Dear Readers, I’m
always glad to host Lisa Wingate on this blog. There’s a kind of funny story
about how we first met. A number of years ago, I can’t remember how many, I had
acquired a Lisa Wingate book. She is a fellow Texas author, and I really enjoyed the book,
because I’d been to some of the places she used as her setting. Her characters
leapt off the page right into my heart. When I finished, I found out she had a
book with the title Never Say Never. I
had a book with that title, too. They were vastly different books, but they led
to me contacting Lisa. I’ve featured many of her books on my blog, and they are
so different from mine. I haven’t read one that I didn’t love. Her stories stay
with the reader a long time.
Welcome back, Lisa. How
did this book come about?
For me, every piece of fiction begins with a spark. From
there, the story travels on the winds of research and imagination. Before
We Were Yours had the most unexpected kind of beginning.
I was up late one night working on materials for a different
story and had the TV playing in the background for company. A rerun of the Investigation Discovery: Dangerous Women
cycled through at about two in the morning. I looked up and saw images of an
old mansion. The front room was filled with bassinettes and babies. There were
crying babies, laughing babies, babies who were red-cheeked and sweaty-faced
and sickly looking. I tuned in and immediately became fascinated by the
bizarre, tragic, and startling history of Georgia Tann and her Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s
Home Society. One of the most shocking things about the story was how recent it
was. Georgia Tann and her children’s home operated from the 1920s through 1950.
After watching the segment, I literally could not clear the images from my
mind. I couldn't stop wondering about the thousands of children who had been
victimized by Georgia’s
system, who had been brokered in adoptions for profit.
What became of them? Where were they now?
I couldn’t help but dig into the story. I was shocked by the
scope of Georgia’s
network, the fact that she affected so many children, and the tragic
consequences of her cruelty and greed.
Wow, you’ve caught my
attention. Tell us about the book’s cover and what makes it unique.
The cover actually went through many iterations before we
landed on a combination that seemed just perfect for the story. I have to say,
of all of my book covers on over thirty novels now, this one is my favorite.
There’s just something about the posture of these two little girls that speaks
to me. They represent twelve-year-old Rill, a little girl growing up on her
parents’ Mississippi river shantyboat and her
young sister, Fern. When they and their five siblings are taken from their
parents one stormy night and placed in one of Georgia Tann’s orphan houses,
Rill struggles not only to protect herself, but to keep her siblings together.
That battle, to me is what this picture represents—the uncertainty of their
situation, the strength of their sibling bond, and Rill’s determination to
return to her free floating life on the river.
Please explain and
differentiate between what’s fact and fiction in the book.
Rill and her siblings in the novel and their shantyboat life
on the Mississippi river are fiction. Avery, the thirty-year-old
senator’s daughter in the modern-day portion of the novel is fictional as well.
The Foss children and Avery Stafford began taking shape as I
combed through accounts of birth parents who’d searched for their stolen
children for decades and adoptees who’d searched for their birth families.
Survivors of TCHS care, desperately seeking their true identities, were
confronted with systematic legislative roadblocks, altered paperwork, and
closely held secrets. Because powerful families and Hollywood
celebrities were involved in TCHS adoptions, and because many people felt that
the children should be left where they were, there was pressure to legalize
even the most irregular of Tann’s adoptions and seal the records, which was
exactly what happened.
As with most stories that are true or partially true, the
dividing line between good and evil is murky in the case of Georgia Tann and
her Memphis Tennessee Children’s Home Society. The journey of the Foss children
in the novel reflects this. Certainly, TCHS removed some children from unfit
birth families and facilitated adoptions into safe, loving homes that provided
great opportunity. Sadly, thousands of others were left with lasting damage and
questions that would never be answered.
I hope Before We Were Yours, in some way,
tells their stories. Yes, it’s fiction. Rill and her four siblings, growing up
on their family’s shantyboat in the Mississippi River
were figments of my imagination. But in a way, they existed. In a way, they are
any one and every one of these children, taken from their families, torn from
their lives with no explanation or understanding of what was happening, and
deposited into an unregulated, unfit, and politically corrupt system that
operated not based on child welfare, but on profit. Those were the stories I
wanted to tell––the stories told in the smallest voices or never told at all.
I’m glad you wrote
this story. I had been aware of this situation, but I didn’t know how long it
went on or how horrible some of the cases were. How much research did you have
to do for this book?
The book was research-intensive. I took in nearly everything
I could find about the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis and Georgia Tann. In large part, I
found bits of the story here and bits there. The Discovery Channel’s Deadly Women and 60 Minutes provided helpful information and visuals. Several books,
including, Babies For Sale by Linda Austin and The Baby Thief by Barbara Raymond were
particularly helpful in researching the adoption scandal. Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat Journal is a beautiful
account of shantyboat life on the river. I also spent time in Memphis, researching locations, combing
through the river museum, visiting the library and the university’s photo
archives, and talking to people who remembered the scandal.
What are some of the
most interesting things you found about this subject that you weren’t able to
use in the story?
Because Before We Were Yours is fiction, I
was able to thread in what I felt were the most interesting pieces of the
true-life history of Georgia Tann and her Memphis
branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. One interesting aspect of the
true story that isn’t in the novel is the special investigation that was
conducted as Georgia Tann’s operation was finally shut down in 1950. The
original report to Governor Browning was filled with information about Tann’s
nefarious methods, the deaths of children in her system of unregulated boarding
homes, and the sheer panic of adoptive families who were terrified that the
children they’d raised for years would be taken away. There were also some
wonderful newspaper stories written years later, telling of birth families
finally reunited.
What inspired and
surprised you while you were writing the book?
The resilience of the children who had survived stints in
TCHS care (and in the care of other orphans’ homes) and their determination to
regain their identities, to resist being defined by the circumstances they’d
been delivered into through no fault of their own.
What do you hope the
reader takes away from the story?
I hope readers take away the message that we need not be
defined by our pasts. I hope Rill’s experience resonates with readers who have
in some way surrendered to the wounds of painful past experiences. Rill faces
that battle as she matures. As an old woman, she advises thirty-year-old Avery,
“A woman’s past need not predict her future. She can dance to new music if she
chooses. Her own music. To hear it, she must only stop talking. To herself, I
mean. We’re always trying to persuade ourselves of things.” Living in a defensive
posture is another form of allowing other people to dictate who we are and what
we believe about ourselves. Letting go, dancing to our own music is a risk, but
on the other side of that process lays light, freedom, and fulfillment. That’s
what I hope people take away from Before We Were Yours. Our lives have
purpose, but to fulfill that purpose we must first claim ourselves.
I also hope that, in a broader sense, the story of Rill and
the Foss children serves to document the lives of all the children who
disappeared into Georgia Tann’s unregulated system. Only by remembering history
are we reminded not to let it repeat itself. It’s important that we, ordinary
people busy with the rush of everyday life, remember that children are
vulnerable, that on any given day, thousands of children live the uncertainty
of Rill’s journey. We have to be aware. We must be kind neighbors, determined
protectors, willing encouragers, wise teachers, and strong advocates, not just
for the children who are ours by birth, but for all children.
What is the next
project you’re working on?
I can’t imagine not being at work on a new story, and yes,
of course I am at work on another novel now. I think this will be novel number
thirty-one. As always, this new story began with a piece of history that was
huge in its day. Just a little over a century ago, anyone, anywhere would have
recognized the names. Today, hardly anyone would. Through fiction, I have the
chance to resurrect these people whose lives have gone into quiet slumber. I
learn about their world and slip into their lives. As always, the experience is
both challenging and wonderful. I’ve finished the first draft, which is always
the hard part. The first draft, for me, is about figuring out the story,
sifting through loads of raw ore and finding the gold nuggets. It’s hard work
and heavy lifting, backbreaking in a way. The second draft is about getting the
story into shape for other people to read–shining up the gold nuggets and
hanging them on a string. That’s the fun part.
What do you do when
you have to get away from the story for a while?
Photography! I love it and anyone who follows my Facebook
page will find tons of photos, from the vast mountain vistas to little wonders
that could easily go unnoticed underfoot. I love looking at life through the
lens of a camera.
Please give us the
first page of the book.
Baltimore, Maryland
A U G U S T 3, 1939
My story begins on a sweltering August night in a place I
will never set eyes upon. The room takes life only in my imaginings. It is
large most days when I conjure it. The walls are white and clean, the bed
linens crisp as a fallen leaf. The private suite has the very finest of
everything. Outside, the breeze is weary, and the cicadas throb in the tall
trees, their verdant hiding places just below the window frames. The screens
sway inward as the attic fan rattles overhead, pulling at wet air that has no
desire to be moved.
The scent of pine wafts in, and the woman’s screams press
out as the nurses hold her fast to the bed. Sweat pools on her skin and rushes
down her face and arms and legs, She’d be horrified if she were aware of this.
She is pretty. A gentle, fragile soul. Not the sort who
would intentionally bring about the catastrophic unraveling that is only, this
moment, beginning. In my multifold years of life, I have learned that most
people get along as best they can. They don’t intend to hurt anyone. It is
merely a terrible by-product of surviving.
It isn’t her fault, all that comes to pass after that one final,
merciless push. She produces the very last thing she could possibly want.
Silent flesh comes forth—a tiny, fair-haired girl as pretty as a doll, yet blue
and still.
The woman has no way of knowing her child’s fate, or if she
does know, the medications will cause the memory of it to be nothing but a blur
by tomorrow. She ceases her thrashing and surrenders to the twilight sleep,
lulled by the doses of morphine and scopolamine administered to help her defeat
the pain.
To help her release everything, and she will.
Sympathetic conversation takes place as doctors stitch and
nurses clean up what is left.
“So sad when it happens this way. So out of order when a
life has not even one breath in this world.”
“You have to wonder sometimes…why…when a child is so very
wanted….”
I am eager to read
the book. How can readers find you on the Internet?
Pinterest: https://pinterest.com/lisawingatebook/
Where can I read and
excerpt of Before We Were Yours?
On my website, of course. Sign up for my newsletter while
you are there, if you wish.
Here is the direct link to the excerpt:
Thank you, Lisa, for sharing this book with us. I eagerly await the release date in June. And they are available by pre-order on Christianbook.com and Amazon.com.
Readers,
here are links to the book. By using one when you order, you help support this
blog.
Before We Were Yours - Christianbook.com (best pre-order price Hardback)
Before We Were Yours: A Novel
- Kindle
Before We Were Yours: A Novel - Amazon Hardback
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