Before We Were Yours: It’s much bigger than just a heartbreaking story
This book is written from two perspectives: An 80 something year old woman spending her last days at a care facility, and a 30 something year old woman at the brink of her political career, preparing to take the seat of Senator after her father. The old woman, Rill spends her days thinking of her early life as a river gypsy. The younger one, Avery spends her days keeping up with her fathers political schedule, shadowing him and learning his ways. Their paths cross when Avery visits the same care facility as Rill for a political campaign. Out of nowhere, Rill grabs her wrist. Shocked, Avery watches as Rill is taken away by the facility staff, to later realize that her bracelet is missing. She goes back to the care facility to pick it up — only to find out that Rill had taken her bracelet (a family heirloom) because she recognizes it. Rill seems to know Avery’s grandmother Judy but neither Avery nor her parents have ever heard of Rill. With Avery’s curiosity at its peak, she visits her grandmother at Magnolia Manor, a better fancier care facility. Sadly, her grandmother Judy is much further down the path of Alzheimer’s than she realized and Avery ends up with even more questions than answers. However one thing was clear — both of these women did know each other. Avery visits her grandmother’s old house where she finds one clue — Tennessee Children’s Home Society.
What follows, is the shocking revelation about the truth of this home, taking the reader through a rollercoaster of Rill’s memories and Avery’s investigation. The revelation about how poor children were stolen from their homes in broad daylight, how papers were either falsified or were unknowingly signed by mothers. The revelation about how these children were only fed tiny helpings of corn mush day after day. The revelation about how workers were openly molesting these children and no one did anything about it. The revelation about how these children’s names were changed so that their biological parents could not track them back and how they were then sold to richer families in the name of giving them a better life. The revelation about how Rill and four of her siblings were taken away from their boat while their mother was at a hospital, giving birth to twins. How Rill felt responsible because at 12 years she was the oldest and couldn’t keep the siblings together at the home. Some got adopted, but one got raped, and then no one saw her again.
It continues on to when both Rill and her baby sister Fern get adopted by a loving family, and how Rill feels guilty and helpless as she watches Fern warm up to their new mother and slowly forget their real one. How Rill struggles to even talk to her new father because she can’t go close to any man since her sister disappeared. It pains to watch Rill struggle through life at such a young age, to watch how she quickly grows up from being an older sister to being the mother of her four siblings in just a matter of months. It pains to watch Rill try to find her real mother, and then feel an agonizing pain as she finds out about her mother’s death and her father’s alcoholism. And finally, to watch her make the decision of living with her adoptive parents for the sake of Fern, because Fern was all she had left now.
But, moving away from Rill, Fern, the rest of her lost siblings, and the truth about Avery’s grandmother Judy, I want to move on to the bitter, difficult truth — everything written about the Tennessee Children’s Home Society is true. This racket went on for almost 30 years from 1922 to 1950 and no one was punished for it, very few children were returned because of the high profile adoptive parents’ interference. Close to 500 children just disappeared under the care of this home, and many more were objectified, starved, beaten, molested, and scarred for life.
However, there is the bigger question — had children like Rill continued to live with their parents as river gypsies or on farms, they would have never had the education and lifestyle which was provided to them by their adoptive parents. Rill went on to become a music composer and made it big in Hollywood. She lived a happy, successful life… helping anyone and everyone along the way. Children like Rill would have remained river gypsies, but they would have been with their biological, loving parents. But Rill’s adoptive parents were loving too. Rill and Fern meant the world to them. Does this love, does the promise of a bright future right the wrong that was done by them when the were little? Should the success of their lives be a rationale for what happened at Tennessee Children’s Home Society? Should the biological parents be happy and content with the knowledge that their children have a life that they couldn’t even imagine? In a grey world, is everything that happened, okay?
“Well that’s one of the paradoxes of life. You can’t just have it all. You can have some of this and some of that or all of this and none of that. We make trade offs we think are best at the time.” — Before We Were Yours
