Any baby, let alone a bastard baby, is born a mystery, and babies don’t come with directions. But Jan Beatty’s iconoclastic memoir American Bastard does come with directions. Here is how she tells us to read her story:
“Try staying with the foreign idea that a baby is born, then sold to another person. Stay with it. There is the physical trauma of the broken bond. There is the erasure of the baby’s entire history. There are these hands that have a different smell, a different DNA – reaching for the baby, calling it theirs. Stay with that for a while. No talking.”
These directions gave me, as an adoptee, the sense of relief I often feel with precise parameters for listening to an adoptee’s story. So much of American adoption history is hidden, sugar-coated, and ambiguous. Beatty’s directions ask us to engage in the most essential element of critical thinking: putting aside underlying cultural assumptions in favor of listening to an outsider’s story.
America’s adoption narrative has been honed for decades by the adoption industry into simplistic images: selfless birthmothers who give up their infants to better lives, lucky adoptees who are so much better off than they would have been had they stayed with their birth families, and adoptive parents who are the saviors of these poor children. The word “poor” here can function as an economic descriptor, since most birthmothers are working class and most adoptive parents are, at least, middle class. They must be: one agency, American Adoptions, estimates the cost of a domestic adoption is between $50,000 to $60,000. The same agency estimates international adoption costs are between $35,000and $50,000.
Beatty is a white, domestic adoptee who was born in the 1950’s during the “Baby Scoop Era,” a period between 1945 and 1973 when entrepreneurial adoption agencies capitalized on societal shaming of single mothers and created record-breaking numbers of domestic adoptions. In the 1960’s alone, at least 2 million women relinquished infants for adoption.
Defining herself as a bastard, Beatty transcends the social context of her adoption through an archetypal journey motif that strikes universal notes. A poet by profession and by nature who has garnered numerous awards, she enriches the memoir genre with lyric elements and poetic strategies including sonic resonances, slashes, and line breaks. She also includes documentary evidence, including her original birth records, the sort of records that are routinely denied to most American adoptees.
The story begins with a child who longs to find resemblance but doesn’t, then shifts to the adult woman who finds “ghosts all over the story of my beginnings.” Told at a young age that she is adopted, she lives as a “split” child, one with fictional parents she must accept as real, and birthparents she must accept as disposable. Tracking the tension inherent in this split, the book dispenses with chronology by casting forward into the future as it reaches back into the past, enacting the diverse and recursive nature of experience. This process was complicated, as Beatty writes in a brief email interview:
“The writing of American Bastard was really different from writing my poetry books. I’ve been working on this book my whole life—as in, dreaming of it, trying to find a form in which to write it, looking for the courage to write it, etc. Although my poetry can be intense and deep, this memoir gave me no escape. There was no ‘speaker’ to refer to, as the ‘I’ in the poem. This was all me, all true, and that was terrifying.”
This back and forth between past, present, and future steers the reader away from questions seeking linear answers, such as “Why didn’t her mother just tell her who her father was?” and toward the more timeless questions of why we crave connection with our ancestors and how blood shapes identity, whether we like it or not. Without a linear narrative, it’s easy to question the “happy ending” pictured in adoption agency marketing materials. Many adoptees, including me, say that there is no “ending” to their adoption story; its effects are ongoing.
But if all adoptions don’t end happily, how do they end? Data on adoption is sketchy, since the practice has been shrouded in secrecy for decades. In most states, adoption records are still sealed, and new birth certificates are issued upon adoption, erasing the original birth certificate. This means that rather than studies based on surveys and demographics, much of the evidence about adoption outcomes is anecdotal and therefore exceptional. It’s the stories that deviate from the norm that are told, and that we remember.
In 2018, for example, there were at least two mass murders of adoptees by their adopters. In California, Jennifer and Sarah Hart drove their six adopted children off a cliff to their deaths, and in Tennessee, Cynthia Collier shot her four adopted children to death before turning the gun on herself. These stories, especially the one about the Hart family where the adopters were a lesbian couple, received a great deal of attention. At the other end of the outcomes spectrum are the celebrity adoption stories portrayed by mainstream media as fairy tales. Less publicized are the few adoption outcome studies based on data, including one that shows adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adoptees.
Stories from the adoptee perspective like American Bastard are especially critical in this absence of data, particularly since that absence leaves room for our culture’s habit of erasing the stories of poor people and equating white, economic privilege with virtue and with the norm.
As an adult, Beatty wrestles with the adoption industry to obtain her birth records. After many miscues and refusals, she meets with her birthmother, beginning a second struggle to learn her father’s identity. The process is far more difficult than the happy reunions of separated families that we see in popular media. Beatty’s birthmother is reticent, reluctant to give up information, and conflicted about incorporating Beatty into her family. Still, Beatty writes, “To see her, to have a face, a body that is actual and real. That part is probably the most important. As an adoptee, I need that face, that blood connection to not feel as alone in the world. That is everything. Everything.” What follows isn’t easy, though. The real-life difficulty of managing the blood connection with years of unanswered questions and denial forces a knotty density into their relationship.
Beatty employs an astonishing number of rhetorical and poetic devices in this book, creating a stylistic density, like a garden with many different species of plants. Some devices enact a paradox, as in this excerpt from a section titled “The term mainland suggests some immense solidity”:
“My birthmother lives in the center of me and she lives outside of me. She covers all ground and yet I don’t know her. She is farther than the horizon – no end to her. She gets her power from blood – nothing else.”
Each sentence contains two clauses, and each clause works in opposition to another. In addition to its sense of rhythm, this pattern mirrors the paradox of Beatty’s simultaneous existence as her mother’s daughter and as not her mother’s daughter.
Some sections of the book are lineated as poetry, and some, lineated as prose, are less than a page long. I appreciated the amount of white space created from these choices, signaling space to think about the preceding text, but this is yet another paradox. Containing more white space than the traditional memoir, the diversity of techniques creates a sense of clutter, not unlike the clutter of genetic difference that surrounds an adopted child like Beatty, who grows up craving the order and simplicity of physical similarities shared by her adoptive cousins. “I longed for that sameness with someone – a body part that I could share, something that would bond us without speech.”
Most people in the United States who are adopted must clear many hurdles to learn the truth about their parentage. Some, including transnational adoptees, may never learn their truth thanks to agencies’ failures to preserve records. Forty of our 52 states still limit adoptees’ access to our original birth certificates, thanks to laws enacted in the 20th century when adoption evolved into a for-profit industry. Beatty, born and adopted in the 1950’s, began searching for her truth long before DNA testing was widely available, but today, many adoptees pay for DNA testing, which can help them dispense with the flawed or deliberately false memories of others.
In search of her identity, Beatty expresses concerns that are both universal and personal. What was the moment of her conception like? Who are her ancestors? Where, and with who, did she spend her earliest days? The answer she finds to this last question reflects one widespread, callous adoption practice of the 20th century: Beatty was kept in an orphanage for about a year until a white family adopted her.
Research shows that the separation of infants from their biological mothers, even for a short time, can cause changes in brain chemistry and a failure to thrive. In response to that research, babies born in hospitals are no longer routinely separated from their mothers as they were in the 20th century, when doctors and other professionals viewed infants as blank slates who had no attachments, preferences, or emotional vulnerabilities. As documented in another adoptee memoir published in 2021, Megan Culhane Galbraith’s Guild of the Infant Savior, a “mothercraft” degree program at Cornell University in the 1960’s used infants from orphanages as “practice babies” for students of homemaking. These students rotated in and out of a practice home while babies spent their days being passed from one set of hands to another to another.
It’s fitting that American Bastard proceeds by leaping, connecting, and separating since that is the form that Beatty’s life has taken. Her goal was to “create an authentic voice, and to make the story as real and true as possible.” From one adoptee to another, it’s my pleasure to say that she succeeds.
Published by Red Hen Press on October 18, 2021, 216 pages, $13.95 paperback]