Reading “Before we were yours” last year was incredibly powerful. It wrenched my heart out and made me so grateful for the family I have, made me hug my baby tighter. When I read the authors note at the end of the book and found that Georgia Tann was not only a real person but considered the “mother” of modern adoption I was floored.
While Tann did make adoption a more accepted thing, and adoption as a means of actually bringing a child into your family when you couldn’t have children of your own rather than taking them in as extra help around the house. She also tore families apart. Stole children, treated children as commodities and sold them, for outrageous costs.
A couple weeks ago I found “Before and After” on my library app. A nonfiction follow up to “Before we were yours”. Telling the real stories of the children and families affected by TCHS (Tennessee children’s home). It was incredible to hear these real life accounts, children who were better off and grateful, children who were worse off, children who remembered the horrors of the TCHS house. Families who had been searching for their stolen children for decades.
Georgia Tann operated between 1920 and 1950..The children stolen today are elderly the age of my grandparents or great grandparents. Until the 1990s they could not access their own adoption records due to Tennessee law, making it extremely hard to get any information as names, dates and ages were changed in order to stop families from finding their children.
For me one of the most interesting accounts was a child adopted by famous parents from TCHS and shipped off to California. His account was not one of anger at Georgia Tann who was a friend of the family growing up. He truly believed that she was not ripping people off and was only double charging when delivering two children to the same city (charging both families for the same costs). I found it interesting after reading “Before we were yours”, doing my own research into Tann and listening to countless other stories throughout the book that someone still believed Tann was not a bad person. And to them she wasn’t, to them, they had a great life, Tann was an “aunt” a friend of the family they saw often. Someone dear to them, maybe their vision is clouded, maybe they truly believe that she was not evil.
I would say no one is completely good or completely bad, but then there’s serial killers and I just can’t find any good in them. However Steven did have a point. Tann did find a lot of children good homes, there were accounts of children who when they found their birth siblings found the horrors of a childhood they had managed to escape. And yet, I can’t wrap my mind around Tann’s good moments being even on purpose, the good she did seemed to be a fluke, she didn’t do home checks. She didn’t “check in” on the children. She blackmailed the families that received children more often than not, threatening to take the child if they did not pay more.
The other story that stood out to me in such a poignant moment was a woman who firmly believed that if her father (adopted) had not been such an incredible and stubborn person, she would be dead. Her parents (adoptive) had been at the infamous mansion to look at an infant boy, yet they heard her crying from a corner. Neglected, and dying. They refused to take the boy or leave without her. She is alive today because her father (adoptive) refused to be persuaded by Tann to take the healthy little boy and instead paid FIVE HUNDRED dollars to take his daughter home.
I am learning a lot of outrageous and angering things this year. Things I wish had been talked about much sooner. While in the 90s there was a 60 minutes episode about Tann and the children who went through TCHS, and yet I feel that is not enough, why are we not taught in school that the still broken adoption and fostering system we have today stemmed from a monster. How was this scandal so easily swept under the rug. A woman stealing children, bribing politicians, and police. Making what would be hundreds of thousands of dollars today, off of desperate mothers, both birth and adoptive.
I think everyone should read “Before we were yours” . It is a beautiful novel and yet portrays just how horrific this time was for the children of memphis, the children of unwed or poor mothers. However I also believe that if you are going to do any research into Tann, read “Before we were yours”, you need to read “Before and After” you need to listen to these men and women whose lives were severely impacted, not just their and their parents lives, but the generations that came after.
“Before we were yours” by Lisa Wingate
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Before_We_Were_Yours/7_4PDQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
“Before and After” by Judy Christie and Lisa Wingate
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Before_and_After/DKuxDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
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