Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair

by Susan Sheehan

  When Lavinia came to see Florence at Odyssey House in 1988, Florence had asked her to bring her some homemade chicken and some macaroni salad. Instead, Lavinia brought her Kentucky Fried Chicken she had bought. “I asked her why,” Clifford says. “I asked her, ‘Don’t you love Florence? Isn’t she your daughter?’ She changed the subject real quick.”

  Lavinia maintains that the judge who removed Florence from her care wanted her raised in a home with a mother and a father. There is no evidence in Florence’s record at Sheltering Arms that this is true, but Lavinia often says, “Look how much better the two I raised are than the one that was raised with a father and mother.”

  In 1988, Lavinia informed Florence and Clifford of Sylvester Drummond’s death. Clifford concluded that she had known his father’s whereabouts all along and had simply chosen not to reveal them. In 1989, Florence no longer remembered living in Memphis, but in 1961 she had told a caseworker at Sheltering Arms that she called her grandmother Grandma, that there were many people in her grandma’s house, and that it was a very happy home. She said she had enjoyed eating a rice dish called mulattos, that she had entered kindergarten in the South, and that her father, Mr. Drummond—who was called Syl by others but Daddy by her—used to take her out while she was on the farm. In 1961, Lavinia Wilson also told the caseworker that when Florence lived on the farm she lived with her father, and that Sylvester Drummond was Lavinia’s stepsister’s husband. It was the worker’s impression that Clifford and Florence were born while he was married to the stepsister. As a caseworker had noted on another occasion, Miss Wilson presents herself in the manner “of a child who holds a very big secret.”

  Samuel Wilson has never seen his father and knows nothing about him except his name. “You just don’t want me to have a father,” Samuel once said to Lavinia, in anger. His mother’s answer was “I don’t want anything less than going to church.” Cynthia Wilson saw her father every now and then until she was nine, when she and Lavinia moved to Astoria. She hasn’t seen him since. “I thank God that my children have stopped asking me about their fathers,” Lavinia Wilson says. “I like being the mother and the father. All men are dogs.”

  In therapy at Odyssey House, Florence had to resolve another substantive issue in her life—the relationships with the three fathers of her children. She readily acknowledged that two of the relationships were not good. Wesley Taylor, the father of Crystal, Carlos, and Matthew, was her Pied Piper to drugs. “He didn’t make me start using, but when I wanted to get off drugs he was the one pushing me further and further on drugs,” she wrote. “Now he is strung out real bad.” She had next to nothing to say about Leonard, Natasha’s father. In the spring of 1982, when she was thirty-one, she had caught the twenty-one-year-old Leonard in Crystal’s bedroom one day upon returning home unexpectedly. She was furious. At the same time that she believed Leonard was sexually involved with Crystal, who was then twelve, Florence was pregnant with Leonard’s child; she felt betrayed by both Leonard and Crystal.

  She felt differently about Clarence, the father of James and Michael. During the February after she came to Ward’s Island, she said she missed getting her annual Valentine’s Day card from him. That May, she reminisced that “this time last year he brought me a whole outfit for Mother’s Day and I had dinner.” Florence came to regret her treatment of Clarence, with whom she believed she had had a good relationship but one she had exploited. “I stole from him, lied to him, I did whatever it took just for drugs,” she wrote. “The more he gave the more I wasn’t satisfy.” At first, Florence wondered if the feelings she and Clarence had formerly had for each other were still there. She subsequently said she learned in group that Clarence, whom she had considered “a father figure” (Clarence is twenty-eight years older than Florence), was nothing but “an enabler” for her drug habit. That wasn’t the type of relationship she wanted with a man when she left the program.

  Florence admitted in therapy at Odyssey House that she had been a “very sick mother”—the same words she used there to describe Lavinia. She resolved to make up for the years her children had spent in foster care as a consequence of her neglect, and for her failure to visit them after they were placed. “I knew the minimum I had to do to prevent the kids from being permanently taken away and being put out for adoption,” she says. “And I did just the minimum.”

  From the time Florence started Pre-Treatment on Ward’s Island, her first Odyssey House counsellor had agreed that she could continue to go to Children’s Village for weekly family-therapy sessions with Carlos and Matthew. Crystal saw Florence every now and then, depending on her school or work schedule and the amount of time she was devoting to her boyfriends. Florence has never confronted her about Leonard, and though they have their ups and downs, Crystal and Florence remain fond of each other.

  Florence was more concerned about the three younger children, especially the two boys—James, who had gone into foster care at the age of one, and Michael, who had gone into care directly from the hospital. “My last two sons I never even saw them grow up, or start walking or even cutting their first teeths,” she wrote in a self-evaluation note in May, 1988.

  Before foster parents are certified, they must agree to let birth parents see the children in their care regularly—usually once a week. The Child Welfare Administration’s caseworkers for the children are supposed to arrange these visits. In the case of Florence’s children, visits took place either in the Brooklyn office (Michael’s foster mother, Geraldine Kent, lived in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn) or in the Queens office (Natasha’s foster parents, Grace and Herbert Dunbar, lived in Springfield Gardens, Queens). Although James had been placed in the Bronx in 1986, his case was never transferred there from Brooklyn, so visits with him were also supposed to take place in Brooklyn but seldom did, because his foster mother found the long subway trip difficult. Toward the end of 1989, Florence prevailed upon C.W.A. to transfer James to a family in the Bronx that was amenable to bringing him on visits.

  The children’s C.W.A. workers changed rapidly. Whenever a worker left and a new one was assigned, weeks often passed before a visiting schedule was again established, despite the willingness of the foster parents to adhere to the visiting rules. Florence was troubled that Michael didn’t recognize her and that neither of the younger boys was warm to her at first, although she acknowledged that she had no one to blame for the situation but herself.

  When Carlos first came to Children’s Village, in July, 1986, he had often been described as sneaky, moody, and depressed. By January of 1988, he had made significant progress. His social workers noted that he regressed only when Florence failed to keep appointments. He occasionally lied or was manipulative, but he was one of the most popular boys in his cottage. Matthew, although he was only ten months younger than Carlos, was babyish: he wet his bed, had frequent temper tantrums, and was afraid of the dark. Carlos, who tended to protect Matthew, was more accessible: he talked openly about his emotions, and he acknowledged Florence’s drug addiction. Matthew was closemouthed about his problems and his mother’s, and most reluctant to talk to adults. It was difficult for him to verbalize his feelings, but, unlike Carlos, who had been found to be learning-disabled and was behind grade level, Matthew was able to go to a public school in Dobbs Ferry and was never left back.

  By early 1988, the behavior of both boys had improved so much since their arrival at Children’s Village that the agency was prepared to discharge them. Carlos and Matthew realized that Florence’s drug rehabilitation might take a long time or might not work out. They said they wanted to live with their sister Natasha’s foster parents, Grace and Herbert Dunbar, who had offered them a home. It took many months for C.W.A. to approve the transfer—the agency tends to act slowly—but on February 28, 1989, Carlos and Matthew moved to the Dunbars’.

  The Dunbars were then in their early sixties, and had been foster parents for twenty years. Mr. Dunbar, who worked for the Department of Corrections, is an old-fashioned
man who prides himself on the fact that his wife has never had to work outside the house. They had raised Mrs. Dunbar’s two sons, who are now in their forties, and a daughter. The Dunbars were eager to adopt one child who had been placed with them, but he was given to his grandmother—a placement that Mr. Dunbar did not approve of, because the woman lived in an untidy three-room apartment and “already had three other grands.” Mr. Dunbar had been abandoned by his parents and placed in an orphanage at the age of five. “I was foster,” he says. “I really missed a mother and a father, and I miss that to this day. Several people were good to me when I was coming up. I see foster care as a way of helping my people.”

  In 1969, four sisters, ranging in age from three to nine, came to the Dunbars from another foster home. In 1980, after the death of Mrs. Dunbar’s daughter, the couple took in their eight-year-old granddaughter. She is now a college student. Three of the four sisters stayed for a number of years (the other didn’t behave, and moved out), and Mrs. Dunbar is still in contact with them. “I get my cards on Mother’s Day, they send, they bring, they come,” she says.

  When Natasha was transferred to the Dunbars’ from Mrs. Peoples’ home in Crown Heights, in 1986, Mrs. Dunbar unpacked her clothes in the back yard and shook them out, a procedure she followed with all new foster children. “I didn’t have roaches and I didn’t want roaches,” she says. “Natasha had been in a typical foster home. Her clothes were ridiculous. The whites hadn’t been washed with the whites, and the colors with the colors, so everything had run in together. She was a typical toddler. I couldn’t keep a fan on the floor or flowers in a vase without her upsetting them, but toddlers are always touching and feeling—that’s how they learn. It was up to me to see that her fingers didn’t get tied up in a fan or her hands burned on the stove. That’s a parent’s job. Natasha wasn’t well behaved when we got her, but she was a bright little girl and she wasn’t no real trouble, and soon she was very good.”

  Natasha excelled in school. The Dunbars ordered Dr. Seuss books for her from a children’s book club, bought her dictionaries, a bookcase, and a blackboard, and had the neighborhood candy store reserve a copy of a children’s newspaper for her. From the bottom of the staircase they could hear Natasha in her bedroom teaching her dolls to read. Mrs. Dunbar was faithful about taking Natasha (and, later, Carlos and Matthew) to the C.W.A. office in Queens, and occasionally to the Brooklyn office to see Florence along with her other children. Once Florence had progressed enough at Odyssey House to be able to travel alone, they invited her to their home. “I never had no parents of foster kids come to the house except Florence, because I liked her,” Mrs. Dunbar says. “When she said she would come, she would come. You set the table, she would sit and eat and not hurry. She stood next to our piano and sang. She had people who had cared for her.” The Dunbars had no idea that Florence had been in foster care.

  When Carlos and Matthew moved to the Dunbars’, it was apparent that Natasha scarcely remembered them and wasn’t happy to have them join her. “They came from a place with rough boys,” Mrs. Dunbar says. The Dunbars gave Carlos and Matthew their downstairs bedroom (“The girls were upstairs with us, and boys and girls don’t mix under our roof”) and had no immediate problems with them. They were friendly, they did the yard work and other assigned chores, they were respectful. Although Matthew struck them as more intelligent, they preferred Carlos. “Carlos was neat,” Mrs. Dunbar says. “Matthew had some nasty habits. He wouldn’t take a bath unless you dropped him into the tub.” Carlos was also honest, but Matthew lied and began to steal. “You couldn’t lay nothing down because if you did, Matthew was gone with it,” Mrs. Dunbar says. “He took my change purse out of my bowling bag and stuffed it into his eyeglass case. I found it when he put his eyeglass case down on the dresser and I could see it looked puffed up.”

  Early in November of 1989, the Dunbars were startled to learn that Carlos had been playing hooky. They were told that he had missed fifteen days of school in September and five days in October. They called Florence and suggested that she go to the school and talk to the principal. “Instead of me getting upset and fussing with my son I just politely went to the school Thursday morning to talk with the principal, the dean, and the guidance counselor,” Florence wrote in a self-evaluation note. Like Mrs. Dunbar, who went to the school several times herself, Florence “couldn’t understand how a child was able to stay out of school for fifteen days and no one saying anything. The only reason the foster mother was notified was because when my son played hooky in Oct. one of the teachers saw him.”

  At the end of November, the Dunbars had another shock. Carlos came home one evening with no clothes on under his coat. He told the Dunbars that he had gone to another boy’s house with some friends, while the boy’s mother was at work. The other boys had made him undress—he and his friends had taken their clothes off before at such gatherings. Carlos got angry and ran out of the house. He came home trembling with cold. Mr. Dunbar took him to the police precinct and filed a complaint. All the boys involved were summoned to Family Court, but nothing came of the inquiry. The Dunbars decided that Carlos would have to go back to Children’s Village. He was readmitted there on January 30, 1990.

  Matthew’s sneakiness and stealing increased after Carlos left, and in the spring the Dunbars told their caseworker they could no longer keep him. Their C.W.A. worker stalled. In August, Mrs. Dunbar suffered a severe stroke. Mr. Dunbar couldn’t take care of foster children and his wife, who would require several months in the hospital. He called his caseworker’s office and explained his predicament, and was told to go home and pack Matthew’s things. On September 12, 1990, Matthew Drummond returned to Children’s Village. To the Dunbars’ regret, Natasha had to leave them for another foster home in Queens.

  That summer, Florence seemed to think it was time for her children to stop playing musical foster homes and for her to take the final steps to get them home. What she needed most was a job. Odyssey House Level Ill’s are eligible for job training (if they need it) and are permitted to work outside the program. Florence felt good when she was sent to the New York State Office of Vocational Rehabilitation for evaluation in May, 1989. A month later, she was sent from O.V.R. to a business school run by the Federation Employment and Guidance Service, or FEGS, an organization sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.

  Florence had excelled at clerical work and, at FEGS, was pleased that tests showed she hadn’t lost her aptitude for typing, filing, reading, or math. By the time she reached Level IV, in July of 1989, she was in school all day brushing up on a few rusty skills. In October, she officially completed school. Her job-placement counsellor at FEGS began to send her out on job interviews. There were numerous applicants for each secretarial position, and Florence wasn’t hired. She acknowledged that many people had more experience—and more recent experience—than she did.

  In late December, shortly after reaching the “reëntry” phase of the Odyssey House program, she was overjoyed to be offered a job as a secretary at an office-supply company, at a salary of sixteen thousand dollars a year. January 2, 1990, was her first day of work. “It was exactly fourteen years since I’d been laid off from my last job and lost all those years to drugs,” she says. “It felt great to be drug-free and working.”

  In the summer of 1989, Florence had met a handsome twenty-four-year-old man named Burton who was at FEGS studying major-appliance repair. Florence and Burton were friends for six months and then became lovers. Level IV’s have the privilege of dating anyone who isn’t in the program. She spoke in group therapy of marrying him. Her therapist at the time thought that this was one of Florence’s fantasies. Crystal hoped that the therapist was right. Once, when Burton was supposed to meet Florence and Crystal at a subway station, he showed up two and a half hours late. That December, Burton invited Florence to spend Christmas with his mother. At the last minute, he said there had been a death in the family, and the plans were cancelled.
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  Many Odyssey House residents who are ready to graduate are unable to find housing, since affordable housing is in woefully short supply in the city. Graduates have been permitted to stay on a month or two past their projected departure dates, because Odyssey House does not discharge its graduates to the street. It encourages some residents to seek housing in New Jersey and other outlying areas or to pool their resources and live with two or three other graduates. Florence is a city person; for her Ward’s Island was “like being out in the woods,” and she has an aversion to the suburbs. The only person she fancied living with, Burton, had told her of an available apartment in Staten Island near the one he shared with his mother. He had proposed moving in with her, so she gave Odyssey House a departure date—March, 1990. The apartment fell through. She took a single room with a shared bath and no kitchen at 104th Street and Central Park West, and left Odyssey House in early May. She didn’t go to her graduation ceremony on May 19th. Her diploma is still waiting to be picked up at Odyssey House’s executive offices, on lower Broadway. Florence says she took the room in haste to get out of the program—she felt that it had nothing else to offer her. She was also five months pregnant with Burton’s child. Florence wasn’t showing much (“I was so big anyway”), but she didn’t want her favorite therapist at Odyssey House to know she was pregnant.

  She did tell Crystal about her condition. Crystal was even more exasperated with Florence for being pregnant in 1990 than she had been when she learned of Michael’s birth, four years earlier. “Now this lady supposed to be finally straightened out, but she still got six children in foster care spreaded all over the map and she expecting a seventh,” she commented disapprovingly to one of her social workers. “Where her head was at and what that young punk be thinking of?”