Agatha was most appreciative but explained that with her age and her health, she would be unable to house me in Roxbury and that besides my not having a place to stay, funds from the Ford Foundation for ballet school had been forgone and that it would take time to requisition the State of Maine about paying for tuition at St. Patrick’s. Under the womanly banner of “where there’s a will there’s a way,” the two agreed to put their heads together. Agatha got on the phone and relaunched her ever-successful campaign for temporary places for me to stay while Carol Jordan secured immediate lodging for me with a fellow ballet student, Sharon, who lived in the suburbs.
Thus ended my sojourn in the old Yankee country of my youth, where Mark Twain and President Franklin Pierce sought strength and inspiration. I knew that this was the end of maple sugar falls and mackerel summer skies, January thaws, and all the back and forth.
My return to Mother Maine had been a refresher course, important to reinforce the values not only of enduring physical strength, but durability in mind and spirit as well. She reminded me that if I didn’t shovel my way out, I would remain snowbound; if I didn’t pull water out of my well, I wouldn’t drink; if I didn’t lift grain bags, my animals would die and if I didn’t spread manure and pitch hay, I couldn’t pick the fruits of my labor. Once again, I witnessed the truth that abundance was predicated on what you poured into the soil—your soil. The lesson was simple and never easy.
I returned to Boston reenergized—the center of my entire cultural universe as far as I could imagine at thirteen years old. Whatever the specific magic that Agatha worked during that stay, I never knew. But something about me had changed. If I fell while trying my wings, I had to take a leap of faith in believing that someone would be there to catch me.
None of the logistical arrangements and changes could have been possible without the intercession of my social worker, Linda Webb, a quiet reed of a woman, who tirelessly pushed the impassive bureaucrats in Augusta for more purchase orders for ballet slippers, pointe shoes, leotards, and tights, and who seriously bent rules to get me across state lines. And that was for starters. Who was this intrepid thinker who risked her job on my behalf? How did I pull the lucky number and have her assigned to my case?
The answer to both questions is one and the same. As a graduate of the School of Social Work at the University of Southern Maine and an employee of the Department of Human Services of the state of Maine, Linda had been identified as having a gift with “special” cases. Before being assigned to follow my foster status and my unique set of circumstances, her narrow specialty had been working with children in adoptive and foster homes who had learning disabilities, and she opened doors for them from preschool to college. Linda genuinely enjoyed her work, not so common among many social workers bogged down with insurmountable caseloads, especially because of the opportunity to assist those few who had a desire to go on to college, and to help their foster and adoptive parents with the complicated application process.
Linda was indeed special. That’s how my “special” file landed on her desk. She embraced challenges as well as successes, bringing to her path as a social worker a Mainer’s practicality and a belief in good works instilled in her from her upbringing in the church. When I later sought her out in my adulthood, she confided in me that part of her motivation to pursue social work was from having grown up in an unstable home. Though she described her family as loving and supportive, the household was also plagued with alcoholism. In her teens, her parents divorced, leading to a traumatic period.
“I would have designed it differently, if I could have,” Linda remarked with a philosophical laugh, as if to acknowledge what another world it would be if we could all redesign our family lives retroactively. And yet, she also believed that adversarial circumstances make people stronger, that difficulty in a child’s life often leads him or her a heightened sensitivity and compassion toward others. That certainly had been true in her life. Social work was clearly her calling.
During visits or phone calls to alert me as to why the purchase orders for my ballet slippers were taking so long, she patiently explained, “Yes, Vicki, we do have discretionary funds at DHS for special interests for some of the children, but a special”—there was that word again—“purchase order has to be facilitated for ballet slippers.”
Discretionary, facilitate, purchase order, Department of Human Services, special interests, guardianship—all these big words. Before long, I got into the habit of carrying a little dictionary with me to decipher what everybody was talking about in my little bureaucratic life; as an adult it became routine for my bigger one. However, I didn’t need a dictionary or a thesaurus to understand what my social worker meant by discretionary purchases.
The tug-of-war over purchase orders for ballet slippers had been ongoing even back when Agatha was still in Roxbury. One of the hitches was that it was twice as hard to get reimbursed for special discretionary purchases; Ma usually waited for the cash proxy in the form of a slip of paper with the State of Maine’s official seal on it. Even when we knew Linda Webb was eventually going to come through, the waiting was so epic that my feet might have grown another half size in the interim. “Any day now” was Linda’s familiar refrain. With the exception of one big toe, my feet were crammed into slippers two sizes too small, restricting me from fully executing the steps. I would resign myself to dance as if I had the support of an entire ballet slipper around my foot, attempting to execute a double pirouette while feeling the cool Marley floor beneath me. Besides being a lesson in patience, the power of those purchase orders taught me the true weight that a piece of paper can hold. A future.
In contrast to her quiet manner, Linda Webb’s written requests to the State of Maine on my behalf were pieces of fiery persuasion, culminating often along these lines:
Since Vicki is so serious about studying ballet, has demonstrated a significant amount of talent, and does wish to make a career of this, it seems we have an obligation to assist her in attaining this goal as we do with other foster children.
Throughout the years, the arrival of the purchase order was followed as soon as humanly possible with a trip to the heart of downtown Boston to buy pink tights at Albert’s Hosiery and then to Capezio’s for ballet slippers. It was practically a holiday. Everything about the purchases made me proud, including my black-and-white-printed plastic Capezio bag that I swung like a badge of honor until the lettering faded and the string broke or until the next purchase order came. High on a shelf, beyond my reach—and that of the purchase orders—were glossy patent leather ballet boxes that all the rich girls had; in pink or blue, the boxes had a ballerina in a tutu and tiara on the front. There was a compartment that snapped shut for slippers and one for fresh ballet clothes. The boxes were the equivalent of passing by the Ritz-Carlton. Look but don’t touch. But I could look and dream.
Linda Webb represented the humanizing of the system to me, additionally personalizing her role through frequent contact almost exclusively through correspondence and phone calls, working for a social cause, children—me.
To the credit of the State of Maine, Health and Human Services, I clearly understood that there were those, though typically faceless, who cared in Augusta and Portland. Though I was living under HHS-regimented constraints and guidelines of colossal size, time and time again Linda Webb emerged from a crushing mound of paperwork to make it manageable, proving that I was more than a case number, that I was a person—a necessary understanding for every foster child. Every child, period.
Twenty-five years later, I explained to Linda that I had to find her because I always wondered about the lady who cared so much, who went beyond the call of duty. She took chances and made what other people deemed impossible, possible. She never took shortcuts or settled because it was too, too, too much work.
Had she ever wondered about me?
Linda smiled sweetly. “I wonder about all of the children I worked with.” She then added, “But it hadn’t occurred to me
that it was even a possibility that I would hear from any of you.”
By the time I tracked Linda Webb down, she and her husband were already the parents of two grown sons they had adopted at infancy. Modest about her many accomplishments, Linda felt most proud of how her sons had grown up to become independent, good young men. As their mother, her priority was to trust them and trust herself, to encourage her sons to embrace exploration of their own origin, talents, strengths, and weaknesses, to acknowledge that they had birth parents. I admired her courage and honesty.
Equally important was for Linda’s children to understand how rooted they were in her being. I already knew how fortunate those two young men were to have Linda as their parent and mentor. No one needed to tell me that a woman didn’t have to give birth to mother a child.
Slender and unassuming, her hair always in a simple bob, Linda employed an economy of language as she asked me questions. In one conversation, she spoke with rare candor about herself by sharing her dream of a world at peace. That dream was at the center of her calling to social work. Linda suggested that if people made an effort to respect and appreciate each other’s differences and not just tolerate them it would lay a foundation for peace.
Linda Webb was peace. I loved the oasis of calm she created for me, how she sensed that though I was a strong child, I was also vulnerable. Our talks and my ability to tell her what was happening in my day-today experiences was the closest I came to having therapy in my youth, something I later would emphatically advocate for all foster children. I trusted her implicitly and named her in my nightly prayers, in which I listed alphabetically all those individuals in my extended families whom I loved for loving me.
Eventually, of course, my case would be reassigned, but until that time, I absorbed all that she gave me, especially one piece of advice I never forgot.
“Vicki,” Linda began, then she paused as though searching for the right words and went on, “it’s important to take time, to step back. We all tend to want to do for others, and most of us get pleasure out of it. But don’t forget to think about who you are and what nourishes your soul.” That right there was the powerful wisdom that I carefully folded up and tucked into my back pocket, remembering every now and then to apply it. Linda Webb was the social worker who never let me down but only pushed me forward.
I had to navigate the road of ultimate acceptance. Of no one’s making, I was never meant to be raised by one mother, but by many. It was during these years of my early teens when I saw Dorothy for the last time, during that meeting in a Howard Johnson’s. I was powerless when Agatha, riddled with illness but determined to carry out this visit between Dorothy and me, insisted on traveling from Maine to downtown Boston.
I didn’t know if I should embrace Dorothy in front of Agatha. Would I be betraying the mother/daughter loyalty between Agatha and me? I desperately wanted to hug them both but couldn’t. Dorothy was an inconvenient intruder. I felt fraudulent in her presence. How could I be the me I had become when Dorothy’s painful truth stood there, quivering, mumbling at me? Without intent, she exposed everything I was ashamed of, everything I wanted to forget or deny, threatening my secret identity. What if someone saw us together—how would I explain? I could no more ignore Dorothy’s illness than I could reciprocate her odd affection. My dispassion concerned me as much as my helpless wish to rescue her from something I had no comprehension of.
Her merciless shaking was something I couldn’t begin to fathom. As an adult I would learn from a renowned Harvard professor and psychologist, Alan Hobson, that Dorothy’s tremors were due to years of antihallucinogens, serving as a sort of chemical lobotomy.
My mother’s suffering and anguish haunted me and maybe that was the part of her that kept us connected. What I am sure of is that Dorothy never surrendered. Upon multiple releases from the Augusta State Mental Hospital and other facilities, each time she would immediately board a bus and show up unannounced to see her children. She never yielded in her fight that I be placed in the most loving hands possible. In her way, Dorothy taught me to never give up if you truly believed in what you were fighting for.
Sewing and knitting together all the pieces of fabric that the women raising me had provided so far, I began to see the makings of a dress. I was experiencing what goes on for so many foster and adopted children, particularly as we enter our teen years and young adulthood. With emancipation looming it the distance, it was a time of reflection and uncertainty, searching and scrambling for any shred of affiliation.
That may explain how I bonded so strongly with Barbara Sterling, the Jamaican-born mother of my friend Jackie Legister, who had many Agatha-like qualities. Her home became an unofficial weekend respite dwelling for me. My first glimpse of Barbara had come at a lecture demonstration at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, which was offered to the public by the Cambridge School of Ballet staff and students. While Jackie was statuesque and exotic, her mother was short and plain. Then, the moment her daughter pointed her toe and lifted her arm, Barbara Sterling’s face lit up the room, which it continued to do whenever Jackie made the smallest of ballet gestures—even the slightest épaulement, or movement of the head and arms.
This was gorgeous maternal pride, enhanced by metal teeth. Jewelry in her mouth? This was fantastic. I had never seen such a thing in my life. Theater, baby! Her already megawatt smile became magnified by the gold crowns on several prominent teeth.
When I began spending respite weekends with Barbara and the rest of her family in Bedford, Massachusetts, among many enticements were the talks that I had with my weekend surrogate mother and the stories that unfolded of her life. These were the stories of dreams handed down from mothers to daughters. Barbara’s mother in Jamaica had herself dreamt of coming to the United States but had instead sponsored her daughter’s journey here. Living up to that investment, Barbara Sterling worked three jobs, owned three homes, and raised three children, and had arrived in America with only three suitcases. Her dream was to be a ballet dancer but knew it was not to be and so passed her dream on to her daughter Jackie—who would eventually take it to New York City to study at the Alvin Ailey School.
Barbara poured a limitless flow of love into all her children and those around her, including me. She was so optimistic for all of us.
My love connection with Barbara Sterling was manna in the desert of my wanderings. Primal and necessary. And there was another aspect to these stays that connected me to what I imagined might have been the island home of my ancestors on my father’s side. A passing thought at times, it was later made more plausible when I learned that he might have well been Jamaican.
It could be a subzero temperature outside but it vanished inside Barbara’s house, where winter and the outer world were mocked. It was here that I learned about the intoxication of steaming chicken and dumplings, thermostats kept at ninety-five degrees at all times, and that I never felt unwelcome. I loved everything about the heat of the hearth and the heart of that house. Never still, there was a bustle of people coming and going. Women gathered to gossip. Grown men drank Red Stripe and Guinness Stout. Mixed with a raw egg, and down the hatch it went. My ears were seduced by a new language, a patois so rhythmic I swore they were singing their call-and-answers to each other. The music skipped, danced around and through me. Familiar, resonant, making me feel safe. It touched something old inside my being.
Barbara Sterling was an earth mother to me, a root woman. To walk into her home was to walk into a living blanket. She was refurbishment along the relay race of my teens, cheering me on from the sidelines as I danced on, toward my next stop in the home of Rosa Turner—a fosterer, mentor, and a one-of-a-kind grande dame.
In the summer leading into the ninth grade at St. Patrick’s, Lauren Turner had come to Maine with me for a visit at Forest Edge that included, of course, Agatha’s never-to-be-missed highlight of the year: the annual Robert Armstead memorial birthday cookout.
Our now ancient S&H Green Stamp rotisserie was on its last leg
s, as were some of the relatives who were getting on in years. I was able to share a foreign yet wonderful way of life with Lauren—farm life and my true home. She and I had come a long way from the fourth grade when she threatened to beat up the girl with pigtails for wearing the same green cardigan that she owned.
Before it was time to go back to Boston, during my usual conversation with Ma about accommodations for me for the next six months or so, Lauren volunteered that it would be perfect if I could stay with her.
“Could I?” I asked Ma, not daring to get my hopes up too much. Lauren was the closest thing to having a sister at that point in time and her suggestion sounded perfect to me, too. At the cookout, to which Lauren’s parents had been invited, we ambushed both Agatha and Rosa, excitedly campaigning for something we thought made sense.
Mrs. Turner was apprehensive for good reason, as I would learn later, when the reality of blood being thicker than water would raise its ugly head. But before that happened, as the result of an intensive lobbying effort that Lauren undertook with her mother, Mrs. Turner acquiesced, saying, “Fine, Vicki can stay here as long as her social worker approves.”
Welcome to Grant Manor Projects.
The area where Agatha’s brownstone stood on Burrell Street was older and more run-down compared to the newer Grant Manor Projects where the Turners lived in Roxbury—but in a neighborhood and households scarred by the ravages of heroin and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, poverty, vets with posttraumatic stress disorder, all ratcheted up by the fury over busing. The court’s ruling in Massachusetts to make sure schools were integrated was noble in theory, but everybody was up in arms about who went where and why. The crime rate skyrocketed and, like always, the poorest neighborhoods bore the brunt of it no matter what color they were.
The Women Who Raised Me Page 17