Before We Were Yours(122)
Sometimes, my sister and I laugh over our clever ruse. “We’re really sisters, not friends,” I remind her. “But don’t tell them. It’s our secret.”
“I won’t tell.” She smiles in her sweet way. “But sisters are friends as well. Sisters are special friends.”
We recall our many Sisters’ Day adventures from years past, and she begs me to share what I remember of Queenie and Briny and our life on the river. I tell her of days and seasons with Camellia, and Lark, and Fern, and Gabion, and Silas, and Old Zede. I speak of quiet backwaters and rushing currents, the midsummer ballet of dragonflies and winter ice floes that allowed men to walk over water. Together, we travel the living river. We turn our faces to the sunlight and fly time and time again home to Kingdom Arcadia.
Other days, my sister knows me not at all other than as a neighbor here in this old manor house. But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present as a pulse.
“Aren’t they so very sweet?” Judy points to the young couple strolling the garden paths near Manor Lake, hand in hand. They make a lovely picture together.
I pat Judy’s arm gently. “That is your granddaughter. I imagine she’s come here to visit with you. And she’s brought her beau along. He’s a looker, that one. I told her the first time I saw them together, he was a keeper. I recognize a spark when I see it.”
“Oh, of course, my granddaughter.” Judy pretends to have known it all along. Some days she would have, but not on this particular day. “And her beau.” She squints toward the garden path. “I’m having trouble calling up the names just now. My silly mind, you know.”
“Avery.”
“Oh yes…Avery.”
“And Trent.”
“We knew a Trent Turner once, didn’t we? He was a dear man. He sold the cottage lots adjacent to the Edisto place, I think.”
“Yes, he did. That is his grandson coming up the walk with Avery.”
“Well, do tell.” Judy waves enthusiastically, and Avery waves in response. Then she and her beau disappear momentarily behind the arbor. They don’t come out as quickly as they might.
Judy presses a hand over her mouth, chuckling. “Oh my.”
“Indeed.” I remember lost loves and loves that never were. “We Fosses have always been an impassioned lot. I don’t suppose that will ever change.”
“I don’t believe it ever should,” Judy agrees, and we fall together in the sweet embrace of sisters, laughing at our own secrets.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
As you close these pages, perhaps you’re wondering, How much of this story is true? That question is, in some ways, difficult to answer. If you’d like to dig more deeply into the real-life history of baby farms, orphanages, changes in adoption, Georgia Tann, and the scandal surrounding the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, you’ll find excellent information in Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children by Viviana A. Zelizer (1985), Babies for Sale: The Tennessee Children’s Home Adoption Scandal by Linda Tollett Austin (1993), Alone in the World: Orphans and Orphanages in America by Catherine Reef (2005), and The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption by Barbara Bisantz Raymond (2007), which also contains interviews with several of Georgia Tann’s victims. For a view of the scandal as it broke, see the original Report to Governor Gordon Browning on Shelby County Branch, Tennessee Children’s Home Society (1951), which is available through the public library system. There are also many newspaper and magazine articles available about the scandal as it happened and about the reunions of birth families in later years, as well as coverage in episodes of 60 Minutes, Unsolved Mysteries, and Investigation Discovery’s Deadly Women. All of these sources were invaluable to me as research materials.
The Foss children and the Arcadia were formed from the dust of imagination and the muddy waters of the Mississippi River. Though Rill and her siblings exist only in these pages, their experiences mirror those reported by children who were taken from their families from the 1920s through 1950.
The true story of Georgia Tann and the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society is a bizarre and sad paradox. There is little doubt that the organization rescued many children from deplorable, dangerous circumstances, or simply accepted children who were unwanted and placed them in loving homes. There is also little doubt that countless children were taken from loving parents without cause or due process and never seen again by their desperately grieving biological families. Survivor accounts bear out that empty-armed birth mothers pined for their missing children for decades and that many of those children were placed in holding facilities where they were neglected, molested, abused, and treated as objects.
Single mothers, indigent parents, women in mental wards, and those seeking help through welfare services and maternity clinics were particular targets. Birth mothers were duped into signing paperwork while under postpartum sedation, were told that turning over temporary custody was necessary to secure medical treatment for their children, or were often simply informed that their babies had died. Children who lived through stints in the home’s custody––those who were old enough to have memories of their prior lives––reported having been whisked from front porches, from roadsides while walking to school, and, yes, from houseboats on the river. Essentially, if you were poor and you lived, stayed, or stopped over in the proximity of Memphis, your children were at risk.