Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair

by Susan Sheehan

  While Crystal was living at Queensboro and was visiting her baby at Bronx-Lebanon at two o’clock one Sunday morning (the hospital permitted visits around the clock), Daquan came by and caught her talking to John, the guy she had been dating (but not sleeping with) when Daquan met her and won her away from him. Daquan wanted to fight Crystal that Sunday morning. “We did a lot of punching and grabbing over the years,” she says. “When I was fifteen, I hit him over the head with a glass ashtray shaped like a gingerbread man. When I was on the phone with my male friends, he’d try to listen; I’d smash him over the head with the phone.”

  Around the time of little Daquan’s birth, Crystal had told her mother how much she was in love with Daquan, her infidelities notwithstanding. She stretched out the monosyllable so that anyone hearing her would have written down “looo-ooove.” “I give it a year after that baby is born,” Florence had said. “Then tell me how much you looo-ooove him.”

  At sixteen, Crystal took care to leave her engagement ring in her pocket or in her dresser drawer except when she was with Daquan. “I realized I was making a fool of myself,” she says. “Daquan’s expectations were husband and wife and me to call him every time I got home from school. At that age, I was blossing and blooming. There was a lot of fun to be had going to roller rinks and discos with people I was meeting nearer my age, but Daquan was getting upset and asking all these questions. I was sixteen, he was twenty-five. I sat him down and told him he’d been where I was going. ‘I never had a childhood, but I’m going to have a teen-agehood,’ I said. ‘Maybe we’ll get back together when I’m older.’ I dated younger guys. Their demands was less great. And they were better-looking. Daquan walks funny and his eyes is always bloodshot. I’m five feet and a half a inch, and he’s shorter than that. For me, you got to be at least five-eight and built big, with lots and lots of muscles. I look at Daquan now and I ask myself, ‘How the hell did I do it?’ ”

  During Crystal’s sixteenth summer, she met Richard, a student at Howard University who was home on vacation. He was tall and muscular, but, she says, “the sex wasn’t there.” Then, in August of 1987, she started seeing Diamond. He took her horseback riding on their first date. On later dates, they went to Coney Island and to the beach at Far Rockaway, and rode around on his red Suzuki motorcycle. They first made love in October, at the Capri, a hotel with short-stay rates near the group home. Diamond, a high-school graduate, lived with his mother, his grandmother, and his sister. Crystal and Diamond later made love, with his mother’s tacit consent, in his room. “He was the best in bed, before or since, and for the year and a half before we split I was unfaithful to him only once, for five minutes,” she says. Crystal becomes wistful and teary when she talks about Diamond. “No one never took me horseback riding before Diamond,” she says. “It was the first time I was close to a horse. I had never gone to the beach with anyone, never looked at no moon. The water, the waves, and the sand—we raced from one lifeguard chair to the next. We put a blanket on the back of his bike and he kissed me—that man showed me some romantic times. People said, ‘All them girls in the group home is ho’s, let’s get one of them girls and stick them.’ Diamond never caught that attitude. I would go to the movies with my girlfriend, and Diamond would have a cab pick us up to take us there. He’d be busy selling drugs but he’d stop to call a cab to take us home from the movies. He made me feel good about myself.”

  The acid-washed blouse and jeans that Crystal had paid for at Macy’s were part of her wardrobe for Satellite Academy, a school to which she would be transferring in the fall of 1987. Flushing High School had proved too “scholastic” for Crystal; her haphazard junior-high-school years hadn’t prepared her for subjects like social studies, and she acknowledges that she had “a bad attitude.” One day, she and two friends hung out in the corridor outside her Flushing High math classroom after the bell rang. She then knocked on the classroom door. “A classmate made an attempt to open the door, but the teacher said to sit back down,” Crystal says. “So I banged on a glass pane in the classroom door and it broke. After that, the teacher hurried up and opened the door. I asked her why she ain’t let me in, because I felt she had dissed me. She told me not to worry, she wasn’t going to write me up this time, just take a seat. The bitch was scared. At the end of the class, she wrote out a memo for maintenance to sweep up the glass and replace the pane. I turned myself in to the dean after that incident, and she said ‘Don’t worry about it.’ That was only because she couldn’t put nothing in my record, because the teacher didn’t write me up. Usually, I got written up for every little thing—like cutting some guy with a pocket knife after gym class—and the dean was unreasonable. She told me to drop out and go get my G.E.D., like I was a dog.” (The G.E.D. is the General Equivalency Diploma for high school.)

  The other residents of the 104th Avenue group home didn’t fare any better at Flushing. Like Crystal, they lacked educational skills, motivation, and discipline, felt overwhelmed by the size of the school, and fell through the cracks. St. Christopher’s educational coordinator had a reason for sending them there. Among the common characteristics of students at Satellite Academy, a public city Alternative High School, with four campuses—two in Manhattan, one in the Bronx, and one in Jamaica, Queens—are that they have between ten and twenty credits and that they have attended ninth grade but have fallen behind their grade level; mostly students aged sixteen and older are accepted. To date, none of the group-home residents have stayed the course at Flushing, but going there at least exposed them to Langston Hughes and made them eligible to transfer to Satellite.

  Satellite is a small, no-frills school, with a high faculty-to-student ratio. Its Jamaica campus has a hundred and ninety students, in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades, and a staff of fourteen. About seventy percent of the students are black; most of the remainder are Hispanic. The school day is divided into six periods, or “slots,” a day, and the school year is divided into four ten-week cycles. One of Satellite’s purposes is to help students catch up. They are able to accumulate sixteen credits a year—four per cycle—rather than the ten per year they can accumulate in schools like Flushing. The six slots at the Jamaica campus don’t include gym (there is no gymnasium), study hall (a frill), or calculus (few students spend more than two years at Satellite, and even those who do rarely manage to complete ninth- and tenth-grade math). Satellite’s teachers consider the most important part of the curriculum to be Family Group, in which groups of between fifteen and eighteen students sit in a circle two or three times a week to discuss personal problems and school problems. For Family Group, the students are given credits in English. In the past, they were also given credits for holding part-time jobs and internships and for doing independent study.

  Crystal preferred Satellite to Flushing. It was smaller, her teachers were more lenient and casual (students addressed them by their first names), her peers were more congenial—and it was easier to cheat. Students who had an English test in the first or second slot would give the test questions and answers to those scheduled to take the test in the third or sixth slot. Crystal wrote down the questions and answers on her hand, or on a piece of paper she slipped into her blouse sleeve, or underneath the desk, or under the “test-exam.” Students caught cheating weren’t necessarily dismissed; they were just given zeros. The teachers were there because they had chosen to work with adolescents who had known trouble. Crystal’s counsellor, a Princeton graduate and former case-worker, would follow her to the girls’ bathroom, where she often went to meet a friend from another class; he would knock on the door and encourage her to return to the classroom.

  Crystal didn’t do well at Satellite during her first year. She hadn’t changed her ways: she was excessively absent, late, and high. In January of 1988, several days before her eighteenth birthday and the end of her first semester, she considered dropping out—almost fifty percent of Satellite’s students fail to graduate—and spoke of settling for her G.E.D. Her counsellor
at Satellite and her social worker at St. Christopher’s prevailed upon her to stay in school.

  Crystal’s eyes—hazel if she is wearing her contact lenses, brown if she isn’t—gleam with remembered joy when she looks back upon her eighteenth birthday. Diamond had appeared at the group home with a Gucci bag and a pair of Gucci boots, three silvery balloons printed with the words “Happy Birthday, I Love You,” and a bouquet of flowers. “Everyone’s face lit up with jealousy,” Crystal says.

  Federal and state laws require child-care agencies like St. Christopher-Ottilie to offer family-planning services to children twelve years of age and over. Since her entry into the group home, Crystal had been using birth-control pills. In August, 1987, she had a series of stomach aches she attributed to the pill. The doctor she had been seeing regularly was on vacation. Another doctor recommended that Crystal stop taking the pill to give her body a rest. In February, 1988, she discovered that she was pregnant—“I guess because we done it so much,” she says. Crystal told Diamond she was going to have an abortion: since she had one child in foster care, it struck her as wrong to have a second child. Diamond had no children, but he accepted Crystal’s decision. He gave her an enormous white stuffed bear for Valentine’s Day. Several days later, she wrote the following note: “I Crystal Taylor, Resident of St. Christopher-Ottilie, is writting letter to confirm that after talking with my social worker … I know my options that I can make, but being that I’m not ready to care for another child and financially I can’t care for another child, so I rather have an Obortion.”

  On March 1st, ten days after the abortion, Diamond Madison removed a gold-link bracelet from his arm, transferred it to Crystal’s, and went to jail on Riker’s Island. He had been arrested twice with large sums of money on him and no way to account for how he had come by the money honestly, and was given a six-month sentence. With time off for good behavior, he served four months. Between March and July, Crystal visited him faithfully the three days a week she was permitted to visit. She missed only two days: she was with little Daquan on Easter weekend, and with big Daquan on Mother’s Day weekend.

  Almost from the day a child is placed in foster care, plans are made to discharge the child. The original plan drawn up for Crystal by St. Christopher’s was “discharge to biological mother.” When Crystal was fifteen, this was not considered a realistic goal, because of Florence’s drug addiction, refusal to seek help, and enduring homelessness. Throughout 1985, monthly attempts made by Crystal’s social worker to reach Florence were futile: she didn’t answer letters sent to her last known address, on Findlay Avenue. The social worker knew that Crystal visited her mother in the Bronx, often in a park, and talked to her on the phone fairly regularly, but Florence preferred to keep those contacts informal. Whenever a social worker asked Florence for a phone number, Florence said that Crystal knew how to get hold of her. Cousin Hazel had no telephone, but a woman in her apartment building who babysat for Crystal’s younger siblings did, and there was a telephone at the nursing home where Florence’s current man, Clarence, worked as a janitor.

  Crystal acknowledged that some of her meetings with her mother were frustrating, because Florence was often high or intoxicated. “My mother didn’t recognize me until I got right into her face,” she said after one Saturday visit. A child-care worker who saw Florence when she came to the group home for the first time, around Thanksgiving of 1985, remembers her as “a fat bag, unkempt, unwashed, and boisterous, who talked too much, laughed too much, and made the mistake of asking for a beer.” She also remembers that Crystal, who was fastidious and was dressed “impeccable,” seemed embarrassed by her mother’s behavior and determined never to look like her or sink to that level. “And yet,” the child-care worker adds, “there was an unshakable bond between them.”

  Soon after Crystal turned sixteen, Special Services for Children accepted a “change of permanency goal” proposed by St. Christopher’s for Crystal: discharge to independent living. In the world of foster care, there are goals within goals within goals. For the next several years, the long-term-treatment goals for Crystal included graduating from high school, securing a full-time job, and making a home for her son. Crystal was highly goal-resistant. She appeared in no hurry to get through school. Her social worker discovered when she contacted Flushing High School in May of 1986 that Crystal had been absent thirty days and late thirty-six times since January. She had little interest in employment. She had enjoyed a summer youth job in 1987 as a hospital receptionist, but a social worker noted in March of 1988 that “the only effort Crystal made to finding a job was talking about finding a job.” And she declined St. Christopher’s many attempts to interest her in a mother-child program, in which she would live in a St. Christopher’s house with other young mothers and their children, attend school (day care would be provided for the mothers during their school hours), and look after Daquan evenings and weekends, thereby acquiring the “parenting skills” that the agency felt she needed. Crystal insisted that she wasn’t ready for this. It suited her to have little Daquan exactly where he was—at the Hargroves’, where she could be an every-other-weekend mother, and do a minimum of Pampering, feeding, and bathing him.

  “I’ve got no parently patience,” Crystal acknowledges. She found it arduous to take Daquan on outings. “It was hard for me to carry him in one hand and his carriage and my pocketbook in the other,” she says. “The baby was heavy, and so was the carriage.” Crystal’s vision of motherhood was buying Daquan expensive toys at Christmas and leather clothes (his first Easter suit, when he was six months, was custom-made), and taking him on annual or semiannual outings to the circus or to amusement parks with big Daquan, “so’s when he grows up he’ll remember he went with his mommy and daddy to Sesame Place.” The status quo was also acceptable to Daquan Jefferson.

  Margaret Hargrove was content as well. The Long children had not suited her. A foster parent has the right to ask an agency to remove a child on short notice. Regina Long was the first to go—“due to unresolvable disruptive behavior in the Hargrove home,” according to St. Christopher-Ottilie’s records—in the fall of 1985. Her brother and two sisters were freed for adoption by the Family Court in January of 1986, but one by one they left the Hargroves—to go to another relative, another foster parent, another agency. Rawanda was the last of the Long children to leave the Hargroves’, at the end of 1987.

  Before little Daquan came to the Hargroves’, Margaret Hargrove had given up her job at the diner to devote herself full time to foster care. In 1985, as the Long teen-agers began to depart, she took in Frances Smart, six, and Donna Smart, seven, who were the third and fourth children of a drug-addicted mother; she would never take a chance on another teen-ager. (Her sister adopted three of Ms. Smart’s children, and Margaret Hargrove adopted Frances and Donna in 1989, and subsequently had Ms. Smart’s twelfth and thirteenth children in foster care.)

  It was financially to Margaret Hargrove’s advantage to maintain six children in residence. She receives what she calls an adequate “paycheck,” which depends on the age of the child (foster parents receive more for six-to-eleven-year-olds than for infants-to-five-year-olds and still more for children twelve or over) and on ever-changing rates. In December of 1984, when two-month-old Daquan Drummond was presented to Alice Hargrove, St. Christopher’s sent Alice’s mother a stipend of $242 a month for him. The current rates for foster-home care in the New York metropolitan area range from $386 to $526 per month for healthy children. For “special” children (those with moderate physical and/or mental disabilities) and “exceptional” children (those with illnesses like AIDS or other extreme physical or mental handicaps), the rates are $845 and $1,281 per month, respectively. These stipends are tax-free. Each child also receives a clothing allowance set by the state and has his or her dental and medical care covered by Medicaid (at a cost of between three and four dollars a day). An agency’s administrative costs add to the yearly sum required to keep youngsters in foster care. The Ha
rgroves receive the same amount of money for the children they adopt, because it is state policy to subsidize adoptions of foster children with handicaps or special conditions, and those who are considered hard to place: those who have been in foster care in the same home for at least eighteen months; siblings; children who have been freed for adoption for at least six months; and minority children who are over the age of eight and white children over the age of ten.

  Social workers called regularly at the Hargrove home, and, because St. Christopher’s has a low turnover rate, Crystal and little Daquan had only a few social workers apiece over their years in foster care. The Hargroves’ house was depicted in favorable terms: it was quiet, efficient, well run; children were playing; dinner was cooking; homework was being done. The only negative observation made was that Margaret Hargrove, who was called “very directive,” had a better relationship with her younger foster children than with her older foster children, with whom there was “underlying tension.” Little Daquan’s care was exemplary. A plump, adorable child, he was the “little prince” of the family, sociable, bubbling, active—a “joyous child who makes people smile” and “receives constant love and attention from foster mother, her daughter, and three teenage foster children.” (He was subsequently doted on by Frances and Donna Smart.) Goals were set for him, too—not just drinking from a cup but also increasing his vocabulary. He met them and might have met the second one faster if everyone else in the household hadn’t anticipated his needs, leaving him with little motivation to express himself verbally. A worker who saw Crystal at the Hargroves’ observed that she was extremely warm and affectionate toward her son, and that he recognized Crystal as “mommy” and “understands he has two mommies.”

  After Crystal turned sixteen, and Daquan had been in foster care for more than a year, it was harder for St. Christopher’s to justify keeping him in foster care with Crystal as the “discharge resource,” because her own discharge was too far off. Consequently, the agency made an attempt to discharge him. He would go to live with his biological father, because Daquan Jefferson had a job and parents who expressed a willingness to help him care for his child; it would be stipulated that Daquan retain custody only until Crystal had completed high school, had an apartment, and had a job that would enable her to support her son.