Milner, Georgia — Claudia is a truck driver in Georgia. She is running transportation logistics here, far from her first rodeo on a movie set. She went on the union job earlier this fall not fully appreciating what she was in for. The movie, Possum Trot, is a true story about the foster care and adoption of black children who suffered unspeakable trauma in their young lives. Claudia knows that experience in her bones. At one point on the set, sharing about her personal story, she said we cannot be silent about the children in foster care who often have no voice, no advocate. She remembers being in that situation herself and being so skinny from malnutrition, not being given food to eat: “I could feel my bones. It’s a real thing.”
At night, while working on the movie set, Claudia discovered an envelope she didn’t realize she had at home: papers that had been sent to her late mother of Claudia’s files while she (the mother) was being watched by the courts. Social workers wrote that young Claudia must have been “retarded” — they deemed that the only possible explanation for Claudia’s strange behaviors. In truth, the circumstances were sexual abuse and other mistreatment from men — some of them newly released from prison — whom her mother had around the house before Claudia wound up in the foster system.
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