Before We Were Yours
Before We Were Yours
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Lisa Wingate on Before We Were Yours
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A late night, a silent TV, and five thousand missing childrenThe book had no planned origin. Wingate was already under deadline on a different project when a chance encounter with a television rerun rerouted everything.
Before We Were Yours had the most unexpected kind of beginning. I was up late one night working on materials for a different story when I happened upon a rerun episode of a true crime program about women. Onscreen were images of an old mansion, filled with bassinettes and babies. I immediately became fascinated by the bizarre, tragic, and startling history of Georgia Tann and her corrupt system of orphanages.
The more Wingate read, the harder the questions became to set down. The Tennessee Children’s Home Society had operated until 1950, well within living memory, and the people who could explain how it went unchecked for so long were mostly gone.
I was both fascinated and appalled and had to know how much of what I’d heard was true, how Georgia Tann’s network could have operated so freely and for so long, and where some of those families might be today.
Nonfiction had already documented Tann’s crimes. What the record was missing, Wingate realized, was the view from inside: what it felt like to be the child in that system, not the investigator reconstructing it afterward.
I knew I had to write about this, and it occurred to me that what hadn’t really been told were the stories of the children. Mostly, I focused on that — the experience through their eyes and what parts of it would have mattered to them.
At a Gaston County library event, she put the specific image that she couldn’t escape into words. The arbitrariness of who got taken was what haunted her.
What was really resonating with me were the stories of the children. What was it like to be a child and just because you’re cute, because you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, you are plucked up out of your life and deposited in one of these for-profit boarding homes around the city where they were holding kids prior to adopting them out for profit? [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Two timelines, a Water Witch motor, and a ruthless editorial ruleBefore a word of the novel went down, Wingate spent significant time in Memphis. She wasn’t working from secondary sources alone: she moved through the physical spaces where the Tann network had operated.
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.
Even with those resources, absorbing the full scope of the case was its own separate problem. The scale of what Tann had done kept expanding, and so did the questions about how institutional failure at that scale was possible.
The most challenging part was taking in the facts of the Georgia Tann case, itself. I was shocked by the scope of her network, the fact that she affected over five thousand children, and the tragic consequences of her cruelty and greed. I wondered what could motivate such an individual? How could so many others — law enforcement officials, welfare workers, court workers, caretakers — take part in or turn a blind eye to kidnapping and abuse? How could as many as five-hundred children have simply vanished with no investigation of their whereabouts and probable deaths?
The novel runs two timelines simultaneously: Avery Stafford’s present-day investigation and Rill Foss’s 1939 captivity inside the Tennessee Children’s Home Society system. Wingate went in with clear eyes about what that structure cost her, and what it returned.
It’s always a challenge to balance dual time frames and a story within a story. It falls into the category of double-the-work and double-the-risk, but also double-the-fascination and double-the-reward. There’s twice as much research, but in doubling the research, you also discover twice as many interesting historical facts, unanswered questions, and nearly-forgotten bits of history. Those fascinators weave new threads into the story loom.
All that research required an equally firm rule about what to cut. Her collected material on the Tann operation could have filled a second book. She didn’t let it.
A novel isn’t a history book. It’s the tale of one character’s journey (or multiple characters’ journeys). Anything not relevant to that journey, anything not propelling it along, should be left out.
The discipline she describes here was not painless. The synthesis notes she had considerably more she could have told about how the Tann network operated, and most of it was cut to protect the characters’ forward momentum.
The personal thread
A lifelong pull toward history no one bothered to keepLong before Georgia Tann, Wingate’s interest in the past had a specific shape: she was drawn not to well-documented history but to the kind that nearly didn’t survive. The Tann case fit a pattern she had been following for years.
I have always loved history, especially the undiscovered sort, and as a result stories based in history are my favorite. It’s interesting to consider how history might have shaped our lives today without our knowing it.
At the Gaston County library event, she described what the research had made personal in the most direct way. Writing the orphanage scenes, she kept transposing her own children onto the children in the story, asking what those years inside the system would have looked like for a two-year-old, a five-year-old, a twelve-year-old, or what it would have meant to be the parent who couldn’t get them back.
This book at its heart, honestly, is a story of political corruption. The reason that Georgia Tann was able to do this is Memphis was incredibly politically corrupt at the time. Boss Crump had Memphis and Boss Crump had the state of Tennessee. And Georgia Tann had the ear and protection of Boss Crump. She literally could not be challenged in Memphis. [paraphrased from audio]
The corruption she names here is what kept her children’s imaginary versions of Rill Foss trapped. Understanding Boss Crump’s protection of Tann wasn’t background context for the novel; it was the reason the novel’s tragedy was possible at all.
What she wants us to sit with
Remembering on purpose, and asking what we’re choosing not to seeWhen asked directly what she hoped readers would carry out of the book, Wingate gave a two-part answer. The first was personal; the second was historical and more demanding.
I hope readers take away the message that we need not be defined by our pasts. I also hope that, in a broader sense, the story of Rill and the Foss children serves to document all the families whose lives were destroyed by Georgia Tann’s unregulated system and the political corruption that supported it. Only by remembering history are we reminded not to repeat it.