A Process

Part 2 of A System

Hello friends, followers, and subscribers, It’s May 10th, but wasn’t it just March? It feels like April, wet and dreary today. Thank you for reading my weekly Roots and Branches/Memoir-ish Musing by Mel ~ I hope you’ll enjoy A Process, the second of 2 segmented essays, continued from last week’s A System.

A Process

1. Leila was to meet with Father S., the liaison with Catholic Charities, at St. Francis Hospital in Greenville where she had delivered her daughter in September. The priest had repeatedly tried to contact Leila by mail — it was urgent she complete the relinquishment papers with him. The baby she'd abandoned to the Sisters' care was now two months old, and they could no longer keep her in their nursery. Unless she signed, the baby would be taken into custody by the State. Father sent his final notice by registered mail return receipt requested to her parents' rural Greenville home, warning that the child's fate and a future good outcome demanded due diligence; a process which required completion of paperwork, her signature, social and health history, and her agreement that, although she was a Baptist, the child would be baptized Catholic, and be placed in Catholic foster care with the goal of adoption. Leila could no longer ignore the message.

2. She was twenty-seven, with no more than a fourth-grade education. Although she stated her occupation was farm and textile mill work, Father S. learned from the authorities that Leila’s more recent work history was waitressing, but that all her life she had been used, and used others. Father noted that in their interview on November 9th, 1951, her demeanor, attitude, appearance, and affect were unpleasant and distant, and from her assertion that she was not capable of caring for her child; that she had no intentions of altering her lifestyle, he could only draw the conclusion that she was not suited to mother her child, to whom she had given the name Ruth Ann. He added that she could not ask her parents, who were barely managing the care of her toddler, to take another child. Leila had fled a brief marriage in Bilouxi while pregnant, alleging the child was his. She gave birth in Greenville Memorial in August, 1948, and brought the baby to her parents' home where she still lived without her mother, under her grandmother's care. The priest concluded his report noting that the County Prison authority wanted his assurance that Leila would not be taking the two-month-old “home”. It's not clear whether they met at the jail or at the hospital.

3. I found Leila forty years later with my half-sister who was caring for her at the time. My sister recalled a social worker visiting her grandparents’ home — a child welfare check at their rustic, rented cabin on Roper Mountain — to check on the child, and to look for Leila, who came and went.

4. November 11th, 1951. Perhaps the Sister of St. Francis swaddled baby Ruth Ann goodbye and bundled her into a car bed for the ride from Greenville east on Route 29 through towns and country. The baby might have squinted at the morning winter sunlight as the social worker drove past glimmering roadside trees that bordered the Saluda Mountains of the Blue Ridge. In Rock Hill, she was carried upstairs to her new crib in the just-renovated Infant and Children's Annex of St. Philips Mercy Hospital. She was now an inmate in the custody of Guardian ad Litem Sister Mathias, in the care of baby nurse, Sister Francetta, until it was her time ...

   

   The Children’s Annex - the nursery with my crib was upstairs.

5. On a sultry summer Sumter evening, an Air Force couple from New York City, recently stationed at Shaw Air Force base invited their pastor for Sunday dinner in the shoebox apartment they rented on Liberty Street. Over dessert, the priest ventured: “How is it you’ve been married five years with no children?” The couple was in their early thirties. With some embarrassment, the husband, a new second lieutenant, related his medical crisis and surgery in 1935 that resulted in infertility. “Well then, you must adopt! I’ll connect you with Catholic Charities. So many babies are waiting to be loved by good people.” The Catholic son and daughter conceded that the best choice for the success of their marriage was adoption. They enlisted the support of family and friends, wrote letters to request references from their former parish, and his military and professional contacts, and obtained medical histories, and physicals. By the fall of 1951, the hopeful parents had satisfied the Agency’s requirements. Deemed worthy and well-qualified, their wait began.

Out of The Blue

Hand-written typed intrastate interstate instructions character references health and educational history genealogy financial situation stability suitability satisfied demonstrated and accepted. Out of the blue, under Virgo’s stars, a place and time, a designated date, on the cusp of Libra the Just, pushed into the autumnal equinox, a fog-like nebula, delivered in sorrow on fall’s first day. The mother and child, together by accident and circumstance, were separated in a single, swift scoop, by happenstance, in a swirl of ambiguity and abstraction, severed and left to wonder. That all should be protected by a process. Birth facts are muddled, muddied by secrets, lies, and erasure, the sealing of records. Out of the wild blue yonder, blue like a September sky, like a sapphire birthstone, she belongs to the Air Force couple. Early autumn brings blue asters, sweaters, schooldays, and storms. 

Photo by Benjamin DeYoung on Unsplash

In the 1950s, a great many young, unmarried, pregnant women, if they had no family support, were sent to a maternity home — in South Carolina, likely The Salvation Army or Florence Crittenton Home. She might be older, married with too many other mouths to feed, or young and unwed, maybe the victim of rape or incest. Catholic Charity’s mission was to sort through records of available newborns — mothers in need, infant surrenders, abandonments, relinquishment, and a situation thus identified, a baby selected for a desiring couple. It was a busy market in the 1950s, a time now known as The Baby Scoop Era. I have to ask - are we approaching a similar time in the Southern U.S.A.?

Florence Crittenden Home in Charleston, SC

References:

Charleston Orphan House

Florence Crittenton Programs of South Carolina

Florence Crittenton Homes: A History (2014). Social Welfare History Project. 

The Baby Scoop Era by Karen Wilson Buterbaugh

The Girls Who Went Away by Anne Fessler

Psychology Today 2021, Adoption in the Baby Scoop Era The Sordid History of Adoption in America Review of American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption By Gabrielle Glaser