Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair Read online

  SUSAN SHEEHAN

  Life for Me Ain’t Been No Crystal Stair

  Susan Sheehan, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is the author of six previous books. A Welfare Mother won a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award and Is There No Place on Earth For Me? won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1983. She lives with her husband, the writer Neil Sheehan, in Washington, D.C. The Sheehans have two daughters, Maria and Catherine.

  Also by SUSAN SHEEHAN

  Ten Vietnamese

  A Welfare Mother

  A Prison and a Prisoner

  Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

  Kate Quinton’s Days

  A Missing Plane

  VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1993 by Susan Sheehan

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form in The New Yorker, January 11 and January 18, 1993 issues. This edition originally published in hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for permission to reprint the poem “Mother to Son” from Selected Poems by Langston Hughes. Copyright 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and renewed 1954 by Langston Hughes.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Sheehan, Susan, 1937–

  Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair / Susan Sheehan.

  p. cm.

  1. Socially handicapped teenagers — United States — Case Studies.

  2. Teenage mothers — United States — Case studies.

  I. Title.

  HVI43I.S45 1993

  362.7’083 — dc20 93-18746

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5109-2

  v3.1

  For Judith Green

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Mother to Son

  I is Lovable

  The Beautifulest Mother in the World

  Afterword

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful, not for the first time, to my friends Elizabeth L. Sturz and Herbert Sturz, whom I telephoned shortly after I woke up one morning in the summer of 1990 with the idea of writing about foster care. They referred me to William J. Grinker, the commissioner of New York City’s Human Resources Administration from 1986 to 1989. Bill Grinker introduced me to Poul Jensen, the assistant executive director of St. Christopher-Ottilie, the largest private foster-care agency in New York State. “If you’re willing to take a ten-hour van ride from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania and back tomorrow, I promise you a subject,” Poul said to me on September 17, 1990. Previous searches for book subjects had taken many months. Those words sounded auspicious. Before a van filled with St. Christopher-Ottilie child-care and social workers had even passed through New Jersey, en route to a school for delinquent boys in Pennsylvania, two of my van mates, Charlotte Bowman and Ron Underwood, convinced me that Crystal Taylor would be a perfect subject. They said she was articulate, would enjoy being written about, and would stay the course: I had told them the story I proposed to write would take a year. I had dinner with Lisa Lombardi, director of group homes for St. Christopher’s, Karlaye Rafindadi, Crystal’s current social worker, and Crystal on October 4th. Crystal and I liked each other from the first pina coladas we ordered. She agreed to work with me—“It’d probably kinda help me learn my roots,” she said—and did indeed stay the course, a two-and-a-half-year one, with unfailing veracity and high spirits.

  In addition to those mentioned above, I am thankful to Robert J. McMahon, Nora S. Schaaf, Barbara Atkinson, Jean Canale, Connie Cantatore, Lee Cappadoro, Moneick Hancock, and Cecilia Rutledge of St. Christopher’s. I am indebted to Nan Dale, Yvonne Bridges, Wendy Fieldman, Sam Turnbull, Louise Weldon, and Karen Wulf of The Children’s Village; to Madelon Kendricks of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center; to Beverly Brooks and Dr. Merrith H. Hockmeyer of The Center for Children & Families; to Joel L. Friedman of Flushing High School; to Douglas Aymong and Joe Cullen of Satellite Academy; to Henry Ackermann of Pius XII Youth & Family Services; to Detective Joseph Gallagher of the New York City Police Department; to Dick Piperno of the Queens District Attorney’s office; to David Liederman of the Child Welfare League of America; to Anne Reiniger of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; to Marilyn Del Vescovo and Salvatore Costagliola of Sheltering Arms Childrens Service; to Benjamin Walker, Fred Blount, and Rochelle Wyner of Odyssey House; to Alice Boles Ott, Betsy Alterman, Muriel Leconte, and Maxine Reiss of CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates); to Jane M. Spinak of Morningside Heights Legal Services; to Emily Stutz, formerly of The Center For Family Life; and to Jamie Greenberg, Keith Kelly, and James Smith of the New York State Department of Social Services.

  Because I had the consent of Crystal, her brothers, her mother, her maternal grandmother, her son’s father, and her son’s foster parents, I was given access to their records at St. Christopher-Ottilie, The Children’s Village, CASA, Odyssey House, and Sheltering Arms.

  This book began as a two-part article for The New Yorker. It is a joy to have a page on which to thank some of my colleagues: Bruce J. Diones, Nicholas Parker, and Owen Phillips; Alice Mulconry, Edwin Rosario, and Stanley Ledbetter; Anne Neglia Calderera, Patricia Goering, and Felix Santos; Nancy Boensch, Patrick J. Keogh, and Christopher Shay; Judy Callender, Eleanor Gould and Joy Weiner; Ann Goldstein, Daniel Hurewitz, Louisa Kamps, and Elizabeth Macklin. Robert Gottlieb was the magazine’s editor when I embarked on this odyssey. Tina Brown, its editor when the articles came in, published them with enthusiasm and (to anyone who has been on the staff of The New Yorker for thirty years) unprecedented and welcome alacrity. It has been my good fortune to have had John Bennet as an editor since 1981. John was the first person I called at the magazine when I decided to write about foster care and the last person to whom I talked—on a starry night from a ship that was plying its way from Hong Kong to Haiphong on the South China Sea—before going to press. He gave me the benefit of his encouragement from beginning to end.

  Sonny Mehta, president of the Knopf Publishing Group, gave me the gift of a new publisher and a fine editor, Daniel Frank of Pantheon Books. I am also indebted to Alan Turkus and to Marjorie Anderson of Pantheon.

  My husband, Neil Sheehan, reads and edits everything I write before anyone else does. Every writer should be lucky enough to fall in love with and marry someone who happens to be a better writer.

  My chief debt is to Crystal Taylor, her family and friends, and to the foster parents I have written about. The names of all the people in this book, including Crystal Taylor, have been changed, and identifying details have been altered. They know who they are and they have my profound thanks.

  MOTHER TO SON

  Well, son, I’ll tell you:

  Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

  It’s had tacks in it,

  And splinters,

  And boards torn up,

  And places with no carpet on the floor—

  Bare.

  But all the time

  I’se been a-climbin’ on,

  And reachin’ landin’s,

  And turnin’ corners,

  And sometimes goin’ in the dark

  Where there ain’t been no light.

  So boy, don’t you turn back.

  Don’t yo
u set down on the steps

  ’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

  Don’t you fall now—

  For I’se still goin’, honey,

  I’se still climbin’,

  And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

  –LANGSTON HUGHES

  I IS LOVABLE

  Crystal Taylor woke up early on Sunday morning, October 7, 1984, went to the bathroom, and noticed she was bleeding lightly. She was expecting a baby, but it wasn’t due until mid-December, so she lay back down on the bed she shared with her boyfriend, Daquan Jefferson, in his parents’ apartment in a Bronx housing project. Daquan’s mother, Dolores Jefferson, took a look at Crystal and said, “You’re getting ready to have that baby.” Mrs. Jefferson couldn’t bear the sight of blood. She told Crystal she didn’t want her to give birth “on the outside,” and, as she was leaving for church, advised Crystal and Daquan to get dressed and go to the hospital. Crystal telephoned her own mother and asked her to meet them there.

  Daquan and Crystal found a taxi near the Jeffersons’ building. They rode for a block while Daquan negotiated the fare with the driver. “Four-fifty,” the driver said. The customary fare to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center was two-fifty—the amount Daquan was willing to spend. Crystal figured that the driver was asking for extra money because of her condition (“They be taking a risk that the velvet-type material they got on they seats be stained,” she said later), and told Daquan, “Pay the money, pay the money.” But Daquan said to the driver “Why you be charging me so much?” and then, to her, “Come on, Crystal, I ain’t letting him rob me. We got to walk and catch us another cab.”

  No cabs were cruising on Webster Avenue, where they got out. As they walked, Crystal kept getting contractions, and thought, I could have a baby right on a corner and this nigger beefing for two dollars. “I wanted to take him by his bony neck and strangle him,” she said afterward, “but I was paining too much to be fighting.” They walked about two blocks. The driver of a second taxi quoted them a fare of two dollars, and they got in. Crystal recalls that the driver drove fast and ran red lights like crazy, and that Daquan didn’t even give him a tip. (“That cheap miser saved hisself fifty cents.”) Her mother was waiting for her at the hospital. Florence Drummond, Crystal’s mother, was on welfare. Crystal was covered by Florence’s Medicaid. Crystal had been to Bronx-Lebanon once or twice for prenatal care, and was admitted as Crystal Drummond, although normally she used Taylor, her father’s surname.

  Crystal’s mother was a heroin and cocaine addict, whose helter-skelter life her daughter often held in contempt. On that Sunday, Florence Drummond looked as if she needed a fix, but Crystal was glad to see her: Crystal, fourteen, was Florence’s oldest child, and the two had usually been close. She had her mother accompany her to a labor room, and told Daquan to wait outside, because he was getting on her nerves. Each time she had a contraction, Florence told her to squeeze her hand when it hurt. The medication she was given to inhibit the contractions had no effect. Crystal was wheeled into the delivery room. Florence held her head and told her to push. The second time Crystal pushed, Florence told her to look at the mirror on the ceiling and watch her baby as it emerged. The baby—a boy—was two months premature and had a heart murmur and slight difficulty breathing. He weighed three pounds six ounces. He was put in an incubator in the neonatal-intensive-care unit. Crystal was wheeled into a room for four.

  In midafternoon, Florence went to the waiting room, where Daquan was sleeping on three chairs, shook him awake, and congratulated him on the birth of his first child. After being taken to see his tiny son, Daquan, Jr., the father, a short, dark man of twenty-three, called his own mother and ran home, still wearing a yellow hospital gown.

  It had never occurred to Crystal that little Daquan—let alone Crystal herself—might end up in New York City’s foster-care system. She had every intention of returning to the Jeffersons’ apartment after her son’s birth. If little Daquan hadn’t been premature, she and Daquan would already have bought a portable crib, baby clothes, and blankets—“all that nice stuff for babies.” In part because of her youth (it was hospital policy to interview all mothers below the age of eighteen), and in part because of her son’s condition (he was considered a high-risk baby), a hospital social worker came to her room on Monday, October 8th. She asked Crystal if she would be returning to her mother’s residence, at 1311 Findlay Avenue—the address from which Crystal had been admitted, and the one recorded on her son’s birth certificate. When Crystal told the social worker that her mother was a substance abuser, who didn’t have an apartment of her own, and that she had been living with her baby’s father and his family, the social worker called the Office of Special Services for Children, a section of New York City’s Human Resources Administration. S.S.C. assigned her and the baby a caseworker to investigate the situation.

  After listening to Crystal, the caseworker (“He was a handsome black man,” Crystal recalled later) informed her that she and her son couldn’t return to the Jeffersons’. Crystal said she had readily consented to sexual relations with Daquan and regarded the Jeffersons as family. She called Florence “Mommy” and Dolores Jefferson “Ma.” The caseworker said that he believed her but that his beliefs weren’t relevant to her predicament. He explained that legally Crystal was still a child and therefore was too young to consent to sex. Daquan was technically guilty of statutory rape, and might be prosecuted; his much greater age would look bad to a judge. S.S.C. was apt to take the position that Crystal had somehow been coerced into living with Daquan and his family and that she and the baby could not be allowed to live with them. In the eyes of the authorities at the time, paternal grandparents were not the equal of maternal grandparents: the baby’s father’s family had no legal responsibility for Crystal or her infant. S.S.C. would discharge Crystal and little Daquan to her mother if Florence proved to be a suitable woman living in a suitable place.

  The hospital put in a request for a visiting nurse to evaluate the apartment at 1311 Findlay Avenue. It was a filthy, overcrowded, underheated one-bedroom apartment rented by Florence’s cousin Hazel, who shared it with her daughter, her latest man, and with Florence and the four children to whom Florence had given birth after Crystal. Hazel was also a substance abuser. Small-time drug dealers were in and out of the apartment storing and rebagging dope. Florence’s youngest child, a boy born in February of 1984, at Bronx-Lebanon, had been a full-term baby, and Florence was in her thirties, so the hospital hadn’t looked into her living arrangements then. Under the circumstances, S.S.C. would not permit a fourteen-year-old child and that child’s child to live in such conditions. Squalor hadn’t appealed to Crystal, either (“so many people sleeping in one room where everyone used to come trampeding”), nor had Hazel’s two-facedness (“She smiled up in Mommy’s face but when she was asleep or out she talked against her and hit up on my brothers like she did on her daughter”). Crystal had therefore packed some of her clothes in a plastic bag and had moved to the Jeffersons’ a year earlier. She had returned to Findlay Avenue periodically. When Crystal was five months pregnant, Florence had called her to report that Hazel’s daughter and one of her friends were wearing some clothes Crystal had left behind, and that Hazel had threatened Florence about meddling. Crystal had gone back and hit Hazel over the head with a rotten two-by-four to protect her mother. (“She ain’t really got injured,” Crystal recalls.)

  Little Daquan would have to remain at Bronx-Lebanon until he weighed five pounds and was in good medical condition. Crystal was resilient and felt fine. Florence visited her every day and brought her marijuana. “She was bored,” Florence says. “She had nothing further to do. Smoking weed made Crystal pleasantly high.” Bronx-Lebanon needed Crystal’s bed. She was discharged from the hospital on October 11th, four days after her admission, and was taken in a cab by the S.S.C. caseworker to the Queensboro Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which operated a diagnostic center where children in crisis were br
ought for evaluation. The caseworker said he would try to help Florence find an apartment. Until then, he would have to put Crystal in temporary care, and Queensboro had a bed available. Crystal cried on the way there and cried herself to sleep that night. As far as she was concerned, the diagnostic center, situated in a part of the borough of Queens given over to one- and two-family houses with front and back yards, was in the country. “I wasn’t used to dirt ground or little buildings and trees,” she recalls. “I was used to the city—to Harlem and the South Bronx—and to concrete and projects and high rises and stores within walking distance.”

  Crystal had arrived at Queensboro on a Thursday and wasn’t permitted to leave the premises the first weekend. For two days, she refused to eat and kept crying. “The staffs told me to make friends with the other kids, but I was homesick,” she says. “I didn’t want to make friends with no strangers, I didn’t want to eat they food, I didn’t want to do nothing. I told them I had always gone to bed willingly with Daquan and I would go to bed with him willingly today. I thought my life that was just started was being ended. One nice lady staff said things wasn’t as bad as they seemed, that my mother would get herself together and I’d go live with her, but for now I had to live there and they were just trying to help me. She knew that when you get hungry enough you eat. That’s what happened. When I came to Queensboro, I was still wearing my maternity clothes. I was soon having two plates of everything. They used no seasoning when they cooked, but I put lots of salt and pepper on my food. That stuff was good. It took me a while to get rid of my stomach and fit into my jeans.”

  It took Crystal less time to make friends with the other girls there—girls lived on the center’s second floor—and with the boys, who roomed on the third floor and, when an alarm on the fire escape in between was set, shimmied down to the second on knotted sheets to smoke reefer and touch the girls until a counsellor caught them. “After I got to know that place, I had fun,” Crystal says.