My friend Patty gave me this book. She had just finished reading it and thought I might like it. I read very little contemporary fiction except for mysteries, but the story sounded interesting.
This is a novel based on the true, horrifying story of Georgia Tann. Tann was a well-respected owner of an adoption agency in Tennessee. What people didn't know was that Tann and her cohort stole poor children, sometimes right off the street, and sold / adopted them out to rich people and celebrities. Stars like Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, and June Allyson adopted children from her. Eleanor Roosevelt consulted her about best adoption practices. They didn't know what a monster she was.
In Before We Were Yours, Avery Stafford, daughter of a politician, is being groomed to take his place after he retires. They're an old southern family, concerned both socially and politically about any unseemly issues both now and in the past. Avery meets an old woman in a nursing home who steals the dragonfly bracelet her grandmother gave her. Avery's mystified by a photograph in the woman's room showing a woman who looks like her grandmother. Her grandmother is getting dementia and forgetting people and things, so Avery can't get much information from her. But she finds out that her grandmother has secrets.
The story skips back and forth between current times and Avery and the past and Rill Foss, the daughter of a family of river rats. When the mother of the river family, Queenie, has trouble in childbirth, her husband, Briny, takes her to a hospital rather than allow her and the twins she's about to have die. While they're gone, the police, under a directive from Tann, kidnap the five children and take them to Tann's orphanage. All the children except one are blond and curly-haired, the kind most desired by adopters. The children are split up and one disappears, perhaps dying at the orphanage. The children are abused, some sexually, and are kept as virtual prisoners, given almost nothing to eat.
Because of the truth of the story, I could hardly put it down. My husband grew up at a school for boys who had lost one or more parent and whose parents couldn't afford to take care of them. Some of the things he's told me about his ten years there, although not as bad as things that happened at Tann's place, had already given me some insight into group homes for children.
Tann renamed the children and falsified birth certificates and other documents, making it almost impossible for parents to find their stolen children, but a few finally did.
In one of those amazing coincidences, Peggy at Peggy's Porch just posted about a woman in England who had been left tied up on a hillside as a baby. She was rescued and finally, through DNA, found who her parents were. Maybe this goes on today, too, but it seems that it was rampant in the 1930s and 40s. I know that things were tough after the depression. In my own family, my grandparents had six children. My grandfather was a proud man and refused any government welfare, but he apparently would accept help of sorts from family. My aunt was raised by my childless great aunt and uncle, and, later, my cousin was raised by my aunt. At least we kept it all in the family.
