Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair

by Susan Sheehan

  Crystal’s childhood ended on Sheridan Avenue in 1977, after Matthew’s birth. By then, Wesley was here today and gone tomorrow; he spent two or three nights out at a time, either at Felicia’s apartment or at Barbara’s, on West 129th Street. Florence resented Barbara for buying him away from her. Whereas Florence received only a welfare check for herself and the children, Barbara also received a salary for working in a restaurant her family owned.

  Florence often kept Crystal out of school to babysit—first for Matthew and then, after Carlos’s release from foster care, for both boys. Crystal resented her mother’s 9 A.M. to 11 P.M. absences. When Florence was home, Crystal was sometimes terrified that she might overdose. At the same time, she recalls, “I was usually glad she was high, because she enjoyed the high and left me alone. When she got her fix, she was the beautifulest mother in the world. We could do things that we couldn’t do two hours ago. There was no doubt when she was high. She’d get into the middle of the street and start wiggling her butt and embarrass me. I’d rather see her like that than in the other mood. If she needed a fix, she’d get edgy and agitated, and when I said ‘Mommy’ she’d go pow, and hit me on the side of the head.” Crystal eventually began drinking and using drugs—cocaine, PCP, mescaline—herself.

  One evening when Crystal was about ten, Wesley and Florence had what Florence calls “a stupid argument that grew.” Wesley started hitting Florence. He hit her until her eyes were swollen and her body was black and blue from head to toe. Florence remembers that he stopped hitting her only when Crystal jumped on his back and hollered his name. When she woke up, he was gone. He came back a few weeks later and apologized. “He said he didn’t mean to do it and was sorry for how bad he had hurted me,” Florence says. “I told him it was over.” For the next ten years, Wesley lived with Barbara. Carlos and Matthew scarcely saw their father after that; when they did, they called him Wesley, not Daddy.

  Florence had other men coming and going even while she was still taking Wesley Taylor’s clothes out of or putting them into plastic bags on his comings and goings. In 1980, before Wesley left for the last time, Florence, approaching thirty, was seeing Clarence, a man in his late fifties. She had also taken up with a twenty-one-year-old named Leonard and, although she was using an intrauterine device, soon became pregnant with Leonard’s child. She broke up with him, because she had good reason to believe he was sexually involved with Crystal. In the summer of 1982, Florence and her children were evicted from Sheridan Avenue for nonpayment of rent. Her furniture was taken by marshals. Florence promised Crystal she would get it back, but she was unable to make good on the promise. For a month, she and the children lived in a nearby basement apartment without electricity. From there Florence moved the children to Findlay Avenue to live with Hazel, a cousin of Florence’s. Clarence had a room and a shared bathroom on nearby Grant Avenue. Florence moved in with him, returning most mornings to check on the children and most evenings to make sure they ate before they went to bed. Natasha, Leonard’s daughter, was born in October, 1982. Florence’s next child, James, whose father was Clarence, was born in February, 1984.

  Clarence worked as a janitor in a nursing home on the East Side. He was the best of the fathers of Florence’s children: he drove them in an aged Cadillac to a bakery in Queens for day-old cake, treated them to fast food, and took them to the zoo. He bought Pampers for Natasha and, later, for James. He also bought drugs for Florence, although he used no drugs himself.

  In the spring of 1985, not long after Crystal and little Daquan went into foster care, Florence checked herself into a hospital detoxification program. She told Clarence where she was—he promised her he would check on Carlos, Matthew, Natasha, and James every day after work—but she didn’t tell Hazel. When Florence hadn’t turned up for several days, Hazel called the police: she didn’t want to be bothered looking after the children. The police came and took the Drummond children to the precinct and then to a hospital, where they were examined for signs of physical abuse. There were none, so the children were returned to Hazel’s apartment. A couple of days later, Crystal’s S.S.C. worker showed up there. He proposed giving Hazel temporary custody of Florence’s children. Hazel’s own daughter, who was twelve, had recently gone to school with bruises and had told her teacher that Hazel had beaten her up. When Crystal’s S.S.C. worker returned to his office, he learned about the pending charges against Hazel. Until the child-abuse charges were disposed of, Hazel could not be given custody of anyone else’s children.

  Clarence let Florence know what had happened. She had been planning to have a hernia operation after completing the detoxification program, but the excitement caused her hernia to flare up. She was taken from the detox floor to the surgical floor to be operated on the following day. After a couple of shots of Demerol the pain subsided. The hernia was no longer a medical emergency, so Florence agreed to postpone the operation for two weeks. She telephoned the S.S.C. worker. He told her to come to his office. She showed him that she was still wearing a hospital band around her wrist, and explained what had happened. He said that because of Florence’s situation—including her prospective return to the hospital—he would have to put her children into foster care. She signed them into placement voluntarily and asked the worker to keep the four children together.

  In April, 1985, Carlos, eight, Matthew, seven, Natasha, two, and James, one, went to live with Mrs. Evelyn Peoples, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Mrs. Peoples, who was fifty, was separated from her husband. She was licensed for foster care directly by S.S.C. Mrs. Peoples had three children of her own—two daughters, who were in their twenties, and a fifteen-year-old son—living at home. When the four Drummond children arrived, she found them extremely undersocialized, lacking in self-control and manners, destructive with toys and her household belongings, and competitive with each other. In March, 1986, a month when her S.S.C. worker wrote that “all children have made an excellent adjustment to their foster care placement,” Mrs. Peoples concluded that she could no longer keep Carlos; she wanted him removed from her home. For a year, he had been stealing money, comic books, and toys from the Peoples family, and had been disobedient at home and in school. There were two final straws for Mrs. Peoples: he had stolen two hundred dollars—the savings of one of her daughters—and Mrs. Peoples had learned from Matthew that Carlos had gone off at least twice with older men and received money in return for sexual favors. Carlos admitted that this was true.

  Carlos was evaluated by a caseworker, a psychologist, and a psychiatrist. He was described in the evaluation reports as a tiny, bright-eyed, cute nine-year-old, who looked no more than seven. Carlos said that his mother had often taken him along when she bought and sold drugs and had had him perform sexual acts with her junkie friends in return for money or drugs. He foresaw an early death for himself from drugs from a needle. He thought his siblings might fare better, because they had not been with Florence so much. He had been beaten from an early age—with sticks and extension cords—and when Florence started to beat him she couldn’t stop; Matthew had been beaten less. Carlos said that he had been left back in the second grade, and that neither he nor his mother had cared.

  The psychiatrist thought that Carlos’s basic average intelligence and his ability to talk about his life experiences were promising signs and made him an excellent candidate for therapy, but he didn’t think Carlos could adjust acceptably to a normal foster-boarding home, and recommended placement in a residential treatment center.

  In May, after Carlos was sent to a diagnostic center while awaiting placement in a residential treatment center, Matthew began stealing money from the Peoples family and destroying property. After testing, it was concluded that he, too, belonged in a residential treatment center. On July 1, 1986, both boys were admitted to Children’s Village, in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Mrs. Peoples suddenly became ill, after the departure of Carlos and Matthew, and required hospitalization. S.S.C. was unable to find a foster home for two children on short n
otice, so Natasha was placed with a family in Queens and James with a family in the Bronx.

  The detoxification attempt had failed, and Florence was too deeply involved with drugs—using them and selling them—to pay attention to her children in 1985 once they were in foster care. Not long after the children went into foster care, she moved her personal possessions from Hazel’s apartment to Clarence’s room. Crystal saw Florence regularly—she could travel alone to the old neighborhood and find her somewhere—but Florence did not show up for important events in Crystal’s life, like her graduation from junior high school. Florence visited the four younger children at the Brooklyn S.S.C. office only twice in 1985. In December of 1985, Carlos, Matthew, Natasha, and James were adjudicated to be neglected; the neglect petition was for eighteen months. Florence scarcely visited her children during the first half of 1986, either. Crystal confided to her social worker at the group home that she was afraid her mother would lose her parental rights and that she was angered by her lack of interest in her children.

  In July, Florence was informed that Carlos and Matthew were at Children’s Village, and in August she went to see them. That summer, Crystal observed that Florence’s stomach was growing. She asked her mother if she was pregnant. Florence, who was thirty-five, answered, “No, I ain’t pregnant, I got a fucking tumor.”

  The phone rang at Crystal’s group home on October 27, 1986. It was Florence. “You got a new brother,” Florence said.

  “You lying, you lying,” Crystal said. “What happened to the tumor?” She later told a friend, “I was angry. It wasn’t only that this lady told me a dumb lie but she already had five kids and a grandchild in foster care and for what she be needing a sixth child?”

  To this day, Florence maintains that she had no idea she was pregnant. “I was so high and the baby was so drugged that he never stirred.” she explains. Two weeks before he was born, she had pains, but she was too strung out to think about them. On the morning of October 27th, Florence felt bad pains. She had an acquaintance call an ambulance. When it arrived, she got in and gave the attendant in the back her name. “Before he could ask me any more questions or take my blood pressure, I gave birth,” Florence says. “I told the attendant ‘Go get the baby.’ When he asked me ‘What baby?’ I told him ‘The baby between my legs.’ He cut the umbilical cord, wrapped the baby in a white sheet, put him on my stomach, and wrapped another sheet around me and him. The attendant asked me did I have a name for him. I said ‘No. What is your name?’ ‘Michael,’ he said. ‘O.K., that’s his name—Michael.’ Later, Clarence came to visit me in the hospital. He didn’t ask me what I was going to do with Michael, because he had already asked me what I was going to do with James.”

  Michael was born with positive toxicity toward cocaine and spent six months in the hospital. He was then put directly into foster care with a fifty-eight-year-old woman in Brooklyn. While Michael was still in the hospital, Crystal often went there to feed him. The nurses assumed she was his mother, which led Crystal to believe that Florence didn’t spend much time there. Florence didn’t tell Carlos and Matthew about Michael’s birth until February, 1987. She didn’t know how they would react to the news.

  Seventeen years earlier, in November, 1969, Florence learned that her mother, Lavinia Wilson, had just given birth to a daughter. She was even angrier than Crystal was in 1986. Florence found out about her sister Cynthia’s birth at a baby shower being given for Florence when she was seven months pregnant with Crystal. Florence’s mother and her two brothers had been invited. Her brothers came. She asked one of them where their mother was, and when he answered “Home with the baby” she asked, “What baby?” He said that their mother was delighted to have a daughter and was enjoying staying home with her, and he told her that Cynthia had arrived, at the beginning of the month, as a complete surprise. Lavinia had given birth abruptly, in her living room. At that time, Florence was eighteen. She had been in foster care since she was six years old.

  Florence Drummond was born to Lavinia Wilson and Sylvester Drummond in New York City on February 12, 1951. Lavinia had had a son, whom she named Clifford, a year earlier, when she was nineteen. Lavinia, one of eight children born to Freeman Wilson and his wife, Rebecca, had grown up on a farm outside Memphis, Tennessee. She was raised poor. Her father was a farmer with a third-grade education; her mother worked in a laundry. Rebecca died when Lavinia was ten, and Freeman married a widow named Mabel. There were numerous step-relatives—children Rebecca had had before she married, children Mabel had had with her first husband. Lavinia attended segregated country schools through the ninth grade.

  When Lavinia was about fourteen, the principal of her school arranged for her to go to Baltimore to “help a colored doctor and his wife” with their two small children and to attend school there. She was put back three grades. “They did that in the North to anyone coming from the South,” she says. Lavinia considered the doctor’s wife too strict and the schoolwork a waste of time, and returned home about a year later. In the summer of 1947, at the age of sixteen, Lavinia went to New York and stayed with step-relatives. “I got a house job taking care of a four-year-old boy,” she says. “That lasted a number of years, until I got pregnant with Clifford.”

  Lavinia moved to a rooming house and went on welfare after Clifford’s birth. She says that Sylvester Drummond “had a job as a housepainter when I first met him, but later decided he was too good to work.” He abandoned her when she was pregnant with Clifford. He soon reappeared, she took him back, she got pregnant with Florence. They parted for good after Florence’s birth, when she caught him cheating on her with “other womens,” one of whom he later married. She believed that her life was deteriorating and sent the children to Memphis to live with Mabel, by then a widow. In 1953, Lavinia, still in New York, had another son, Samuel Wilson, by a man she had known in passing. No one in the family had been religious, but after Samuel’s birth Lavinia came under the influence of a missionary, Winona Snowden, from a fundamentalist church in Harlem, whom she refers to as her “spiritual mother.” She felt guilty about having had three children out of wedlock, started going to church most weekdays, several evenings, and for hours on Sunday, and describes the life she has led since as “a saved life.”

  Clifford and Florence returned to New York from Memphis in 1955; they went back there as children only once, for Mabel’s funeral, in 1956. In the mid-fifties, Lavinia and her three children lived in a walkup on West 130th Street. They had a sparsely furnished bedroom and living room, and shared a bathroom and a small kitchen with the other family on the floor. There was a communal hot plate, but they had their own icebox—an old-fashioned one, which cooled food with a block of ice. The welfare check on which Lavinia and her children subsisted didn’t go far. As Clifford remembers his youth, “Mom scraped pennies. There was no money for enjoyment, except a small black-and-white TV. No Christmas presents, no birthday presents, not enough clothes, and not too much to eat—sometimes just a can of spaghetti for dinner. Mom ate what we did.” What Lavinia’s children remember most about their early years is the churchgoing and the beatings. Lavinia often lost control and hit Florence and the boys with whatever implement was handy—an ironing cord, an extension cord, a doubled-up brown belt.

  When the children played with the pan under the antique icebox into which the melting block of ice dripped, and spilled the water, Florence says she alone was whipped for the misdeed. Sometimes when just the three children were home, Florence ran away before her mother’s return, to avoid an anticipated beating. She would either come home by herself or be brought back by the police. She appeared to be the target of her mother’s guilt; Lavinia later told a caseworker that she felt compelled to punish her, according to “the Lord’s direction.” Lavinia also often forced Clifford to beat Florence.

  A neighbor of Lavinia’s had been threatening to telephone the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Lavinia dismissed the threat, but it was carried out one day in
late 1957, when the neighbor heard Florence wailing even louder than usual. Florence was removed from the apartment and taken to Manhattan’s Children’s Court, on East Twenty-second Street. Her body was a mass of bruises, welts, and cuts; one side of her face and one eye were badly swollen. Lavinia was ordered to appear in the court. Clifford and Samuel accompanied her. Two neighbors testified against Lavinia. She was found guilty of inflicting frequent and severe beatings on Florence, was placed on probation, and was referred to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric evaluation and to the Harlem Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic for guidance. She and the boys went home; Florence did not. Florence was committed as a neglected child to the Bureau of Child Welfare. (By the time Florence’s children went into foster care, B.C.W. had been renamed Special Services for Children.)

  In December, 1957, Florence was placed by Windham Children’s Services, which specialized in temporary foster-home placements, with a young family in Brooklyn; she completed first grade while she was staying with them. Florence spoke to the caseworker about her dislike of the beatings she had received from her mother and about the lengthy church sessions she had had to attend with her; she said the emotional, frenzied worship frightened her. She also talked about the time away from her mother in the South. The caseworker believed that she was as healthy as she was because of the years she had spent with her grandmother.