Singing With Leila

A Memory

Singing With Leila: A Memory

It must have been clairvoyance — I sensed the shift — when the half-sister I had never known responded to the woman who had given us life, summoning her to Texas, where she’d lived for thirty-seven years in hardship and declining health.

I had tried for the previous two years to learn about my South Carolina birth and adoption. My birth name, her full name, and my original birth certificate were sealed by South Carolina upon my adoption. Catholic Charities, the agency that placed me, would provide only non-identifying information, which was virtually useless to me in a search for a biological family. An amended “birth certificate” replaced my original records with my adoptive parents’ names and the names they chose for me. From my home in Pennsylvania, I was in touch by landline and mail with a network of adoptee allies who succeeded in gleaning my first name. It was pre-internet days, and the records were forty years old. Catholic Charities finally stretched the information they would give me, reading me the social worker’s archived penciled notes.

Our fate was sealed when Leila gave me the name Ruth Ann, signed the certificate of live birth, and two months later, signed the relinquishment papers. Under South Carolina’s promise, she could not hope to see me again. In 1951, social workers assured mothers there were stable homes with married couples happy to take their infants. To protect the adoptive parents, it was said, from efforts by bereaved birth mothers to contact them and the child and to protect the child from labels like illegitimate, bastard, and foundling, all birth records would be sealed. It was Post World War II — So many displaced, transient, unwed mothers, and young servicemen. The State and society would benefit. Or so that was the plan.

Conestee Mill

My birth mother shared her features with me, brown hair and eyes, high cheekbones, a five-foot-seven frame, the lilt and wit that sometimes masked a quieter side, a sadness, a longing. From within her womb, I learned the clutch of her sobs, the grip of her fear, and the depth of her dread. I rolled with the hearty laughter that rocked her. From under her heart, I heard her voice in Gospel and country love songs, her strong alto I’d one day sing, feeling the reeling rhythm of the honky-tonk jukebox and radio. Leila joined the songs of women who worked in bars or were textile mill carders and bobbin winders in Conestee on the Reedy River. Leila once lived in a saltbox shanty with her millworker daddy and her plain, frugal mother. Their heritage was Scots-Irish and German — voyagers, pioneers, farmers, soldiers, musicians, and weavers. One October Sunday in my forty-third year, in the tiny brick country church where my great-grandmother’s family once prayed, beside the cemetery where many of our ancestors rest, I sang between my first mother and my half-sister outside Greenville.