Injustice and Class Divisions Theme Analysis

In Before We Were Yours, the Stafford family is among the wealthiest and most well-respected families in South Carolina—they are a political dynasty with a sterling reputation. The Foss family, on the other hand, belongs to the lower classes and struggles to make ends meet. The two families are separated by time and place, but Avery Stafford stumbles upon a connection that changes the course of her life—her grandmother, Judy Stafford, was born to Queenie and Briny Foss, but was kidnapped and sold to a wealthy family as a newborn. In fact, Judy is just one of thousands of lower-class children, including the other six Foss children, that were kidnapped and sold to wealthy families by the nefarious Georgia Tann, head of the Memphis branch of the infamous Tennessee Children’s Home Society. The longevity of Tann’s career as a child trafficker (she operated the TCHS from 1924 to 1950) sheds a light on a dark period in America’s history when helpless children of the lower classes were quite literally treated as objects to be sold to American elites for their enjoyment. However, this practice also calls into question how “pure” some of the most well-respected bloodlines in America are. Through the stories of the Foss children, Judy Stafford, and Trent Turner Sr., Wingate exposes a horrible wrong that was done to America’s lower classes and illustrates how America’s upper classes directly benefitted from this injustice.

For the Stafford family, reputation is everything, and part of their reputation involves the uniform respectability of every member of the family—even those who just marry into it. In fact, Avery initially struggles to conceive of a scandal more serious than the possibility of lower-class relatives threatening to step into the spotlight. Avery recounts her mother Honeybee’s story of meeting Wells Stafford (Avery’s father), saying that “When she learned that [Wells] was a Stafford, she set her cap.” This highlights the fact that many people desire to be a Stafford—Honeybee resolves to marry Wells simply for his family name, even before she knows him personally. However, Avery believes they must have “woodpile relatives”—in other words, distant relatives that belong to the lower classes—after learning that there is someone named “Queenie” that Judy doesn’t want her to know about. Avery’s concern highlights just how distant her upper-class family is from the lower classes, and their opinion of poverty as somehow scandalous and shameful, something that would threaten their family’s reputation.

The children Georgia Tann preyed upon were uniformly poor—they belonged to shanty towns or impoverished single mothers. When Tann gets hold of them, they are immediately treated as objects to be molded and sold, highlighting the perception of lower-class people as subhuman. When Trent Turner III learns that his grandfather was also one of the children Tann kidnapped, he wonders how things might have been different “if his [grandfather’s] parents hadn’t been poor.” This emphasizes the fact that it was poor children who were targeted, not middle- or upper-class children. Notably, Tann would habitually tell potential adoptive parents (who were typically wealthy and well-respected) that the children’s biological parents were college graduates, professors, or other members of the educated classes. This means that Tann also recognized the stigma attached to poverty and sought to hide the truth, knowing upper-class Americans would never risk their family’s reputation by adopting children born to poor parents.

Because Tann is only interested in profit, she doesn’t evaluate the families who want to adopt children—if a person has money, Tann will sell them a child. In other words, Tann’s fraudulent adoption service caters to the desires of the upper classes at the expense of the lower. The Seviers adopt Rill and Fern to fill the void that several miscarriages and stillborn children have left, shown by Rill’s observation that Victoria Sevier “only wants the dead.” The irony is that the wealthy Seviers filled that empty space with children who were kidnapped from their loving parents; in other words, Tann created a void in Queenie and Briny Foss’s lives in order to provide the means for an upper-class family to fill the empty space in theirs. Furthermore, the Sevier family’s maid Zuma tells Rill and Fern that they will be sent back to the orphanage once Victoria conceives again, saying she’s “seen it all befo’” already. This reinforces the idea that Rill, Fern, and the other children in the TCHS are seen as little more than tools to be used and possibly discarded by the upper classes for their own gratification.

In the written account of her early life, Judy also shares that she was purchased by a wealthy man to give his daughter after her biological child is stillborn. This means that even though Judy went on to have a happy life, she was originally only an object meant to bring comfort to a grieving upper-class family—and this was only accomplished through the victimization of her lower-class biological parents.