Terrifying history as fiction
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate is a bestselling 2017 novel, at once sobering and compelling, based on a notorious true-life scandal. A tale of children – real live babies and young girls and boys – being traded for money.
From 1920s to 1950 a social worker called Georgia Tann facilitated the adoption of thousands of children. But this was no regular professional procedure in the course of her work; she orchestrated the abduction of these infants and youngsters from poor families, kidnapping often in broad daylight, gave them new names (to help prevent birth families tracing them), and sold them to celebrities and people with political influence. And she charged exorbitant fees for doing so, adding extra for deliveries out of state.
Whilst in the so-called ‘care’ of orphanages belonging to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society those little people were kept in terrible conditions, abused, terrified, half-starved. They were tied to beds and chairs, beaten, locked in cold dark cupboards, molested. But on special days they were bathed, dressed in proper clothes, fed good food, and paraded before potential parents. Entirely fictitious background stories were spun about them, stories of their exceptional pedigrees and privileged background. And all the while they were on display, they were under dire threats as to what would happen if they dared misbehave or tell tales about their real identities or conditions in the home. That fear remained with them and kept them silent even after their adoptions.
Miss Tann also duped women in maternity wards into signing surrender papers while they were still under sedation. She told parents their babies had died when they hadn’t. And in addition, she headed up a network that under her watch allowed or intentionally caused the deaths of as many as 500 children and infants.
How did she get away with it, and for so long? Well, it has transpired that she had law enforcement agencies and family court judges in her pocket. She seemed untouchable. And in the end, she died of cancer before she could be brought to answer the charges against her.
This much is true.
But Lisa Wingate has used fictional characters to bring the horror of this scandal to life.
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 sisters exist only in these pages, their experiences mirror those reported by children who were taken from their families from the 1920s through 1950.
The year is 1939. The poor but close-knit Floss family live a magical life on the Mississippi on a shantyboat built by her father Briny. Queenie is her mother. When Queenie is taken to hospital during an extremely difficult birth of twins, the children are left unattended on the boat, and it’s then they are all abducted by the river police and taken to Memphis to a children’s home. 
Rill Foss is 12, and feels ultimately responsible for her three younger sisters and a brother, but she is powerless to prevent them being split up and either given to different families or disposed of. All except one of them have their mother’s blonde curly hair and blue eyes putting them much in demand. Their story (told by Rill) fills alternate chapters and is told with immediacy and the brutal clarity and honesty of a child wise beyond her years.
Woven alongside her account, is the present day story of Avery Stafford, a federal prosecutor in Maryland, and her growing awareness of the attrocities perpetrated decades before and the lifelong legacy borne by its victims. Her father is a well known senator and all her privileged life has been spent surrounded by wealth and fame. She has recently come home to support her father while he receives treatment for cancer. His mother, Grandma Judy, to whom Avery feels very close, is losing her grip on reality and now lives in a very upmarket care home. But there are ugly protests swirling about inequality, threatening the standing of the Stafford family, so they redouble their efforts to stay in touch with the less-advantaged. In the course of visiting a more mediocre care home, Avery is accosted by a woman, May Crandall, who appears to think Avery is someone she knows. And on her bedside table is a photograph of four laughing women, one of whom looks remarkably like Grandma Judy.
For my part I should have preferred the links to become apparent much later; it’s obvious from very early on who these old ladies are. However, hats off to the award-winning author, herself a former journalist, for giving us a harrowing glimpse inside this scandalous period of American history. But it leaves one wondering, scared even, about what other terrible crimes have been, or indeed are, being perpetrated in plain sight. And what if anything we are doing about them. What, for example, about the ongoing reports of the Ukranian children – many blonde, blue-eyed – who have been forcibly abducted by Russian troops, standing at over 20,000 according to one source? 20,000 innocent children!
What are we doing about it? What should we do?
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