Before We Were Yours(81)

Her voice cracks and trails away. She pushes upright in the bed, clears her throat. “I was born on the Mississippi River in a shantyboat my father built. Queenie was my mother and Briny was my father. I had three little sisters, Camellia, Lark, and Fern, and a brother, Gabion. He was the youngest….”

She closes her eyes, but I can see them moving under thin, blue-veined lids as she continues her story. It is as if she’s dreaming, watching the images float by. She talks about being taken off the boat by the police, ending up in the children’s home. She describes weeks of uncertainty and fear, workers who were cruel, separation from her siblings, horrors like the ones Trent and I have read about.

The story she tells is heartbreaking yet mesmerizing. We stand on either side of the bed, barely breathing as we listen. “I lost track of my other three siblings at the home,” she says at the end. “But Fern and I were fortunate. We were kept together. Adopted.”

She stares out the window, and for a moment, I wonder if she’s told us all she intends to. Finally, she returns her attention to Trent. “The last time I saw your grandfather as a child, I was afraid he would be one of those who wouldn’t survive the home. He was such a timid little thing. Always in trouble with the workers without meaning to be. He was practically like a little brother by the time I left. I never thought I’d see him again. When a man named Trent Turner contacted me years later, I assumed he was a fraud. I didn’t recognize the name, of course. Georgia Tann habitually gave new names to the children—to help prevent their birth families from finding them, no doubt. I can tell you that I remember her as a horrible, cruel woman and that I believe the extent of her crimes may never be fully told. Few of her victims were able to do what your grandfather did—reclaim a birth name and a heritage. He even found his biological mother before she died, and he reunited with other relatives. He became Trent again, but when he was little, I knew him as Stevie.”

Her attention wanders again, her mind seeming to travel with it. I shift the photo of the four women just a bit, make a few inferences. In court, this would be leading the witness, but here it’s just helping to uncover the story. “Are these your sisters in the photo with you and my grandmother?”

I know the three women on the left must be sisters or cousins. It’s obvious enough, even with the hats shading their faces. I’m still troubled by their similarities to my grandmother. The hair color. The pale eyes that seem to reach beyond the photo. But the facial structures, at least as much as I can see of them, are different. The features of the three sisters are substantial, perfectly chiseled. They have wide, square chins, and ski-slope noses, and almond-shaped eyes that slant upward slightly at the edges. They are beautiful. My grandmother is lovely as well, but her features are thin and birdlike, her blue eyes almost too large for her face. They are luminous, even in black-and-white.

May takes the photo and holds it in her shaky hands. Her study seems endless. I have to force myself not to prod. What’s going on in her mind? What is she thinking of? What is she remembering?

“Yes. The three of us—Lark, Fern, and me. Bathing beauties.” She gives a quick, wicked giggle and taps Trent’s hand. “I think your grandmother worried a bit whenever we came around. But she needn’t have. Trent loved her dearly. We were so grateful to him for helping us to find one another. Edisto was a special place for us. It was where we were first reunited.”

“Was that where you met my grandmother?” I crave a simple answer to all of this. One I can live with. I don’t want to find out that my grandmother was somehow paying penance for our family’s involvement with the Tennessee Children’s Home Society—that my grandfathers were among the many politicians who protected Georgia Tann and her network, who turned a blind eye to atrocities because powerful families did not want her crimes revealed or their own adoptions nullified. “Was that where the two of you became friends?”

Her finger traces the white frame on the photo. She’s looking at my grandmother. If only I could climb inside her mind or, better yet, inside the picture. “Yes, yes it was. We’d crossed paths at society events before I ever knew her, though I will say, I had a completely wrong impression of her prior to making her acquaintance. She grew to be a dear friend. And she was so very generous to loan my sisters and me the cottage on Edisto from time to time, so we could get away together. That photo was taken during one of our trips. Your grandmother joined us there. It was a lovely late-summer day on the beach.”

The explanation soothes me, and I’d like to stop there, but it doesn’t explain why the words Tennessee Children’s Home Society were on the typewriter ribbon in my grandmother’s cottage…or why Trent Turner, Sr., was in communication with my grandmother.

“Trent’s grandfather left an envelope for my Grandma Judy,” I say. “Judging by her daybook, I think she was making plans to pick it up before she got so sick. Inside the envelope, there were documents from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. Health assessments and surrender papers for a baby boy named Shad Arthur Foss. Why would she have wanted those?”

I’ve caught May off guard now. There is more to this story, but she’s biting down hard on it.

Her eyelids flutter and descend. “I’m so very…so very…tired all of a sudden. All this…this talking. It’s more than I usually…do…in a week.”