Before and After

by Judy Christie

  The novel exposes a chilling piece of history that I knew nothing about. I grew up in the South, was the editor of a daily newspaper in West Tennessee, and married a Jackson, Tennessee, native. How had I never heard of this?

  It’s April 2018, a year almost to the day since my column about her novel ran. As we chat, I’m eating a baked sweet potato with extra butter. I drink my midday Diet Dr Pepper. Lisa nibbles on a few nuts and drinks water. We may have lots in common, but eating habits are not among them.

  These occasional calls break up the solitude of writing, and today’s conversation seems routine at first. We talk about her travels and what a year it has been. She mentions her efforts to redesign her website. I tell her about a screenplay I’m revising and a freelance piece for a magazine.

  The call is winding down when Lisa pauses and seems to take a deep breath. She speaks a little hesitantly. This is not her usual tone, and I sit up straighter. She tells me for the first time about the possible reunion and her worries about whether it’ll come off all right.

  “I think it’s an incredibly cool idea,” I tell her. She fills me in on her thoughts so far, and I jot down a few notes, a habit I’ve had since I was a teenager.

  The location in Memphis seems ideal to me. So many stories began there. Georgia Tann’s babies and children came mostly from Tennessee, although many were sent to adoptive families in California, New York, and other states. Lisa kicked off her Before We Were Yours book release tour in Memphis. Then she asks me an intriguing question, one she seems to choke on a little bit: “Would you, by any chance, be interested in being part of this? Possibly doing interviews and documenting the stories? These people have such incredible histories, Judy. These need to be written down, and if they’re not, they are going to be lost.”

  My heart pounds. This is the kind of assignment that uses my journalistic background, my love of storytelling, and my interest in meeting fascinating people. Documenting these lives would be an honor. It would take me to Tennessee, a state filled with my kinfolks. Maybe Lisa and I will even help justice be served by giving adoptees the last word. Take that, Georgia Tann.

  My usual practice of sleeping on important requests flies out the window faster than my intention not to grab a cookie for dessert. I’m in. My planner’s mind runs through my calendar. “What’s the timetable?”

  “The reunion would be in June.”

  “Of this year?” Something lodges in my throat. I’m not sure if it’s panic or sweet potato. Dates for events like this are set years in advance. Lisa is talking six weeks away. What about booking plane tickets? And a block of rooms? Is there any way to pull together a group of people from all over the country that quickly? What will attendees do at the gathering: Hear about the novel? Tell their stories? Try to find more information about their heritage?

  Lisa fills me in on the details of their fledgling plans, the struggle to arrange venues, and the work of the core group of TCHS adoptees, busy coming up with suggestions for the shape their gathering might take.

  It’s all somewhere between set in stone and completely tenuous.

  This photo of Tann’s orphanage on Poplar Avenue in Memphis was used in a TCHS brochure. Some say the building burned; others say it was torn down. Thankfully, it no longer exists.

  Bringing together people whose lives intersected in one place, more than a half century ago, but who have never actually met one another is, at best, a challenge. At worst, it could be a disaster.

  Can it really be done? And in six weeks?

  I stare at my calendar. Calculate. Plan. Pray.

  Before the day is done, I have reorganized my schedule, blocked out a trip to Memphis, and committed to this event with all my heart. If there is a reunion, I will be there. And I will write the stories of all who want to share them.

  It is late April.

  In early June, we will be Memphis-bound.

  We have no idea who else will be there. Perhaps there will be only four or five of us visiting in a hotel room. That will be just fine, I tell myself. Whoever needs to show up, will.

  For now, my gathering of stories begins.

  I order a half dozen of my favorite notebooks and two dozen Pilot Varsity blue-ink fountain pens.

  PART TWO

  RSVP

  I can speak to you on the telephone…I would love an opportunity to honor my mother’s story.

  —EMAIL FROM AN ADOPTEE’S DAUGHTER WHO CAN’T MAKE THE REUNION

  WISH WE COULD BE THERE

  Raised as sociable Southerners, Lisa and I have hosted our share of events. Lisa was a pro at all-star birthday bashes for rough-and-tumble sons and puts together epic holiday potlucks. As for me, I’ve planned a surprise bowling party for my sister-in-law’s sixtieth, an old friend’s wedding reception at my house, an annual gathering of buddies who met in our college dorm in the mid-1970s, even the annual newsroom New Year’s Eve party, back in the old days when people still smoked indoors.

  Invariably, a moment of terror arises after the invitations are out of my hands…and beyond my control. I second-guess myself, start a few lists, and resist (or not) the urge to throw a quilt over my head.

  This reunion, such a tender and unknowable occasion, raises similar—and yet new—questions. Lisa and I take several planning roller-coaster rides a week.

  It’s okay, we tell ourselves. If we host it, they will come.

  Won’t they?

  Responses trickle in—a mix of “wouldn’t miss it” and “so sorry I can’t make it.” We celebrate RSVPs from Connie, our planner and cheerleader, and three other adoptees who plan to attend. At least six of us will be there. Those who can’t come send heartfelt replies with their reasons: a long-planned vacation to Hawaii, a grandchild’s wedding, lack of money for an expensive plane ticket, a couple of surgeries.

  The regrets contain another message, though—these kind people are devoted to telling their family stories and would be happy to visit long-distance. Perhaps life will bring us together down the road, maybe even at another reunion, but till then, I can capture their stories. I tear the plastic shrink wrap from my optimistic stack of new notebooks and begin to call the adoptees and family members who want to talk.

  And I begin gathering pieces of history.

  CHAPTER 3

  A CADILLAC AND A SECRET

  “I know I have a mother out there somewhere.”

  ANNA WEST IS IN TROUBLE. She is unwed, pregnant, and living in a boardinghouse on Walnut Street in Johnson City, Tennessee. Joseph, the father of the baby, is older by a decade or more and lives in a nearby town.

  A tall, stylish young lady of nineteen, Anna gives birth at the boardinghouse on a cold February day in 1943.

  The baby girl is beautiful like her mother, with blond hair and dark brown eyes. As newborns go, she is a stunner. Anna names the child Josephine, after the father. He is the one who pays the doctor and hospital bills, and his last name is used on the birth certificate. Anna’s last name is the same as his on the document, and she is listed as his wife.

  But as much as the new mother wants it to be, this is not true.

  Joseph is already married and has a family. Anna tells her landlady, who is pressuring her for rent money, that he has sued his wife for a divorce and will marry Anna as soon as he can take care of the legalities. He visits the newborn baby, but then six weeks go by when he doesn’t come back or send any money.

  Anna is growing desperate.

  Sandra

  SANDRA MORRIS, A RETIRED EDUCATOR, goes out to lunch with a group of longtime friends once a month. The women have a glass of wine and discuss books. Before We Were Yours ends up on the book-choice list and grabs Sandra’s attention. She knows her mother was adopted in Tennessee. Could this be her story?

  After she reads the novel, she begins to ponder the documents she
scarcely looked at after her mother died. Should she dig through her mother’s papers to see if there’s anything there?

  She heads to the metal filing cabinets in the spare room and finds details she never knew, including the typewritten Tennessee Children’s Home Society “Story Sheet” with dozens of heartbreaking details about her mother. Overcome with emotion, and eager to honor her mother’s memory, she writes Lisa to share the story.

  Months later, she hears about the planned gathering of adoptees and their families and wants to attend—but she has already booked a vacation during that time. Still, she feels drawn to this event and hopes to share her mother’s story, so she and I connect over the phone. “Talk about fate,” she says. “I was so fascinated and horrified by Before We Were Yours at the same time…My gracious. This is totally real…Except for the documents I needed to close out her estate, I really paid only cursory attention to the papers until I read Lisa’s book.”

  She mails me copies of the documents so that I might understand the story, then help it live on. “What’s exciting to me is that someone is going to hear my mother’s story,” she says. “This is a way for me to say, ‘Mama, I love you.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  ANNA RETURNS TO WORK JUST weeks after her baby is born. She has no choice after support from the baby’s father dries up. It’s work or be turned out on the street. She makes arrangements to leave baby Josephine at the boardinghouse with the owner, Mrs. Feathers, and goes to work, putting in long hours at a cafeteria and at a café. But on a waitress’s salary, she can’t keep up.

  The TCHS Story Sheet notes explain what happens next, a tale that is harrowing and hard to digest. By June, four months after Josephine’s birth, Anna has fallen behind on her room rent. She pays a little now and then but is getting deeper in debt all the time.

  Still, she holds on to her daughter, even though it is an outlandish notion to those observing her plight. An unmarried woman with a child? It simply is not done. This beautiful baby should go to a “good” home with well-off parents. Adding to the pathos of Anna’s situation is her sorrow over the death of her own mother shortly before she came to East Tennessee. Her father has remarried, and her stepmother, she feels, does not like her. Anna is adrift with a baby and no financial or emotional support.

  Mrs. Feathers is losing patience. She complains to a juvenile judge about the late payments. The judge is unsympathetic to the single mother and criticizes Anna’s second job as being at “one of our questionable cafés.”

  At the boardinghouse, an ominous cloud gathers over baby Josephine. She’s landed on Georgia Tann’s radar. Adoption workers keep track of the baby girl and write regular reports that sound like sales pitches for a new product in development. “A very fine baby,” the paperwork raves about Josephine’s looks. Mrs. Feathers is instructed to “keep the baby there.” TCHS will pay until the child can be brought into custody. A doctor concurs that Josephine is “a prize baby.”

  TCHS workers investigate Anna’s character, making notes. They attack her in their reports, using assumptions and insinuations. “None of it has been verified but some of it is true,” a TCHS worker’s notes read.

  A removal case is well in the making. Even after being made aware of it, Anna will not agree to go to court to give up her child. She hangs on, works hard, clings to her little girl.

  Her efforts do little good. A TCHS employee decrees, “If the mother refuses to appear in Court, I would commit the baby for adoption as an abandoned and neglected child.”

  It is now October, and Josephine is eight months old. Mrs. Feathers insists that she cannot keep the child any longer without adequate compensation and reports that Anna does not see the child enough. Besides, she says, the rent is fifty dollars in arrears.

  Baby Josephine is only days away from losing her mother.

  * * *

  —

  ELMER AND EVELYN PETERS are Pennsylvania natives, but they are on the road performing throughout the South in a traveling gospel show.

  Evelyn badly wants a baby and learns that there is a way to adopt in Tennessee. She’s heard that it might help if you are from Tennessee. Of course, a stable lifestyle would help, too.

  She and Elmer settle in Knoxville.

  He becomes the sales manager for a company that furnishes drapery, pictures, and objects of fine art to churches, theaters, and well-appointed homes. Besides owning an interest in the company, he makes two thousand dollars a month—a whopping thirty thousand dollars per month in modern-day dollars. In addition, Evelyn has plenty of family money.

  When they apply to TCHS for a child, their financial means catch the attention of the orphanage’s officials.

  A pretty little girl soon becomes available, removed, allegedly, from an unfit mother and taken to the nursery at St. Mary’s Hospital in Knoxville. Temporarily, she is called by the alias Priscilla in medical paperwork. The doctor thoroughly checks her out and assures TCHS that she is “a lovely baby but badly spoiled. She is very unhappy in the nursery.”

  Three weeks after being taken from her mother, Josephine lands in the waiting arms of Evelyn and Elmer. The child, not quite nine months old, is given the new name Helen, after the town where Evelyn was reared. The adoption worker offers glowing statements about the new parents: “Josephine was theirs from the minute they saw her. They were both overcome. To them it was just as sacred as though she had been born to them.”

  The adoption agency cannot hold back their praise for how wealthy and wonderful Evelyn and Elmer are. A sampling from a poorly typed report:

  Worker has known them and had interviews on the subject of their interest to adopt a child. They are both ideal parents—they would never see a child without being interested in whether poorly dressed or clad in finery. They just love children…

  Elmer tells the worker that the new family is “ideally and completely happy.”

  The worker agrees: “Worker has seldom seen so complete preparation for a baby, everything is useful and beautiful…Many of their friends have spoken to the worker in the interest of a child for this home.” When she visits the home again, she says, “The baby has exquisite clothes. Many are handmade by relatives.” And:

  They are a most charming couple and have a host of friends in Knoxville. They have not bought a home in Knoxville since they might find it advantageous to transfer to another section of the country in the development of their company.

  Baby Helen. “She has been deluged with lovely gifts, including several war bonds…a prize baby,” read an orphanage report following Helen’s adoption.

  As soon as the transaction is final, Evelyn and Elmer do indeed move away from Tennessee, heading to Pennsylvania, where Elmer works as an electrical engineer. But Evelyn’s carefully constructed outline for life with a new daughter does not go as planned. With the adoption now official, the closely held secret of baby Helen’s background festers. “I think that my grandmother wanted a baby so badly…she then wanted to hide anything to do with it,” Helen’s daughter, Sandra, says. The new father does not feel the same need for secrecy, however. Strife rips through the marriage.

  Hiding the adoption wears on the couple, and Elmer leaves. “I think it just destroyed their marriage,” Sandra says. “It was the biggest secret in the world. It was a subject not open for discussion.”

  Her parents do not tell Helen she is adopted until she is a teenager, when they break the news with the gift to her of a brand-new Cadillac. Helen becomes resentful and confused. She feels that Elmer has cut her out of his life, and her relationship with Evelyn is tense.

  Her adoptive mother eventually marries the other preacher from the gospel show, and conflict grows between mother and daughter as Helen moves into adulthood. “My mother felt like she was supposed to be grateful that she was adopted,” Sandra remembers. “T
he feeling I got was that my grandmother thought my mother wasn’t appreciative enough.”

  Like many TCHS adoptees, Helen has no siblings. “All the time she talked about how much she hated being an only child,” Sandra says. I’ve been alone my whole life, she would say.

  Helen marries four times, has three children. She becomes a registered nurse when Sandra is a youngster, losing herself in her career, including helping with medical care for women in prison. “She worked. She worked, worked, worked,” Sandra says.

  Her mother’s legacy of pain carries on with Sandra, who, as she grows, tries to earn family love that she feels she can never quite get. She lives with her grandmother, Evelyn, off and on, and they have a good relationship, but it, too, is tinged with the struggle for affection.

  When Evelyn dies, she leaves a substantial amount of money to her adoptive daughter. The money, though, is not what Helen craves. She needs truth. In her late forties, in 1992, Helen can stand the secret of her birth no longer. She consults a lawyer to find out how to get access to her records, still sealed in Tennessee. “I know I have a mother out there somewhere,” she says. “I want my mother.”

  When the records arrive, the anguish continues. She receives meager information about her mother but nothing about her biological father. “A search for your birth father is not being initiated, since there is no verification in the record of his acknowledging paternity,” the state of Tennessee tells her. Despite documents that show Joseph as her father, she feels she has been rejected all over again.