Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (12 page)

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 notice, so Natasha was placed with a family in Queens and James with a family in the Bronx.

T
he 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.

S
eventeen 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.

In 1958, Florence's foster family went out of the state for a summer vacation, and Florence had to be moved. Windham chose another temporary foster-care family, who lived around the corner, so that Florence's life would have some continuity. She expressed pleasure in accompanying the foster family on excursions to parks and museums and in leading a fuller life with the new family than she ever had with her mother. During Florence's first year in foster care, Lavinia, Clifford, and Samuel periodically visited her in Brooklyn; the case worker noted that Florence appeared happier to see her brothers than her mother.

Florence's court-ordered indefinite stay in foster care was contingent upon Lavinia's psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. In March, 1958, the Bellevue psychiatrist who examined Lavinia had determined that she “could not be counted on to control her impulses” and that “the child, therefore, should not
be with her.” That year, Lavinia was also described by a caseworker as an “emotionally disturbed, immature person.” When Lavinia was subsequently interviewed by caseworkers, she said “she felt that she was justified in whipping Florence and that she perhaps did not whip her with the right kind of article because the Judge had said that she should not have been thrashed with a strap.” On another occasion, a caseworker reported, Lavinia said that a “neighbor complained that she heard only Florence being whipped, that wasn't true. She beat them all. So did the neighbor beat her own children. How else does one teach them right from wrong? The trouble was they had the strap in court. If they don't want her to use a strap, let them just tell her what to use.” When Lavinia was asked what Florence did that provoked the beating, “she could not recall anything,” the worker noted.

Lavinia Wilson kept some appointments at the Mental Hygiene Clinic, but when Florence was not returned to her she stopped attending the clinic. Because she showed no insight into her behavior, did not realize she had any emotional problems, and stated that she had no need for any type of casework or guidance, long-term foster care was recommended for Florence. In the second half of 1958, the Bureau of Child Welfare started looking for a permanent home for her. Despite Florence's “unusually good adjustment to foster care,” it took the Department of Welfare's Allocations Unit a few months to place her, because there was “a lack of homes.” In early December, Sheltering
Arms Children's Service, a Manhattan voluntary agency on East Twenty-ninth Street, placed Florence with Earlene and Benjamin Gardner.

O
n December 5, 1958, Florence went to live with the Gardners, in an airy, spacious apartment in a building with an elevator, off Convent Avenue in a middle-class section of Harlem, about fifteen blocks from Lavinia Wilson's two tenement rooms. Earlene Gardner's mother had been a foster mother since 1934. As she grew old and infirm, Earlene, a voice teacher who didn't marry until 1947, when she was in her forties, took over the foster children and reared them with the same philosophy: “Books and boys don't mix.” A few Kodacolor prints, stamped “February, 1959” in red on the back, show Florence, wearing a frilly party dress, blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. The photographs have faded to sepia tones after thirty years in the Sheltering Arms files.

Almost the first thing that Florence's caseworker noticed about her was that she addressed Mr. Gardner as Daddy, while Marjorie, the other foster child in the household, called him Mr. Gardner. Perhaps because Florence was outgoing and appreciative, the worker concluded, she elicited a friendlier response from him than the “aloof and “difficult” Marjorie did. To the worker, he was a “passive” figure. To Marjorie, he was a loathsome man. He worked irregularly, contributed little
financially to the household, drank to excess, held it up to his wife that he was about ten years her junior, slept in a separate bedroom, refused to have his clothes washed with the children's clothes, and wouldn't eat with the children.