Before and After

by Judy Christie

  From the moment they hold her in their arms, her new parents love and care for their sick baby. An organized man, her father had already arranged a visit with a pediatrician friend. They’d expected to take their new baby boy in for a routine checkup on the way home from the orphanage. Just a precaution.

  Instead, they arrive at the doctor’s office with a sickly baby girl who’s in dire need of an intervention. “Undesirable babies were sometimes left to die and be buried on the premises of Tann’s TCHS. These babies had physical illnesses or deformities or were judged ‘unworthy’ or ‘unattractive,’ ” Lillian writes in a two-page account of her life that she compiled for recent talks about Before We Were Yours. “I had been left in a corner crib, presumably to die because of my physical problems and unattractive appearance. My daddy’s choice and my mother’s sympathy most likely saved me from a backyard grave.”

  The doctor examines Lillian, and his diagnosis is swift. She is hungry, and her stomach hurts because she is allergic to cow’s milk. The allergy is also the cause of the rash. Her strange cries are the result of having been born tongue-tied. The physician clips her tongue, prescribes ointment for the rash, and suggests a diet of goat’s milk.

  From that day forth, Harold begins adding regular trips to the country to his schedule, to buy goat’s milk for this tiny daughter of theirs. Within days, she bears almost no resemblance to the pitiable creature left to suffer in Tann’s orphanage. She is thriving.

  Lillian grows up an only child in a quiet household, a tidy two-bedroom, one-bath home not far from the orphanage. An introspective little girl, she loves books and is given voice and speech lessons to help with her slight speech impediment. Her new parents are honest about her birth and read her a bedtime story about adoption most nights. The queen and king had a baby and couldn’t take care of it, so they gave it to a farmer and his wife. As in the made-up tale, her adoptive parents grew up as farmers. They were from Mississippi and came from little in terms of money or possessions. Her new mother was a sickly child and quit school after the eighth grade. Her dad lived in poverty but came from a family of mechanical geniuses. He wound up enrolling at Ole Miss, acquiring the education that led to his career as an engineer.

  Lillian as a schoolgirl. Raised as an only child, she knows she is adopted but does not learn the truth about her birth family for decades.

  Harold is a calm man. Viola, a strict woman. Despite their love, as Lillian speaks of her childhood she recalls the feeling of not quite belonging. Once again, I hear those familiar words: Something was missing. In crowds during her growing-up years, she habitually looked to see if she could spot a sibling, anyone related to her. “I guess I always wanted a brother or sister,” she says in her easy-on-the-ears Tennessee accent.

  Even now, questions linger. But she is unruffled as she talks about her story and about how she came to be connected with Before We Were Yours and, eventually, the TCHS reunion. An avid reader, she is enmeshed in her busy life when she notices Before We Were Yours on the New York Times bestseller list and requests it from her branch of the Memphis library.

  Not long after, a friend who knows about her family background invites her to speak about her life to a book club at Kirby Pines, a Memphis retirement community, with the author of Before We Were Yours participating on the phone from her home in Texas. Nearly a hundred book enthusiasts listen to Lillian’s first public telling of her story, enraptured by the account of her life. “It’s amazing how that worked out,” she says. “I’m not going to preach a sermon, but I don’t believe it was an accident.” Since that day, she has given as many as three book talks a week, comparing and contrasting her life with that of the Foss siblings in the novel.

  She keeps her adoption records in a tote bag, ready to go.

  The novel and the talks bring emotions to the surface. “I think adopted children always have a piece of themselves missing. You’re rejected at birth for something you had nothing to do with. I would love to know exactly what was in my birth mother’s mind when she gave me up. Of course, I’ll never know. I would like to think she wanted me to have a better life. I’d love to ask her, ‘Why did you do this?’ ”

  That question will become a specter in an otherwise comfortable life, something that quietly hovers over Lillian once she’s old enough to understand what adoption means. As a child, she lacks self-confidence and is not outgoing. She remains a loner throughout her school years, migrating to one best friend at a time. A case of the measles strikes her in fourth grade, and she has to miss school. While some parents might have brought her Play-Doh or a Mr. Potato Head to play with, Harold entertains her by teaching her basic algebra. He gives her problems to solve while he is at work and goes over them with her when he comes home.

  Her lifelong interest in math begins. Viola, however, is not a numbers person and cannot understand her daughter’s fascination. Mother and daughter do not have much in common and butt heads as Lillian grows. Their disconnect doesn’t have to do with love, Lillian insists, but stems from different interests. She learns young that, despite the childhood book about adoption, Viola does not want to talk about it. Even in adulthood, Lillian respects her mother too much to ask.

  Instead, Lillian makes up her mind that only when her mother dies will she try to find out about her birth family.

  Decades pass before she hears how she came to be in the orphanage the day she was rescued. Viola has died, and Harold has had a heart attack. After that, he opens up to her. “I need to tell you something,” he says. “I need to tell you that we got you from a woman named Georgia Tann.” He shares more details about the day she was left suffering in a corner crib, then was spared almost certain death by the tenacity of this now-frail man who raised her. By the kindness of strangers who would become her parents. Harold then tells her the name of her birth mother and the street where she lived when Lillian was born.

  Just like that, missing pieces begin moving into place.

  Lillian learns by accident how much her parents paid for her adoption. “Dad didn’t mean to tell me. He was joking with me and said, ‘That’s the worst five-hundred-dollar investment I ever made. I should’ve taken Butch.’ ”

  Why did they have to pay five hundred dollars when a Tennessee adoption was seven dollars at the time, and they picked the baby up themselves? And what happened to that cute little boy Harold turned down, the one he teasingly later referred to as Butch? Did the baby boy, too, stay in Memphis or was he sent to California or New York? Is he still alive?

  There’s no way of knowing.

  In the early 1990s, when Tennessee’s adoption records are finally opened and many adoptees and their families find themselves watching televised programs about Tann’s misdeeds, Lillian is among those viewers who question their heritage. Straitlaced, she cannot fathom her birth mother having a child out of wedlock. She imagines instead that she was a stolen baby. Maybe her mother has been looking for her all these years.

  On the East Coast, another woman sees the program, too, and because she does, Lillian’s life is about to take a twist. The woman is Lillian’s half sister Fran, a sibling Lillian has no idea exists. Fran is also a Tann baby, born one year to the day before Lillian. Confusion over their birthdays in state records leads her to Lillian. Fran’s adoptive parents live in Memphis when she is born, but they want to get away from Tann, fearing being blackmailed into paying more money to keep their child. They move out of town as soon as the adoption is final, a not uncommon reaction for threatened parents who feel pressured by Tann.

  Almost fifty years later, Fran’s husband, having tracked details through the opened birth records, calls Harold. “Do you have a daughter who is adopted?” he asks.

  “Yes.” Lillian’s father does not seem particularly startled by the question.

  “Does she know she’s adopted? I think she might be my wife’s half sister.”<
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  Harold, aging and not in good health, is delighted by the news. His daughter will have someone else to love. “He was happy for me,” Lillian says.

  Fran collects all sorts of papers on her adoption and hands the materials over to Lillian, which helps her accept the truth of her own birth. “I had documentation,” Lillian says. Then she adds, with a big smile, “Math teachers have to prove things.” Still, she finds it almost impossible to believe that her mother, whose name was Barbara, had two babies with different fathers a year apart. Lillian speculates that she was an unhappy person who never got along with her own father and came to Memphis looking for love.

  Over the course of regular, long phone calls, sister Fran becomes part of Lillian’s life. Sadly, though, they are still kept apart. This time the barrier is not secrecy but distance and retirement finances. “I know her, and I love her—even though I’ve only seen her three times,” Lillian says.

  Years after she connects with Fran, Lillian decides to see what she can find out about her biological father. Another surprise awaits: the discovery of a second half sister, Joyce, with a shared father. Through an attorney, Lillian contacts Joyce, her dry sense of humor emerging as she describes the letter she sent: “I do not want anything from you,” she writes. She wants her sister to know she is not an ax murderer and not after her kidneys. She does, however, seek medical information about her birth father.

  She signs the letter with her birth name, including the last name she once shared with Joyce.

  Then she waits.

  The letter lands with a thud. Joyce responds to the attorney, saying her father, now dead, would never have considered having a child out of wedlock. “Why is that lady lying?” she writes.

  After a while, though, Joyce seeks confirmation of the claims and asks that Lillian pay for a DNA test. Years ahead of mail-order-kit technology, the test costs three hundred dollars, money not easy to come up with. “That was a financial struggle for me,” Lillian confesses. But she saves up and takes the test.

  She waits again.

  The results show Lillian and Joyce to be half sisters.

  More waiting ensues.

  Finally, Joyce agrees to a lunch date with Lillian, who is nervous. Lillian’s daughter, a young adult at the time, encourages her. “Mom, where is your faith?” she says. “I’ll go with you.”

  The meeting is stressful. “We talked,” Lillian says. “It was very awkward…I did not want to cause her any distress at all.”

  While this sister keeps Lillian at arm’s length, she does share copies of pictures, including a photo of Lillian’s birth father. He was a sailor, then a civilian employee for the U.S. Navy. He, like her adopted father, worked with numbers. Lillian chuckles. “I ended up being a math teacher, so I think I got a double dose.”

  She now has two pictures of her birth parents together. One was taken at the Pink Palace, a museum in Memphis, in July 1946. Lillian was born in February 1947. Her birth father married another woman that same month.

  Lillian’s feelings about Georgia Tann are conflicted, and I sit on the edge of the sofa and lean forward to hear what she will say. “I’m sure she did some good,” she admits. And yet Lillian knows she came close to dying in Tann’s care. It’s a heavy realization to handle. Dealing with the past and the challenges of life, she admits, makes her blue at times. Still, she realizes that her life is much better because of her adoption. “When you take a step back and look, I’ve been so blessed.” She considers trying one of the popular inexpensive DNA tests to find more family connections. But she doubts that she will. “It’s not a driving force in my life. I can’t get all excited about the family who gave me away.”

  She and Joyce continue to meet for low-key visits. “Slowly, slowly we are forging a relationship,” Lillian says. “We’ve gotten to be friends.” She smiles, at peace with her life in this moment. “I was an only child until age fifty, and now I have two half sisters.”

  DO THE RIGHT THING

  The city has grown up around Lillian’s home, her quiet street close to the hubbub of modern Memphis. I ease out onto a thoroughfare with our visit still on my mind. She spent years pouring herself into students in her classroom and her own children and grandchildren, and now she’s navigating the world as a widow. Yet she marches on, a diligent crusader of sorts, on a quest to see what comes next. She plans to join us for the reunion, but she is helping administer an ACT test that Saturday morning and isn’t sure how late she will arrive.

  Another reminder of the short time frame on which this gathering is balanced. That people have other plans. Responsibilities. They’re busy.

  And yet Lillian welcomed me into her day, prepared a space for me with flowers from the garden and homemade cake on a china plate. Gave me the gift of time—the rarest and most precious commodity in today’s overcommitted world.

  Do I make strangers as welcome in my life as this woman has made me in hers?

  The thought whips me into a grocery store parking lot to try to fix a reunion snag I’ve discovered. When I ducked into the gathering room at our hotel earlier, I was disappointed to find that it was Sterile…with a capital S. Unwelcoming and unhospitable.

  I grab a basket, then hesitate. Is this premature? I have no idea how many people to buy for. What would they like? Wine! People like wine, right? But red or white? How about chocolate! Who doesn’t like chocolate? Maybe bottled water for non–wine drinkers. And chips. Napkins. And fresh flowers. I grab items as if we’re hosting a wedding reception for two hundred, think of Lillian, and push aside my doubts.

  It’s not hard knowing where she got her kind heart. I can almost see her adoptive father moving across the room where, as a newborn, she lay dying.

  Never hesitate. Do the right thing.

  Now, that’s a lesson to take with us.

  I head to the cash register. If these groceries bring strangers together in even the smallest way, they will be worth the effort. If the reunion opens even one happy door for an adoptee or leads to the discovery of important family information, it will be the right thing.

  Pushing the cart back to the car, I’m eager to show Lisa and our adoptee-coordinator, Connie, what I’ve bought.

  CHAPTER 11

  REUNION EVE

  “All you can do is jump in and see where it goes.”

  THE DUSTY WINGATE FAMILY CAR pulls into the hotel’s covered drive, and Lisa hops out in a summer-print sundress and sandals. She looks only slightly road-weary after crisscrossing Arkansas in a government van with a kindly state librarian, visiting a dozen libraries.

  My relief that she has actually made it is ridiculously high, my nerves on edge because her final stop on the Arkansas book tour was only hours before. Many things had to fall into place for us both to be at this hotel at this moment. To meet the logistical challenge of getting her from rural Arkansas to Memphis required her husband, Sam, driving from Texas to her mother’s home in the Ozark Mountains to drop off their dog-child, Huckleberry, then to southeast Arkansas to pick Lisa up and deliver her to the reunion. My tense arms are waiting to give both of them a hug.

  “Yay!” Lisa sings out with her usual big smile. “We’re here. We made it!”

  A trace of pre-party jitters dances around Lisa’s face but doesn’t distract her from plunging right into the lobby and the reunion weekend ahead. One way or another, this thing is happening. At least now we have flowers. And wine. And chocolate. Enough to welcome everyone if only a small group shows. Enough to welcome everyone if a large group shows. Friendships, we hope, will be forged. Stories will be told and preserved.

  Here. In Memphis. Where the plot of Before We Were Yours took shape. Where, for decades, Georgia Tann altered lives on a whim.

  Where one year ago this very week, Lisa chose to introduce the novel to the world at the Memphis Public Libraries’ summer reading kickoff
event.

  The venues have changed so many times that it’s only with the help of a timetable emailed today from Lisa’s mother that we think we might know where we are supposed to be and when. Another round of events has been scheduled, filled, and then expanded to include a book talk and an informal supper at Kirby Pines Retirement Community; a Saturday gathering at the library for anyone with connections to TCHS; a book talk at Novel bookstore, owned and operated by Memphis residents in a lovely neighborhood; a visit to the cemetery monument in honor of children who died in Tann’s care; and two Sunday afternoon talks in the Elmwood Cemetery chapel.

  This packed agenda has come together with Scotch tape and crossed fingers, more nebulous than either of us would prefer. We’re fairly sure we’ve made adoptee-organizer Connie and the hotel staff crazy more than once with rotating hospitality suites, ever-changing blocks of rooms, and imprecise guest lists.

  The weekend is shaping up to be a cross between a happy family reunion and a small high school homecoming—with plenty of talking, listening, and updates on who was found and how. Even now, just a night’s sleep away from the first event, Lisa and I confess to each other that we are depending heavily on the kindness of strangers and the blessings of good people.

  Some adoptees’ participation remains iffy, whether because of surgery, distance, or doubt. Sadly, Patricia lets us know for sure that health concerns will prevent her from being here. It’s a blow to lose one of the core group, but we’ll FaceTime her into the gatherings.

  We’re thrilled with the expected adoptees and their family members who we’re sure will take part. Plus, there are some new people Lisa met at various Arkansas book events. She hopes several will join us on the spur of the moment, and we pencil their names in on our messy spreadsheet.