--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I'm Ayesha Rascoe, and this is The Sunday Story, where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story. You're probably familiar with the baby boom. After World War II, there was a huge spike in fertility rates. But not all of those babies were wanted. At the time abortion was mostly illegal in the U.S. and so that baby boom it also led to something that people have called the baby scoop era.
--:-- [Soft music fades out]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Yes, that's actually what they called it. Before Roe v. Wade there was a period from 1943 to 1973 when many unmarried women and girls were forced to give birth and put their babies up for adoption. The exact numbers are hard to know because these births often happened in secret in places called maternity homes.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Grady Hendrix is an acclaimed horror writer, and he made this tragic history the setting of his latest novel, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. It's a book that in some ways reverberates with the present today. Things are obviously different from the years before Roe v Wade. Abortion is still a protected right in 21 states and the District of Columbia, and there are abortion pills now that can cross state lines. But with the fall of Roe and the resulting abortion restrictions, some of this history it echoes.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: My conversation with Grady Hendrix when we come back. Stay with us.
--:-- [Soft music continues]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This message comes from NPR sponsor 1Password. Protect your digital life with 1Password. If you're tired of family members constantly texting you for the passwords to streaming services, 1Password lets you securely share or remove access to logins. Access from any device, anytime.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This message comes from BetterHelp. President Fernando Madeira describes how BetterHelp Online Therapy has helped him.
--:-- [Soft music continues]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This message comes from Doctors Without Borders. People are living through a moment defined by unrelenting crises and need. Civilians are caught in the crossfire of violence and war. Malnutrition threatens the lives of children. Communities depend on life-saving humanitarian aid.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Rady, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Okay, so set this up for us. The story starts in the early 1970s with a pregnant 15-year-old girl, her very angry father at the wheel. They're speeding from Alabama to Florida. And there is so much judgment at this time for unwed mothers in general, but especially for teenage unwed mothers.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Her name is Neva. She's 15 and she's pregnant. And she's being taken to a maternity home in Florida. And there were about 190 of these across America. You know, they were around for a long time, but their peak was really from about 1940, 45 to 1973 when Roe versus Wade passed.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And this is where if your daughter got pregnant and didn't have a ring on her finger, you would send her. She'd spend the last trimester usually of her pregnancy in hiding, have her baby. Her baby would be taken from her and put up for adoption. And she'd return home with some kind of cover story you tell the family or the neighbors.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Oh, she, you know, visited her aunt this summer or she went to work on her French in Chicago. And she would be expected to never talk about or think about her baby again.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And the girls were kept under very tight control. Like, the woman running the place where Neva ends up, she instructs the girls that they are not to talk about their real identities. They're given fake names. And they are also kept in the dark about what exactly is going to happen to them when it's time to give birth.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: They're told, oh, there's no pain. You'll just go on to sleep. You won't remember anything. And that's not true. Even back then, I mean, they had some stuff going on, but that's not true.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Yeah, well, you know, the homes were run by, you know, the Catholic Charities ran homes, the Florence Crittenden Homes, the Salvation Army. They were independent homes. And they all varied in how they treated the girls.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: I mean, you had homes that had nutritionists and obstetricians on staff who gave them classroom teaching, who had social workers. And then you had homes that were almost like prisons. Money was taken from them. They were kept indoors all day.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But the few common things between the homes is yes you never used a real name. You never said where you were from. And you were kept ignorant.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: You know all these girls had these due dates bearing down on them like freight trains, and they were dying to know what's going to happen. And people say, oh, don't worry about it. That's none of your business when, you know, it's kind of entirely their business.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: You know, the novels going along, it's all very realistic because, you know, these homes existed. But then here comes this bookmobile and a mysterious librarian and this spell book for groovy witches.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Yes. Talk to me about Fern, Rose, Holly and Zinnia. That's the kind of the group, or should I say coven, that comes together and their first foray into the dark arts.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Yeah, well, you know these girls are so hungry for information and who gives people information but librarians and in the late 60s and early 70s it was a glut of these sort of supermarket paperbacks of you know everyday spells and how to cast charms and how to be a sensual witch.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And I thought well what if a librarian gave them one of these books that actually gave them what they want which is some power and control over their lives what if one of these books really did teach them how to do witchcraft.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And, you know, as they say, be careful what you wish for. Exactly. I mean, so they get a little into it. They do a little spell and someone feels the effects of it. But, you know, things do get rough. Witches are witches. They're going to do witchy things. And there's always a price to pay for power.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: But it really seems here that more of the horror in this book is the reality that the girls are living in, where they just have zero agency over their bodies, their babies, their kids, and they're put in this position where they have to make these horrible decisions, and they're just children.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: What kind of led you to write this kind of story?
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Well, two things, really. I mean, one was, so when I was in my 20s, I found out that two members of my family had been sent away to maternity homes. And they were both in their 60s or 70s. I would have never talked about it.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And it kind of blew your mind. The idea that these women I loved very much had children and were expected not to know them or see them or think about them.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And for all they knew, their kids were dead or maybe they were alive or maybe they hated them or maybe they had forgiven them, but they had no idea. And so I was sort of thinking about that for a while and really wrestling with it and trying to figure out what was that like? Why was this okay?
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And you read a book by a woman named Ann Fessler called The Girls Who Went Away, which is, there's very few books written about the homes. I mean, Ann's book and Ricky Sollinger's Wake Up Little Susie are kind of the only two.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And Ann Fessler's book is an oral history of the homes. And she lets the mothers talk about their experiences. And I was really blown away. I mean, the fact that millions of kids were born in these homes and that these were kids, you know, these were girls and they were 14 and 15 and 13 years old.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And we were telling them, give up your baby, never think about it again. I mean, that's impossible for a mother to do. And just the cruelty of it really sort of made me think there's something here.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And it took me years until I was sort of like, okay, I'm going to try this book. And then it took me two years to write it while my editor and I fought over a lot of it and I failed to write it several times and things just sort of went off the rails.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But yeah, so that's what I was thinking to get me here. Well, I'm glad you stuck with it.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And that's interesting about, you know, failing to write it, but then getting to this work. So that should give some people hope because you kept at it and you succeeded.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Well, yeah, I mean, you know, and also I need to say, you know, I am a childless middle-aged man. I have no place writing a book in which every character is a pregnant teenage girl.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And so I had about 12 moms who really shared their birth stories. I mean, they let me ask stupid questions. I had about four OBs and laborists who worked with me, both men and women, who I would just keep coming back to, okay, what's it?
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And so a lot of the time writing this book was trying to get that part of it right. Well, because there are obviously birth scenes in this book, and they are not for the squeamish, we should say. Not for the squeamish.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: But isn't birth not for the squeamish? It's not. No, I've done it. And I have to tell you, it is the best thing in the world, but it's also extremely terrifying.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And you talked about researching. Were you surprised or shocked by some of the things you learned about hospital births, especially back then and what they were like?
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Oh, sure. I mean, listen, giving birth in 1970 my hat is off to any woman who did that because that they should get a medal of honor. You know, I had OBs telling me stories about doctors who would induce labor if their patient came in on Friday because they didn't want to mess up their weekend waiting around for her to give birth.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Um, you know, women you know were regularly tied down at that point when they gave birth.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Girls like this who gave birth as one OB pointed out to me would probably just be knocked out because the doctor really didn't want to mess around with them too much and have to quote unquote deal with them.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So even reading things like the Williams Obstetrics Manual, Guttmacher's Family Planning, which was sort of the go-tos at the time, the attitude towards things like morning sickness, that's all in a woman's mind. That's just a made-up problem because a woman is uncomfortable with giving birth and so she's nauseated by it.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And one doctor said something to me that really informed how I wanted to approach the birth scenes in this. It was a doctor I've known for a long time, and she was telling me about her OB rotations in the 90s and, you know, really harrowing stories, the kind of, you know, war stories that just left my jaw on the floor.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And at the end of our interview, she said something that really stuck with me. She said, you know, I've been in the room for, I don't know, close to 90 live births. And she said, and every single one of them is a goddamn miracle.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Something happens there that we don't have words for. And that really stuck with me and was kind of what I wanted to capture. Yes, it's horrifying. Yes, it's painful. Yes, it's intense. But this is everything. You know what I mean? This is where we all start. You know, there are two people in a room and then there are three.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: When we come back, Grady and I talk magic.
--:-- [Soft music continues]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This message comes from NPR sponsor Oracle. In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time?
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. With OCI, you can run any workload in a high-availability, consistently high-performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: To try OCI for free with zero commitment, go to oracle.com slash NPR.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile might be right for you with plans starting from $15 a month.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Shop plans today at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for a 3-month 5GB plan required. New customer offer for first 3 months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This message comes from NPR sponsor Adobe. Introducing the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio, now with AI-powered PDF spaces.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Need to turn 100 pages of market research into five insights with a click? Templates for a sales proposal that'll close that deal, or an AI specialist to tailor the tone of your market report. You can do all that with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with Acrobat.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: [Speaking in the background, but not clearly identifiable]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: We're back with author Grady Hendrix. It's not giving anything away to say that this book involves magic, but you deal with different types of magic, right? Or witchcraft, like a certain type from the spell book. But you also have root work, hoodoo, that comes out of the African spiritual traditions.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Yeah, so I'm from Charleston, South Carolina. I've done some research down in the Sea Islands. I helped someone write a book many years ago that had some hoodoo in it. And I just kept researching because it was this amazing tradition.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: You know, voodoo and hoodoo often get confused, but they're very different. I mean, voodoo has gods involved in the loa, and hoodoo is very much about medicine and root work and charms and healing.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And so it was this tradition that I worry is going to get lost, and it's a really intense part of sort of that Sea Island, you know, South Carolina going into Georgia tradition. It's so regional and so of those islands.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And it's also in North Carolina. I don't want to give away my family business, but we have some root workers in there.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: It was a form of resistance. You know, Dr. Buzzard, who was a really famous root doctor, he would, when someone's son got drafted, he would mix up a tea for them and have them drink it.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And what people figured later is the tea had gunpowder in it that would give them some cardiac arrhythmia. And so they'd go into their physicals and flunk their physicals and not be sent to usually Vietnam or Korea.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: So, you know, there was this really amazing other element to it where there was a really real-world political edge to it.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: One thing that this book obviously deals with is the misogyny that these girls face. They're all shamed for becoming pregnant. The boys really face no consequences at all.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: But they're also told that if they just go along with the plan, willingly sign their rights away to their babies or unwillingly, then they can just go back to their lives like nothing ever happened.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And how damaging do you think that sort of lie is?
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Oh, I mean, I think that's something that haunts a lot of these women for the rest of their lives. You know, reading Ann Fessler's book, talking to a few people, you know, you're a kid. You can barely make decisions about what to wear. And suddenly you're being told you need to sign these papers and you have no choice.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And these girls were not told their options. They were not told, you know, their legal rights. And I think a lot of them, I mean, I know a lot of them are haunted by guilt for the rest of their lives.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And I've seen people reunite with their kids after being sent to maternity home. And it's incredible. It is really incredible. The healing that's there and how something feels completed is mind-blowing.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And I've seen, on the other hand, women who never saw their kids again. And it didn't necessarily ruin their lives, but it was always a shadow that hung over them for decades.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And the fact that we did this on such a wholesale level as a society and like you said what made my jaw drop was how much we hated these girls. I mean, newspaper editorials about how Alcatraz should be turned into a home for unwed mothers. Newspaper columnists calling these girls sick and unnatural.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And no consequences for the men. I read a lot of books of resources. I found one social worker manual, a handbook from 1974 that mentions unwed fathers in one sentence. And that's it.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Hmm. And obviously, you look at this and you think about, like, what is the evil in this book? These teenage girls, they're put into these positions to make these impossible decisions without all the information, without any real adult guidance.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Like, is that the real evil in this story?
--:-- Grady Hendrix: You know it's funny I thought about this a lot right I write horror novels I mean I write entertainment and in writing this I was like well who are my bad guys who are my bad guys like well it can't be the witches I mean the witches are scary but the witches are also offering knowledge and liberation and then I thought well is it the people running the homes and I thought no you know the people running the homes were really convinced they were doing what was best for these girls is it the girl who's got pregnant no of course it's not these girls who got pregnant some of them were date raped. Some of them were molested. Some of them just didn't even know what birth control was or have access to it.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: It's one of those stories where there isn't a villain. There are just a lot of people who were really convinced that they were right. And that conviction did so much damage to so many millions of people.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Well, it seems like there is a lot of gray in this world that you've created because there is this possibility of freedom in the path of of quote-unquote darkness with the witches. And then there's the possibility of that lie that the girls are being fed, that if they just go along with giving up their babies, everything will go back to normal.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But you show that both of those paths are messy. Like, is that how you think about this?
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Yeah. I mean, I think we're all told as teenagers, even as adults to some extent, here's the path, follow the path and everything will be fine. You won't have to worry about anything. And I think most of us know that that's just not true.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And then I looked at these witches who were sort of the counterpoint to that. And what really inspired my witches was less sort of Wicca or paganism and much more. I sort of found the voice of the witches in political action literature of the late 60s and early 70s.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: Witch, which was a group known as Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. The Black Panthers. The Weather Underground. all these groups that said, we are at war with the mainstream because the mainstream is leading us down a path of destruction.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And all these groups have these same internal debates. You know, what is violence justified? How far can we push things? If we're at war with the mainstream society, what does that look like? What are we allowed to do?
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And I think it's one thing to say, hey, I'm going off to join the Liberation Army. I think it's another thing to say, I'm never going home again and I will live under an assumed name and I will be on the run for the rest of my life. You know, it's scary.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So, I mean, I think these girls are presented with two choices and one looks very scary and the other looks very safe and they're both equally dangerous. And, you know, I wanted to ask you, obviously, you know, you are a horror writer, entertainment writer.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: You've written books like How to Sell a Haunted House, the Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires and My Best Friend's Exorcism. How do you come up with your ideas?
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Man, they're everywhere. You know, I mean, the world is—one of the reasons I write horror is because it's about the world around us. It's not about space or another planet or a fantasy world or the far future. It's usually about the here and now and people around us.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: And good God, there's so many stories, you know, if you're just willing to listen. And then once you add in that, like, you can make it not boring by throwing in a vampire or some witches or a werewolf or two.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I mean, I wish I could keep up with how many books I want to write.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Kim Naderfane-Petersa and edited by Jenny Schmidt and Liana Simstrom.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: It was engineered by James Willits. Big thanks also to the team at Weekend Edition Sunday, which produced the original interview with Brady Hendricks.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and Justine Yan. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: This message comes from Paka. Everyone's got that one hoodie they practically live in. But the Paka hoodie? It's on another level. Softer than cashmere, warmer than wool, and still breathable, this alpaca fiber hoodie goes from airport to mountain trail to couch without missing a beat.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Right now, grab a Paka hoodie and score a free pair of alpaca cruise socks. Moisture-wicking, odor-resistant, and guaranteed for life. Level up your hoodie game at go.pakaapparel.com slash NPR, code NPR.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile might be right for you with plans starting from $15 a month.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Shop plans today at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for a 3-month 5GB plan required. New customer offer for first 3 months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.
--:-- Grady Hendrix: This message comes from Warby Parker. What makes a great pair of glasses? At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost, like free adjustments for life. Find your pair at warbyparker.com or visit one of their hundreds of stores around the country.
