The name of the father on the birth certificate was Dr. Thomas Whitfield. I read it three times by the light of the parlor lamp, with the porcelain doll lying on my knees like a patient. Every soul in Natchez knew that name. Dr. Whitfield had delivered half the children in Adams County, and the east wing of the hospital still bore his name in tall brass letters. The mother was my own grandmother, Lavinia Merrill, then thirty four years old, a widow and a nurse at his clinic. The child was a girl, born on the ninth of March 1959, in Charity Hospital in New Orleans. Margaret Anne. And beside her name, in the neat hand of a clerk, one word. Surrendered.
I shook the lining of the dress once more, and out into my palm slid a small gold locket on a broken chain. Inside lay a curl of black hair, no longer than my thumb, tied with a thread of pink silk. Behind it was a bank book from the Britton and Koontz bank, opened in 1959 in the name of Margaret Anne Merrill. The first deposit was twenty dollars. The last, in 2022, was a deposit of two hundred. Every month for sixty four years, my grandmother had put a little money away for the daughter she had given up, and she had never once told a living soul.
I understood the glass case then. The doll was not a keepsake. It was a grave marker, of a kind, set in the one room of the house where my grandmother would see it every day. A child had been taken from her in a hospital bed, by a doctor with a name that opened every door in town, and the doll had held what she could not say. I held it against my chest in the dark of the parlor. A clock ticked in the hall. Somewhere on Pearl Street, a dog was barking at the moon. “Lavinia, I will find her,” I said, out loud. “I promise.”
A hollow porcelain doll opened in a locked parlor case gave one granddaughter the weekend to bring a lost aunt home to Natchez.
My mother Gwen is seventy five and lives in a small brick house in Vidalia. I drove across the bridge the next morning with the locket in my pocket and sat down at her kitchen table. She looked at the birth certificate for a long time. “Brenda, Mama never said a word,” she whispered, “but I always knew there was something. She cried on the ninth of March every year. She said it was a headache.” She pressed the locket to her lips. “I had a sister, and I did not know. All these years, a sister.” Her whole thin body shook, and I held her until the coffee went cold.
The grandson of Dr. Whitfield arrived at the house on Pearl Street on Thursday evening. Preston Whitfield is fifty six, a lawyer, with silver hair and a pressed linen suit. Someone at the bank had talked. He stood in my parlor with another man in a gray suit and said that the doll was part of the estate of Lavinia and might contain private papers about his family. He offered fifty thousand dollars, cash, on the spot. When I said no, he lunged for the case on the shelf and seized the doll by the arm. It slipped from his hand, and the porcelain face struck the floor and cracked from brow to chin.
The sound was awful. For one moment, nobody breathed. My nephew Terrence, who is six feet three and had been waiting in the hall, stepped into the doorway and quietly closed the door. “Mr. Whitfield, I believe you broke something that belongs to my family,” he said. Preston stared at the shards on the rug. All the color had drained from his face. The man in the gray suit looked at his shoes. “That is my grandmother, in a way,” I said, and my voice shook. “And you just dropped her.” Preston turned and walked out into the evening without another word.
I found Margaret Anne on a Sunday, through a registry of adopted children, in Baton Rouge. She was sixty six, a retired schoolteacher with the hair of her mother and the straight back of her mother. She came to the door of her brick house in a green cardigan and stared at the cracked doll in my arms. Then she stared at my face. “Dear God,” she said softly. “You look like me.” I told her about the locket and the bank book and the certificate. She sat down on the porch steps and put her head in her hands. “My whole life, I wanted to know whose eyes I had,” she said. “They are hers.”
The money consequences were quiet and just. The bank book, with its sixty four years of small deposits and its interest, came to eighty one thousand dollars, and I put it in the name of Margaret. A test of the blood confirmed what the paper had said, and Preston Whitfield, to his credit, called a family meeting. The Whitfield heirs agreed to a settlement of six hundred thousand dollars for the daughter of their grandfather, along with a written acknowledgment, which Margaret accepted and framed. She spent the first part on her grandchildren. She spent the second on a headstone for Lavinia, which at last bore both their names.
In the name of my grandmother, Lavinia, who passed in January and who put twenty dollars away every month for sixty four years, I started the Glass Case Fund. It pays for legal help, registry searches and counseling for families in Adams, Jefferson and Wilkinson counties who are looking for relatives given away. In the first year, we reunited twenty three families. A woman of seventy two, in a lilac suit, held a faded photograph of an infant and said, “I was told he did not survive.” I took her hand and told her we would look until we knew.
On Easter Sunday, Margaret came to the house on Pearl Street, in a navy dress, with her daughter and grandchildren. We sat in the parlor around the old glass case. I had taken the doll to a restorer in Jackson, and she came back with a mended face, a thin silver seam that ran from brow to chin like a river on a map. Margaret lifted her from the case with both hands. “Mama,” she whispered. Then she turned and placed the doll in the arms of my mother, and the two old sisters sat side by side on the sofa, rocking her gently between them.