Before and After Page 7

  Lessons worth carrying in our hearts.

  Lessons I feel like I’ll be hearing more about in the days ahead.

  CHAPTER 6

  ONE DAY OLD AND SENT TO MEMPHIS

  “My wife is the one who found my birth family.”

  HATTIE ESME ARROW IS FORTY years old when she tells her children she is going to Paris, Tennessee, to have an abdominal tumor removed. The truth is much more complicated. The cause of Hattie’s weight gain and rounded middle has a life of its own.

  A son arrives, the last of her eight children by three fathers. This baby, named Edward Jasper Adams, is born on the evening of February 29, 1948, in McSwain’s Clinic in Paris, and the next day he is spirited off to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, one hundred fifty miles away.

  A week later he is adopted.

  It is an oft-used method of procuring inventory for Georgia Tann: communication with a network of doctors and outlying clinics, so as to get her hands on newborns.

  Hattie Esme signs the paperwork with a made-up name, Mary Adams. She claims in the records that the child’s father, Gus Adams, died in 1947, and that the boy needs a home. However, the man listed as his father actually died nineteen months before the baby was born.

  False names. False dates. A false history.

  The baby’s mother is a sharecropper, the records say, and overweight. “Birth mother feels she cannot keep the baby. She is now on relief. She is very average from a plain family of farmers.”

  She has a bad reputation around town, and her other children are treated poorly by local folks. “They’re Hattie Arrow’s kids,” people say, as if that explains everything.

  * * *

  —

  THE JOHNSTONS—CLARA, THIRTY, AND Bud, twenty-eight—live in Memphis. They have tried to adopt for several years and are thrilled by a sudden call from TCHS. They are invited to come pick out a child. They are given the choice of a boy or a girl.

  They choose a boy. A son. Baby Edward, whose name becomes Michael.

  The adoption moves him into a substantially better life.

  His is a tale of six siblings who stay with their mother, one who dies as an infant, and just one who is adopted.

  Michael will not know the rest of his story for more than fifty years.

  Michael

  MICHAEL JOHNSTON LIVES IN MEMPHIS, not far from where our reunion is to take place. In one of those strange happenstances of adoptee connections, an adoptee who’ll be joining us sends Michael’s name my way. One story leads to another. Word gets around. With an estimated five thousand—and perhaps more—children having passed through Georgia Tann’s system, they are out there everywhere.

  When I phone Michael, age seventy at that point, he speaks with the enthusiasm of a busy man who is happy with his life. He tells me he is planning a trip to Nashville to see a brother with whom he has connected only in recent years. Eager to discuss his life story, he speaks with obvious love for his wife, Grace, and describes how she persisted in helping him find out his family history. We talk for a long time, and I make plans to speak with Grace when they return from their trip. The energy level is high, and I can tell that Michael feels he is living in the midst of a miracle.

  Toddler Michael. He believes an uncle who had money helped finance his TCHS adoption. “I was lucky,” Michael says. “I was only eight days old when I was adopted.”

  His information has come to him in bits and pieces. “The forms were full of lies,” he says. The record of his placement shows a Memphis address, but even that appears incorrect. He does know this, though: “April 8, 1948, that was the day my parents picked me up.” The only fee listed on any of the paperwork is a $2.50 charge for an adoption change of name. Michael surmises that his adoptive father’s oldest brother, who had money, paid for his adoption. “He had a very instrumental part in my being adopted. At the time, they didn’t know about the gruesome goings-on at the Tennessee Children’s Home.”

  From his earliest days, Michael knows he is adopted, thanks to a book on the subject that his parents own. “I would sit on their laps, and they would read it to me…I couldn’t have asked for a better upbringing,” he says. He is raised in Memphis, only about a half mile from Elvis’s home. He tells the anecdote cheerfully: “We’d go over, and I’d get autographs from him and sell them to my cousins from out of town.”

  His adoptive father, Bud, is in the Navy in World War II and afterward goes to work for the railroad, where he and Michael’s uncle work for decades. Michael follows in the family tradition. Before his career is established, though, he spends two years in the Army in Vietnam. “Uncle Sam sent me a letter,” he recalls, his voice dry. “Your local draft board wants to see you.” He was three credit hours from being a senior in college.

  A man of strong religious faith, Michael is brought up Baptist, his father a deacon in their church. “I grew up in a good Christian home, but I also grew up an only child,” he says. The comment is reminiscent of those of other adoptees who, though in happy homes, tell me they mourned the absence of siblings. He turns to his faith as he discusses how he found his family: “God let us do this in the right time.”

  For years, he is not that interested in looking into his past, but Grace wants to know more about his medical history. Each has been married once before, and now they have been married to each other for thirty-six years. When Michael develops vascular issues, they send a letter to the Tennessee Department of Human Services and receive a letter saying that the records can be opened for one hundred fifty dollars, plus twenty-five cents a page for copies. “I was still humdrum about it when my wife started. It took months to prove I was who I said I was…it was kind of an ordeal for me to get my adoption records,” he says.

  When he does, only four siblings are listed. Swept along with Grace’s efforts, he is hooked and remembers the exact dates of important discoveries in his search. A major anniversary is June 17, 2005, when he receives his paperwork from the state. Grace immediately attempts to run down the surname Adams. The lies begin to surface. “Georgia Tann wasn’t terribly concerned about records,” Michael says. “We had exhausted everything in West Tennessee and could find no trace of this Adams family. My wife just kept pushing.” With Michael’s health issues, Grace wants to know about medical information that should be shared with his sons. Plus, Michael is close to Grace’s brother and sister, and she believes he deserves to know if he has living siblings of his own.

  Grace gets on the computer every afternoon and on weekends. “I would look up the name Adams and hit dead end after dead end,” she says. “I thought, ‘There’s got to be another way.’ ” Among the meager clues she has to work with are the names of Michael’s birth mother’s brothers and sisters and the name of a town in Michigan.

  Grace remembers a landmark day: “One Saturday, when I’d done everything I could on the computer and nothing was matching up, I called directory assistance in Michigan.” After she explains that she is trying to locate her husband’s family, the operator comes up with one possible number.

  When Grace calls the number, she gets a recording. “I put a message on her answering machine: ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you. There’s a possibility you may be related to my husband…I understand in this day and age if you don’t want to call me back.’ ”

  Improbably, she has found a cousin who lives in a house that belonged to the cousin’s grandparents, dead for years…and the phone number is still listed in the cousin’s father’s name. The woman calls back immediately, asking, “What makes you think I’m related to your husband?”

  Grace gives her some background, including a list of names.

  “Let me call you back. I need to make a phone call,” the stranger says. She hangs up, calls Michael’s birth sister, then calls Grace back. “I’m your husband’s first cousin,” she admits. Michael arriv
es home from work just then. “Wait just a minute,” Grace tells her.

  “I handed the phone to him. From that point on, there’s been a family relationship.”

  Michael still remembers that date, too: October 29, 2005. “I didn’t find my family until then. My wife is the one who found my birth family.”

  His older sister Mildred calls soon after the cousin, saying, “I understand you’re my brother.” She goes on to inform him of the lie her mother told about the tumor. “It all makes sense now…You’ve got a brother and a sister. I don’t know how they’re going to take this.”

  Barely two minutes into the conversation, Mildred asks if she can ask him a personal question.

  “After what you just heard from me, you’re entitled to ask me anything,” he says wryly.

  “Michael, do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?” He tells her “yes” and learns that his siblings are devout Christians, a bond that unites them to this day.

  * * *

  —

  MILDRED’S YOUNGER SISTER MARTHA recalls quite well the “Are you sitting down?” moment when she first heard about Michael, and she recounts the conversation to me with delight. Mildred calls her on that very same Saturday, saying, “You’re not going to believe this. We have another brother. I just talked to him, and his name is Michael. Call him if you want to.”

  “Nah, I’m going to wait.” Martha’s uncertainty is evident. “I’ll get with him later.”

  The next morning, she feels antsy…as if she has to do something, but she doesn’t know what. So she calls her pastor for guidance. After church on Sunday night, she decides: “I’m going to try to call this Michael guy.”

  She and her baby brother talk for an hour and a half, and a special relationship takes root. As they get acquainted, their conversations range from big topics, such as what life was like with Michael’s birth mother, Hattie Esme, to their mutual dislike of milk. “He will not drink milk, and I haven’t drank milk since I quit the bottle,” Martha, seventy-four when we visit, tells me.

  Before they wrap up the call, she tosses him a typical sister taunt:

  “You definitely grew up with a better life than we did…The only thing you missed out on was brothers and sisters—and that’s not always all it’s cracked up to be. You’ve got yours coming, little brother. I took it all those years, being the youngest, and now you’re the youngest.”

  Michael does not hesitate: “Bring it on.”

  That their mother kept this secret from them, not even disclosing it right before she died, at age fifty-eight, baffles the siblings. An aunt confesses, “Well, she didn’t take it to the grave. I knew.”

  The family secret wasn’t so secret after all. Michael’s biological grandmother also knew. She saw a photo taken of him when he was born and said he looked like Granddaddy. And Michael’s oldest half brother, sixteen when Michael was born, spoke of a brother on his deathbed. “We’ve got another brother,” he whispered, troubled in his final days. The family soothed him, thinking he was delirious and remembering a brother who died as an infant. He insisted: “No, we’ve got another brother.”

  “He might have known,” Martha says. “He might have suspected. Mother might have told him. He never breathed a word. She never talked about it.”

  Although Michael has gained two sisters and a brother, he does not get to meet his other siblings, the sisters who died in 1995 and 2002 and the brother who died in 2001, plus the brother who died as an infant. But as Martha tells me the story from her perspective, she reels off those he has seen with the practice of a family matriarch. “He’s met our niece’s daughter, our great-niece; and he has met one of my sister Sandy’s children, and he also met my sister Audra’s grandchild, and her ex-daughter-in-law.” And that is just a start.

  During his initial telephone visits, Michael learns that both his sisters live in Arkansas. Mildred tells him, “You’re family. You’re coming to stay with us.” Three weeks later, Michael and Grace join them for Thanksgiving dinner.

  Thanksgiving that year takes on a whole new meaning. In addition to a big meal, they feast on meetings with other kinfolks, family stories, and lots of sibling teasing. Pure gratitude is the sauce that covers everything.

  Michael’s wife recalls the day: “There was a close bond. They accepted him, and he accepted them…I was just overjoyed. He was developing a relationship with his family like I’d had with mine all along. To me it was as if they’d only been apart for a few months, not for more than fifty years.”

  Though many lies were told, one thing is true: Michael’s adoption saved him from struggling through the sort of unhappy childhood his siblings endured. While the orphanage paperwork is not flattering to Hattie, her reviews from her grown children are worse. Even as older adults, they’re still upset with their mother. Martha tells about each of them suffering frequent beatings, including with a wooden two-by-four. “She couldn’t take care of another child. She never took care of us.”

  Michael is sad but grateful. “None of my siblings have anything good to say about our mama,” he says. “I was so blessed to grow up in the family I did.”

  The birth-family resemblance is strong, though, and his sisters love telling him how much he looks like his older brother Sammy, who initially is reluctant to meet him. Sister Martha recalls the first time she saw Michael that Thanksgiving holiday. “I was looking out the window, and I saw him getting out of the car, and I said to my husband, ‘Oh my God, he looks so much like Sammy.’…I opened the door. It was like we had been together before.” Michael and Martha wonder if they share the same birth father, but they have not tested their DNA.

  As soon as Michael and Grace come inside and meet Martha, she phones her daughters to tell them that her brother is there and that he is a nice person. “Meet your uncle Michael,” she says with a big smile when they arrive.

  There is another round of calls a few minutes later, this time with Michael bringing in his son Kurt. “I want you to talk to your aunt,” he says, and hands over the phone.

  Kurt informs his newly introduced aunt, “I can tell Dad is excited. He gets this funny little laugh when he’s excited.”

  On Friday after that first Thanksgiving, they jump right into what Southern families do: they sit down together and share stories. But they also look at TCHS adoption records. “I saw the handwriting on there and knew it was Mother’s handwriting,” Martha says. At that point, the paperwork is moot. “I was sure by then that he was my brother.”

  Michael’s voice is emotional as he recalls that first meeting and how his wife’s determination made it happen. “She forced me into finding my family,” he says. “It’s been a real blessing.”

  Martha

  BORN MAY 22, 1944, IN West Tennessee, Martha is four when her mother tells her she is going away to have a tumor removed. “I remember her going to the hospital and having surgery. I remember they brought her home in an ambulance, and I remember they carried her in the house. That’s about all I remember.”

  Martha’s world with her birth mother is a sad contrast to the one Michael will experience with his adoptive parents. She grows up not knowing about Michael, but she does know that something is different about her family. Her parents have a child born with spina bifida. He lives five weeks and dies in June. In August, Martha’s dad passes away. She is only two.

  “I don’t remember any of that. I knew I had a dad and didn’t understand why he had died,” she says.

  The stigma of her father’s death, her mother’s behavior, and poverty all hang over the children. People are cruel. Martha remembers being in town and going into a store to get a five-cent ice cream with a brother and a sister. The children are about ten, eight, and six. “We were in there having ice cream, and someone started talking to us, a man. And he said, ‘Who’s y’all’s daddy?’ Someone
said, ‘Those kids don’t have no daddy.’ ”

  An older half brother becomes her father figure. “Growing up without a father was difficult, but I didn’t know it until I was in school,” she says. “People would say bad things…” Hattie and her six children live in a small, four-room house with a tin roof. “We lived out in the country on the farm…my family was very poor,” Martha says. Her late father had not even been a sharecropper but was merely a farmhand.

  Our lengthy phone conversation has been filled with lots of emotion, and Martha pauses to express a moment of compassion for her mother. Her voice wavers as she says, “She was in her thirties when my dad died. She had needs and wants. She was still a young woman, and she was caring for six kids. She did a lot of yelling. She always seemed bitter. Maybe that was because Daddy died and left her six kids to raise. I know it was a hard life…She had been nothing but a homemaker.” During those hard years, Hattie Esme never feels good, has high blood pressure, and is anemic. Every morning she cooks breakfast on a wood stove, then puts great northern beans in the pot, boils potatoes, and makes cornbread while the stove is hot.

  Martha’s thoughts are darker when it comes to Michael’s probable birth father, a married man who might be her biological father, too. “I never liked him…I remember him being around our house too much,” she says. Again, she feels for her mom, though: “I know mothers will do whatever they have to for their children.”

  The man’s visits are seared into her memory. “Sometimes in the summer, when I was about eight, I’d put a quilt on the floor to sleep in the living room…There was only one fan, and we’d sleep with the door open. I can remember hearing him come in at night and get in bed with her. I knew it wasn’t right for him to come into the house at night.”