Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (3 page)

Crystal was in the first half of eighth grade when she left Hazel's apartment. Daquan encouraged her to continue attending C.I.S. 147, which was near both Findlay Avenue and the Jeffersons' apartment. She set off for school most mornings, but she usually took the money that Daquan gave her every day for food and sundries for herself and her friends, used it to buy marijuana, met her friends in a school bathroom, and left with them for a White Castle restaurant, where she treated them to burgers. She skipped school after lunch. In eighth grade, she was very often high or absent, or both, and was well known to C.I.S. 147's truant officer. She was held back at the end of eighth grade, in June, 1984; she thinks her reading level had “sunk” as a result of too much hanging out, and she doesn't recall being present for any reading tests. By then, of course, she was pregnant. That September, she began to repeat eighth grade at Bronx Regional High School, in a special program for pregnant teenagers, which she liked. (“They served nutritious juices and everybody had a big stomach.”) She had been there only a few weeks when Daquan was born. After the birth, she continued her eighth-grade studies at a special program in a Brooklyn school, to which residents of Queensboro were bused.

W
hile Crystal was at the diagnostic center, she was questioned, tested, and evaluated by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a social worker. The psychiatrist noted that “her attractiveness is somewhat marred by a chipped upper front tooth.” An old wino had hung out on the ground floor of 1311 Findlay Avenue. People often beat up on him. One day, Crystal was running into the building to go to the bathroom in Hazel's third-floor apartment. He thought she was running toward him to hit him, and swung the bottle he had in his hands at her—a reflex action. The bottom of the bottle cracked both her upper front teeth, one of them badly. Crystal's mother did not take her to the dentist. Both her teeth were capped after she left Queensboro.

Crystal lacked enthusiasm for tests that involved shapes like triangles, circles, and squares. “You want me to put blocks in a box?” she asked. “This is for babies.” Her “Performance I.Q. Score” was ninety, but there were “indications of potential for higher functioning.” A “Psychosocial Report” stated the “presenting problem” succinctly: “Child has no place to go.” Her interrogators found her pleasant but depressed over her situation, which did not change as October turned to November.

By December, little Daquan weighed seven pounds, required no medication, and was overdue for discharge from
the hospital. Crystal engaged in some wishful thinking—that her mother would find an apartment, and that she and her siblings would be a family again. “Not that I would have been living with her, but I could then still be living with the Jeffersons and have my baby with me in his baskinet,” she recalls. But Crystal had less reason than the nice lady staff member, who knew only partial truths, to think that her mother would get herself together in the near future. Florence wouldn't come out to Queens when Crystal's caseworker called her. She made two appointments but didn't show up, saying she had no carfare. “Mommy didn't even live with Hazel,” Crystal says. “She spent her nights with Clarence, the father of her last baby, in a room he rented. Day in and day out, she skin-popped heroin like she been doing since I was a toddler. I had to face the reality that Mommy getting an apartment wasn't a reality.”

In mid-December, Crystal agreed to place her son voluntarily in foster care. She was crying when she signed the voluntary papers, but her S.S.C. caseworker had explained that if she didn't sign and the court took little Daquan and put him in foster care, she would have a harder time getting him back when she was older. In 1984, babies about to be placed in foster care in New York City went through an Allocations Unit. About ten percent were sent to families that had been licensed by the city and were directly monitored by employees of the city's Human Resources Administration; the rest were sent to voluntary agencies that had foster-care contracts with
the city. Voluntary agencies employed their own “intake” workers (who screened and accepted children), social workers, nurses, and other personnel; their paperwork was monitored by the city.

As it happened, the family that received Daquan Drummond was affiliated with St. Christopher's Home, a Catholic agency that had been founded in 1895, in Sea Cliff, on Long Island. For most of its early years, it had served as a country home for children convalescing from surgery until their parents could care for them, and had also taken care of orphans. A year after Daquan Drummond went to St. Christopher's, it merged with Ottilie Home, a Protestant agency that also dated back to the nineteenth century. Since the fall of 1985, the agency has been called St. Christopher-Ottilie by the outside world, but within the agency it is generally called St. Christopher's. The largest number of children the agency currently serves are those in its family-foster-home-care program. Twenty-three hundred children live for a few days, a few months, or a few years with eleven hundred families of various faiths in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island; some are adopted by their foster parents. In late December, St. Christopher's had no places available with black foster families in Brooklyn or Queens, so on December 20, 1984, Daquan Drummond went from Bronx-Lebanon to a black family on Long Island. Black children are occasionally placed with white families, and vice versa, but it is state practice and St. Christopher's to try to place children with foster parents
of the same race. As for Crystal's prospects, Queensboro, where she was staying, was supposed to house youngsters for periods of up to ninety days while doing “workups” on them, and then, with the assistance of the city's Allocations Unit, to discharge them to the most appropriate setting—a parent or parents, other relatives, foster parents, or an institution of some kind.

On January 3, 1985, Crystal was one of three girls from Queensboro who went to a St. Christopher's office in Queens to be interviewed by the director of St. Christopher's city-based congregate-care facilities. In addition to its licensed foster-care families (technically known as foster boarding homes), St. Christopher's had four small “agency-operated boarding homes” (known in the vernacular as group homes) for girls and three for boys in Brooklyn and Queens, and also a number of larger facilities in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, for hard-to-place and mentally troubled children. There was one opening at a St. Christopher's group home in Queens Village. By the time Crystal returned to Queensboro, she was told that the place was hers. She was considered a good candidate for a St. Christopher's group home because she was perceived to have behaved herself at Queensboro. She had attended school every day of the week, no one had questioned what she did on weekends, she had not been caught smoking marijuana in the dorm, and she had a son in a St. Christopher's foster boarding home. Then, too, as Crystal sometimes says, “I is lovable.”

T
he 1987 Encyclopedia of Social Work defines “foster care” as “full-time substitute care of children outside their own homes.” The term includes care provided in foster homes, like the one for which little Daquan was bound, and various institutional and group settings as well, like the group home to which Crystal was going.

Before 1800, the most common form of foster care practiced in the United States was indenture, which derived from the old English Poor Laws: it provided for the forced apprenticing of dependent children until they reached the age of twenty-one. In their textbook
Child Welfare Services
, Alfred Kadushin and Judith Martin argue that after the abolition of slavery, in 1865, “it was hard to justify an indenture that required the apprehension and return to a master of a runaway apprentice.”

The origin of modern foster care dates back to 1853, with the founding of the New York Children's Aid Society, by Charles Loring Brace. It developed what was called a “placing-out system.” In the mid-nineteenth century, the city was faced with the problem of how to deal with approximately ten thousand vagrant children—most of them the offspring of immigrants—who were roaming the streets. Brace believed that the best way to save the children was to send them to rural areas, where farm families could put them to work in an environment regarded as morally superior to the evil urban streets. Between
1854 and 1929, a hundred thousand children from New York and other Eastern cities were rounded up and dispatched by the trainload to “free foster-family homes” in the Midwest or the South. While the younger orphan-train children were often taken in for benevolent reasons, older ones were expected to earn their keep, and one critic of placing out remarked that it was “the wolf of the old indenture philosophy of child labor in the sheepskin disguise of a so-called good or Christian home.” The demise of placing out resulted from protest by the Roman Catholic Church against the placing of children in Protestant homes (most city children were Catholics) and from opposition by people in Western states to the dumping of dependent children in their midst. The practice had also come under criticism from an increasing number of child-welfare professionals.

In the late nineteenth century, another alternative was devised for hapless children. Orphanages (which dated back at least to the fourth century but were revitalized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) began to be perceived as temporary homes for poor children who had become wards of the state until they could be placed in foster-family homes. In the late eighteen-sixties, Massachusetts became the first state to pay foster families board money to maintain children who might otherwise have been placed in institutions. Nevertheless, according to Kadushin and Martin, controversy raged between the advocates of institutional care and the supporters of foster-family care over which type of care was the more desirable. The
first White House Conference on Children, in 1909, concluded that “the carefully selected foster home is, for the normal child, the best substitute for the natural home.” This clear preference for foster-family care notwithstanding, institutional care of one sort or another continued to be the more common form provided in America in the early decades of the twentieth century, accommodating fifty-three percent of the nation's foster children as of 1933. A half century later, the proportion had declined to sixteen percent. By 1990, many child-care authorities had come to perceive the two forms of care as complementary resources. The institutions, many of which originated as orphanages, now shelter children who not only cannot live with their own families but are too disturbed to live with foster families.

The number of children in foster care declined after the passage of the Social Security Act, in 1935, because its provisions allowed more children to be financially maintained at home. The numbers began to rise again in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, as families came apart, but then declined in the nineteen-eighties, as a consequence of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 and several other laws that attempted to control the number of children in foster care, often by helping troubled families stay together or by removing in a more timely manner children who had been placed in the system. In 1984, when little Daquan was placed in foster care, New York City's figure was 16,240, and the
state's was 27,187. With the advent of crack cocaine and homelessness, the number of children in foster care took flight, and the problem also became an increasingly urban phenomenon. By 1989, there were 45,931 children in foster care in New York City and 58,540 in the state. By 1991, the numbers were 50,518 and 64,584, the latter showing New York State to have the second-highest population of foster children in the nation, after California.

In 1991, there were four hundred and thirty thousand children in foster care in the United States, at a cost of some six billion dollars, and, with more children being born each year into tenuous families or into circumstances where a child lacks even a single parent, the number seems certain to grow. In the last decade of the twentieth century, black, Native American, and Hispanic children are vastly overrepresented in foster care, and their stays tend to be longer than those of white children. Approximately eighty percent of the children coming into care are estimated to have lived with a single parent, and an increasing number of babies entering care are suffering from severe physical disabilities, notably AIDS and drug addiction. An increasing number of the adolescents in care are displaying the emotional consequences of long-term placement and multiple placements—of being moved from foster family to foster family or from foster family to institution and back, without ever really having had a place to call home.

T
he St. Christopher's group home to which Crystal Taylor was brought by some maintenance men from Queensboro on Friday, January 4, 1985, is a modest four-bedroom, two-story frame house on 104th Avenue, a residential block in a lower-middle-class, predominantly black neighborhood. When the group home was opened, in 1981, St. Christopher's rented the house; subsequently the agency bought it. Like St. Christopher's other group homes for girls, it houses six residents at a time, who share three bedrooms. One child-care worker covers the house from Monday morning to Wednesday afternoon, a second from Wednesday afternoon to Saturday morning, a third from then until Monday morning. This arrangement, which requires two full-time workers and one part-time worker, each of them paid hourly rates during the day and evening and a flat rate for sleeping, is the least expensive way of maintaining round-the-clock coverage. The child-care worker on duty sleeps in the fourth bedroom, which doubles as an office.

The worker who welcomed Crystal to the house immediately began to explain its regulations. No men were permitted in the bedrooms, no alcohol or drugs anywhere. Each resident was responsible for keeping her half of the bedroom tidy, for doing her laundry (there was a washer and a dryer on the premises), and for doing a rotating list of chores—cleaning
the living room/dining room, the bathrooms, the kitchen, and the storage-and-laundry-room area, and taking out the garbage. A resident was given carfare, an allowance, and an opportunity to earn an extra ten dollars when it came her turn to do one of the tough jobs, like defrosting the refrigerator or scouring the stove. There were curfews—9
P.M.
on week nights, and midnight or 1
A.M.
on weekends, depending on age and conduct. The residents were entitled to a limited number of outgoing local phone calls a day. They were required to attend an hour-long group meeting every Tuesday evening with a psychologist, and every second Tuesday each met individually with the psychologist for twenty or thirty minutes. At Queensboro, Crystal had been given a diagnosis of “Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Disturbance of Conduct and Emotions”—a catchall diagnosis given to most youngsters seen briefly in such settings. The social worker, with whom each resident had to meet twice a month, also came to the house on Tuesdays.