renee was feeling abandoned. i told her don t go. stay here. i need you. you re my sister. so she went. she did her thing, and i was upset, and i was sad. by 1986 and on her own now, pepper had given hope she d ever find her real parents, but she had an immediate problem, the trouble that comes with having no real name, no i.d., no birth certificate. she was under rhonda smith at shirley s urging at school. she had no way to prove her legal name, and without some cooperation from shirley, her search for such documents seemed hopeless. and then how did you find out she was sick? she turned completely yellow when they diagnosed her with pancreatic cancer. with shirley on her death bed, shirley tried to act like a dutiful daughter.
she had told me that she had adopted me, but i was also shipped around a lot from home to home because she had a lot of health problems, from what i was told. he was neglected, he said, and often abused, bounced around for years. until anna brown shipped him off to a colorado couple when he was 14. and that s when he found his birth certificate, started calling himself ray smith and began puzzling over the apparently unanswerable questions of his life. why did ann name me jim brown if my name was really ray? how come i never knew about jeri? things like that. and then i wondered, you know, was i kidnapped? no answers from anna brown, who died soon after that. and, as for life in colorado, by the time he was 16 things were getting a little rough, maybe because of my past, i wasn t a real easy kid.
where did they go? the little girl had no idea. but she did know that from now on, she had a new name. they called her pepper. pepper smith. she was not yet 5 years old. we lived in cars and motels and going from state to state staying at salvation armies to get a meal here and there. just what s it like to live in a car? it s horrible. it s embarrassing. she was confused, of course, and terribly frightened at first. she begged, take me home. shirley ignored her. she agined running ay. i had nowhere to go. i was too scared. then as the weeks and months and then years went by, as her powers of reasoning grew, the question grew, too. did her mother bobbie actually give her away? shirley told pepper that renee was her sister. the two girls listened wide-eyed
her name was shirley. a friend of her mother s. the little girl she brought with her was renee and renee was 6. a little older then. didn t matter. they dashed off to her bedroom to play. this is renee now. that room is stuck in her memory, too. her room was gorgeous. a nice sized room for a little kid. she had a canopy bed. tons of dresses. toys galore. and you had none of that. no. and i was li, w, thiis nice. aaln wod to ree. the most wonderfulhing she d ever seen. and whilthe little girls played in the bedroom, shirley was with bobbie in the living room talking. and then she called renee. so when it was time to leave, i didn t want to go. can we stay longer? no, but your new friend is coming with us, said shirley. oh, okay. so she came, and then that s how everything started. so it did. it was to be an overnight, the girls were told. a little fun.
raymond leonard smith, jr. is what geri called him before he too was snatched away, abducted by the babysitter, shirley. where was he now? geri gave us a copy of his birth certificate. he would be about 40 now. and our chances of finding him seemed, frankly, slim. we called 40 yield ray smiths all over the country. ray smith in colorado, ray smith in maryland, in new jersey, in kansas. with you did he go by the name ray smith? and then a call back. it was the ray smith from colorado. he had the right name, the right age, place of birth, had grown up without knowing any blood relatives. all this ray smith knew was his mother s name. according to his birth certificate was geri. he was starting to sound a lot like our ray. we asked if he would submit to a dna test he agreed.