TOWANDA, WHERE WERE YOU?

 A quite lengthy post this morning on Debbi's Front Porch led me to a lot of thinking, about a thing I remember from my childhood.   There was a quite-influential woman in Memphis named Georgia Tann, whose leadership of the Child Welfare department was so iron-handed and illegal and downright cruel, though permitted blithely by  whatever Powers-That-Were in that era, they made the news all over the world---especially the part about selling the pretty children to the likes of Joan Crawford and Lana Turner.   

My answer from Debbi's comments page:

But I DID live the years of that unspeakable harridan---Georgia Tann, whose regular escapades were blatted on the Commercial Appeoal front page almost every morning at breakfast, and whose dreaded name uttered to us North Delta children could shudder you with cold and make you straighten up and fly right for quite a spell.   Other kids had the Boogey Man and the Wampus Cat and even a semi-local Bell Witch to keep them on track; THEY were mere amateurs.   That Memphis Witch was allowed to cruise the streets of poor neighborhoods, tempting the “pretty” children into her luxurious car, and they were gone---sold or bartered to families far away, and nobody would listen to the parents.  She switched her expensive Goldsmith’s and Lowenstein’s skirts through any place she chose, and wrought havoc worse than the Four Horsemen. 

 

She was unbelievable---what cogs in the Memphis Machine turned HER out and set her upon hapless parents of that era?   Several of the au courant court-and-prison cases right now reflect the glossing-over of Powers-That-Be on the side of some stunningly cruel and incomprehensibly powerful folks who seem to have the ear and Permission of whatever board or authority governs in some places. 

 

And I unwillingly confess kinship to one of those tiny-bit-of-authority-gone-berserk people:   My Mother’s cousin, whose position in the Child Welfare office in her Mississippi county was the ruin of many families, for her word was seemingly law in all the cases.    On Sunday visits home to her Mama, she’d regale the dinner-table with how she just COULDN’T decide, and maybe they could just all flip a coin "RIGHT NOW, and Y'all can witness it!" to see if the latest ‘case”  kept or lost their children to The System.  And woe to the ones who tried to report her to any authority---she also relished retelling those woebegone souls’ pleadings and threats, as she’d cut herself “just another little smitch ‘a that pie.”

 

Once, I heard her talk about it in person---my twelve-year-old self rebelled against the words so carelessly and triumphantly flipped into the after-dinner smoke:  “ONE OF ‘EM---HE THOUGHT HE’D SASS ME, and EYE took his kids,”  with a satisfied chin-lift and smile.   However poor the family, or how dire the circumstance, that kind of smug enjoyment is shatteringly repulsive. 

 

And in some crazy amalgam of Life and Literature, I’ve never forgotten a moment in that movie, “Stolen Babies,” when Georgia says to her new young social worker who is stunned by learning just how inhuman their System is, and has protested to her over lunch after a court date:  “We’re gonna have some CAW-fee, and a little bite ‘a sumpn’ sweet, and then I’m gonna drive you HOAM.   And you can THINK about things til Monday.” 

 

  That one sentence so reverberated with me, it has hung in the air for me to look back at for decades.

 

Boy, did this get me thinking today!   I’m not one to flash unpleasant moments or events or people onto the screen---never have been, but some things just need some rock-kickin’ and some light of day---for folks to take notice and speak up. 

 

 TOWANDA!