On subsequent weekends, Crystal was allowed to go to the Bronx, purportedly to stay with her cousin Hazel. She stayed with the Jeffersons. She saw her mother outside on Findlay Avenue and went to visit her son at Bronx-Lebanon every weekend.
Crystal had started drinking cheap wine and using drugs before she entered her teens, when she lived on Sheridan Avenue, in a sixth-floor walkup. Her mother had often kept her out of school to babysit two of the younger children. Crystal resented being cooped up in a hot apartment while her friends were outside playing. As a child, she liked going to school (“School was the only time I had some freedom, I could run and play”). She passed every grade through sixth despite her absences and the very scant help that Florence gave her with her homework. “I could only ask Mommy once how to do the times table,” Crystal says. “If I didn’t get it and asked again, she’d beat me. If I said ‘Mommy, I don’t think it’s fair,’ I got hit again. I could never express my feelings without getting a beating.” Sometimes Crystal was hit for what she considered just cause—her two younger brothers ate slowly, and if she was hungry she took food off their plates—but usually not.
Florence frequently left the house at 9 A.M., saying to Crystal, “I’m going to the welfare, watch the kids, I’ll be right back,” and returned at 11 P.M. “I had to feed and change my brothers,” Crystal says. “It was as if they were my kids. Mommy cooked a big dinner on Sunday to last two days. If I hadn’t watched her cook, we’d have eaten cold foods as the week went by. I seen her wash the rice and clean the chicken and if we had chicken in the refrigerator I’d fix it for me and my brothers and leave her a plateful. Or I’d make franks and frozen French fries. We got food stamps and Mommy bought groceries with them. But we had no grownups.”
When Florence was out of money, she would send Crystal to borrow food from an elderly woman who lived alone next door. The neighbor would give Crystal the two pieces of bread or the eggs she asked for, in a friendly way, but when Crystal sat outside, on a fire escape the two apartments shared, she would hear the neighbor saying to herself, “God damn it, why don’t they get they own bread?” Gradually, Crystal only pretended to seek food, simulating footsteps by tapping her feet in the hall, and letting time pass until she could return to report that the neighbor had no bread. Crystal escaped the troubles of her house in various ways. She jumped from the roof of her building to the roof of the building next door and went down a flight of stairs to visit friends who lived on the fifth floor. She looked out her living-room window at the George Washington Bridge, admiring the color orange as the sun went down and night fell, and fantasized about being on a tropical island. She locked herself in the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She played with her “doll babies” and a doll house she and Florence had made out of a box.
Crystal’s worst single memory of her childhood is of a time when her father, Wesley Taylor, overdosed on heroin and almost died. Her parents and their friends were often in the kitchen; the children were told to stay in their room when the grownups were getting high. One evening when Crystal was about ten years old, she heard her mother screaming “Wesley! Wesley! Wesley!” She came out into the hall. Wesley was foaming at the mouth, and Florence was stuffing ice down his throat and into his pants. There were needles and bloody tissues on the kitchen table. That evening, no one else was there. Florence told Crystal to go to the building next door to get a friend. Crystal obeyed, all the while crying, “I want my daddy, I want my daddy.” She remembers telling the man she was sent to summon that her father was dead and to come quick. The man tried to lift Wesley and make him walk but hadn’t succeeded by the time an ambulance came. “Promise me you won’t do it no more,” Crystal said to her father after he returned from the hospital. “Baby girl, I ain’t going to do that no more. That was a close one for me,” he told her. The next night, after Wesley left to visit his mother, Felicia Taylor, Florence used up the rest of the heroin.
“I started growing hatred,” Crystal says. “My father almost died and here she used that stuff and was so out of it. I thought, How stupid can you be? I was scared—I didn’t know what to do if she overdosed. I said ‘Mommy, you O.K.?’ and she said ‘I’m O.K., you go to your room.’ ”
When Crystal was twelve, she ran away from home for the first time, and during the seventh grade she started having trouble in school.
“I had this seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Reynolds, who had a bald spot,” she says. “I came in drunk one morning. He was writing on the blackboard, and everyone was copying stuff off of it. I got up. He told me to sit down. The sun was shining on the bald spot. I went to slap the shine off of his head. I tapped him teasingly on the center of his bald spot, calling out ‘Fiddle-diddle, no hair in the middle!’ He chased me around the room with a pointer. I hopped over the chairs and rolled over the desks. I slapped the paperwork off of his desk, while he shouted ‘You come back here!’ and ‘You get out of my classroom!’ I was rolling on the floor trying to get away from him and the pointer and toward the exit. I leaves. In the hall, I seen the principal coming and ran the other way, to the girls’ bathroom. They suspended me for two days. They made me shake Mr. Reynolds’ hand and promise I’d never do that again. I managed to keep a straight face.” Crystal played hooky, didn’t do any homework, and didn’t pass a single course that year. In the spring, she took a city-wide reading test for seventh graders: she read above grade level and was promoted.
One morning before going to the eighth grade, at Community Intermediate School 147, she smoked a bag of angel dust—phencyclidine, or PCP—that she had put in Hazel’s freezer the previous night to keep it fresh. When she arrived at school, she attacked her eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Sprigg, after Mrs. Sprigg asked her a question. Crystal remembers that an assistant principal and others (“ambulance people, maybe, and cops”) held her down. The next thing she remembers is waking up in Lincoln Hospital, strapped to a bed. Daquan came to the hospital with one of his brothers and two cousins, bought her a container of milk (“Milk brings the dust down,” Crystal says), and took her home to her mother that evening.
Crystal was still so out of it that she didn’t recognize Florence. Florence, for her part, didn’t believe that her daughter had been in the hospital; she thought Crystal had been with Daquan, about whom she had mixed feelings. When Crystal first met Daquan, he was a drug dealer. He gave Florence drugs, because she seemed to expect them as her due. Crystal grew weary of her mother’s freeloading and told Daquan he didn’t have to get Florence high in order to date her. After Daquan stopped giving Florence drugs, her attitude toward him seemed to change. Once she became pregnant, Crystal persuaded Daquan to give up dealing in drugs, by swearing that he would never see his son if he went to jail. In September of 1984, Daquan Jefferson went on welfare, and was put to work as a custodian for the New York City Board of Education. When a permanent position opened up, he got off welfare; he has held the job ever since.
After attacking Mrs. Sprigg, Crystal gave up smoking dust. She had already given up sniffing cocaine (it had caused her to black out) and dissolving “mestabs,” a pill form of mescaline, on her tongue, because “I suffers from asthma and they gave me dizzy spells.” She never tried heroin (“not after seeing what it did to Mommy”), did speed, or shot cocaine (“I’m scared of needles”). Until relatively recently, she sprinkled cocaine into cigarettes and enjoyed smoking “coolies.” To this day, she loves smoking marijuana, particularly in the evening and on weekends. It relaxes her, gives her a good appetite, helps her go to sleep, and makes it easier for her to have sex with the men in her life with whom she doesn’t enjoy having sex.
Crystal was in the first half of eighth grade when she left Hazel’s apartment. Daquan encouraged her to continue attending C.I.S. 147, which was near both Findlay Avenue and the Jeffersons’ apartment. She set off for school most mornings, but she usually took the money that Daquan gave her every day for food and sundries for herself and her friends, used it to buy marijuana, met her frie
nds in a school bathroom, and left with them for a White Castle restaurant, where she treated them to burgers. She skipped school after lunch. In eighth grade, she was very often high or absent, or both, and was well known to C.I.S. 147’s truant officer. She was held back at the end of eighth grade, in June, 1984; she thinks her reading level had “sunk” as a result of too much hanging out, and she doesn’t recall being present for any reading tests. By then, of course, she was pregnant. That September, she began to repeat eighth grade at Bronx Regional High School, in a special program for pregnant teenagers, which she liked. (“They served nutritious juices and everybody had a big stomach.”) She had been there only a few weeks when Daquan was born. After the birth, she continued her eighth-grade studies at a special program in a Brooklyn school, to which residents of Queensboro were bused.
While Crystal was at the diagnostic center, she was questioned, tested, and evaluated by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a social worker. The psychiatrist noted that “her attractiveness is somewhat marred by a chipped upper front tooth.” An old wino had hung out on the ground floor of 1311 Findlay Avenue. People often beat up on him. One day, Crystal was running into the building to go to the bathroom in Hazel’s third-floor apartment. He thought she was running toward him to hit him, and swung the bottle he had in his hands at her—a reflex action. The bottom of the bottle cracked both her upper front teeth, one of them badly. Crystal’s mother did not take her to the dentist. Both her teeth were capped after she left Queensboro.
Crystal lacked enthusiasm for tests that involved shapes like triangles, circles, and squares. “You want me to put blocks in a box?” she asked. “This is for babies.” Her “Performance I.Q. Score” was ninety, but there were “indications of potential for higher functioning.” A “Psychosocial Report” stated the “presenting problem” succinctly: “Child has no place to go.” Her interrogators found her pleasant but depressed over her situation, which did not change as October turned to November.
By December, little Daquan weighed seven pounds, required no medication, and was overdue for discharge from the hospital. Crystal engaged in some wishful thinking—that her mother would find an apartment, and that she and her siblings would be a family again. “Not that I would have been living with her, but I could then still be living with the Jeffersons and have my baby with me in his baskinet,” she recalls. But Crystal had less reason than the nice lady staff member, who knew only partial truths, to think that her mother would get herself together in the near future. Florence wouldn’t come out to Queens when Crystal’s caseworker called her. She made two appointments but didn’t show up, saying she had no carfare. “Mommy didn’t even live with Hazel,” Crystal says. “She spent her nights with Clarence, the father of her last baby, in a room he rented. Day in and day out, she skin-popped heroin like she been doing since I was a toddler. I had to face the reality that Mommy getting an apartment wasn’t a reality.”
In mid-December, Crystal agreed to place her son voluntarily in foster care. She was crying when she signed the voluntary papers, but her S.S.C. caseworker had explained that if she didn’t sign and the court took little Daquan and put him in foster care, she would have a harder time getting him back when she was older. In 1984, babies about to be placed in foster care in New York City went through an Allocations Unit. About ten percent were sent to families that had been licensed by the city and were directly monitored by employees of the city’s Human Resources Administration; the rest were sent to voluntary agencies that had foster-care contracts with the city. Voluntary agencies employed their own “intake” workers (who screened and accepted children), social workers, nurses, and other personnel; their paperwork was monitored by the city.
As it happened, the family that received Daquan Drummond was affiliated with St. Christopher’s Home, a Catholic agency that had been founded in 1895, in Sea Cliff, on Long Island. For most of its early years, it had served as a country home for children convalescing from surgery until their parents could care for them, and had also taken care of orphans. A year after Daquan Drummond went to St. Christopher’s, it merged with Ottilie Home, a Protestant agency that also dated back to the nineteenth century. Since the fall of 1985, the agency has been called St. Christopher-Ottilie by the outside world, but within the agency it is generally called St. Christopher’s. The largest number of children the agency currently serves are those in its family-foster-home-care program. Twenty-three hundred children live for a few days, a few months, or a few years with eleven hundred families of various faiths in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island; some are adopted by their foster parents. In late December, St. Christopher’s had no places available with black foster families in Brooklyn or Queens, so on December 20, 1984, Daquan Drummond went from Bronx-Lebanon to a black family on Long Island. Black children are occasionally placed with white families, and vice versa, but it is state practice and St. Christopher’s to try to place children with foster parents of the same race. As for Crystal’s prospects, Queensboro, where she was staying, was supposed to house youngsters for periods of up to ninety days while doing “workups” on them, and then, with the assistance of the city’s Allocations Unit, to discharge them to the most appropriate setting—a parent or parents, other relatives, foster parents, or an institution of some kind.
On January 3, 1985, Crystal was one of three girls from Queensboro who went to a St. Christopher’s office in Queens to be interviewed by the director of St. Christopher’s city-based congregate-care facilities. In addition to its licensed foster-care families (technically known as foster boarding homes), St. Christopher’s had four small “agency-operated boarding homes” (known in the vernacular as group homes) for girls and three for boys in Brooklyn and Queens, and also a number of larger facilities in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, for hard-to-place and mentally troubled children. There was one opening at a St. Christopher’s group home in Queens Village. By the time Crystal returned to Queensboro, she was told that the place was hers. She was considered a good candidate for a St. Christopher’s group home because she was perceived to have behaved herself at Queensboro. She had attended school every day of the week, no one had questioned what she did on weekends, she had not been caught smoking marijuana in the dorm, and she had a son in a St. Christopher’s foster boarding home. Then, too, as Crystal sometimes says, “I is lovable.”
The 1987 Encyclopedia of Social Work defines “foster care” as “full-time substitute care of children outside their own homes.” The term includes care provided in foster homes, like the one for which little Daquan was bound, and various institutional and group settings as well, like the group home to which Crystal was going.
Before 1800, the most common form of foster care practiced in the United States was indenture, which derived from the old English Poor Laws: it provided for the forced apprenticing of dependent children until they reached the age of twenty-one. In their textbook Child Welfare Services, Alfred Kadushin and Judith Martin argue that after the abolition of slavery, in 1865, “it was hard to justify an indenture that required the apprehension and return to a master of a runaway apprentice.”
The origin of modern foster care dates back to 1853, with the founding of the New York Children’s Aid Society, by Charles Loring Brace. It developed what was called a “placing-out system.” In the mid-nineteenth century, the city was faced with the problem of how to deal with approximately ten thousand vagrant children—most of them the offspring of immigrants—who were roaming the streets. Brace believed that the best way to save the children was to send them to rural areas, where farm families could put them to work in an environment regarded as morally superior to the evil urban streets. Between 1854 and 1929, a hundred thousand children from New York and other Eastern cities were rounded up and dispatched by the trainload to “free foster-family homes” in the Midwest or the South. While the younger orphan-train children were often taken in for benevolent reasons, older ones were expected to earn their keep, and one critic of placing out remarked
that it was “the wolf of the old indenture philosophy of child labor in the sheepskin disguise of a so-called good or Christian home.” The demise of placing out resulted from protest by the Roman Catholic Church against the placing of children in Protestant homes (most city children were Catholics) and from opposition by people in Western states to the dumping of dependent children in their midst. The practice had also come under criticism from an increasing number of child-welfare professionals.
In the late nineteenth century, another alternative was devised for hapless children. Orphanages (which dated back at least to the fourth century but were revitalized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) began to be perceived as temporary homes for poor children who had become wards of the state until they could be placed in foster-family homes. In the late eighteen-sixties, Massachusetts became the first state to pay foster families board money to maintain children who might otherwise have been placed in institutions. Nevertheless, according to Kadushin and Martin, controversy raged between the advocates of institutional care and the supporters of foster-family care over which type of care was the more desirable. The first White House Conference on Children, in 1909, concluded that “the carefully selected foster home is, for the normal child, the best substitute for the natural home.” This clear preference for foster-family care notwithstanding, institutional care of one sort or another continued to be the more common form provided in America in the early decades of the twentieth century, accommodating fifty-three percent of the nation’s foster children as of 1933. A half century later, the proportion had declined to sixteen percent. By 1990, many child-care authorities had come to perceive the two forms of care as complementary resources. The institutions, many of which originated as orphanages, now shelter children who not only cannot live with their own families but are too disturbed to live with foster families.
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