Photography by Matt Marcinkowski
Zella Mae Jackson stands in front of the former Homer G. Phillips Hospital
Around 4 a.m. on February 20, Zella Mae Jackson Price heard a Facebook message beep into her phone. Later, fully awake, she puzzled over it. Why on earth would this polite young woman think she was her grandmother?
Mehiska Mae Jackson replied immediately: Had Zella given birth to a baby girl on November 25, 1965?
Why, yes, Zella answered, but that baby girl died.
No, Mehiska replied, she didn’t.
Mehiska’s mother, Melanie Diane Gilmore, had gone through childhood assuming she was the daughter of John and Muriel Young. Then, in middle school, an envelope arrived in the mail, addressed to Muriel Young for Diane Jackson. Who was that, Melanie wondered, tempted to tear open the envelope.
Just as she was about to slide her finger under the flap, Muriel came home. When she saw the envelope, she sat Melanie down in the chair across from her and, as gently as she could, explained the piece of paper that read, “Birth mother: Zella Mae Jackson.” Muriel was actually Melanie’s foster mother. Zella had given her up. And there was no point trying to contact Zella, because she was dead.
Melanie, who is deaf, watched her mother’s lips closely. None of it made sense. Was this why they didn’t look alike? Her sister Barbara, 25 years older, had their mother’s hands and their father’s features. Melanie had nobody’s. But why hadn’t her m—her foster mother—told her sooner? And why hadn’t Zella been taking care of her until now?
She had a funny feeling in her stomach. She didn’t know the right questions to ask.
But she wasn’t convinced her mother was dead.
Melanie informed classmates at the Missouri School for the Deaf that she was going to find her mother. But with no grownup to help, her search stalled fast.
At 18, she went to the dentist and he said that according to his records, her name was Diane Jackson. So that was confirmation of something.
At 21, she and her foster mother, long widowed, moved to Oregon, where Barbara was living with her husband. A stroke had slashed away Muriel’s ability to take care of herself. One day, she was having a hard time speaking, but she looked like she wanted to say something, and her eyes were scared. “Come on, you can tell me,” Melanie urged.
Finally Muriel managed her confession: “Your birth mother is alive.” The stroke had twisted her lips, and Melanie had to lean close to be sure.
After that, the words flowed easier. Was Melanie mad?
“No, I’m not mad,” Melanie said, hugging her. “I love you and I forgive you.” Years later, Melanie’s own daughters would be outraged for her. But at the moment all she could think about was how lucky she was that the Youngs had taken good care of her.
And how she was going to find her birth mother.
She looked through old telephone books but found no Zella Mae Jackson. She went to libraries. She even hired a company to help her search. And she gave her twin daughters, Mehiska and Melika, the middle name “Mae” and the last name “Jackson.”
The girls remember a sadness in their mother, always. She boxed it away like a porcelain doll, lifting the lid every once in a while just to look. But when they were about 8 years old, she got bad news, and she bawled so loud it scared them. She’d been told her mother couldn’t be found and must be dead after all. And she was crying like it was a real funeral.
A few days later, she was better. She’d decided she didn’t believe it. She kept looking—haphazardly, on and off—for another nine years. Finally, in 2010, she announced that she was giving up.
Four years later, Melika had a dream—a premonition, the twins decided. As a present for their mother’s 50th birthday, they would find her mother.
Online searching had gotten a lot easier, and more people were online now—even grandmothers. They tried Facebook and narrowed in on Zella Jackson Price, a gospel singer in St. Louis who looked just like their mom.
Now convinced, the girls wangled a DNA sample from their mother, telling her it was for a school project, and sent it to St. Louis, where Zella added her own sample and sent it on to Arizona.
The DNA samples were—with 99.9997 percent confidence—a match.
Mehiska and Melika blindfolded their mother with a soft turquoise scarf, and their brother Samuel gently steered Melanie, clad in pajama pants printed with red-nosed reindeer, into a bedroom. She was half panicked by the blindfold and wholly intrigued. “Not yet. Do not tell her!” one of the twins warned. They at their mother down on the edge of the bed and removed the scarf so she could read their lips. “We found your mom,” they said, and signed, and repeated. She looked aghast—what had made them think this would be a funny prank? “We’re telling the truth,” one of the girls insisted. Samuel took over, explaining how they’d sent the DNA swab to St. Louis. How it had matched. How they all had a whole new family there.
Melanie’s hand went up to cover her mouth, and she bent, hugging herself against the shock. Mehiska started to cry; Malika kissed her mother’s forehead. Then Melanie sat up, wiped her eyes, and tilted her head back, taking it all in. “Do you want to talk to her?” the kids asked eagerly, and that knocked her sideways again. How could she? They replaced the blindfold, but she tugged it off irritably and saw Zella’s face on the screen in front of her. They’d set up an ooVoo video chat.
“Mommy!” Melanie exclaimed, and burst into hard sobs. But she came back fast, mopping tears and snot with a tissue one of the kids handed her. Leaning forward on the bed, eyes fixed on the screen, she signed, “I love you,” her smile bright and wide. Repeated it. Told Zella, with palms thrust at the screen, to “Slow down!” so she could read her lips. Signed again: “I forgive you.” Repeated it as one of her daughters whispered, “Mom! It’s not her fault!” Zella didn’t give her up after all, they explained in a rush. All this time she’s thought her baby was dead.
The awfulness of it hit Melanie first, then the elation. She wasn’t abandoned! Her face cleared, nothing left but joy. “You’re beautiful!” she told Zella, not even bothering to sign.
When Mehiska went in to wake her mother the next morning, she was smiling even before her eyes opened.
When the car pulled into Zella’s driveway, she rushed forward, forgetting the daily ache in her artificial hip, keening with joy as she took her grown child in her arms. She inhaled Melanie’s smell, held her body close, recognized herself.
She’d had two babies before this one and three after, but God had a sense of irony: Melanie looked more like her than any of them.
Watching the video of that mother-and-child reunion, women all over St. Louis felt old scars rip open. They, too, had lost newborns.
Could their babies be alive? Was this kind of joy possible for them?
Just about every African-American churchgoer in St. Louis knew Zella Jackson Price. They’d heard her belt out lyrics such as “I’m happy just to know that I’m his child” (a line whose meaning had now doubled) in their churches, in the documentary Say Amen Somebody, even on the soundtrack for HBO’s Angels in America. Zella carried herself proudly, but she wasn't aloof. Life’s events were either God’s work or the devil’s, and she praised God’s blessings nonstop. Knowing they’d be warmly welcomed, people called or emailed with their own stories. In response, over and over again, she shared hers.
She’d barely noticed the first contractions, she said. She was home watching TV—she’d moved back with her parents after leaving the high-school boyfriend she’d married at sweet, clueless 16. When water streamed down her leg, it terrified her, because she was only six and a half months pregnant and hadn’t even needed maternity clothes yet.
She called her future husband, Harvey Price, a man with “a tall, fine brown frame” who lived a few streets over and drove a cab. He hadn’t been quite as overjoyed about the baby as Zella was—he already had three children and was just divorcing his third wife. Better to be an old man’s sweetheart than a young man’s fool, Zella teased with her mother, who’d also married an older man. Zella loved Harvey’s attention—he’d been indulging her cravings with shrimp dinners at Sarah Lou’s. And that night, after a surprised, “It’s not time yet!” he drove her to the hospital.
She heard her baby’s first faint cry, the mewling of a weak kitten, before they rushed her away. “Mother, the baby is struggling,” she recalled a woman in scrubs telling her, “and she’s losing weight fast. Do you want to name her?”
Of course she did. Just as she’d named Michael, the preemie she’d lost five years earlier. So much was the same: He, too, had crowned before she made it into the delivery room. He, too, had struggled from the start. And this baby girl was even smaller.
It wasn’t long, Zella said—maybe one hour, maybe three—until another woman came to break the news that Baby Diane Jackson had died. Did Zella want to leave her at the hospital?
In her nurse’s aide training, she’d seen dead babies used to study fetal development. If she couldn’t take her baby home, she at least wanted to help other people learn. She’d left Michael, and she’d leave this baby, too. For science, she said.
This spring, Zella hired a lawyer, Albert Watkins. He swiftly formed a theory: A ring of medical staff, lawyers, and city officials had conspired to steal and sell babies. He fired off a letter to Gov. Jay Nixon and St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, suggesting that there’d been “a scheme and artifice to steal newborns of color” for private adoption.
Melanie had been told that she went deaf when her “ears popped” after an early childhood illness. A severe ear infection can indeed cause deafness—but so can prematurity—and she had no memory of hearing, ever. Watkins was convinced that Melanie had been stolen and sold, then “returned” when the adopting parents realized that she was deaf and slipped into foster care. Back in 1965, it could take months to diagnose hearing impairment in a preemie.
There was record of Melanie’s being adopted by her foster mother—but at the age of 18. “The Youngs didn’t have the paperwork of a parent abandoning her, which was the official story,” Watkins maintained, pointing out that without Zella’s consent, there would have been “was no administrative order showing relinquishment of parental rights or anything else that would allow adoption before 18.”
He and another lawyer, Donna Clark Frayne, started sifting through other mothers’ stories. The history slid all over the place, slippery with grief. But as the numbers grew, patterns emerged: Many of the women were very young when they gave birth; many were unwed; often it was a first baby; several had twins; all were African-American. When it was built, Homer G. Phillips instantly became the largest hospital in the U.S. dedicated to healthcare for blacks, and even after it was “integrated,” in 1955, the demographics didn’t change much.
“These women would present alone,” Watkins said, implying an extra aura of vulnerability—although at the time, fathers weren’t allowed upstairs anyway. “They all had interaction with one doctor, Mary Tillman, and one hospital administrator, McKnight, who had very close ties with Annie Malone [Children’s Home].”
Watkins said he had reason to believe that “somehow, some way, Annie Malone was involved. Someone there would facilitate a temporary placement of these babies in very close proximity to Homer G. Phillips.”
Virgil McKnight did serve on the board for the Annie Malone Children’s Home, but that wasn’t so unusual. The two institutions stood next to each other and had worked hand in hand for years. Dr. Mary Anne Tillman worked at Homer G. from 1960 until 1979 and was for many years the only staff pediatrician overseeing the newborns. Although she was too gracious to say so outright, her initial tone suggested that she found the notion of a baby-stealing ring preposterous: “In my opinion, there would not be a market. And if there were, it would be a nice full-term baby. Not ittle-bitty babies. And most black adoptions were in-family.”
Precisely, Watkins countered: “There was a need in the marketplace. All the adoption agencies catered to white mothers.” If a middle-class African-American couple couldn’t get pregnant, wanted a newborn, and didn’t have a young relative with an unwanted pregnancy, they might be desperate enough to pay.
But how did they get the babies out, Tillman wanted to know. Homer G.’s maternity ward was a long wing, crowded, with no privacy, just flimsy curtains separating the beds. Helen Wallace, a nurse who oversaw the nursery, conceded that they were often understaffed. (“Homer Phillips was the black hospital and I guess maybe they felt that we didn’t deserve anything better.”) Still, she couldn’t imagine how the scheme would have worked. “Babies had to be discharged to somebody,” she said. “Zella’s baby didn’t just jump out of a bassinet and go out into the street and get into foster care!”
It would have been easy, Watkins argued. “Put them in a blanket and walk them out the back door. Remember, this is a f—king baby mill. It’s a circus.”
The ring spanned the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, he announced, and it had to be for profit. “It would have required known cooperation between medical professionals, the city of St. Louis, its division of children’s services, and the state foster care system. All the checkmarks and safeguards that were in place could not have failed simultaneously.”
He said as much to CNN, CBS, ABC, Fox News, The Washington Post, the Associated Press International, and Al Jazeera America, using such phrases as “pay to play,” “cash on delivery,” and “a very dark and unlawful trafficking.” He flew to D.C. to speak with legislators; involved the National Center for Missing or Exploited Children; drew support from the Missouri National Organization for Women. He announced that the FBI had committed a human trafficking analyst to investigate.
Told that the FBI would only confirm that it was “aware of allegations,” he said, “If they’re denying it, then I find it interesting that they keep calling me in to bring them updates.”
Panicked questions came from mothers and adult children all over the city. The St. Louis Health Department opened a hotline. By May 12, it had logged 144 calls.
By the end of May, that number had doubled.
“Well, hello, sweetie! You are the cause of all this!” a woman exclaimed, kissing Zella on the cheek. The other women lining Watkins’ conference room, gathered for a press briefing, beamed at her.
“I met you some years ago at First Free Will,” Leatrice Barry said. “You were picking up your grandchild.”
“You look good,” said Donzetta Lester, admiring Zella’s magenta silk jacket.
Zella told her story yet again. “It feels good, it feels good—and it hurts. I didn’t get a chance to love her for 49 years. But I’ll double up on it.” Just learning it was possible, she said, “I was already in a cloud, and then I was shoutin’ some more,” when the DNA test came back. “But what do you mean, my baby died and 49 years later all the time she’s been looking for me?”
They talked about the video of her meeting her daughter, and Zella said, “It’s the most read story across the world as of today, the AP told me.”
Otha Mae Brand would say later, “I’m glad it happened to somebody like Zella, ’cause if it had just been a little bitty nobody like me, they probably would have pushed it up under the carpet.”
KSDK’s Art Holliday came in with his camera crew, greeting the women courteously and letting their stories unspool. Leatrice Barry had been 21, married almost two years. Her baby was premature and breech, and Barry was told that the baby didn’t weigh enough. Home again, sobbing over the tiny clothes she’d had ready, Barry begged the visiting nurse to find out more. The nurse returned with the information that the baby had died of a respiratory ailment, and Barry figured that they didn’t want her to feel guilty because she’d had a cough that summer. Now, she wasn't sure. “To relive all this!” she exclaimed. “It gnaws on you. What has your child been doing? Who had her?”
One after another, the women agreed: A nurse told them, the babies were whisked away, they never got to see or hold their babies, they never got death certificates.
“Why?” Brenda Stewart demanded, her voice harsh with tears and anger. “Because I was 16 years old, you had the right to take my baby? No. You did not have that right.” She was told that she was too young and her parents didn’t need another mouth to feed. Baby having a baby, they said, even in the delivery room, even when they told her the baby was stillborn but she’d heard her cry. Even when they left her alone, cussing and screaming, and let the blood dry on her thighs. For 51 years, she’d been gut-sure her baby wasn’t dead.
Marie Galloway remembered her young Creole stepmother, Phoebe—Peaches, for short—being pregnant every year for 13 years, yet only three children had lived. Jacqueline Butler was told that her baby died of brain damage but didn’t believe it.
“Man, this is crazy,” Holliday muttered. “This is like trying to lasso a tornado right now. We don’t know where this story’s going to lead.”
As more and more mothers came forward, Tillman started to wonder whether Watkins’ theory could be true. “It could have been known that if you wanted a baby, you could get in touch with such-and-such a person,” she said slowly. “I’d need to see the hospital admission record. We kept a logbook then. Then I’d need the delivery room record. Then, when the baby was discharged, who picked up the baby…”
But there was the rub. Homer G. Phillips’ records stayed put for a decade after the hospital closed, sharing the vast, echoey space with mice and spiders. Then the files were sent to National Records Storage, in boxes whose numbers were supposed to match up with the last six digits of each patient’s Social Security number. These were paper records, created in the smudgy era of carbon copies, and each folder had to be examined to make sure nothing had been jammed into the wrong file. By June, there were 149 formal requests, and the city had a team of more than 15 people—including police investigators—involved in the search, with three people dedicated to combing through each box and triple-checking one another.
“We get requests for shot records,” said city Health Department spokesman Harold Bailey, sounding dazed. “Never had anything like this.”
What made city officials especially nervous, but could only be hinted at, was the chance that some records would never be found. Melba Moore, director of the Health Department, pointed out how abruptly Homer G. Phillips had closed back in August 1979. It was a far cry from the 1937 grand opening, which drew a jubilant crowd into the streets to cheer and clap. There was a parade. Mayor Bernard Dickmann said it was “one of the happiest moments in my administration.”
In 1979, people just left their desks and wards as is. Outside the hospital doors, St. Louisans marched in protest, blocked traffic, threatened boycotts. Police used German shepherds to quell the outrage, and according to one account, it took more than 100 officers to escort the remaining patients safely from the building.
Nobody’s first priority was paperwork.
Now, what was left had to be exhumed and dissected while the mothers waited. By the time Zella finally received the form to request records, her story had gone viral. People in the U.K. and Germany and the Netherlands had watched her fold her lost daughter into her arms. But her hometown’s bureaucrats had spelled her name Vella, and she had to start over.
“I think they’re killin’ time,” she remarked. A frustrating earlier trip to vital records to find her baby’s birth certificate had left her “so vexed I was goin’ through red lights. My son said, ‘Mom, Mom! Let me drive!’”
While Zella was cursing the paperwork, her newfound daughter was making plans to move to St. Louis.
“When she came here she was so elated,” Zella confided, “but when she got ready to go back, she was…” Zella slumps her shoulders, an unstrung puppet. “And when I found out what she was going back to, oh, that hurt me.” Melanie’s marriage was miserable beyond repair. It was time for a change. And Zella couldn’t wait to make Melanie happy. “She still wants her own place, and I understand—she’s 49 years old. I’m going to have to be contained!”
Melanie planned to change her name back to Diane Jackson as soon as she moved to St. Louis. “I can sleep better at night and think that the thoughts I had before about my birth mom were not true,” she emailed. “I feel at peace with myself and with my mom, knowing that I was not given away but stolen from the hospital.”
Every child should have the chance to know his or her birth mother, she added. “You will never know the truth about something until you meet that person.”
Zella’s baby was born in 1965, just missing the cutoff for the Missouri Digital Heritage site, an online (and incomplete) database of death certificates issued 50 or more years ago. But the database did contain death certificates, signed and witnessed, for at least four of the babies. One was the premature daughter of Gussie Parker, one of the first women to come forward. Two had been born to Peaches Galloway—though Marie was still convinced there had been more deaths than that. And one was Leatrice Barry’s baby girl, death caused by prematurity and respiratory distress syndrome.
Marnita McGill Adams’ story was more complicated.
The third child of Lorice Jackson, Marnita grew up in the McGill family. Lorice’s younger daughters said their mother was told she’d died and grieved Marnita every year on her birthday. But in the fifth grade, Rose Jackson saw an older girl who looked just like her, lined up with the seventh grade in the schoolyard. She went up and said hi, asked the girl’s name. That night, she mentioned it to her mother and said the girl’s name was Marnita. “Are you sure?” the mother asked.
Rose never saw the girl again. And the next year, Marnita went to school in a different district (she’d been staying with an aunt). When she was 15, after her adoptive mother died, she received a call from a woman who said she was Marnita’s mother and invited her to come live with her. Not having a clue as to who this woman was, Marnita hung up, choosing to stay with her adoptive father.
In 1992, he died, and his siblings took Marnita to court, claiming that she’d never been legally adopted and should not inherit his property. Lorice had since died, but Judge James R. Dowd compared her signature on the consent-to-adopt form (Lorice was blind and could not write) with the X she used to sign other documents and agreed that it was “suspect.” Nonetheless, he noted strong evidence that Marnita had lived as the McGills’ adopted daughter and upheld her right to inherit.
Dowd reviewed the case file when he read about Zella’s experience, but said the McGill case offered no evidence of a baby-stealing ring.
Frayne, representing Marnita and her sisters, pointed out that at the time, it had been an isolated case. So had Zella’s, at first—and even she wasn’t sure it fit Watkins’ theory. She’d been 26 years old, not a vulnerable teenage mother. She said she thought her baby had just gotten mixed up with one who died, and when someone realized the mistake they didn’t dare backtrack.
“These other women, though, are still trying to find death certificates, and most of them are not finding them,” she said. “I think there was a market for black babies—’cause black females did not let go of their children.”
So much looked suspicious, seen half a century later.
“I never got a death certificate,” the women said. But they wouldn’t have, unless they’d requested one later through an undertaker.
“I never even got to see my baby,” most of the women said. But a premature or sick baby would be whisked away. When Helen Wallace came there to work, in 1947, Homer G. didn’t even have incubators, just padded boxes heated with overhead lights. The staff air-conditioned the tiny, cramped preemie room by setting a bucket of ice in front of a fan. There was oxygen but no ventilators, Wallace recalled: “We’d do manual stimulation—a little finger CPR if they needed extra breath.”
Lawyer Donna Frayne was alarmed by one client’s story of a baby wrapped in a blanket and put in a coffin with another dead body for burial. But sharing a coffin was common practice at the time, Tillman said, when parents couldn’t afford a funeral.
The sheer number of dead babies shocked people, in 2015. But in 1960, the death rate for white babies in St. Louis (per 1,000 births) was 21.4. The death rate for nonwhite babies was more than double that number, 45.9. And nonwhite mothers had almost twice as many stillbirths.
Almost every woman said it was a nurse who told her that her baby was dead, which sounded suspicious. Tillman and Wallace both insisted that the doctor was always the one responsible for delivering news that bad. But a woman in scrubs in the delivery room could have been a female doctor—Homer G. had quite a few, at a time when people still assumed that a doctor would be male. And it’s also easy to imagine nurses breaking protocol, given that there was a nationwide doctor shortage at the time, and Homer G. Phillips was seriously overcrowded. White politicians gave Homer G. less money and fewer resources than they allocated to City Hospital No. 1, which treated mainly white patients. When Homer G. proved itself efficient anyway, with lower costs per patient and better outcomes than City’s, the hospital commission suppressed the report. A circuit court grand jury cited the poor conditions in the preemie nursery. And when Dr. Helen Nash, a legendary pediatrician, requested ice cream and bananas for her young patients, the dietitian showed her the grocery list that came from downtown: Ice cream and bananas were marked for City Hospital only.
Without adequate funding, supplies, and stature, the hospital ran on a different sort of conspiracy: an internal loyalty, an unwillingness to discipline or criticize other staffers, a determination to keep going no matter how lousy the conditions were—and, eventually, such a weary resignation that the conditions barely registered.
In the hot, hectic delivery rooms of Homer G., a lot of good medicine was practiced—but a lot went wrong, too. Of the 585 babies born between April 1965 and April 1966, there were 92 deaths, Tillman told reporters at the time. After touring the hospital in 1967, Alderman Joseph W.B. Clark Sr. said, “This is one of the reasons why infant mortality in St. Louis is now No. 1 in the nation—because all the premature babies are born right here.”
Watkins came up with two more bits of possible evidence. He found the mother of one of the many adopted children now searching. She refused to talk to media, but according to Watkins, she said she willingly gave up her baby at the hospital—“and then they paid me the money.”
He also said he had “records from Homer G. Phillips’ administration, meeting minutes that said, ‘We have a lot of missing babies.’”
That document turned out to be a 1956–7 annual report from the hospital’s pediatric division to various regional public health authorities. It said that of the 526 premature babies who’d thrived and been discharged from the hospital, 151 were being seen in the clinic, 65 in municipal clinics, three by private physicians, and so on—and 193 were “not accounted for.” That wasn’t surprising, the report continued, because the hospital had no social worker assigned to preemies and no regular visiting nurse service.
A more benign interpretation of the “missing babies” is that they’d vanished from the healthcare system and might not be receiving pediatric checkups. Those 193 infants “who are at present lost to us constitute our ‘area of greatest need,’ and account for a large percentage of our high infant mortality rate in the city,” the report continued.
But not because they’d been stolen.
Watkins also said a source told him that “in 1961, approximately 20 of the maternity nurses were fired. I’m told by one of the nurses that it had to do with irregularities in the placement of babies with Annie Malone.”
Wallace shook her head. “I can’t think of any nurse who was downright fired. In order to be fired there, you really had to do something very, very bad.” The hospital was regularly criticized for its laxness with its employees, many of whom trained there and stayed for life.
Still, rumors and stray memories were now bubbling to the surface. People whispered that a woman had come forward saying she’d lived right across the street from the hospital and “kept babies” until the new families could get them.
And Zenobia Thompson, a registered nurse and activist who made the documentary The Jewel: The Story of the Homer G. Phillips Hospital for Colored, kept flashing back to an inexplicable incident, back when she’d worked on Homer G.’s maternity ward. Young and single, bubbling with maternal instinct, she’d fallen in love with an adorable baby boy, Michael, who had to be kept extra-long at the hospital. “I’d put him in his pumpkin seat and set him next to me while I did records,” she said.
One day, she was napping at her mother’s house when her aunt, who kept foster children, came in and set a baby on the bed next to her. Thompson opened her eyes and exclaimed, “That’s my Michael!”—and her aunt flew into a tizzy. First she told Thompson it wasn’t. “Oh yes it is. I know that baby.” Then her aunt made her swear not to tell anyone.
The secrecy was disconcerting, even then. In retrospect, it felt ominous.
Darlene Curry was only 17 when she got pregnant, but she was already married—she’d eloped with her boyfriend because he was going off to Simpson College in Iowa. That didn’t last—he missed her too much and came home, and they rented a tiny apartment and turned their closet of a bedroom into the baby’s room, lit by a powder-blue piggy-bank lamp. Young and healthy, Curry had an easy pregnancy.
In the delivery room, she remembered a rubbery mask and the sweetish “twilight” drug that lightened the pain. But after her baby came, she said, someone put strips of gauze across her eyes. “You have a boy,” they said, “but he’s born dead.”
Still hazy, sick with grief, Curry asked what she should do about the baby’s body. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it,” the doctor said. Now, she wondered: “Why would a doctor take such a personal interest in the arrangements for my baby?” She sighed heavily. “Who would think, at the age of 81, this would evolve? I haven’t really felt right since.”
There was no easy closure for Curry, no death certificate online. But another woman, confused for years by her mother’s varying stories of her origins, used the Homer G. Phillips story to force the truth. “All I want to do is find out, am I one of the kids they said were dead?” Pamela Hood said. “I’m not dead! And I want to find my mother to find out what really happened, because all my life I’ve been thrown away.”
Her mother relented and gave her the name.
“At first I was excited,” Hood said. “Then I got real nervous, kind of scared. What if she didn’t want to see me?”
Her birth mother came outside and stood at the end of her driveway, telling Hood she shouldn’t have knocked on her door. “She’s a very private person,” Hood said afterward, voice tight. “She did give me up for adoption legally. She says she doesn’t remember my birthdate. She still doesn’t know how to tell her family about me. She said we could do lunches, talk, see what type of person I was.” With that, Hood’s polite restraint broke. “If you are still ashamed or embarrassed, then f—k you. I’m not trippin’ over this. Normal people that have children, they find them or the child finds them, and they’d be more like—” Well, like Zella. “It just kind of hurts that you still want to keep me a secret.”
Hood said that her adoptive mother was unable to bear children, and it’s perfectly possible that money changed hands: “No one in our family was struggling. All of them had very good jobs, like uppity people. I was well, well, well provided for.” Her birth mother said nothing about being paid, she said, “but I’ll put it to you like this: Who knows if they paid her or not? She can’t remember my birthday!”
On May 27, the news broke. According to the St. Louis Family Court records, Zella’s baby had been abandoned. She’d had the baby at City Hospital No. 1, not Homer G. Phillips. The father named on the birth certificate was her estranged first husband, Theon Jackson, and not her future husband, Harvey Price. Five months later, the baby was placed in the foster care system.
Watkins claimed that the records were forged, calling them proof of the scheme. He quoted an outraged Zella, saying she didn’t even know where City No. 1 was and never would have crossed town in the racially charged ’60s to deliver at the “white” hospital. He said that a black man shot on the steps of City No. 1 would have been “put on a gurney and rolled north to Homer G. Phillips Hospital.”
City No. 1 did still treat mainly white patients, but not exclusively; it had been desegregated since 1955. Price told the Associated Press that Theon had a child born at City Hospital No. 1 with another woman the same year. And Otha Mae Brand, who had her baby just two years later, begged to be taken to City and not Homer G. “Back then when you dialed 911, anybody came,” she said. “It was the police that came, in a paddy wagon with the metal seats, and my palms were sweating, and I would slide when they turned the corner. I told them to take me to City because the fellow I was pregnant by, his mother told me a horror story about Homer G. They used to nickname it Killer Phillips! When they pulled up in front, I said, ‘I told y’all, don’t bring me here!’ Even though Homer G. was closer, I always went over to City No. 1.”
Technically, Zella could have gone to City No. 1. But it wouldn’t have been the expected choice. She’d gone to Homer G. for her two previous babies and would for the two that came after. So either it didn’t happen, or it was a deliberate choice.
Even Melanie somehow got word that she was born at Homer G. Phillips, because she wrote someone named Betty in the juvenile office in 1995, asking for help finding her mother and saying she’d been born “at the Phillpi Homo [sic] Hospital.”
The St. Louis Circuit Court juvenile division authorized the opening and resealing of Diane Jackson’s file at that point, in 1995. But that didn’t stop Melanie’s search.
And the release of the records this May didn’t stop Watkins.
The birth certificate was obviously a forgery, he said. “Anytime you have a criminal or nefarious act like this involving the theft of a baby,” Watkins told CNN, “there has to be appropriate documentation.” He said he had proof: Zella’s sister-in-law worked at Homer G. and remembered visiting Zella there after the birth. Furthermore, he said, the signature on the birth certificate was not in Zella’s handwriting.
“The mother left this infant at City Hospital #1 and failed to ever return for it,” the file says. “Mother’s whereabouts unknown.” Yet Zella’s home address was on the birth certificate.
“I wasn’t hid,” she said. “I was very visible.” Even after she married Price, in 1967, she kept Jackson as part of her name for her older children’s sake. And her career made her a celebrity among churchgoers. Yet year after year, the foster care reports repeated that there’d been no contact with Zella Jackson, and the petition to adopt, filed when Melanie turned 18, stated that Zella “has never come forward to claim the child.”
Watkins was still insisting that Muriel Young’s adoption of Melanie at 18 was illegal, because no one secured Zella’s consent. But this was an adult adoption, so the court didn’t need her consent. Besides, the released records showed that there was “paperwork of a parent abandoning her.”
So why did Muriel Young wait until Melanie turned 18? “She’s in foster care this entire time, and they’re getting checks,” pointed out Mehiska, who’s learning cynicism early. “At 18, they can use her as a tax write-off.”
Even after that first release of records, KMOV’s website titled its story about the records “Lawyer finds new evidence to support Homer G. Phillips human trafficking claims.” Watkins pressed on, arranging a DNA test for another possible mother-child pair. Zella, Melanie, and her daughters would be on an ABC 20/20 episode, and on June 3, they were in New York, taping an interview for The Security Brief.
But the next day, Watkins met with an assistant U.S. attorney and some federal law enforcement agents, and they handed him copies of additional documents and a portion of the foster care file.
It includes a March 17, 1966, letter from a social worker at City Hospital No. 1 to the administrator of St. Louis Juvenile Court, stating that the police went to Zella’s given address, 4568 Pope, and were told that she’d moved, and her grandmother and uncle were “either unable or unwilling to give any information regarding Mrs. Jackson’s whereabouts.”
Two weeks later, a child welfare aide requested a court order to give temporary custody of Baby Girl Jackson to the division of children’s services.
On April 7, a deputy juvenile officer wrote the child’s great-grandmother, Mrs. Margaret Waterford, asking whether she’d be willing to serve as next friend at the June 6 court hearing.
There was no police report to prove that they’d gone to Zella’s house, Watkins pointed out. “And what is her incentive to lie? To shield her daughter? Let’s run with that. First, it’s inconsistent with her behavior with her other children. Second, she denies it. She states that to this day she has never been to City No. 1.
“The feds said, hey, look, this shows your client is not being truthful with you,” he continued, “which is very troubling to me. It was insinuated that Zella, at the time of the reunion, felt she couldn’t tell her special-needs kid she abandoned her. There’s a psychological report—they were trying to evaluate her mental problem.”
No, actually not. “As more than a year has elapsed since the date of abandonment,” the referral read, “we are requesting psychological testing and evaluation of this child to aid in determining the prospects for her successful adoptive placement.”
The sister-in-law who supposedly remembered seeing Zella at Homer G. Phillips after her delivery, “has gone radio silent on us,” Watkins said. Instead he offered an affidavit that a friend of Zella’s, Ruth A. Grimes, dictated to an aide in the nursing home where she resides. Grimes said she’d visited Zella at Homer G. and found her crying because her baby girl had passed.
Zella stood by her story. But if documents were forged, they were forged across multiple agencies and over many years. “Our office is still looking into the matter,” said U.S. Attorney Richard Callaham, “and trying to keep an open mind. All the documents we have been able to obtain, we shared with Mr. Watkins, and I’m confident in saying there is absolutely no evidence or suggestion that any of these documents were forged.”
The second DNA test Watkins had scheduled showed no match, but he intended to try again with a different child in January: “I’m not backing down from the possibility that something serious was wrong.”
Thus far, though, he’d found scant proof. And hundreds of women in their last decades of life were now waiting, suspended between two sadnesses, grieving the loss of certainty as well as the loss of their child.
Hope, once it’s raised, doesn’t die easily. But neither does love.
Melanie Diane Jackson Young Gilmore now knows her real name. She’s found the mother she hunted all those years—and was prepared, all along, to forgive. She’s still moving to St. Louis to be close to her.
On Zella’s Facebook page, someone posted a link to an article about the new records contradicting Watkins’ theory. But right above it is another message from Mehiska, this one exuberant, saying that “Grandma Zella Jackson Price” is coming to town for her college graduation. And below, there’s an earlier comment from Zella to Mehiska: “I am looking forward sweetheart. I can’t wait, I love you baby, kiss Diane for me.”
She doesn’t intend to lose her again.
This feature appeared in St. Louis Magazine's August 2015 issue. On August 14, the U.S. Attorney's office released pages upon pages of detailed medical records. They show Zella Jackson Price hospitalized at Saint Louis City Hospital, not Homer G. Phillips, for nine days, and her 2.6-pound baby girl remaining there for the next four months. The federal investigation is now closed. Jackson's attorney, Albert Watkins, intends to continue pursuing the case and maintains that the records prove nothing.
