. From that, Brigette found cousins who live way down South, a world away from their own home in Utah. Then the TCHS reunion cropped up. “The timing was really good,” James says. “So many things came together to make it work.”
The nerves, as it turns out, aren’t necessary. He and his cousins connect in a way that kinfolks do, talking about their lives, their interests, their similar experiences jumping out of airplanes in Vietnam, and even the birth names they share. “We hit it off like you wouldn’t believe,” James tells me afterward, with a kind of mystified glee. “We kind of look alike. It’s amazing. We had an absolutely wonderful, wonderful experience with them.”
Brigette exudes happiness—and maybe a dash of relief—when she calls me after I speak with her father. “It was really easy. My dad shook everyone’s hand. He sat between cousins, and they just talked and talked and talked.” After dinner, with the restaurant too loud for the conversations they wanted to have, they were invited to a cousin’s home. “I wish I had cooked for y’all,” one cousin’s wife, all Southern hospitality, said.
“They weren’t standoffish,” Brigette says. “They were totally down to earth and wanting to talk.” Brigette can scarcely believe what has improbably come together. There she is, late on a summer Sunday evening, visiting her father’s birth family. “I’m in a living room in Mississippi, of all places.”
The week after James gets back from his odyssey, he speaks to a genealogy class at his church. “I think it’s important families find out about their families,” he says. “You want to know who you belong to.”
Brigette addresses the entire congregation for Father’s Day. “We believe that we were put on this earth to make choices,” she says. “My dad had to make a lot of choices.” James expresses joy that he made the hard choice to take the trip. “It was one of the highlights of my life to meet those wonderful people and know I’m related to them.” Leaving Tennessee was a little sad, though. “I’ve been there now,” he says. “It was a magnificent experience that I’ll cherish the rest of my life.”
Brigette hopes there may be more family reunions ahead and answers to other questions. “My dad’s story is not yet finished,” she says.
Vivian, Paula, Elinor, and Kate
THE FOUR SISTERS RETURN TO their separate parts of the country, each of them wrapped up in thoughts about the weekend.
As Kate’s plane lifts off, she is joyful. The reunion connections run deep, and she feels a sense of kinship with those she met. “It’s been a very good learning experience for me to listen to the other stories,” she observes, “and it brought us together as a family…and we brought our mother home.”
Vivian emphasizes the value of remembering: “It’s important that this story not be forgotten for its reverberations and trickle-down effects.”
Paula agrees as we discuss writing these stories down. “Do something so this doesn’t happen again,” she urges.
Nelda’s daughters are determined to discover as many relatives as they can.
“Now I’m in touch with a brand-new first cousin,” Vivian says. “Guess what? She lives in Memphis. I wish we had known that, and I’m going to follow up on it.”
Paula tells her book-club friends all that she learned about Tann and TCHS. “They just can’t believe it,” she relates later, “how horrific it was. They can’t believe it happened.” She reflects on her time down South. “Coming back to my mother’s roots was really coming back to our roots. Hearing the stories was heartwarming and emotional…The gathering really meant a lot to me…I’ve had to digest it all.”
Elinor echoes the emotion: “I feel like I’m finally at a place where I can put the past to rest.” Days after the weekend in Memphis, she takes a camping trip for her birthday, goes for long walks, and gradually processes the gathering. “I felt at peace. I also felt grateful.”
The sisters plan to return to Memphis for their own summer reunion with birth-family members.
Perhaps other adoptees and their families will come back, too. “I would like to see it become an annual meeting,” Kate says. “I just hope this continues and that it develops into something that brings closure to people before they pass away.”
Lisa and Me
LISA AWAKENS EARLY ON MONDAY to fly to California to give a book talk. She will scarcely mention the reunion; it is too fresh. But it will weigh on her mind as she settles into yet another airline seat. Her husband loads their car and heads toward Arkansas to pick up their dog and get a break from the delivery—and rapid-fire consumption—of endless takeout in our rooms.
My husband, super errand-runner and encourager, and I drive the twelve hundred miles to our new home in Colorado, happy to unwind together in the car. We discuss the wonderful people we met and the stories they so bravely shared. When I return to my office, I look through the notebooks filled with scrawled memories. I methodically label each interview, all of them carefully recorded in my notebooks, on my iPhone, or on my tiny digital recorder. Piles of paper begin stacking up, ranging from a copy of Georgia Tann’s death certificate to my own copy of the Browning Report, which catalogs the results of attorney Taylor’s investigation. Sticky notes dot every surface: Check on this. Look up that.
A flurry of emails, texts, and calls fly among all of us. The reunion continues. Our tie is strong.
The hope carried by these new friends wraps Lisa and me in its cloak as we gather at my house in July to consider what we have learned and to try to figure out how to encapsulate this odyssey we’ve been on. The kind souls we met remind me of the fictional adoptees in Before We Were Yours and the character Avery’s realization: “The five little river gypsies who suffered at the hands of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society deserve to have their stories carried forward into the future.”
It is not hard to see why these real-life people connected with the fictional Foss family. Fact has indeed met fiction. As I ponder this, I reflect on another quote from the novel that has especially resonated with me since our gathering, this one from the character May as she nears the end of her days: “People don’t come into our lives by accident.” Lisa and I agree that this seems especially true when we consider the group of people who traveled to the reunion, the messages they brought, and the stories we all took back home with us.
Perhaps somewhere, somehow, siblings will find one another through these and countless other stories. Or adoption laws will be changed in more states to allow families to reconnect. Maybe individual crusaders will step forth to make sure that nothing like this happens again. Perhaps yet another teenager somewhere will send in his DNA sample and find a long-lost relative for a grandparent.
Maybe after reading these stories, someone out there will choose to become that one person for one person. Change a life. Save a life.
Tell a story that would have otherwise been lost.
For the heroes of these stories:
the adoptees and their families
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE GREATEST PLEASURE OF THIS book has been getting to know the wonderful people who shared their stories with us. We thank you for your generosity, the time you spent with us, and your friendship. We look forward to many visits ahead. Our gratitude also goes to all the people who hosted us in Memphis, including volunteer Janice and the entire welcoming group at Kirby Pines Retirement Community; the staff at Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library; our friends at Novel bookstore; Kim Bearden and her team at Elmwood Cemetery; and the staff of Staybridge Suites Memphis–Poplar Ave East, who went the extra mile to make our reunion group feel at home. And, of course, we thank photographer Cindy “Cuz” Self and her husband, Doug, and our intrepid husbands, Paul and Sam. Gratitude goes, too, to Lisa’s mother, Sharon, and journalist friend Kathie Rowell for feedback and support of all kinds.
On the print and publishing side of things, thank you to our wonderful agent, Elisabeth Weed, who believed us when we said, “No, really, we’re going to find a way to tell these stories.” Our gratitude also goes to the publishing group at Penguin Random House and our dream team at Ballantine Books, including Kara Welsh, Kim Hovey, Jennifer Hershey, Matthew Martin, Susan Corcoran, Melanie DeNardo, Debbie Aroff, Toby Ernst, Jennifer Garza, Colleen Nuccio, Craig Adams, Bonnie Thompson, Barbara Bachman, and Emily Hartley—and especially to awesome editor Susanna Porter, who raced down the fast track with us to bring this book to print. Without the hard work and encouragement of all of you, these true stories might never have been told, and we hope that they do a good thing in the world and in the lives of vulnerable children today.
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