Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (6 page)

The second Sunday Crystal was taken to Harlem by Mr. Jones, she went to a store near Hattie's building. Two young men, Floyd and Keith, were on the street. Crystal was a new face in the neighborhood. When they asked who she was and she told them she was there with her uncle, Mr. Jones, they knew that she was the latest little girl Mr. Jones had lured to Hattie's apartment. “You got to stop sleeping in the bed with that old man,” Crystal remembers their saying. “After eating the hamburger and French fries they bought me, I did more drinking and smoked reefer with them. Then they took me to an
abandoned apartment in Hattie's building, only it was higher up. Floyd raped me while Keith watched. He then apologized, saying, ‘You looked so good I couldn't help myself.' He didn't touch me again.”

Floyd and Keith fed, housed, and clothed Crystal for almost two weeks, first at Floyd's girlfriend's house and afterward at a hotel. Crystal was content: she had no desire to return to her mother's building to see Mr. Jones, to do more babysitting, to absorb more beatings. Mr. Jones told Florence that Crystal had gone to the store and never come back. Florence thought that someone had kidnapped Crystal. She had separated from Crystal's father, Wesley Taylor, two years earlier, but he lived in the vicinity of Hattie's apartment. She got in touch with him, and he went out looking for her. Floyd and Keith, who were a pair of robbers, got wind of the search and turned Crystal over to a police precinct in Harlem. She was questioned, and was examined by a doctor. Mr. Jones was brought into the precinct. He denied her accusations. She was driven home in a police car. “When I got there, Mr. Jones was outside the building,” she says. “He went downstairs to the basement apartment, where he lived with his wife. I went upstairs. My mother believed me in a way.”

Crystal was thirteen when she met Daquan, on Findlay Avenue. On their first date, they went to the movies, had their pictures taken by a photographer outside the theatre, and went to a hotel elsewhere in the Bronx where Daquan paid for a so-called short-stay room, one they were entitled to occupy for
three hours. They both smoked dust. Crystal told Daquan she was hungry—she wasn't eager to go to bed with him. He went out, and returned with “some nasty chicken.” While Daquan was taking off his clothes, Crystal saw forty dollars on the floor and pocketed it. “After we had sex and done all of that, I asked Daquan for some money to buy jeans with,” she recalls. “I really thought that money had been left in the hotel room by some previous person until Daquan asked me if I seen his money. I had the nerve to get down and pretend to help him look for it underneath the bed and the rug. When he realized he wasn't going to find it, we left. I told him afterwards, when we was living together, ‘I robbed you. How do you think I got that extra pair of jeans?' He told me he had a feeling I took the money but he didn't want to accuse me so he ain't said nothing.”

Crystal says, “I really loved Daquan, but while I was living with him I got away with having sex with another guy, Derrick, at Derrick's place. Then there was this Puerto Rican. I couldn't resist his soft lips. I had him call me at the Jeffersons'—I told him I was living with my grandmother and had an overprotective uncle but I'd be moving out soon. I went to the movies to see
Splash
with him. Daquan caught me when he brought me home, and hit me, so I never had sex with the Puerto Rican. I was two months pregnant by then.”

When Crystal realized that she was pregnant, she made plans to go to a hospital clinic to verify her condition and quietly obtain an abortion. She set off for the clinic after telling Daquan she was meeting a friend before going to school. He
followed her to the hospital and, unbeknownst to her, into the clinic. As the nurse's aide gave her the test results, Daquan cried out “Yes, yes, yes!” and hugged her. Crystal, who was thinking, No, no, no, felt frustrated. She cried. “My scheme had been blown.” Mrs. Jefferson agreed with her son. “You don't be needing no abortion,” she said. “Them things are dangerous.”

While Crystal was living at Queensboro and was visiting her baby at Bronx-Lebanon at two o'clock one Sunday morning (the hospital permitted visits around the clock), Daquan came by and caught her talking to John, the guy she had been dating (but not sleeping with) when Daquan met her and won her away from him. Daquan wanted to fight Crystal that Sunday morning. “We did a lot of punching and grabbing over the years,” she says. “When I was fifteen, I hit him over the head with a glass ashtray shaped like a gingerbread man. When I was on the phone with my male friends, he'd try to listen; I'd smash him over the head with the phone.”

Around the time of little Daquan's birth, Crystal had told her mother how much she was in love with Daquan, her infidelities notwithstanding. She stretched out the monosyllable so that anyone hearing her would have written down “looo-ooove.” “I give it a year after that baby is born,” Florence had said. “Then tell me how much you looo-ooove him.”

At sixteen, Crystal took care to leave her engagement ring in her pocket or in her dresser drawer except when she was with Daquan. “I realized I was making a fool of myself,” she says. “Daquan's expectations were husband and wife and me to
call him every time I got home from school. At that age, I was blossing and blooming. There was a lot of fun to be had going to roller rinks and discos with people I was meeting nearer my age, but Daquan was getting upset and asking all these questions. I was sixteen, he was twenty-five. I sat him down and told him he'd been where I was going. ‘I never had a childhood, but I'm going to have a teen-agehood,' I said. ‘Maybe we'll get back together when I'm older.' I dated younger guys. Their demands was less great. And they were better-looking. Daquan walks funny and his eyes is always bloodshot. I'm five feet and a half a inch, and he's shorter than that. For me, you got to be at least five-eight and built big, with lots and lots of muscles. I look at Daquan now and I ask myself, ‘How the hell did I do it?' ”

During Crystal's sixteenth summer, she met Richard, a student at Howard University who was home on vacation. He was tall and muscular, but, she says, “the sex wasn't there.” Then, in August of 1987, she started seeing Diamond. He took her horseback riding on their first date. On later dates, they went to Coney Island and to the beach at Far Rockaway, and rode around on his red Suzuki motorcycle. They first made love in October, at the Capri, a hotel with short-stay rates near the group home. Diamond, a high-school graduate, lived with his mother, his grandmother, and his sister. Crystal and Diamond later made love, with his mother's tacit consent, in his room. “He was the best in bed, before or since, and for the year and a half before we split I was unfaithful to him only once, for five minutes,” she says. Crystal becomes wistful and teary when she
talks about Diamond. “No one never took me horseback riding before Diamond,” she says. “It was the first time I was close to a horse. I had never gone to the beach with anyone, never looked at no moon. The water, the waves, and the sand—we raced from one lifeguard chair to the next. We put a blanket on the back of his bike and he kissed me—that man showed me some romantic times. People said, ‘All them girls in the group home is ho's, let's get one of them girls and stick them.' Diamond never caught that attitude. I would go to the movies with my girlfriend, and Diamond would have a cab pick us up to take us there. He'd be busy selling drugs but he'd stop to call a cab to take us home from the movies. He made me feel good about myself.”

T
he acid-washed blouse and jeans that Crystal had paid for at Macy's were part of her wardrobe for Satellite Academy, a school to which she would be transferring in the fall of 1987. Flushing High School had proved too “scholastic” for Crystal; her haphazard junior-high-school years hadn't prepared her for subjects like social studies, and she acknowledges that she had “a bad attitude.” One day, she and two friends hung out in the corridor outside her Flushing High math classroom after the bell rang. She then knocked on the classroom door. “A classmate made an attempt to open the door, but the teacher said to sit back down,” Crystal says. “So I banged on a glass
pane in the classroom door and it broke. After that, the teacher hurried up and opened the door. I asked her why she ain't let me in, because I felt she had dissed me. She told me not to worry, she wasn't going to write me up this time, just take a seat. The bitch was scared. At the end of the class, she wrote out a memo for maintenance to sweep up the glass and replace the pane. I turned myself in to the dean after that incident, and she said ‘Don't worry about it.' That was only because she couldn't put nothing in my record, because the teacher didn't write me up. Usually, I got written up for every little thing—like cutting some guy with a pocket knife after gym class—and the dean was unreasonable. She told me to drop out and go get my G.E.D., like I was a dog.” (The G.E.D. is the General Equivalency Diploma for high school.)

The other residents of the 104th Avenue group home didn't fare any better at Flushing. Like Crystal, they lacked educational skills, motivation, and discipline, felt overwhelmed by the size of the school, and fell through the cracks. St. Christopher's educational coordinator had a reason for sending them there. Among the common characteristics of students at Satellite Academy, a public city Alternative High School, with four campuses—two in Manhattan, one in the Bronx, and one in Jamaica, Queens—are that they have between ten and twenty credits and that they have attended ninth grade but have fallen behind their grade level; mostly students aged sixteen and older are accepted. To date, none of the group-home residents have stayed the course at Flushing, but going there at least exposed
them to Langston Hughes and made them eligible to transfer to Satellite.

Satellite is a small, no-frills school, with a high faculty-to-student ratio. Its Jamaica campus has a hundred and ninety students, in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades, and a staff of fourteen. About seventy percent of the students are black; most of the remainder are Hispanic. The school day is divided into six periods, or “slots,” a day, and the school year is divided into four ten-week cycles. One of Satellite's purposes is to help students catch up. They are able to accumulate sixteen credits a year—four per cycle—rather than the ten per year they can accumulate in schools like Flushing. The six slots at the Jamaica campus don't include gym (there is no gymnasium), study hall (a frill), or calculus (few students spend more than two years at Satellite, and even those who do rarely manage to complete ninth- and tenth-grade math). Satellite's teachers consider the most important part of the curriculum to be Family Group, in which groups of between fifteen and eighteen students sit in a circle two or three times a week to discuss personal problems and school problems. For Family Group, the students are given credits in English. In the past, they were also given credits for holding part-time jobs and internships and for doing independent study.

Crystal preferred Satellite to Flushing. It was smaller, her teachers were more lenient and casual (students addressed them by their first names), her peers were more congenial—and it was easier to cheat. Students who had an English test in the
first or second slot would give the test questions and answers to those scheduled to take the test in the third or sixth slot. Crystal wrote down the questions and answers on her hand, or on a piece of paper she slipped into her blouse sleeve, or underneath the desk, or under the “test-exam.” Students caught cheating weren't necessarily dismissed; they were just given zeros. The teachers were there because they had chosen to work with adolescents who had known trouble. Crystal's counsellor, a Princeton graduate and former case-worker, would follow her to the girls' bathroom, where she often went to meet a friend from another class; he would knock on the door and encourage her to return to the classroom.

Crystal didn't do well at Satellite during her first year. She hadn't changed her ways: she was excessively absent, late, and high. In January of 1988, several days before her eighteenth birthday and the end of her first semester, she considered dropping out—almost fifty percent of Satellite's students fail to graduate—and spoke of settling for her G.E.D. Her counsellor at Satellite and her social worker at St. Christopher's prevailed upon her to stay in school.

Crystal's eyes—hazel if she is wearing her contact lenses, brown if she isn't—gleam with remembered joy when she looks back upon her eighteenth birthday. Diamond had appeared at the group home with a Gucci bag and a pair of Gucci boots, three silvery balloons printed with the words “Happy Birthday, I Love You,” and a bouquet of flowers. “Everyone's face lit up with jealousy,” Crystal says.

Federal and state laws require child-care agencies like St. Christopher-Ottilie to offer family-planning services to children twelve years of age and over. Since her entry into the group home, Crystal had been using birth-control pills. In August, 1987, she had a series of stomach aches she attributed to the pill. The doctor she had been seeing regularly was on vacation. Another doctor recommended that Crystal stop taking the pill to give her body a rest. In February, 1988, she discovered that she was pregnant—“I guess because we done it so much,” she says. Crystal told Diamond she was going to have an abortion: since she had one child in foster care, it struck her as wrong to have a second child. Diamond had no children, but he accepted Crystal's decision. He gave her an enormous white stuffed bear for Valentine's Day. Several days later, she wrote the following note: “I Crystal Taylor, Resident of St. Christopher-Ottilie, is writting letter to confirm that after talking with my social worker … I know my options that I can make, but being that I'm not ready to care for another child and financially I can't care for another child, so I rather have an
Obortion
.”