Before and After

by Judy Christie

  In the 1980s, before Tennessee adoption records are opened, James connects with a woman who has been successful in tracking down her own biological sisters, who were Tann babies from Memphis. She tells James she has a good friend who is a nurse at the hospital where James was born. For fifty dollars, the friend can get hospital microfiche records for him. He pays and gets some information. The nurse is not the only one operating a sort of cottage industry during this period, taking in a little cash while helping TCHS babies find their birth families, particularly before the Internet becomes more widely used.

  Later, James turns to the state of Tennessee, which costs him more money. The word from them? “Your mother has died, and that’s that.” But a report on a CBS television program changes his perspective, with word that perhaps there is more information available for TCHS adoptees. James writes to the network, and an assistant there tells him whom to contact.

  James, Brigette, and a genealogist neighbor, Linda, persist in the search. Linda, who does genealogy research at James’s church, encourages him to find out what he can. At first James does not have enough information—and what he has is vague. Finally, he finds the names of his birth mother and father and their ages. That is enough for Linda to go on. “He gave me several clues that really opened it up for me,” she tells me on the telephone. “It just started flowing…Doors were opening after so many years. He didn’t give up hope.”

  Linda checks census records and begins to feel secure about the family research. She uses FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, and sometimes Google. One of the first things she examines is FindAGrave.com. “You receive a world of information if you can get into the cemetery records.” As she draws the pieces together, it’s thrilling. “I knew how much it meant to him…It’s like having a mystery so long and having it solved. I loved every minute of it. I felt like I was an investigator. James is kind of a quiet person, but he’s been excited to share his journey. Other people have been thrilled for him.”

  Brigette has used the information from Linda and her own research to dive deeper for details of her dad’s heritage. “If you need someone to dig under the rocks, Brigette’s the one,” James says.

  “It’s like working a puzzle or unraveling a mystery,” Brigette explains as we sit together, enjoying the respite after the emotional gathering in the auditorium.

  They go on to fill me in about James’s adoptive father, Charlie, a missing player in the story of James’s childhood, the man who left and did not come back—for decades. James’s adoptive mother, Iris, who never remarries, tells James that his father has died. So imagine their surprise when twelve-year-old Brigette answers the phone and Charlie is on the other end. After he identifies himself as her grandfather, she is confused and hands the phone to her mother, who asks a few questions and informs a stunned James who is on the phone. “He has all the right answers,” Millie tells James.

  Charlie comes to visit, and James meets him at the airport, unsure of what to say or do. He watches his father, equally unsure, exit the plane. “I walked up to him and said, ‘Dad, it’s James,’ and he started crying.”

  Past hurts are forgiven, and they develop a good relationship. Charlie had four children with his second wife, and although Charlie is now dead, his family maintains a connection with their adopted brother. “His kids are really good to us,” James says.

  We pause on this sweet story. The staff of Kirby Pines has our table all set up in the dining room—maybe we can talk more over dinner. We definitely want to hear the details about another reunion ahead for James. He is scheduled to visit, for the first time, several relatives uncovered by recent sleuthing.

  He has Brigette to thank for that. Brigette, who is part caretaker, part detective, and all daughter. Watching her walk slowly beside James through the halls of Kirby Pines, her carefully organized family research notebook tucked under one arm, it’s easy to see she’s awfully good at all three roles.

  POINTS OF INTEREST

  Between the reunion events in Memphis, Brigette has an agenda planned for their visit. She has carefully mapped various sites that are part of her father’s early life and drives her parents to each of them. One is the former location of John Gaston Hospital, which has since been torn down. “Well, Dad, this is where you were born,” she says.

  Mom Millie lightens the moment when she points to the medical center now on the site. “Oh, there’s the Elvis Presley Emergency Room.”

  The three then go to where Tann’s orphanage stood on Poplar Avenue. The turn-of-the-century mansion is long gone. A commercial building stands in its place. Together, father, mother, and daughter walk across the big lawn out back. Memphis lore holds that some babies who perished in the orphanage were buried there, but I cannot find any information to verify that. “We were kind of wondering if there are still little bodies out there,” James says. “It was a very sad deal.”

  They also visit the cemetery memorial to babies who died in the care of TCHS. “That was emotional. It really was,” James says. “I was thinking about Lisa’s book.” He recalled how the book’s cover does not show the faces of the two children. For the children buried at Elmwood, he says, “You never got to see who they were.”

  For James, at least some of the mysteries will be solved over the course of this weekend. When he, Millie, and Brigette depart Memphis, they will drive to Little Rock, Arkansas, to meet other family members.

  They will not, though, be seeing James’s half brothers, whose names Brigette found through an obituary. “I wrote them this letter. ‘This is my Dad; we don’t want anything.’ Neither of them responded.” The regret in those words is unmistakable. She can only hope that the rest of the meetings with James’s biological cousins will go as planned. So much hope has been invested in this trip, so much effort, so many years of searching. She wants it to be great. As great as her dad, who deserves this.

  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the phone would ring, and her father would get the chance to meet his half brothers, after all? “It’s a shock to many people. We’re hoping that their hearts will be softened, and they will want to meet my father, too,” Brigette says. “We shall see.”

  She has arranged one last gift for her father on their trip. She has located James’s birth mother’s grave and even asked the cemetery attendants to clean it up. She drives her father there for what will be an emotional visit.

  As he stands by the grave, he considers his life and the mother he never knew, the woman who gave birth to a four-pound boy and bestowed upon him maybe the only other thing she had to give: a name that recalled two men who mattered to her.

  His mother is no longer here to share her story, but perhaps the extended family can tell him more when he meets them for lunch in Arkansas. In the meantime, there is just this patch of quiet ground and James’s belief that the woman beneath it did her best.

  His soft words are a reminder of how we might choose to live: “Human beings make mistakes. I have no anger toward her. I never have.”

  Perhaps that’s a lesson he’ll share with others as this reunion weekend develops. We have no way of changing the past. Anger and resentments can hold us captive there, bring us back again and again. Forgiveness frees us to move forward, into the now, into new possibilities, into the future.

  * * *

  —

  A small group of adoptees, including James, Millie, and Brigette, meander with Lisa and me into a special Kirby Pines dining room. Our conversation is already loosening up as we get to know one another, our voices louder and our laughter more frequent. White linen tablecloths cover tables that have been pushed together for our group, and a waiter brings us water and iced tea before we head for the serving line, where we share prolonged discussions on what dishes to choose, the same kind of chitchat I would have with old friends or at a family supper.

  Among the folks I’m happy to get to know in person is Janie B
rand. We’ve already chatted on the phone, and she’s next up for an interview. She was one of the core group who helped pull this reunion together, and, sitting across from me at dinner, she perfectly combines good cheer and Southern graciousness. I’m also eager to look at the photos and paperwork she has brought.

  Next to me sits my cousin Cindy, our photographer, and we’re getting caught up on family news—our late mothers were sisters who died too young, and we’ve been close since. We segue to discussing tomorrow’s schedule, and Cindy hops up to snap more photographs. I join in the chatter around the table and watch these budding friendships grow over shared chocolate chip cookies and bites of fruit cobbler.

  I’m thankful. That’s the best word I can come up with for this moment, and it fits.

  CHAPTER 14

  A PAIR OF BROWN PAPER BAGS

  “She left us on the courthouse steps.”

  SUE NELL IS ONLY THREE and a half.

  She doesn’t understand what’s happening when her mother deposits her, along with her five- and six-year-old brothers, outside the courthouse in Tiptonville, Tennessee.

  They watch her leave. Then they huddle together on the steps and wait—for what they do not know.

  A big black car arrives sometime later. A smiling older woman steps out and says, “Come with me.” The children are ushered into the car by a chauffeur and a woman they believe to be a nurse.

  The trip to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis is just over one hundred miles. The interstate has not been built. The winding state highway takes them farther and farther from their mama—and the sharecropper’s shack that is home. At least they still have one another. They can survive that way. They’ve been doing it for a while now, brothers and sister hiding away together, dodging drunken tirades in their home and beatings delivered with the buckle end of a leather belt.

  As the black car winds toward Memphis, the older woman promises them they are all going to the same place. They just need to be good little children. Cooperate. Behave. They sit silently in the comfortable seats. Brother Henry holds Sue Nell’s tiny hand. Henry always protects her, if he can.

  All will be well, so long as he’s there.

  But Memphis looms near now. The worst is about to happen.

  Janie

  JANIE BRAND, AGE SEVENTY-TWO WHEN we meet, may be one of the last living adoptees who recalls Tann, the woman who affected so many lives. Unlike many who came and went as babies, Janie was old enough to observe Georgia Tann and to remember experiences in the big house on Poplar, Tann’s notorious Memphis Receiving Home, which former staff members would later describe as a “house of horrors.” The memories are imprinted on her brain and her heart.

  Other adoptees attending the reunion are curious about that donated mansion, where their lives took sharp, unpredictable turns. They chat over muffins and scrambled eggs in our hotel’s breakfast room and here and there in the hallways. A handful of them stayed up late last night in one of the rooms, talking over wine.

  Despite the lack of name tags and an official opening event, strangers have become friends. Janie’s story fills in gaps for the others. She’s generous about sharing what she knows, and when we sit down for an interview in our hospitality suite at the hotel, she offers both painful and hopeful details. “The traumatic things, you remember,” she tells me as we begin. “You can’t erase a child’s memory.”

  Her life before that day on the courthouse steps is also clear in her memory. Their mother, Eula, cannot read or write. Food is scarce—sometimes she has one egg to feed three children. They live in a sharecropper’s shack in the country, with Horace. “This man who I knew as my father was beating the stew out of me,” Janie says.

  Her middle brother, Henry, practically a baby himself, frequently hides her in a cornfield to protect her. “Shhh,” he whispers to her. “Don’t let him find you.” Sometimes he takes the beating himself, so she won’t have to. The man, Horace, does not want the children. Doesn’t like them. He’s tired of providing for them, listening to their noise, putting up with them. Eula is pregnant again. These others are too much of a burden. He wants them gone, and so their mother loads them up and takes them to the courthouse.

  Little Sue Nell has already experienced enough trauma for a lifetime—abuse, then abandonment. But now, as she is taken from the car at the Receiving Home on Poplar, she suffers separation from her brothers. “I know they took me from the car first on purpose and let the boys think they were coming, too,” she explains. “My brother never would have let them get him out of the car without me.”

  That home is only for babies and toddlers. Older children are boarded at nearby orphanages and in unregulated private homes around the city. Tann knows how to separate siblings. She’s good at severing the connections cleanly, abruptly, keeping the fuss to a minimum.

  The loss will haunt Sue Nell for decades.

  Sick with tonsillitis, she is swept into the frightening house on Poplar and kept upstairs in the nursery. The Tann environment isn’t kind to sick children. According to orphanage records, she is treated with a glass of orange juice and a vitamin pill. “If I died, I died,” she says.

  Two weeks later, when her grandfather learns what has happened to the children, he drives to Memphis to get them back. An orphanage employee informs him that they have already been given away. “They are gone.”

  Sue Nell is just upstairs at the time.

  Her brothers are at a different facility, a place that to this day remains unknown. All they will remember later is that there were nuns who wore habits. But they don’t stay there long. Soon they are boarding a plane in the middle of the night with a Tann employee and several other adoptees. They’re delivered to Hollywood, to satisfy orders in Tann’s thriving market among celebrities and people with film industry connections.

  The boys meet their new parents, Lana and Jonathan Snyder, in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel, where the TCHS helper is quick to pass them off. The Snyders think they are twins and are charged one thousand dollars for each of them, nearly thirty thousand dollars today. The paperwork is handled by an attorney in a small West Tennessee town, who processed approximately two hundred TCHS adoptions through the Hardeman County Court, nearly all involving children sent to California or New York.

  This rural county was reportedly chosen by Tann because California courts would not approve adoptions by unlicensed agencies. And TCHS was not licensed. In Memphis, a Shelby County judge would no longer okay Tann adoptions unless he interviewed the birth parents to make certain they were willingly surrendering their children; he also required the adoptive parents to appear in court for similar questioning. So the paperwork had been moved out into small towns. Tann had her ways of circumventing regulations of all types.

  In California, Sue Nell’s brothers don’t settle in well. One scarcely speaks for a year. When the two do talk, they carry on constantly about a little sister. Finally, to quiet them, the parents adopt a baby girl for them. The adoptive parents pose all three for a round of photographs. The new family is complete.

  * * *

  —

  SUE NELL, MEANWHILE, HAS been waiting alone in the house on Poplar Avenue. She has recovered from her illness, but the place is strange, frightening. “Every so often, they’d get a child, get them cleaned and dressed up, and then off they’d go,” she remembers. “You’d never see them again.” She also remembers a different mood in the house when Tann was there. The tension ramped up. Staff and children walked on eggshells, tried not to be noticed.

  It is a skill Sue Nell already knew from her early years.

  Learning to navigate life at the orphanage, she is unaware that plans are being made for her. She is destined for a Jewish home in New York. But that family, the one she was scheduled to belong to, is in Europe by the time Sue Nell is well and the call is made. What would her life have been li
ke if they had been home?

  At the orphanage, she continues to watch other children go through the ritual of being washed and dressed to attend parties to show them off or to meet their new parents. Then the day comes when the same thing happens to her. She knows what the hair bows and the pretty dress mean. “I was out in the swing when I met my parents. Mother and Daddy came out there, and I left and went home with them.” The memory is so significant, she rephrases it as we talk: “I was in a swing in the backyard when my parents came, and I left with them that day.”

  She has to give the clothes back before she leaves. The brown paper bag of belongings she arrived at the orphanage with goes with her when she departs. Her new parents, Cecelia and Frank Hudson, take her shopping for clothes, and she is amazed to have new things of her own. She and her brothers never had anything new. They had hardly anything at all.

  She is also given something else: a new name.

  Sue Nell is gone.

  She is Janie now.

  Her adoptive mother is fifty-two years old and has been divorced once, and the couple’s marriage is troubled—facts that, of course, the child does not know on this day. She’s also unaware that a fee of one thousand dollars has changed hands. The cost of a pretty blond-haired girl. Her mother dresses her up and has a photographer take pictures, the girl’s first portraits. As far as she knows, there were no photographs of her before that day.