Introduction
Ross Gericke: Hello and welcome to Unreadable, the official Forsyth County Public Library podcast for news, upcoming programs, and recommendations. I’m your host Ross Gericke, the Branch Manager at Hampton Park.
In this episode, I talk with number one New York Times bestselling author Lisa Wingate about her book Before We Were Yours. Before We Were Yours is our eleventh annual Forsyth Reads Together selection, and Lisa Wingate will be visiting the Forsyth Conference Center in person on March 26, 2024 at 7:00 PM to talk about her book. Make sure to visit our event calendar online to register and be on the lookout for Lisa Wingate’s next novel Shelterwood, out in June.
Now on with the show.
Interview
Ross Gericke: Hello, Lisa, and welcome to the podcast.
Lisa Wingate: Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to chat with you about books today.
Ross Gericke: It's my favorite topic, too. So before reading your book, I had never heard of Georgia Tann or the Tennessee Children's Home Society. How did you find out about it, and why did you decide to write a novel about it?
Lisa Wingate: You know, I never know what I'm going to write about it. It's always something that just sparks my mind, and I want to know more about it. And then I sort of think, well, maybe other people want to know more about it, too.
And so, I randomly came across Georgia Tann in the Tennessee Children's Home Society, and when I heard about it, I just thought: how does this happen? How did it go on for decades? How do thousands of children be, you know, passed through the hands of this for-profit adoption agency being run by this kind of mastermind criminal woman, and nobody does anything about it? And it wasn't even that it was super quiet. I mean, these kids were advertised in ads in the newspaper, and [there were] little cute pictures of kids with captions like “Want a perfect Christmas present?” or “Tommy wants to play ball, but he needs a daddy. He could be yours for the asking.” Just crazy stuff that by today's standards, you think: Why didn't anybody do anything? Why wasn't anybody flabbergasted or horrified, or why didn't anybody question or investigate? And so I wanted to know more about it. I wanted to know how much of what I had heard was true. I researched it and found out even more things were true.
Then as a fiction writer you’re always looking at whose eyes would I tell the story through in a novel, because in a novel, of course, you're looking at it from somebody's lens and from the character’s lens. And see, I thought maybe a social worker or something, [or] a teacher, somebody who kind of perceives what's going on, but then I sort of realized that the story that really hadn't been told was the story of the children. What was it like for these kids who got taken from their families and taken into this network? And what was that experience like? How did they survive it? How did they go on and build lives for themselves? How did they feel about it afterward? So that was the genesis of these five little shanty boat kids, living on the Mississippi River, who randomly crossed the radar of this woman who had a whole network trolling for kids that she could appropriate into her system.
Ross Gericke: So, Georgia Tann is important to the novel because of her place in history, though she only features in a few key scenes in your book, but was it difficult to write not just an actual historical character but one with such a complex legacy?
Lisa Wingate: It was difficult, and people have asked me often what motivated her [and] why did she do what she did. She's a little bit of an enigma. I mean, she definitely has the characteristics of just basically a sociopath who enjoyed the power, the fame, [and] the glory of being able to give people something they really wanted or pulled out something they really wanted. She definitely has those tendencies. We can only go back and theorize as to how she got this way. The why is maybe a little easier. I mean, she made a lot of money at it. She ran in the best circles. She achieved a degree, a fairly high degree, of public accolades for her work placing orphans. I mean, she kind of got famous for it.
The why she did it in the end is a little easier to figure out than how she became the kind of person who could let hundreds of children die in her care and not be bothered by it, or who could refer to children — they used to send letters, she and her lawyer, and there would be a request for five-year-old blonde boy or something, and they'd say do we have that in inventory — so the kind of person who can refer to kids as inventory.
Ross Gericke: Do you see her legacy as largely evil, or did she manage to do any good, intentional or not?
Lisa Wingate: Well, it's both, really. Certainly there were some kids who were taken out of horrible situations and ended up in good adoptions. That's purely accidental because none of it’s vetted basically, according to what's best for the kids. So [for] the kids who are removed, it's really not vetted — does this kid need to be removed? It's just can we get a hold of this kid, and can we market this kid. So, some kids were in situations they needed to be removed from, but many weren't. And it's the same with the adoptive homes. It's just a situation of can these people pay, will they pay, and will they maybe continue to pay over years and years in the future? So, some of the adoptions were good. Some weren’t.
She also creates by her brilliant marketing the modern idea we have of adoption. Prior to Georgia Tann, adoption — taking in a child as your son, who's not yours biologically, as your son or daughter, heir to your fortune, it just really wasn't done much at all. I mean, people would take in kids as wards, or maybe take them and let them work on their farm, or something like that, but the idea that you could take a child in — orphans were sort of looked down on as kind of damaged because they were orphans, and she creates this idea that you could take a child in, just the same as your biological child. She would say, they’re blank slates; they’re blank slates. If you surround them with beauty and culture, you can make them anything you want them to be. Of course even the newborn is not a blank slate. There's a lot of DNA there that comes with the child, so it was false advertising. But, she does create modern adoption as we understand it today. So, that in the long run, of course, becomes a good thing for a lot of kids who need homes who don't pass through Georgia Tann's hands.
Ross Gericke: I learned a lot while reading your novel, on many different levels but also about shanty boats. I didn't know about those. How did you come up with the idea of having the Foss family living on the Arcadia at the beginning of Before We Were Yours?
Lisa Wingate: That kind of came out of the research. I had read where Georgia Tann — she procured kids from all over the place, and whole groups of siblings were just gone when they were walking some dusty, dirt road out in the country going home from school. Kids disappeared off the porches of poor shanty shacks in poor parts of town and whatnot. But one of the places that was mentioned were the shanty camps on the river. That was a way of life in those decades. Tens of thousands of people who either lost their fortunes in the Great Depression, or just wanted to, cobbled together a shanty boat. Usually, they were just a drift craft, and they would drift down the Mississippi River and dock when they wanted to and where they wanted to, and when they got tired of it or the work played out, or whatever they were there for, they just drifted south some more. [When] they got all the way south, they’d catch a tow behind a motorized boat and go however far north they wanted to.
So it seemed like a fascinating type of life. But it was also a population who were very, very transient and usually very poor [and] had no contacts in Memphis. So, the shanty camps were one of the places where she got kids because they were the perfect victims. They're a little naïve about the world. They maybe don't understand anything about this thing that — people in Memphis, especially in poor parts of town, a lot of them had an idea something was going on. Kids were disappearing, but they didn't really understand it. Some of them understood it but couldn't do anything about it. But the shanty people, they don't know. They've just drifted up to Memphis. They have no idea what they might be getting into.
Ross Gericke: Your novel strikes an interesting balance, I thought, between some very dark subject matter but also being a very approachable and hopeful novel. You structure the novel with sort of a juxtaposition of the Stafford family’s wealth in the modern day sections and the struggles of the Foss family in the past. Was that structure something that came early in the creation process of the novel or something you arrived at later?
Lisa Wingate: It was something that came early. I really like — I love seeing a story kind of through two lenses, especially a present day lens or sort of present-day lens, more of a modern lens, and then the what-happened-before. I'm always fascinated with the concept — I go through old towns and things when I'm traveling, and you see buildings that are houses and they're abandoned now, and you think: what went on there? What happened on this piece of ground that nobody knows about anymore or it's been forgotten? I'm always fascinated: how did that affect what's going on today, but people don't know it today because they don't know what happened there? Because everything, every town, every person, every community, every society is a product of all the things that came before. And so, I'm a little fascinated with maybe some of the lost history that we don't understand today, how it has created who we are and how we view things, but it's there. And what if we could rediscover it and understand how we came to be what we are. It was definitely an intentional creation.
And the more I studied it, the more I realized there are a whole lot of people affected by this, by what she does. One child, then, has a whole birth family, who have this missing limb in their family, who's just gone then when the child disappears. They wonder, they wonder, they wonder; they never know: is the child okay? Is the child out there? Will we ever see the child again? On the other side, you've got this whole adoptive family, and they're all changed too. And if they've gotten in business with Georgia Tann or tied up in Georgia Tann's business, then they have an ongoing worry for all the years because she was very good at manipulating — you see a lot of, when you do the research, you see a lot of letters and checks and people sending photos back to the orphanage year after year after year about how much they appreciate little Judy or little Johnny and what a wonderful baby, and here's some money for the orphanage. And people were — they had that hanging over their heads then, after they had adopted from her, and so they have a thing going on too.
And so, I was fascinated with — all these people are out there today, and they are tied up in this history. It is part of their history, but many of them don't even know it because adoption wasn't talked about very much in that time. It was a little bit of a thing you kept quiet or didn't tell at all. And certainly once the scandal broke, people didn't go around telling about it if they had it. You put that Tennessee Children's Home Society paperwork in the bottom of a drawer somewhere. So a lot of people are out there who never even realized they were connected to this, or if they knew it, they didn't realize 10-20 years later what it may mean if you were a Tennessee Children's Home Society adoptee.
Ross Gericke: All right. So, this next one is a bit of a spoiler. So listeners who want to avoid all spoilers might want to pause here [and] come back later after finishing the novel, but I want to know. So, Camellia. She's different from the rest of her family. She's dark-haired. She's fiery, and honestly, I thought she might end up being the main character of the book. However, despite all of her character development, she disappears early in the novel under terrible circumstances, never to be seen again. Why?
Lisa Wingate: Why does Camellia disappear? There are a few things at play there. One is the fact that George Tann’s most marketable commodity were the blonde — little blonde-haired children. So yeah, that was her biggest market. She was incredibly clever in her crime. She found a pretty good market, too, for kids who were not blonde-haired or blue-eyed or fit that profile, and she marketed a lot of kids — she sort of made inwards into the Jewish Community through some rabbis and other things — there were many kids who didn't fit that blonde, blue-eyed profile, who she marketed to Jewish parents who wanted to adopt a kid of Jewish Heritage and didn't have that many outlets because you couldn't really adopt outside your faith or whatever. So, she made a big market creating Jewish babies who might have been the kid of a Tennessee dirt poor sharecropper one day, but the next day, on paper, they were Jewish. They were the offspring of Jewish parents, who died in a car wreck or somebody couldn’t keep the baby.
Camellia certainly could have gone into that route. However, there's also a sad truth in that a lot of kids did not survive these orphan homes where they were boarded. Georgia Tann had a main receiving home, which was really infants and babies, up to small toddlers, who could go to this main receiving home. She actually didn't live there, but her offices were there. That was the kind of picture postcard for the Tennessee Children's Home Society, this big mansion with all these little babies in it. But around town, she had a network of boarding homes. Now the boarding homes, they are unregulated. They are run by anybody. The people are not vetted. The kids are not checked on. The people are getting paid a certain amount every week to keep them. So yeah, there's really no incentive for these people to feed the children [or] properly wash the children. Kids would show up in court with body vermin, lice, and other things. And of course, there were people who ran these boarding homes for terrible reasons as well. There were a lot of people who had substance abuse problems and whatnot. There were certainly people who just wanted to get their hands on little kids. It was a terrible, terrible system.
And some kids did not make it out of this system. Because when you have those kind of people caring for little kids, it's a recipe for bad things to happen. And sometimes — the reason we never find Camellia in the story, when she is just gone, and we don't really know what happened to her — people have said why didn't they find her in the end and that seemed like a dishonor to families who may never have that answer. There were many groups of siblings who found most of their siblings but never found one or never found two, and they will never know, unless DNA turns it up or something at this point, they will literally never know what happened to that one of their siblings.
And so, that's why Camellia's story goes the way it does because that's the reality. I mean kids would be separated. They would be told — they may be paired with another kid they've never met and they're taken to some hotel across the country to be delivered off to — this is your new mommy and daddy — and told to say you're not eight years old, you’re six years old, and this little kid who you are with, this is your sister, you're to say this is your sister. And here's the name you are now. I mean, it's crazy what these little kids went through and amazing that any of them were ever able to reunite their whole sibling groups.
Ross Gericke: Yeah, I was afraid that would be the answer.
So, you worked with Judy Christie to create a follow-up nonfiction book, Before and After. I haven't had a chance to read the book yet, but I do have a copy that I checked out from the library right here. What inspired you to continue digging into the history of the Tennessee Children's Home Society after you had finished your novel?
Lisa Wingate: I didn't really intend to. They found me. When I was writing the novel, I had talked to — interviewed — a couple of real life survivors who were both baby adoptees, so they didn't remember their trip through the orphan houses. But they had been adopted into prominent Memphis families, and at the time, they would talk to me on the proviso that I wouldn't out them, that I wouldn’t mention them and their names in conjunction with this thing that had happened in Memphis.
So, I didn't really expect to hear from anybody, but then all of a sudden, I started hearing from — at first on the book tour live and then by the time I got home in late summer from the book tour — people were emailing me about it, and they kept kind of asking: how did the others feel about it? Would you ever think of getting us all together? Because by the time I come along in history — early on there had been Denny Glad and the Tennessee Right to Know Project, who were this group of women who worked incredibly hard to piece together old court records, kept card files of them. When an adoptee would come along asking for information, because this is the era of sealed paperwork in Tennessee, they would often be able to say yeah, we have you in what we've copied down out of these public court dockets and here's the information we have on you.
By the time I come along — they shut that down once the records were open to Tennessee — so by the time Before We Were Yours comes out, these people — there's no Facebook page. There's no clearing house. There's no place for these people to find each other. It just kind of went on long enough and people asked me enough, and I was invited to go back and speak in Memphis at the graveyard, where the official Tennessee Children's Home Society plot is, Elmwood Cemetery. Even though I was kind of nervous about how it would go, I just thought if you're ever gonna do it, this is the time and place. You're gonna be in Memphis. The nineteen babies they ever admitted died are buried in Elmwood. Hundreds disappeared, but the admitted ones are buried there. I just thought if there's ever a place to gather these people it's there.
I went back to some of the ones who had asked me the most and said plan what you want, I'll be there. I'll let everybody know who's contacted me and all the survivors and next generations and next generations I've heard from, and we'll see what happens. Because it seemed wrong that the stories of these people are dying with these people, and sometimes the families don't even really know the stories because these people have been discouraged from talking about it all these years. I just thought it's a shame if it's not recorded. So, I asked my journalist friend Judy Christy, my coauthor for the book, would you come interview the people. I don't know if it'll be a magazine article or a book, like what it'll be, but at least the stories will be recorded, and the rest is history. It became this book, Before and After.
Ross Gericke: That's amazing. You actually got to be a part of history then, at least part of recording it, right?
Lisa Wingate: Yes, absolutely.
Ross Gericke: Do you have anything else coming up that we should be on the lookout for?
Lisa Wingate: The next book is coming June 4th. So almost seven years to the day from when Before We Were Yours came out, which is shocking to me. I feel like it was a couple years ago. I was getting ready to go speak somewhere the other day, and it was somewhere I had been on tour for Before We Were Yours, and [I thought] I was just there a couple years ago, what am I gonna say that's new. Then I realized that came out in 2017, so it's been seven years almost, which is just crazy.
So, Shelterwood — there was a book in between there, The Book of Lost Friends came out too, and Before and After. Anyway, it's been a long time, so the new book comes out June 4th. The name is Shelterwood, shelter and wood all in one word, which is a logging term for the big trees that protect the forest underneath and protect the small trees. And if you cut down the shelterwood, the little – everything else in the forest doesn't do very well. It's oddly enough another orphan story but of a completely different kind.
Ross Gericke: Any hints about the plot you'd like to give?
Lisa Wingate: Yeah, no, I'm happy to tell. I can finally tell. For the longest time it was a secret. So I grew up in Oklahoma in areas that would have been originally governed in the days of Indian Territory by the Creek, Cherokee, and Choctaw Nations, so kind of in northeastern, north central, [and] the central southern Oklahoma. While researching The Book of Lost Friends, I came across another just unbelievable piece of history about what happens to —what had been the communal tribal plots of land for what was called the Five tribes, so the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Choctaws is divided up at the turn of the century and individual land ownership is given to each member of the tribe. And that sets off a course of events. So that means little children become landowners, because they are registered members of the tribes. And when oil is discovered on that land, that sets off a series of events that is just amazing.
A small, similar story is told in Killers of the Flower Moon about what went on with oil rights among the Osage. But the Osage owned their land in a little bit different way than the lands of the Five Tribes. So among the Five Tribes, these landowning children become really choice victims for the people who are trying to get a hold – who are trying to make their fortunes in oil basically and what ensues is kind of like the Georgia Tann Scandal. It's one of those things you think: how did this go on this long, for decades? Why didn't anybody stop it? Why wasn't anything done about it? And when I started to read what had really happened, this nearly buried piece of history, and the women who tried to fight it and eventually did force Congress a few decades later to do something about it federally, I thought this story needs to be told. The women's side of this story, of these incredibly brave women who were willing to go against all this money and power on behalf of these children, needs to be told.
Ross Gericke: I'm all in. That sounds exciting. I know that one will be popular here at the library too. Probably have a pretty good sized holds list on it. Lisa, that sounds amazing. Can't wait to see you at the end of March. Thank you for coming on the podcast.
Lisa Wingate: It's been such a pleasure. I can't wait to visit.
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