Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (18 page)

On the day of the funeral, Lavinia Wilson, still slender and wearing a pretty church dress and one of her many pretty church hats, asked her grandchildren what they wanted for Christmas. Lavinia did buy the children Christmas presents, and was surprised when Florence and Crystal gave her a hat and Cynthia gave her a suit. As Florence had predicted, she would never be accepted by her mother. Florence continues to envy Cynthia, the favored daughter, who until recently lived with her three-year-old son in her mother's apartment. Cynthia and her son now have an apartment of their own in the Bronx. Like her mother, Cynthia, who was nineteen when her child was born, was silenced by her church for one year for having a baby out of wedlock. Before she moved out, she attended church every Sunday. Florence's brother Clifford turned to crack in the mid-eighties. He had no place to live, and moved in with Lavinia and Cynthia in 1987. He stayed there for three years. While he was with them, Lavinia beat Cynthia severely, and on more than one occasion Cynthia went to stay with Samuel Wilson and his family for a couple of months. When Florence first got out of Odyssey House, she asked Lavinia if she could visit her in
Astoria; she has stopped asking. Lavinia initiates few phone calls and usually confines her travels to her part-time job at a discount store and to her church.

F
or six weeks after her father's death, Crystal lazed around Florence's apartment watching sitcoms, cartoons, and soaps and “conversating” on the phone. She appreciated the opportunity to be with Natasha, James, and Michael: “Now they knows that I am they big sister, Crystal.” Since 1989, she had worked in the mailroom of an advertising agency on Madison Avenue. The agency was paying her disability insurance for three months. Tarrant drove Crystal to her doctor's appointments; her hand healed well, but the bullet left a bad scar. Tarrant told her he would take care of her rent and some other bills—the recession had cut into his income, he said—until she got back on her feet.

When Crystal went to her apartment to get her mail on October 25th, she discovered that it had been burglarized: her TV, her VCR, and a telephone that Tarrant had given her were missing. In early November, Tarrant drove Crystal's furniture and other possessions and her spring and summer clothes to a five-by-ten-foot storage room and paid six months of eighty-dollar-a-month storage charges. He had paid Crystal's September and October rent. Her month's security deposit covered the November rent.

The day after visiting the apartment, Crystal learned from an acquaintance that she could earn fifteen hundred dollars if she would marry an illegal alien, convince the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it was a bona-fide marriage, and stay married to him until his visa was stamped in a way that permitted him to leave the country and return. Crystal needed the money to pay off clothes bills and rental-car charges she had put on her credit card. She was to marry a Moroccan in his late thirties, and Florence, who was also in financial straits, would marry a Nigerian in his early twenties. Crystal met the Nigerian and liked his looks. “You be getting this fly husband and I be getting another senior citizen,” she observed to Florence. Ultimately, it was Crystal who married the Nigerian—and had a brief romance with him—and Florence the Moroccan. Crystal was paid in full for her marriage. Florence received only five hundred dollars' advance money; the marriage broker absconded with the remaining thousand dollars.

Florence's financial problems had begun after she applied for welfare. At first, she received $313.20 a month and food stamps worth $271. Then the computer at the public-assistance office turned up the fact that Florence still owed money on her earlier welfare fraud: serving the week in jail in 1977 hadn't wiped out the debt. The office was also under the mistaken impression that all Florence's children were still in foster care. As the months went by, her welfare checks got smaller. By summer, she was receiving $72.60 a month and food stamps worth $401. The food stamps didn't pay the rent, and
she couldn't pay it with her part-time salary and the small welfare checks, either. (She did take advantage of supermarket specials, and stockpiled groceries.) By the end of the year, Florence owed her landlord twelve hundred dollars—her share of three months' rent. The landlord obliged her by filing a dispossess—a document that states the amount of rent the tenant owes and threatens the tenant with paying up, appearing in court, or moving out. Florence and her landlord knew that when she went to court the rent would be paid, because the city has a mandate to prevent eviction if children are endangered.

Pamela, Florence's social worker at the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, which a number of child-welfare professionals consider one of the best preventive-services agencies in the city, was trying to help Florence straighten out her finances. Florence, Natasha, James, and Michael met with Pamela at the center every Monday evening, and Florence was persuaded to join a single-parent group session on Thursday evenings. One evening when Florence arrived at the center, Pamela told her that she had been flabbergasted to learn from the director of the local public-assistance office that Florence was married. The director had told Pamela that her client had a nerve asking public assistance to pay her rent when she was swindling the taxpayers by getting rich from a foreigner. Pamela asked Florence why she hadn't told her about the marriage. For once, Florence came right out and admitted what she had done, and why. She told Pamela that she had received only five hundred
dollars, and had spent a lot of that to buy the children clothes. The director agreed to pay the back rent and to close Florence's welfare-fraud case. Florence's latest experience with welfare convinced her that she would be better off working full time, and when full-time jobs again became available at her company, in February, 1992, she accepted one. By then, Florence didn't have to worry about rushing home to pick up her children from after-school care at six o'clock. Matthew Drummond, fifteen, had been released from Children's Village just before Christmas, 1991. He had been caught stealing from other boys in Dobbs Ferry after his return there from the Dunbars', in September, 1990, and from Florence when he came home on weekend visits early in the year, but then the stealing had stopped. He was happy to come home and also attended the Monday-evening therapy sessions—a requirement during his three-month trial-discharge period—although he was even more guarded than his mother.

F
lorence has been depressed in recent weeks. In order to be eligible for food stamps and other benefits—and because she still hopes to marry Burton—she paid five hundred and seventy-five dollars to get a divorce from the Moroccan. Sixteen-year-old Carlos had appeared to be doing well at the Children's Village group home near Dobbs Ferry until December of 1991,
when he started to bully the younger boys and to provoke fights, threatened to damage a staff member's sports car, and punched holes in walls. In the opinion of his social worker, part of his behavior was attributable to his father's death. He was sent back to Children's Village for a while, and, then, in the summer of 1992, was transferred to a Children's Village group home in Flushing. He is smoking reefer, sleeping with girls (he says he uses condoms, because “I don't want to be no one's father”), and cutting some classes. He goes to Florence's apartment fairly often on weekends, but his discharge goal is “independent living.” He recently visited the Dunbars. “I won't go home unless I foul up and have nowhere else to go,” he said to Mrs. Dunbar. “There's something about my mother that isn't quite right.”

As Carlos seemed to adjust to Flushing, Matthew began to behave in ways that were unacceptable to Florence. When he was supposed to pick up the younger children after school, he showed up late or not at all. He was defiant. Florence found the windows of her apartment open and large amounts of bread, juice, and eggs missing from her refrigerator. The younger children found a bottle of beer under his bed. Florence suspected that Matthew was not going to school and was hanging out with a friend at home; she learned that he had played hooky for two weeks. Florence called a social worker at Children's Village and said she couldn't handle him. Elaborate arrangements were made for him to return to Dobbs Ferry in late
October for a month or two, but he was kept there for only a day. When Florence's children exasperate her, she threatens to send them back to their foster parents. “Mommy, you shouldn't be saying that,” Crystal tells her.

C
rystal did face up to the necessity of bringing her son to live with her. In the Bronx, no one walked him to school or had any time for him. Little Daquan had misbehaved in his second-grade class. He had rolled around on the floor, quacking like a duck, and hadn't done his schoolwork. When Crystal tried to discipline him, over the phone, he had said “Mommy's only blowing off hot air.” When he used words like “butt,” she thought of the Hargroves and of how children didn't use rude words in Mrs. Hargrove's house. Crystal went apartment hunting and, in the spring of 1992, found a one-bedroom place four blocks from Florence's apartment for five hundred and eighty dollars a month. In September, Crystal changed her work hours: instead of six-thirty to two-thirty, her schedule was nine to five. Daquan goes to school with Florence's children and is in after-school care until Crystal gets home. He had been left back in the Bronx, and after moving in with his mother he began to repeat second grade in Brooklyn. He spends a lot of time with Florence's children, frequently sleeping over at his grandmother's apartment. Crystal often finds herself telling him,
“Daquan, I ain't your friend, I is your mother,” but she is glad to have him home. “I only beat him on his behind or his hands,” she says. “I don't hit my baby on his face.” Little Daquan (Crystal has had his birth certificate changed so that he is now Daquan Jefferson instead of Daquan Drummond) seems at ease with Crystal's beaux, who sometimes sleep over, and he visits the Bronx with her regularly. She often teases big Daquan, who is still attracted to her and keeps in his closet some of the clothes she wore when they met. “They his memories,” Crystal says. A combination of her teasing and her need for money recently conspired to make her decide to go to bed with him, but at the last minute she backed out, and later told a few friends that she wouldn't “do the nasty for twenty-five dollars.” Crystal warns little Daquan about taking up with women like her. She has modest expectations for him. “If he brings me a high-school diploma, I be satisfied,” she says. “The one thing I know is he ain't going back to foster care.”

P
amela, the social worker at the Center for Family Life, left for another job in September, 1992. She had worked with Florence and her children for a year and a half, but she had been unable to budge Florence on the issue of corporal punishment, which Pamela opposed. Florence said she was going to continue to hit her children, and she did. They all know their punishment corners. And yet Pamela, who knew Florence's
faults, thought she also knew her strengths. “I think that she has potential and that the kids may do all right,” she said in January, 1993. “Despite all the history of foster care, they really are a family.”

Washington, D.C.
April, 1993

O
f all the people I have written books about, Crystal Taylor is my favorite. It is a balmy evening and I am smiling because I have just spent an hour on the telephone with her. I even smile when I dial her number or when she calls with some news. It has been three months since the two-part article about her and her family appeared in
The New Yorker
and tonight I had to choose a title for our book. One afternoon in August, 1991, Crystal had told me about her family's eviction from the apartment on Sheridan Avenue when she was eleven. She, Florence, Carlos, and Matthew had spent a month after the eviction living in the basement apartment of a drunken friend of her mother's, where they had had to use candles because the electricity had been cut off. It was then that she quoted the two lines of a poem by Langston Hughes, which appear on
this page
. A week before tonight's conversation I obtained a copy of “Mother to Son” and sent it to her. “Yeah,” Crystal said, as soon as I brought up the poem. “That's nice. That man writes like I talk, using ain't. And lookit, I put an extra
s
on stair. When you was up here last month and we had dinner, you told me how much you liked my extra
s
's.”

“You're right,” I said. “Whenever you talk about your lingeries or your mens, it's so much more original than the way I speak.” I had the same feeling when Crystal spoke of blousing through magazines I browsed through and when she wrote, in a diary she kept for me while I was out of the country at the end of 1991, “Money is the sauce to all evil traits.”

“Well, for all the hanging out we done we neither of us ain't made much progress language-wise,” Crystal replied. “You's still saying ‘asked' and I's still saying ‘axed' but it don't matter. I'll learn you one of these years. Call me next week. Love 'ya. Bye.”

Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“[A]n extraordinary act of journalism.”
—Washington Post Book World

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction,
Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
tells the story of how “Sylvia Frumkin,” a highly intelligent young girl, became a schizophrenic in her late teens and spent most of the next seventeen years in and out of mental institutions. Sheehan follows “Sylvia” for almost a year, talking with and observing her, listening to her monologues, sitting in on consultations with doctors, and even for a period sleeping in the bed next to her in a mental hospital.

“[Susan] Sheehan is tenacious, observant and unsentimental. The history of a single patient leads us into a maze of understaffed institutions, bureaucratic fumbling, trial-and-error treatment and familial incomprehension. Though Sheehan keeps herself invisible, her sympathy is palpable.”