Before We Were Yours (2017) by Lynn Wingate

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Before We Were Yours (2017)

by Lynn Wingate

1556 Poplar Avenue, Memphis, Tennessee
Tennessee: 1/11

   Every year I go on vacation to the East Coast for a couple weeks and end up doing things like sitting in cottages on the Cape and reading at a secluded cabin along the Maine coast.  For these trips, I like to do into the Libby library app and randomly download 5-10 novels with the idea that I can just have them all ready to go.  I much prefer vacation reading on a Kindle to reading an actual book because of the weight and space that books take up when travelling. Also, buying a book on vacation is a frequent occurrence, so why bring one with you.  Projects like this one and the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die are good sources for titles for this purpose.  Tennessee is part of the chapter that includes Pennsylvania, West Virigina, Kentucky, Missouri and Arkansas. 87 books in all, it is the shortest individual chapter I've encountered, and it is the second to last chapter East of the Mississippi river.

  I can already tell you I have issues with the selection of books from Tennessee because none of Cormac McCarthy's early books are included.  As far as I'm concerned, he is the best writer to come out of Tennessee full stop.  The general public associates him with the desert Southwest, and for good reason, but McCarthy was hardly a one-trick pony.  Instead, I'm starting Kentucky with this "historical issue novel"- a genre that editor Susan Straight favors, with reasons- it's fictionalized version of some historical event, typically something that happened in the mid 20th century.

  Before We Were Yours was based on an early example of human trafficking, before that was a thing. The Tennessee Children's Home Society orphanage, run by the notorious Georgia Tann, trafficked children to wealthy families with the acquiescence of the local police and politicians in the Memphis area.  Tann would collude with local law enforcement to strip parents- inevitably white parents of little education and no social status, of their parental rights, then arrange for them to be adopted by local and non-local families, always for substantial, and sometimes continuing payments.  Tann died in her bed as the heat was coming down, but she essentially got away with it.

   The novel takes shape as a familiar back and forth between the present, where the wealthy (female) scion of a Tennessee political family has returned home (Hallmark movie style) to deal with her Senator father's declining health (and to establish residency for a potential Senatorial campaign of her own). While there, she becomes entwined in a mystery involving her Grandmother, suffering from Alzheimer's, which is triggered during a seemingly random encounter at a elderly care home.

   Wingate tracks back and forth between this present and the experience of young girl who is stolen from her "River Rat" parents in what I believe is either the late 1920's or early 1930's.  The behavior described by Wingate by Tann and her minions is real horror show stuff- akin to the body of fiction describing the Irish "laundries" for unwed mothers.  Tann extends her brief to murder, as is the fate of one unruly sibling who refuses to play ball with the trafficking arrangements.  Tann also engages in continuing blackmail of the adoptive parents by raising false issues about the adoption "paperwork."  As a criminal defense lawyer, it was this last part that was especially damning.

  Great as a history lesson, but as a novel it was strictly Hallmark channel level stuff.