Before We Were Yours – Lisa Wingate

The afterword in this novel is what really got to me. It reads like a horror in itself and I am glad I only read that after I finished Lisa Wingate’s wonderful story. She introduced me to the reality of what is probably one of the most notorious cases of human trafficking in America.

Georgia Tann was the director of a Memphis-based adoption organisation where she ran her horrific business of selling children during a thirty-year period between 1920 and 1950. Her business was trading in children of all ages who were kidnapped and sold to wealthy families all over the country at exorbitant prices.

Some of these heinous deeds included duping birth mothers into signing paperwork while under postpartum sedation for temporary custody of their babies to secure necessary medical care for the children; or were simply informed that their babies had died. In other cases children from poor families were whisked off front porches or grabbed along the roadside on their way to school.

That was in itself horrendous, but what made it worse was how the kids were treated in her so-called orphanages (where they were kept hostage), suffering severe abuse, hunger and appalling living conditions resulting in hundreds of children dying under her watch.

From her writing it becomes clear that Lisa Wingate is deeply passionate about these atrocities and about the fact that Tann died of cancer before she could be prosecuted and brought to justice. Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting story describes how families were – for generations – affected by Tann and her organisation’s misdeeds.

The plot – set in 1939 on board a family’s Mississippi River house boat – is based on actual incidents of how greed and inhumane behaviour of those in power can prey on the vulnerable who, due to poverty or lack of education, lose control of their own destinies.

Before I depress you to the point where you don’t even want to start reading this book, I need to assure you that it is such a great read that it will be impossible for you not to become swept up in the story from the first page and remain glued to the last… including the absorbing afterword.

I’m fond of novels that bridge more than one time period, giving the reader different perspectives. Wingate tells two different tales – one of young Avery Stafford, a competent lawyer from an affluent American political family delving into her grandmother’s mysterious past; and the other of Rill Foss, a twelve-year-old girl who, with her four younger siblings, are stolen off their river boat and placed in the Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage facing an uncertain future.

It is especially rewarding when the writer succeeds in engrossing the reader through alternating chapters that are seamlessly interwoven and tension-building – veering between despair and optimism.

Windgate’s novel is testimony to the fact that, very often, even in the case where infants are adopted, there is something – perhaps blood or perhaps love – that ensures no matter where life takes you, the heart never forgets where it belongs.