On December 5, 1990, Crystal Taylor moved out of the independent-living apartment and into a studio apartment in the basement of a one-family house in Hollis, Queens, fifteen minutes away by car. She had been in St. Christopher’s care for five years and eleven months. Her first post-foster-care apartment was small, dark, and drearily furnished. She had found it by buying a newspaper—Crystal has virtually no interest in the news and very rarely buys a paper—and scanning the real-estate ads. Lonnie had driven her around to look at apartments. The rent was five hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. The double bed sagged and smelled of mildew; water, not light, seeped into the place.
Crystal received a hundred-dollar discharge grant for clothing and a five-hundred-dollar discharge grant for furniture. She spent the five hundred dollars on a new double bed. She left St. Christopher’s angry—she felt she had been hurried out instead of being allowed to stay until her twenty-first birthday, and she didn’t like having to wait for her discharge grants until she produced receipts for her purchases—but she was also grateful. “If I hadn’t been put in foster care, I’d have gone back to the Jeffersons’,” she says. “Without the agency pushing me and keeping me thinking right, I’d have been a junior-high-school dropout. Me and Daquan would have had a couple of more kids before breaking up. I’d have stayed on drugs, and I’d probably be on welfare. I wouldn’t be working for an advertising agency. I’d never have met Diamond. The staffs at St. Christopher’s told me that if I had been fourteen in 1990 me and little Daquan would have gone home to the Jeffersons’. They say the system is getting more overloaded. My timing was right. Things happen for a reason. St. Christopher’s gave me a second chance at life.”
Crystal enjoyed smoking reefer, drinking liquor, and entertaining her male companions in her new apartment, without social workers arriving unannounced and pointing out how many agency rules she had broken, but by January 1st she missed St. Christopher’s subsidies. She had previously been able to spend her take-home pay—about three hundred and twenty dollars every two weeks, without overtime—on additions to her stylish wardrobe. In the fall of 1990, she had cheerfully gone shopping after work, buying silk blouses, pricing Louis Vuitton wallets, putting leather jackets on layaway. After December, her earnings scarcely covered her rent, her phone bill, and her beeper bill. “I’m not shopping, that’s the sadness in my life,” she observed to a friend. “There’s nothing like having something else.”
On January 15th, Crystal received an upsetting piece of news. Little Daquan had told his teacher that Mrs. Hargrove hit him in the face with a stick. Crystal had visited her son regularly while he was in the Bronx but had slacked off after his return to the Hargroves’, because she knew he was safe there, and because she was too busy running around with Troy and Jimbo and Star—other drug dealers she was seeing. Daquan Jefferson had not been visiting his son much, either. Crystal knew that Mrs. Hargrove might “chastise” Daquan but would never hit him. Since Mrs. Hargrove had all the foster children and adopted children she was certified to have, she felt she could not jeopardize her situation as a foster parent, so she told Crystal to please fetch little Daquan in three days. Crystal believed that her son’s lie was his way of getting his parents to pay some attention to him. In January of 1991, Daquan, six, went back to the Bronx to live with his father, his grandmother, and his teen-age cousins—the children of one of Daquan’s brothers, who had used drugs and died of pneumonia.
In January, a week after her birthday, Crystal was introduced to Tarrant, a thirty-nine-year-old Bahamian who owned a grocery store in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, by an acquaintance who had once worked part time for him, off the books. Tarrant was busy in his store Mondays through Saturdays from about 10 A.M. to 2 or 3 A.M. and netted about a thousand dollars a week. He sold everything—bread and condoms, cigarettes and beer, milk and envelopes (three cents apiece). He smoked reefer, but he didn’t drink much and didn’t sell drugs. “He was too scared,” Crystal says. She wasn’t taken by his looks. He had plain features and “he always needed a decent haircut and a shave.” His clothes were custom-made but unstylish; to Crystal it seemed that he could be mistaken for “a bum on a train.” She was attracted to Tarrant by what his money could buy her. He gave her a VCR two weeks after they met, as a belated twenty-first-birthday present. He bought her a heater for her dank apartment, gave her a hundred dollars here and two hundred dollars there to have her hair done, to buy a dress, to pay some of her bills. He gave her groceries.
Crystal was not physically attracted to Tarrant, and for a few weeks she fended him off by saying she wasn’t sexually active. When she finally had to go to bed with him, she got herself “really cheebered up” on marijuana beforehand. She knew she had to spend Sundays with him, when the store was closed, and although he was considerate—on his birthday, he took her to City Island to eat lobster, her favorite food—Crystal found him boring. He asked too many questions about things that she thought were self-evident. He called her at ten-thirty one night to ask her what she was doing. She said, “Getting ready to go to sleep. What the fuck do you think I’m doing? I have to be up at 4:30 A.M. to get ready for work.” Tarrant bored Crystal more after he was robbed at gunpoint in his store one night in May. He lost about thirty-five hundred dollars and had less money to spend on her. When he didn’t give her a television set that he had promised her as a Mother’s Day present, she told him, “Mother’s Day comes just once a year.” When he answered, “I’m backed up on my bills,” she said, “That sounds personal. I don’t got nothing to do with that. Just give me mine.” She did entertain a few doubts about using him. “If you go to bed with a man for money and not pleasure, it’s not good for the other part of you,” she says. Crystal got the TV set from Tarrant and started dating Stanley, a young man who had no money but was more fun to be with—for a while. Then she started seeing Glenn, a young man who sold drugs on her block, where one house stood out for what it was—a crack house, to and from which dealers roared in their cars and on motorcycles day and night.
In July of 1991, Crystal contemplated a relaxing summer. Little Daquan was going to Savannah, Georgia, to stay with some of his father’s relatives from early July until mid-August; she wouldn’t have to make the trek to the Bronx for six weeks. Tarrant was going home to Nassau to visit his family for the first two weeks of August. She would be free to watch her twenty-five-inch Sharp TV with stereo, and be cooled by a fan Tarrant had recently provided, with Herb, a van driver she had met while riding with him as a passenger, or with Cyril, a subway-maintenance man she had met at a subway station, or with Glenn, who had “put some zest back in my life.”
Before Tarrant flew to Nassau, on August 1st, he gave Crystal five hundred and seventy-five dollars. Some of it was designated for little Daquan’s return train fare from Savannah and some for her telephone and credit-card bills. Tarrant had also told Crystal to use some of the money for a deposit at the Jack La Lanne Health Spa near her office (she wanted to improve her stomach muscles), and said that after his return he would give her the money for the monthly fee. While Tarrant was away, she went to Jack La Lanne twice after work. She got more exercise in bed. Over Friday and Saturday one week, she had to change her satin sheets (another gift from Tarrant) twice. By the time Tarrant returned, she was through with Cyril (“He treated me like a common slut”) and Herb (“He was too childish”) and was angry with Glenn, who had dropped out of sight a few days earlier.
By late August, Crystal was neglecting Tarrant for Marcel, an outside messenger she had met at work. “I never really knew what to say to Tarrant,” she says. “Marcel had no money, but I could be myself with him. We’d walk down Lexington Avenue and I’d laugh so hard the bones in my cheeks used to hurt, and he’d be laughing, too.”
On Sunday, September 8, 1991, at about 3 A.M., Crystal returned to Queens from the Bronx, where she had been shopping for school clothes for little Daquan and hanging out in a park with Marcel. As she and Marcel approached her apartme
nt, she spotted Tarrant’s van parked outside and told Marcel to turn around and go back up the block. Tarrant didn’t see him, but he started to argue with her. She told him she was going into the house. He got out of the van and stormed into the apartment behind her. She took her sneakers off, and he kept arguing with her. “I’m getting out of here,” she said, and bent down to put her sneakers back on. “You ain’t leaving out of here,” Tarrant said. “You don’t love me, and I don’t have nothing to live for right now. I might as well take you and me together.” As she was putting on her second sneaker, she heard four clicks. She looked up and saw a 9-mm. pistol pointed at her head. It had malfunctioned. Tarrant set the gun down on the table, quickly pulled a smaller pistol out of his pocket—a .22-calibre—and aimed it at her head. Before he pulled the trigger, Crystal put her left hand up to her head—a reflex action. The smaller pistol was working—Crystal heard a loud pow and felt something strike her left hand. Tarrant got ready to pull the trigger again. Crystal grabbed him and cried, “Please don’t, please don’t!” He told her, “I got to kill you, because I shot you and you’ll tell the police,” and he kept the gun pointed at her.
Crystal apologized for having hurt Tarrant—she hadn’t telephoned him when he beeped her, she had pulled a pillow over her head when they were in bed. She said, “I love you, I love you, and let me show you something I just got for you.” She had bought Tarrant a card, and she took it out of her pocketbook. The words printed on the card were “I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you.” Tarrant read it while still holding the .22-calibre pistol in his hand.
“I won’t go to jail,” he said.
“I won’t tell on you,” she answered. “I’ll go to the pay phone up the street and tell the police I got robbed.”
Crystal walked out of the apartment toward the pay phone. Tarrant followed her in the van and parked it in front of another building. She called the police, and Tarrant drove away. When they arrived, she said she had been on her way home from a girlfriend’s house and two men had jumped her in the street. The police drove her to North Shore Hospital, on Long Island. Her reflex action probably saved her life. The bullet had lodged in a bone of her hand.
A surgeon operated on her hand on Sunday. Crystal spent the night in the hospital and was discharged on Monday. Her left hand was in a cast, and she couldn’t do much for herself. She was also afraid to return to her apartment. A year earlier, shortly before Crystal settled into her basement studio in Hollis, Florence Drummond had moved into the first apartment she had had since 1982, when she was evicted from the sixth-floor walkup on Sheridan Avenue. During the past year, Crystal and Florence had seen each other often and had become good friends. They went to clubs together. Florence went to Tarrant’s store to keep Crystal company during the one or two evenings a week that Tarrant expected her to be there to keep him company. A drug-rehabilitation program that Florence completed in 1990 had given her a second chance at life—a second chance to be a mother to her children. On Monday, September 9, 1991, Crystal left the hospital and went to live in Florence’s apartment. It felt good to her to be going home.
THE
BEAUTIFULEST
MOTHER
IN THE WORLD
When Florence Drummond gave birth to her first child, a daughter she named Crystal, on January 11, 1970, one month before her nineteenth birthday, she was living in an elegant gray stone mansion in Manhattan’s East Seventies that had been converted into a home for unwed mothers. Crystal was born in New York Hospital. “It was lovely,” Florence says. “And the next day you couldn’t tell I just had a baby. I walked around that hospital hallway like someone who had never been pregnant. I was ready to go home.” A few days later, Florence returned (with Crystal) to what had been her home until the sixth month of her pregnancy—the apartment of a friend in a housing project in Harlem.
Florence had met Crystal’s father, Wesley Taylor, in the summer of 1968. She was walking from her friend’s building to a store to buy cigarettes. When she passed him on the street, he said hello, “nicely.” She ignored him. When she passed him on the return walk, he asked her name and whether she lived in the project. She answered. He kept coming around—he lived nearby, with his mother, Felicia Taylor; his father, Roderick Jenkins; and his younger brothers—and eventually they started dating. “Crystal’s father was a real charmer,” Florence says. “He swept you off your feet.” She had been brought up in a strict manner, and Wesley was her first man. Wesley had spent most of his childhood in his mother’s home town, Birmingham, Alabama; had come North for his last year of high school; and had graduated in 1968—an A student, a part-time messenger, and a fairly heavy drinker. He worked as a full-time messenger until early 1969, when he enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War. While he was still in basic training, Florence realized she was pregnant. She wrote to him about her pregnancy and hoped that he would marry her in August, when he was due home on leave before going to Korea, but he told her then that he didn’t have enough money and that the Air Force might not approve of such a marriage. Florence knew that Wesley already had a daughter, Melanie, born in September, 1968, who lived with her mother in Delaware. What she didn’t know was that Wesley was hoping to eventually marry Melanie’s mother. Melanie’s mother married someone else. “After that, his philosophy became to do unto others as they do unto him but let him do it first,” his brother Nelson Taylor says. Wesley got another woman, Carol, pregnant while he was on a subsequent home leave; his son by her, Howard Taylor, was born in the fall of 1972. Florence claims she was “mad at first” about Howard’s birth but got over it.
After Crystal’s birth, Florence applied for welfare. Before her application was granted, she obtained the first of a series of jobs as a clerk-typist for lawyers and insurance agencies; she paid a Hispanic babysitter to care for Crystal during the week. She cashed the welfare checks she was sent without notifying the Department of Welfare that she was gainfully employed. When Staff Sergeant Wesley Taylor was discharged from the Air Force, in 1973, after a second tour in Korea and a few months in Vietnam, he and Florence and Crystal stayed at Felicia’s for a while, then moved to a one-bedroom walkup on West 128th Street. There was a church nearby, where Crystal attended a Head Start program. There was also a small restaurant nearby, where Wesley took up with a woman named Barbara while continuing to see Carol—and others. Florence’s next apartment with Wesley was on West 100th Street. Supposedly renovated, it was filled with rats “the size of cats,” she says.
Wesley had become seriously addicted to drugs while he was serving overseas; his drug habit became even worse once he was back in New York City, and he never kicked it. He received unemployment insurance, and when that ran out he went on welfare. “Wesley led me into drugs,” Florence says. “Heroin and cocaine.” In January, 1976, she was laid off from her job; she supplemented her welfare checks by shoplifting. In August, 1976, Wesley and Florence’s second child, a son they named Carlos, was born—gravely addicted to drugs. He developed pneumonia, spent a few months in the hospital, and went directly into foster care in the Bronx. Crystal remembers accompanying Florence to visit him. Carlos appeared frightened of Florence, whose skin is dark. He was less frightened of Crystal, who describes her complexion as “high yellow,” perhaps (Crystal speculates) because the daughter of Carlos’s foster mother had light skin. After Carlos’s birth, Wesley, Florence, and Crystal moved to a two-bedroom sixth-floor walkup on Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx.
Florence was pregnant again a month after Carlos was born. In the spring of 1977, she was arrested for shoplifting, and it was discovered that there was a warrant out for her arrest on charges of welfare fraud in excess of five thousand dollars. In early June, she was sentenced to serve seven days on Riker’s Island. As a pregnant woman, she probably wouldn’t have had to do jail time for a first shoplifting arrest, but the welfare fraud was grand larceny. The week in jail covered both offenses. She returned to her apartment
from Riker’s Island, found women’s underwear in her bed, tracked Wesley to a bar on 126th Street, and caught him kissing Barbara at the bar door. On June 30, 1977, Florence and Wesley’s second son, Matthew, was born. “Call it a guardian angel, but Matthew was born free of drugs,” Florence says.
As a veteran, Wesley Taylor was entitled to education benefits. While Florence was in jail, he enrolled in a community college, and spent some tuition and book money getting high with Barbara. After Matthew’s birth, Florence stopped using drugs briefly and went to a business school, studying to become an executive secretary. She dropped out of school, because in order to get Carlos out of foster care she had to be home full time. Wesley’s contribution to Carlos’s release was to hold a job. He worked at a parking lot until Carlos came home, in 1978, and for a while afterward; it was the only job he ever had after leaving the service. Wesley had a second son with Carol as well—Roy, born in 1978.
Drug users and drug dealers frequented the apartments on West 128th Street and West 100th Street, but life took a turn for the worse at Sheridan Avenue. Of Florence’s children, only Crystal can remember her as a sober working woman “before my father hooked her on drugs,” and only Crystal has a few happy memories of Wesley. His terms of endearment for her were “baby girl” and “bugaloo.” If her room was messy, he would say, “Damn, you is a dirty little heifer,” but not without affection. When she was about five, he took her to her first circus, with Melanie—that was the only time she ever met her half-sister. He hit her just once, because she ran into the street and narrowly missed being struck by a car. Crystal also remembers that she had “all types of toys, dolls, and, after Mommy swindled a man she met in a bar out of some money he had stashed in his apartment, a new pink bicycle.”
Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair Page 8