Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (13 page)

Lavinia, Clifford, and Samuel visited Florence in May and September of 1959, at the agency's office. Florence's reaction to seeing her mother was casual. She enjoyed seeing her brothers. Then the visits stopped for a year, for no apparent reason. Lavinia returned to the agency in September of 1960, without Clifford or Samuel. The Sheltering Arms caseworker asked where they were. Lavinia said she had sent them South, to a boarding school run by her church, because she had to work and couldn't take care of them after school. Lavinia wanted to know when she would get Florence back. Despite the adjudication of neglect, she claimed that the judge and the probation officer had told her that Florence's removal was only temporary. The caseworker asked her if it wouldn't be a better idea to have all three children with her in New York, rather than just Florence. Lavinia said no. Lavinia, then thirty, struck the worker as “a woman who appears to be in her late teens,” and “appears to function well with her children out of the home, but to have much guilt related to the manner in which Florence was removed and is kept from her.”

On December 29, 1960, Clifford and Samuel, who were home for Christmas vacation, showed up at Sheltering Arms with Winona Snowden, the missionary who had brought Lavinia into the fundamentalist Harlem church. Mrs. Snowden
spoke at length to the caseworker. She said that she devoted much of her time to the “girls” she recruited and converted. In her opinion, Lavinia was so exceptionally orderly that she couldn't tolerate anything out of place, and when Florence would play and leave a mess, as children do, Lavinia would fly into an uncontrollable rage. Lavinia had improved since the boys went South. Mrs. Snowden had got Lavinia her present job, as a domestic for a wealthy family, for which she seemed suited. (She had done factory work, but factories often went out on strike.) The boys had grown during the three months they had been in school, thanks to better, consistent care and regular food. The Bureau of Child Welfare reviewed Florence's case annually, but kept her in foster care, because Lavinia never seriously sought her return home and never changed.

Florence has happy memories of attending Camp Mini-sink, in upstate New York, for several weeks every summer, and of participating in year-round activities that the camp held in Harlem. She liked watching television with Mrs. Gardner, going to the zoo, to church socials, and to the movies, and shopping. Food seemed to be her primary concern. (That was evidence of her “early deprivation,” in one caseworker's opinion.) Her room contained many toys related to food—a refrigerator, a stove, dishes, cooking utensils—and she ate voraciously. After three and a half years at the Gardners', she was twenty-four pounds overweight. In her teens, she was five feet tall (that was to be her adult height), weighed a hundred and forty pounds, wore a woman's size-18 dress, and was mistaken for somebody's
mother by one of her former caseworkers while she was visiting the agency. Dexedrine—an amphetamine with a high potential for abuse—was briefly prescribed for weight reduction by an agency doctor, but proved ineffective. Mrs. Gardner had difficulty finding youthful clothes to fit Florence, and sometimes resorted to friends' hand-me-downs.

Mrs. Gardner emerges from the hundred-page narrative of Florence's years in care (the pages reek of mildew after a quarter century of storage in Sheltering Arms' basement, and those on Thermofax paper are brittle and crumble at a touch) as a rigid person with troubles of her own. One of her most obvious concerns was money. In the nineteen-sixties, foster parents received a stipend of approximately a hundred dollars a month for each child and could submit a monthly expense account. Mrs. Gardner put in for twelve dollars and fifty cents after she had to call a plumber to extricate a piece of china from the toilet: Florence had broken a good plate without telling her. When Mrs. Gardner put in a request for five dollars to send Florence's trunk to camp ahead of her, the caseworker warned her that the agency would not pay for what it deemed an unwarranted expense. Within a year of Florence's arrival, Mrs. Gardner was pleading with the caseworkers for another foster child. Her pleas increased after Marjorie's departure, which had come about when Marjorie was caught shoplifting from two department stores, was sent to Bellevue for observation, and was placed, at her request, in a group home, because she had been beaten by Mr. Gardner.

Lavinia Wilson was originally informed that Florence was living on Long Island, and for three years she visited Florence at the agency. Mrs. Gardner, who was privy to this deception, said Lavinia could always be told later that Florence had moved: Mrs. Gardner had had a bad experience with home visits by one foster daughter's alcoholic mother, and preferred agency visits. In 1962, Lavinia Wilson was told the truth and was permitted to visit Florence at the Gardners' for an hour on the third Wednesday of every month. Although the visits went smoothly, Lavinia usually visited only every second month, and once didn't show up for five months; she explained that in addition to working full time she had been attending evening courses in typing and other subjects. Mrs. Gardner took it upon herself to invite Lavinia to special occasions, such as Florence's junior-high-school graduation and a Sunday-school graduation, and let Florence accompany Lavinia to a local photographer to have her picture taken in her graduation dress (an authorized ten-dollar expenditure). Lavinia Wilson said tearfully to a caseworker that she could not have done the job with Florence that Mrs. Gardner was doing. Mrs. Gardner told the worker that Miss Wilson stayed only an hour when she visited and “does not need to be told when to go.” She described her as a very cooperative, considerate mother.

Florence expressed gratitude to the Gardners, but after three years with them she told her caseworker that she was anxious to return to her mother and had made a conscious effort to be good. Her mother had said that if she was a good girl she
could come home. As the years went by, Lavinia continued to express a desire to have Florence return to live with her but always found an excuse, such as inadequate housing, not to have her do so.

Mrs. Gardner derived a great deal of satisfaction from her girls' academic achievement. Florence did well in grade school. Her intelligence was tested—it was average—and when she fell behind in some subjects in junior high school Mrs. Gardner sought tutoring help for her.

F
lorence left the Gardners' abruptly in June of 1967, at the end of tenth grade, and asked to be moved to another foster home. Up to then, her caseworkers had had only an inkling of the situation in the Gardner household. Florence is sure that they were as aware of Marjorie's beating as she was but let it go because Marjorie was perceived to be a wild child. (She later turned to drugs, and died at an early age.) Mr. Gardner had made sexual advances to Florence in a taxicab. He had wandered through her bedroom at night on several occasions. Mrs. Gardner had installed a lock on Florence's bedroom door, which she could chain from the inside. When the lock didn't prove strong enough, she advised Florence to put her dresser against the door, and, later, her trunk. In December of 1966, after Mr. Gardner started to call her at friends' houses and at Camp Minisink's library and, on one occasion, hit her, Florence ran away and
went to stay with a friend named Virginia Miller, an older woman who had been raised by Earlene Gardner and her mother. Mrs. Gardner begged her to come back, and she did, temporarily, because, she says now, “of all the people in my life then, she was the one I took to best.”

Mrs. Gardner had found it necessary to call the police on several occasions in order to insure her own safety as well as Florence's. As Florence got older, she learned that Mr. Gardner was accustomed to beating his wife. Once, when Florence was in her room, she heard her foster mother crying, “Stop, Benjamin! Stop, Benjamin! Benjamin, no!” As she recalls it, she went into Mrs. Gardner's bedroom, saw that Mr. Gardner had her down on the floor, went to the kitchen and got the cast-iron frying pan, and said, “If you ever put your hands on Mommy again, I'm going to kill you.”

Florence spent a few days in June with Virginia Miller, and was then placed in the home of Shirley and Monroe Patten, an elderly couple in Yonkers, who also had a ten-year-old foster daughter, Dawn. For a time, Sheltering Arms considered the placement satisfactory—Mrs. Patten helped Florence acquire the habit of a daily bath and the use of deodorant, and supervised the selection of more appropriate clothes—but Florence was required to perform numerous household chores, while Dawn did nothing. She felt like an outsider, secondary to the spoiled, dependent Dawn, and stole money from Dawn's coin bank and from Mrs. Patten's bureau drawer. The agency arranged for visits at the office by Florence and Mrs. Gardner.
Mrs. Patten accepted this arrangement. What she didn't understand was Lavinia Wilson's lack of interest in her daughter: in a year, Lavinia telephoned only once.

Florence completed the eleventh grade at Yonkers High School, lost twenty pounds (Shirley Patten was a good cook but put her on a diet), and missed city life. She had dated her first boy, and he had introduced her to drugs, while she was with Virginia the previous summer. As soon as school was over, in June of 1968, she left the Pattens' house, without telling them or Sheltering Arms of her plans. She went to Virginia's home for a weekend, and then spent several weeks with another foster sister while initial arrangements were being made for Virginia's home to be certified as a temporary foster home for her. On July 29, 1968, the agency asked Lavinia Wilson, who was on vacation from her job, if she could provide a home for Florence for a brief period, since foster homes were not plentiful for girls of Florence's age, and she was regarded as too wholesome to be put in a group home. Lavinia agreed to think about it for a few days.

On August 2nd, Lavinia telephoned Sheltering Arms. She flatly refused to become involved, or to take Florence even overnight, suggesting that the agency place her “where someone can make her finish school and then she can go out and get work.” Lavinia spoke of the problems of teen-agers, late hours, and going wild, and attributed the failure of Florence's placement with the Pattens (which she had heard about from Mrs. Gardner) to Florence. Florence was devastated, and said to her caseworker that she hated Lavinia—she referred to her as Lavinia,
not as Mother—and resented her obvious favoritism toward Clifford and Samuel. One reason Sheltering Arms certified Virginia as a foster mother for Florence was that in the agency's judgment Florence's real ties were to the Gardners' extended family.

Soon after Florence moved in with Virginia Miller, she met Wesley, and became pregnant during the spring of her senior year of high school. While she was pregnant, it seemed that she might need surgery for removal of a breast mass, and Lavinia Wilson's signature was required on a hospital operation consent form. When a caseworker spoke to Lavinia, in June, she asked, “Who's going to pay for it?” When she was told that the Bureau of Child Welfare would pay, she agreed to sign the form. According to the worker, “She seemed very much removed from Florence and what she was going through.”

Florence's high-school attendance was poor during her senior year, and she had to take three courses in summer school; she graduated with a commercial diploma in August of 1969. The agency recommended that she move to a home for unwed mothers in October, 1969. Her case at Sheltering Arms was closed in March of the following year.

T
hough Florence envied her brothers because they were never in foster care, Clifford and Samuel hadn't had idyllic childhoods, either. The boys had to go to church with Lavinia
every day. They were often beaten by the women who were “tarrying”—talking to God on their knees with their eyes closed, saying “Alleluia!” and “Praise be the Lord!” When the women rose to their feet, they would hit Clifford and Samuel. On their way to church, Lavinia, Clifford, and Samuel sometimes passed Sylvester Drummond, a tall, thin man who looked to Clifford “more Hispanic than black.” He used to hug Clifford and give both boys money for ice cream, but Lavinia always pulled them away from him, saying “He's no good.” When Clifford asked if the man was his father, she said, “I don't want to talk about him,” and “The case is closed.”

Clifford had a problem controlling his bladder and often wet his pants on the way to church. He says that one night when he was about seven, Lavinia told him she had to punish him. She told him to go into the bathroom and drop his pants. While he held his genitals, she burned them with three kitchen matches, and then with three more matches, and then with three more. He still remembers the sight of the nine matches in the toilet. He remembers screaming. He remembers thinking that the real reason his mother injured him was that he reminded her of his father. Later, Clifford sought out a doctor at Harlem Hospital, and the doctor agreed to treat him without asking questions. Clifford didn't want his mother put in jail, nor did he want her to know that he required skin grafts and was having reconstructive surgery. He never told Samuel what Lavinia had done to him.

During their years at the boarding school, the boys
endured daily chapel and hours of church and revival meetings on Saturdays and Sundays—and a great deal of corporal punishment. Clifford was ten years old when they were sent there, and Samuel was seven. Samuel remembers that while he was stretched across a table someone on one side of the table beat him with switches and someone on the other side hit him with a razor strop. He was often tied to a chair with his back to a pole. Many nights, the mattress was taken off his bed, and he was tied to the springs. If Clifford cut him loose, both were beaten, and Samuel was tied to the bed again the next night. Both boys were periodically put in tubs of cold water with their hands and feet tied together behind their backs. Once, after being hog-tied and dumped in cold water, Samuel caught pneumonia. He was slipped into a nearby town, admitted to a doctor's office by the back door, and then taken to the hospital. For a while after that, he was treated nicely, but the whippings soon resumed. He and Clifford threatened to run away.