Georgia Tann

Quick Facts

• Role: Primary antagonist; director of the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society
• First appearance: When she oversees the seizure of Rill Foss (May Crandall) and her siblings near the Dawson Warehouse lot
• Key relationships: The Foss children (victims), Mrs. Murphy (subordinate), adoptive families like the Seviers (clients), Avery Stafford (present-day investigator of her legacy)
• Themes: Embodies the Corruption of Power and Exploitation of the Vulnerable

Who She Is

A real historical predator reimagined in fiction, Georgia Tann is the novel’s cold engine of harm—a polished reformer in public who, in private, industrializes the theft and sale of children. She runs an elegant front with the Tennessee Children’s Home Society while operating a nationwide trafficking network. The book lets her menace accumulate in glimpses: a watchful silhouette, a sales pitch, a knock at the door. Her presence threads together the dual timelines, revealing to both readers and Avery how power cloaked in benevolence can ravage the powerless.

Personality & Traits

Georgia’s villainy is not impulsive; it’s systematic. She weaponizes class prejudice, bureaucratic control, and a salesman’s charm to turn children into inventory.

• Manipulative and deceptive: She fabricates “blank slate” backstories and reassures buyers that children come from “good stock.” She lies about Rill and Fern to the Seviers, then returns to extort more money, proving her philanthropy is a mask for fraud.
• Greedy and materialistic: She appraises children by “marketability,” favoring “precious blonds with curls,” and sets exorbitant, illegal fees—treating adoption as luxury retail.
• Cruel and uncaring: Conditions in boarding homes like Mrs. Murphy’s show her disregard for safety and dignity; suffering and death are costs she accepts as overhead.
• Powerful and connected: With judges, police, and doctors in her pocket, she manufactures legal cover for kidnappings and enjoys near-total impunity in Memphis’s machine politics.
• Classist and judgmental: She justifies theft as “rescue,” insisting she’s elevating children to “high type” families—language that sanitizes violence with social Darwinism.

Character Journey

Georgia is a static force whose unchanging cruelty defines the arc of everyone around her. Early scenes establish her as a poised authority figure; later revelations expose the scale of her enterprise and the complicity enabling it. In the past, her decisions shatter the Foss family; in the present, Avery’s investigation peels back the layers of myth around a celebrated institution. The narrative denies her redemption or reckoning: she dies of cancer before facing justice, leaving communities to deal with the aftermath—a pointed commentary on how systems protect perpetrators and delay accountability.

Key Relationships

• The Foss Children: To Georgia, the Foss siblings are merchandise, not minors. Her instant valuation—praising the blond children while dismissing the “common” dark-haired sister—compresses her worldview into a chilling market scan. The family’s love and resilience form a moral counterpoint to her commodification.
• Mrs. Murphy: As a subordinate who runs a boarding home steeped in neglect, Mrs. Murphy enacts Georgia’s policies and fears her reprisals. Their relationship illustrates how corruption cascades downward: Georgia’s orders create an economy of obedience and cruelty that others perpetuate to survive within her system.
• Adoptive Parents (e.g., the Seviers): Georgia flatters and manipulates prospective parents, selling them stolen children with curated myths. Her later blackmail of Mrs. Sevier shows that even “clients” are not partners but revenue streams—evidence that greed, not “child welfare,” drives every decision.

Defining Moments

Georgia’s power is most visible when she turns intimate family spaces into showrooms or crime scenes.

• First appraisal of the Foss children: Outside the warehouse, she coolly prices the siblings, delighting in the blondes and devaluing the dark-haired Camellia Foss. Why it matters: The moment fuses classism, colorism, and profit motive into a single predatory gaze.
• The viewing party: She stages a genteel showcase, delivering a philanthropic pitch about “blank slates.” Why it matters: The event reveals how performance and language launder atrocity, converting theft into charity.
• Blackmailing Mrs. Sevier: Georgia invents a threatening “birth grandmother” to extort more funds. Why it matters: She’s not just selling children; she’s monetizing fear, proving there is no ethical boundary she won’t cross.

Symbolism

Georgia personifies institutional rot: a smiling emblem of reform whose authority enables abuse. Her longevity and acclaim symbolize how a polished facade hides a corrupt core, a warning sharpened by the novel’s interest in image and legacy. She also anchors the theme of Secrets and Their Consequences: the lies she tells become generational wounds that survivors must excavate decades later.

Essential Quotes

“What a lovely little bunch of foundlings,” the woman—Miss Tann—says. “Five precious blonds with curls. How perfect.”

This opening valuation frames children as commodities and reveals Georgia’s aesthetic marketplace—youth, whiteness, and conformity fetch top dollar. The line’s sugary tone is a sheath for violence, highlighting how polite language enables predation.

“Well…that one didn’t get the looks in the family, did she? She’s rather common. I suppose we’ll find a taker for her, though. We almost always do.”

Her dismissal exposes a hierarchy of worth built on appearance and class. The casual “we almost always do” reduces a child’s fate to inventory turnover, showing how normalized—and routine—her cruelty has become.

“They’re perfect in every way,” she says to the guests over and over. “Wonderful physical specimens and mentally advanced for their ages as well. Many come from parents with talents in music and art. Blank slates just waiting to be filled. They can become anything you want them to be.”

The pitch blends eugenics-adjacent language with consumer promise, turning adoption into bespoke acquisition. “Blank slates” erases history and trauma, legitimizing theft by pretending origins can be overwritten.

“These poor lost children and the families who need them are my impetus and inspiration for the tireless work I do. Day in and day out, I endure my arduous labor and the sad beginnings of these little waifs so that I might rescue them and give them life and add life to countless empty homes.”

This self-mythologizing monologue is the public mask: sacrifice, rescue, uplift. Its sanctimony reveals how narrative power protects her—philanthropic rhetoric becomes both shield and sword, winning allies while silencing dissent.

“She’s not a young woman or an old woman but someplace in between. She’s thick and heavy, her body settling in rolls inside her flowered dress. Her hair is short. Some of it’s gray, and some of it’s brown. Her face makes me think of a heron bird. That’s the way she watches while the policemen line us up. Her gray eyes move quick and jerky, tracking everything that’s going on.”

Rill’s predatory “heron” image captures Georgia’s essence: patient, still, and lethal when it’s time to strike. The quick, jerky eyes suggest a hunter calculating angles—an observer who turns observation into capture. The scene situates her menace not in brute force, but in watchfulness backed by state power.