'Negro infant found in box'

The best newspaper story I never wrote:

One of the women who worked the front desk said, “Bob, could you help her with the microfilm reader?”

My desk was the first in the newsroom, so I often got requests from people looking for news from years ago. The “her” was a young woman – early to mid-20s – a couple of inches over five feet tall.

“Sure,” I said. I got up and gestured toward the microfilm reader. “This way.” At the reader, I asked what year and month she wanted.

“June, 1967,” she said.

I got the roll of film from a drawer and put the roll on a spooler and ran the film leader through the lens. I turned on the reader light and explained the forward and back controls.

“Thank you,” the young woman said. I returned to my desk and resumed working on a story for the next day. About ten minutes later, I looked up when the young woman approached. She said, “Will you please show me how to print a story?”

“Of course,” I said. She and I returned to the reader.

She pointed at the screen. “That’s me,” she said. I looked at the story she indicated. The headline said:

‘Negro infant
‘found in box’

“That’s me,” she said again. “I am the baby who was found in a box.”

I sat at the reader and read the story, how a deputy sheriff in June 1967, while on patrol on a back road in the county, saw a whiskey box beneath a tree near a barbed wire fence. The deputy stopped his car and got out. It was a dry county, and finding a labeled whiskey box was not a common occurrence.

As the deputy neared the box, he saw a bullet hole in two sides. Then, he heard the crying baby. The baby was wrapped in a blanket. The deputy picked up the baby and the box and went to his car and drove to the local hospital, as fast as was safe. Doctors said the baby was about three days old, and in good condition, other than insect bites and some dehydration.

The young woman said, “There are more stories.”

The next day’s paper in 1967 said the hospital had received 30 requests from county people – white and black – to adopt the infant.

A story the day after that said county officials gave the baby to the husband and wife who owned the city’s black funeral home.

I looked at the young woman. Her face held despair. I said, “You could use a hug, but we can’t do that sort of thing any more.”

“My mother will hug me when I get home,” she said. She then said she had not known until then where she came from.

“At family reunions, old aunts would say, ‘You’re the girl they found in a box.’ I never knew what they meant. My mother always said it didn’t mean anything, what they said.”

She was 25, married to a successful man, had two kids and lived in Dallas. She was at the newspaper office because she wanted answers.

I said, “Let me write your story.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask my mother. If she says it’s OK, then it will be.”

I printed copies of the pages. She left the office.

Next day I called her adoptive mother. I said I wanted to write the story. “It will be a great story,” I said.

The adoptive mother said, in a voice not friendly, “What good would it do?”

I did not have an answer.