Before and After Read online

  Before and After is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2019 by IMWW LLC and Monday House LLC

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Photo credits are located on this page.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: Christie, Judy Pace, author. | Wingate, Lisa, author.

  TITLE: Before and after : the incredible real-life stories of orphans who survived the Tennessee Children’s Home Society / Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate.

  DESCRIPTION: First edition. | New York : Ballantine Books, [2019]

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2019034565 (print) | LCCN 2019034566 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593130148 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593130155 (ebook)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: Tennessee Children’s Home Society— Corrupt practices—History. | Adoption agencies—Corrupt practices—Tennessee—History. | Family reunification—Tennessee—Case studies.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC HV875.56.T2 C47 2019 (print) | LCC HV875.56.T2 (ebook) | DDC 362.73092/2768—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019034565

  Ebook ISBN 9780593130155

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Christopher Brand

  Cover image: © Krasimira Petrova Shishkova/Trevillion Images

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  From the Authors

  Prologue

  Part One: Truth Meets Fiction

  Chapter 1: Real-Life Adoptees

  Chapter 2: In Their Own Voices

  Part Two: RSVP

  Wish We Could Be There

  Chapter 3: A Cadillac and a Secret

  In Black and White

  Chapter 4: Clues from a High School Science Class

  What’s in a Name

  Chapter 5: It’s All in the DNA

  Tenacity and Time

  Chapter 6: One Day Old and Sent to Memphis

  Part Three: Reunion

  Where the Story Begins

  Chapter 7: Born on Christmas Day

  Hidden Rooms of the Heart

  Chapter 8: A Political Baby

  The Why and How

  Chapter 9: A Hollywood Life

  An Unwritten Script

  Chapter 10: Left to Die

  Do the Right Thing

  Chapter 11: Reunion Eve

  Chapter 12: The Only Home She Knows

  Open and Closed

  Chapter 13: Handed Off in a Train Station

  Points of Interest

  Chapter 14: A Pair of Brown Paper Bags

  Late Arrivals

  Chapter 15: Seven-Dollar Baby

  Family “Bibles”

  Chapter 16: The Court Case

  Newly Extraordinary

  Chapter 17: The Night All the Babies Died

  What If?

  Chapter 18: Four Sisters

  The Lesson of Forgiveness

  Part Four: The Reckoning

  Chapter 19: A Historic Cemetery and Final Peace

  Chapter 20: Afterward

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  About the Authors

  Where are you? Do you look like me?

  Are you like me in any way?

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

  FROM THE AUTHORS

  THESE STORIES ARE AS REMEMBERED and generously told by Tennessee Children’s Home Society adoptees and their families. To respect their privacy, we have changed the names of adoptees and family members, with the exception of wonderful actors Stephen Smiley Burnette, his daughter, Elizabeth, and his parents, the incomparable Smiley and Dallas Burnette.

  * * *

  —

  IN OUR HEARTS, WE WILL always hold sacred the true names of each of the people we have gotten to know through their stories.

  PROLOGUE

  JULY 1950 IS A HOT, uneasy month in West Tennessee.

  The United States enters the Korean War. Fear of a third world war hovers while the region still grapples with the aftereffects of the second one. The stock market plunges. As if that is not enough, boll weevils plague cotton crops and devastate farmers trying to eke out a living.

  Tumult of a different sort, though, brews for a young pregnant woman. She has been sent out of state with her three-year-old son, her sister, and a nephew to await the birth of her second child.

  A house is provided. Expenses taken care of.

  But the largesse comes at a high price.

  She has agreed to hand her baby over to Georgia Tann, who has run a questionable orphanage in Memphis for more than twenty-five years. Rumors about Tann’s toxic adoption practices swirl like a hot wind on a dusty day, and they are about to hit gale force.

  Tann’s empire at the Tennessee Children’s Home Society—shortened to TCHS by those familiar with the operation—has been built with a combustible blend of desperate pregnant women, shattered children, vulnerable poverty-stricken families, eager adoptive parents, powerful politicians, ego, and greed.

  But this young mother’s life is complicated, and Tann offers a solution.

  A sweet baby girl is born on Monday, July 10, 1950.

  Five days later, a TCHS worker whisks the newborn away. The traumatized mother is left behind with her preschool-age son. The baby girl will not see her brother again for four decades. The aunt, who has come along as a companion on this sad journey, will keep the secret from family and friends back home, intending to take it to her grave.

  On July 26, the infant is delivered to a new set of parents—a couple with turmoil of its own.

  Scarcely two weeks old, the tiny girl is on a path that will shape everything she becomes. Whisked away with the speed of a wartime ballistic missile, she will spend most of her life piecing together the mystery of her birth and early years…and wondering how things might have been different.

  PART ONE

  Truth Meets Fiction

  CHAPTER 1

  REAL-LIFE ADOPTEES

  “Have you considered a reunion?”

  CONNIE WILSON IS RELAXING IN her condo in Southern California with her beloved Labradoodle, Jackson, when the email arrives.

  “Oh my gosh, Connie!” a book-club friend from Arizona writes. “Have you read Before We Were Yours?”

  It’s June 2017, and the novel by Lisa Wingate is brand-new. Connie has not heard of it. But faster than her pup can nudge her to play tug-of-war, she downloads a digital copy. In only forty-eight hours, she devours it, tamping down emotions as she reads. The fictionalized story about children adopted through the Tennessee Children’s Home Society is oh so familiar to her.

  Connie’s life is historic in a way she would rather have avoided: she is one of the l
ast babies placed by the scandal-ridden orphanage. In her late sixties when she, Lisa, and I meet, Connie is one of the youngest members of a unique and uncomfortable club—living adoptees connected to TCHS. People whose lives were irrevocably altered at the hands of Georgia Tann. For Connie and thousands like her, events that took place decades ago are difficult to place in the past. The effects remain ever present.

  On September 11, 1950, just two months after Connie’s birth, a criminal investigation into Tann’s adoption practices was announced. Orphanage funds were cut, and the babies on hand were left in limbo. Connie’s adoption was held up, and her guardianship was transferred from TCHS to the Tennessee Department of Public Welfare. That was when she joined the tail end of a decades-long line of sad statistics.

  Under the autocratic control of Georgia Tann, and thanks to her effective grip on look-the-other-way political and civic leaders, TCHS managed to operate in Memphis from 1924 to 1950 without scrutiny or interference. Approximately five thousand children, many of whom were not actually orphaned, passed through the agency’s doors. An unknown number, estimated at five hundred, perished in unregulated, often squalid, holding facilities. Others were delivered into homes that faced little to no scrutiny, to parents who, for a host of reasons, could not adopt conventionally.

  These real-life stories left their mark on ordinary people, now in the final season of their lives, as they pass along their experiences with TCHS and Tann’s deeds to future generations through their personal accounts of what happened…and through their DNA.

  A blend of what was happening in the world, from the Great Depression to World War II and the Holocaust, and including the stigma of unwed motherhood, led to the growth of Tann’s network for obtaining and placing children. Poverty-stricken mothers gave up babies out of desperation; unmarried young women were not allowed to keep their newborns because of the taint of illegitimacy; and poor parents, hard at work, often unable to afford babysitters, found their children lured from front yards and into Tann’s chauffeur-driven black limousine as it glided around Tennessee and Arkansas. With her paid network of doctors, social workers, and even boardinghouse owners, Tann snatched babies up as soon as they became available.

  This photograph of Georgia Tann in the parlor of the orphanage was included in one of the home’s marketing brochures for prospective parents.

  Some frantic birth parents—along with the occasional physician—attempted to challenge Tann, a stern-looking woman with short hair and glasses. Tann, however, had political clout and immense wealth, built on the backs of children sold for profit, some of it from checks made out to her personally. With the help of her connections via Memphis mayor E. H. “Boss” Crump, a political kingpin with powerful ties throughout the state, and others in positions of authority, she deflected inquiries with the ease of swatting a mosquito on a Tennessee summer afternoon.

  Georgia Tann writes adoptive parents and asks for reimbursement, with checks made payable to her personally.

  But now, in 1950, the year of Connie’s birth, the end of Tann’s reign of terror nears. Tennessee politics are changing. Crump is out. The new Tennessee governor, Gordon Browning, appoints attorney Robert Taylor to ferret out the grisly truth of TCHS’s Memphis operations. He has already discovered damning evidence. Only a small network of co-conspirators know the truth. With the investigation under way, they flee into the crevasses of Memphis and disappear like rats running into the city’s sewers. Although some community leaders—powerful, wealthy, political—have undoubtedly been complicit, all the blame is conveniently assigned to Tann.

  She holes up in her home, reportedly in the last stages of uterine cancer—too ill, it is said, to respond to the charges or face the public. Governor Browning releases Taylor’s shocking initial report, which details Tann’s years of nefarious dealings in the adoption market. She has, the governor reveals, made herself rich and completed an unknown number of horrendous deals involving flesh-and-blood products.

  Within days, on September 15, 1950, it is announced that she has died. Tann, fifty-nine, never married, leaves her estate to her mother, an adopted daughter, and an adopted sister. The orphanage is not mentioned. The Tennessee State Legislature quickly and quietly seals the paperwork of thousands of TCHS children, which will leave adoptees desperately searching for decades to uncover the truth about their heritage. The investigation concludes that Tann profited from the operation of TCHS in Memphis in excess of five hundred thousand dollars in the last ten years of her life—taking in today’s equivalent of between five and ten million dollars.

  During that period, the investigation found, she placed more than a thousand children for adoption outside the state of Tennessee, principally in New York and California, the exact number not known.

  If Connie, the baby girl born just two months before Tann’s death, and these thousands of other children were characters in a novel, justice as well as blame might have landed squarely on Tann’s head. Police would swoop into her Memphis Receiving Home, rescue her remaining charges, shackle Tann, and whisk her off to jail. She would endure a trial and be forced to stand eye to eye with children she procured in the 1920s or 1930s or 1940s, or with parents whose babies were snatched, or with people in California and New York who paid extra for children because they sensed that if they didn’t, their in-process adoptions might suddenly go wrong.

  But real life does not happen that way.

  Tann dies, never having admitted to her crimes and, supposedly, never having known that she has finally been exposed, and certainly not having paid back the money that supported her lavish lifestyle. She is never made to face families she misused, those good and kind people who will spend a lifetime unraveling the knots she tied, a lifetime trying to heal the hearts she broke.

  But finally, all these years later, her name is ruined, her power gone. Now the triumph belongs to quiet conquerors, who are ready to tell their stories.

  In a piece of history with so many villains, they are the heroes.

  * * *

  —

  STILL IN THE THROES of reading Before We Were Yours, Connie is intrigued when her book-club friend surfaces again with an invitation: “Would you mind talking about you and the book?”

  A seasoned traveler after years in the business world, Connie happily makes plans to hop a plane to Arizona a couple of months later. Spurred on by this interest in her past, she emails the author of the novel, a woman she has never met.

  09/12/17 AT 4:06 P.M.

  Dear Lisa Wingate,

  Reading your new book Before We Were Yours inspired me to go back through all the records, articles, and information I have gathered about my adoption…

  I was reunited with my natural brother after 40 years of not knowing I even had one (same for him). It is a wonderful story if you are interested. I also think you would find interesting all the letters from Georgia Tann and the research for the 40 years that followed.

  I’d also love to know how the other victims are today. What emotional impact this had on them.

  Please let me know if you’d like me to come speak with you, bring any records, or just have a phone call.

  Looking forward to hearing from you,

  Connie

  Lisa is crisscrossing the United States on a book tour when the note lands in her swollen email inbox. The idea of an in-person meeting draws her, but the novel is only weeks old. With stops on her publicity tour from New York City to Los Angeles, she can scarcely keep up with what time zone she’s in. She will ponder the logistics later, when she can settle into her favorite writing chair with her cherished dog, Huckleberry, and sleep in her own bed.

  But as the miles add up, so do emails from other adoptees and their family members. Before We Were Yours stirs an unanticipated response from real-life older adults who have lived with so many questions and too few answers—and from their children a
nd grandchildren, who carry DNA mysteries of their own.

  Aging adoptees seem compelled, often in understated ways, to talk about what happened when their childhoods were redirected by Tann. Even those with the most positive adoptive experiences recall agonizing moments. Many others speak of homes filled with drama and heartache. Some describe unthinkable experiences, both in Tann’s horrific system of holding facilities and in unvetted adoptive homes.

  After all these years, many remain, in ways, incomplete. Their emails reveal deeply personal experiences and haunting quests pursued along lonely paths. They volunteer stirring real-life stories:

  My brother was taken from a hospital. My mother was told he died.

  I was shipped to Hollywood.

  My birth mother was Irish-Catholic, but my adoptive parents were Jewish.

  They ask heartrending questions:

  Was my mother selling her children?

  Could I have been stolen as an infant?

  How could this have happened?

  Why didn’t anyone stop it?

  Packets of information with detailed adoption records wait in Lisa’s post-office box when she returns home. Among them, the compilation of information about Connie’s forty-year effort to unravel the mystery of her adoption.