Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (9 page)

Crystal and Daquan had been presented with an ultimatum in the fall of 1988: Take little Daquan out of foster care or give him up for adoption. No further extensions of placement would be considered; more people are willing to adopt babies and small children than to adopt older ones, so adoption becomes the permanency plan if return to the family is not possible or advisable. Foster parents are usually given the first chance to adopt children who have been in their care. Margaret Hargrove proposed an “open adoption” to Crystal and Daquan, in which the biological parents would retain certain rights of access, but although neither of them wanted to have their son on a full-time basis, neither of them had any intention of forfeiting any parental rights. Daquan Jefferson agreed to take his son until Crystal was out of foster care herself and was financially on her feet. Margaret Hargrove had other small children in foster care in 1989, but little Daquan was still her favorite. When he went to the Bronx for pre-discharge trial weekends at the Jeffersons', she expressed her displeasure over his imminent departure. She told her social worker that little Daquan was not supervised properly during the weekend visits, and returned to “the foster home in an obstinate manner.” She also reported his reaction to her social worker: “This is my
house and you're going to put me out of my goddam house,” he had said. “The Bronx is dirty.” Little Daquan moved to the Jeffersons' in September, 1989.

“One reason Daquan wanted the baby was he knew he'd see me more,” Crystal says, and he did: she visited every weekend or two. Margaret Hargrove gave little Daquan a party for his fifth birthday—she invited his parents and other members of Crystal's family—and telephoned the Jefferson household frequently throughout the following months.

F
or his fifth birthday, Crystal gave her son a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar gold bracelet with his name in diamonds. It was one of the rare moments after Diamond's release from jail when he had money to spare, and he contributed a hundred dollars toward the bracelet. Around that time, he asked Crystal for a hundred and fifty dollars, so that he could go job-hunting. She took the money out of her bank account. He spent it, along with money borrowed from other friends, on a secondhand Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle. Crystal was not pleased. Diamond and a friend made some money hauling dirt to construction sites with a dump truck and sold a little crack, but he wouldn't get an honest job and earn real money. “You started off doing for me. How are you going to end it like this?” Crystal asked him. Diamond came every now and again to what Crystal referred to as “the independent house” or invited her to
his mother's apartment. After they had been in bed an hour or two, one of his friends inevitably paged him on a beeper and he left in a hurry. “His friends said ‘Jump' and he answered ‘How high?' ” Crystal recalls. “He put them in front of me to hang out. I always said they would be the death of him.”

By 1990, Crystal had a beeper herself, and was hanging out with an assortment of young drug dealers. They kept her in reefer and had plenty of money to buy her a pair of sneakers or a leather jacket and to take her to restaurants, parties, and clubs. She liked being wined and dined and riding around in their jeeps, BMWs, and “Benzes.” She was having fun.

Her social worker was not pleased. The original plan for the independent-living apartments was that they were to be used by the residents for a year and a half at the most. The social worker wanted to “trial-discharge” Crystal in the summer of 1990, so that if she ran into trouble afterward St. Christopher's could again help her—though only for six months, until she reached twenty-one, the day the money stopped. In the spring of 1990, Crystal ducked many of her required weekly appointments with the social worker, didn't see the St. Christopher's psychologist (although he was one of her favorite people at the agency), and let her bank account dwindle. She was buying clothes and jewelry, having acrylic tips put on her nails, and getting her hair done. (When she was a little girl on Sheridan Avenue, her favorite possession was a doll whose hair she could wash, braid, curl on small rollers, and blow-dry. She played with it for hours; it was one way to tune out the misery that surrounded
her.) Crystal has a talent for hair, and her hair style changes frequently—from a simple set with bangs to a French twist, or perhaps to a very elaborate affair, requiring the addition of blond braids or a hairpiece woven with seed pearls. Crystal had grown weary of group-home discussions and now ducked various obligatory independent-living-unit meetings, sensitivity groups, and workshops. They took time from her men and from her job. She particularly objected to an independent-living workshop held upstate, which caused her to miss four days at the office.

“She basically uses the independent-living-apartment program as a boarding house,” her social worker wrote on her record. “She enjoys all the benefits but is reluctant to put anything back into it.… She makes little effort to help with responsibilities connected to the program, i.e. money management, dropping off receipts, attending workshops, and keeping appointments.” Crystal felt that her part of the independent-living bargain consisted simply of working at the ad agency.

Crystal mentioned to the social worker that she was having trouble with her boss about her hours of employment: she preferred daytime hours. The social worker offered to help her seek another job, but her schedule was soon switched; for a time it was 9
A.M.
to 5
P.M.
, and then 6:30
A.M.
to 2:30
P.M.
She dallied about seeking an apartment. She admitted that she was afraid of letting go. She wanted to age out of St. Christopher's at twenty-one. She was lucky to live in one of the few states in the United States that keep young people in care until
that age. In April, the social worker drove her to the Y.W.C.A. in Brooklyn. While she was there, a young man called on a woman resident, and the young woman had to come downstairs to see him. “I ain't living where nobody can't visit my room, in nobody's Y, in nobody's Brooklyn,” Crystal said, and did not pursue residence at the Y.

While Crystal's social worker was planning Crystal's discharge, Crystal and Daquan were unplanning little Daquan's. In June, 1990, little Daquan, wearing a lime-green cap and gown, received a diploma from a Catholic kindergarten in the Bronx, in which his father had enrolled him. When Florence was evicted from the apartment on Sheridan Avenue, back in 1982, her furniture and other possessions had been confiscated by the marshals. She hadn't retrieved them. Most of Crystal's childhood photographs were lost, to her regret, so she tends to take photographs of the joyful events in her life. In the snapshots of her son's graduation, Crystal has on a three-piece peach-colored pants outfit that shows her trim figure to advantage. The outfit had a three-hundred-dollar price tag, but Daquan had bought it “hot” for fifty dollars from a friend who boosted clothes.

A week after his graduation, little Daquan was back at the Hargroves'. He was glad—there were no children his age at the Jeffersons', and he preferred playing with other youngsters in a back yard. So was his father—he liked to spend his time off from work with his friends. So was his mother—Crystal had never stopped believing that her son received better care on Long Island than he did in an increasingly dangerous part of the
Bronx among teen-agers and adults who had no interest in a child. Margaret Hargrove was overjoyed at the return of her “star” (as one social worker had described little Daquan). Daquan Jefferson agreed to pay his son's first-grade tuition at a Catholic school on Long Island and to pay for school uniforms, and contributed fifty dollars every now and then for the child's clothes. Margaret Hargrove didn't ask for money for food, and spent additional money to clothe little Daquan to her satisfaction. She had no trouble hiding him from the social worker who called on her regularly to see the six other children living in her home, for whom she was certified.

A week after her son's return to Long Island, Crystal took up with a young Jamaican drug dealer named Troy, who was tall and husky and always wore dress pants, a silk shirt, and leather shoes—“like he was going somewhere,” Crystal recalls. “Like he had a job on Wall Street. But no tie.” She told all her friends she still hoped that Diamond would get a job and that someday they would be together, but added that she liked Troy better than the other men with whom she had been consorting. He was muscular, and he was tall: he reminded her of Diamond.

On Monday evening, July 23, 1990, the phone rang at the independent-living apartment. Crystal was in the shower—she had just come in from jogging with Troy—and threw a towel around herself and answered the phone. It was a friend of Benita's. She asked Crystal if she was sitting down, and said she had some bad news for her. While Crystal was thinking that this
girl never called
her
, and was wondering what kind of bad news she could possibly have, and was trying to get her off the phone—she had to get dressed—Benita's friend told her that Diamond was dead. “Stop playing with me,” Crystal said. Her voice started to crack when the girl told her where his death had occurred—at the intersection of Hempstead Avenue and Springfield Boulevard, not far from 104th Avenue. Crystal hung up, and called the group home, thinking that the child-care worker on duty would know if anything had happened to Diamond. The worker had heard nothing. Crystal and a friend took a cab to Hempstead and Springfield. A group of people, including one of Diamond's close friends, were standing outside a restaurant there. After painting the Ninja that morning, Diamond had gone to the restaurant that afternoon to buy his grandmother some food. As he was standing on the corner drinking a soda, eating chips, and talking to a drug dealer whom Crystal knew only as Duke, a man in a blue Mazda, who had quarrelled with Duke, pulled up and, while waiting at a stoplight outside the restaurant, sprayed bullets at both men. Duke was wounded. Diamond was killed.

When Crystal's social worker went to the apartment the next day, Crystal was distraught. She spoke of all the good times she had had with Diamond. When she was at the group home on Christmas Eve, she recalled, he had interrupted his drug dealing at eleven-fifty-nine to wish her a Merry Christmas, and he had done the same a week later, to wish her a Happy New
Year. Even after they had split up, he went out to the Hargroves' by himself to see little Daquan. “I seen a future with him,” Crystal said. The social worker held her, comforted her, and drove her to Diamond's mother's house so that she could pay her respects. The social worker also spent time with Crystal the following day. Crystal hadn't gone to work on Monday: Troy had rented a car for her, so that she could drive her girlfriends to a concert at Giants Stadium on Sunday. She and Troy had returned the car on Monday, then had brunch at a diner and made love at the house he had bought for his mother, near the independent-living house. She took the rest of the week off to attend Diamond's wake and funeral. Troy accompanied her to a store and chose and paid for a black-and-white hat for the funeral. She had told Troy about Diamond's taking her hundred and fifty dollars and spending it on a bike. “This is what happens to people who do wrong to you,” Troy had said.

In September, Crystal reluctantly returned to the process of apartment hunting. She was reading the real-estate ads, as her social worker had taught her, and she observed that most of the listings were asking for “principals only.” She asked the social worker why landlords wanted to rent only to school officials. The social worker explained that “principals only” meant “of urgent importance.” (In a real-estate ad, “principals only” actually means that only the person who intends to rent the apartment—not an agent seeking to list it—should respond to the ad.) Crystal was amused by her own mistake. She apartment-hunted halfheartedly.

O
n Sunday, November 4, 1990, Crystal beeped Troy. She was with Charissa, a girl who lived diagonally across the street from the independent-living apartment. Charissa was friendly with one of Troy's brothers, and on the previous June 15th she had invited Crystal to Troy's birthday party; that was when Crystal had met and started dating him. Troy always behaved toward Crystal in what she felt was a considerate manner. He invited her “to be his company” when he drove his mother from Jamaica to a beauty salon in Brooklyn where she chose to have her hair done, and when he drove to downtown Brooklyn to buy fish for the barbecues held at his house. He took her to the movies after work, once taking along his daughter (who lived with him) and little Daquan, and he drove her out to the Hargroves' to return Daquan after a weekend visit. He gave her a hundred dollars for a leather jacket for little Daquan, asked what she wanted him to bring her from his trips to Florida, and spent most evenings with her: they went to restaurants and clubs, and went on a party-boat ride.

Troy, driving a jeep, pulled up in front of the independent-living apartment around six o'clock. Crystal was still standing outside Charissa's house. Another jeep pulled up in front of Troy's, and two young men got out. As Crystal crossed the street, she saw that one of the men was walking on
the sidewalk toward her house. The other was walking in the same direction out in the street. His eyes met hers as they both approached the jeep. She said hello to Troy. The man walked past her, then turned around and, having apparently satisfied himself that the track was clear, pulled out a gun. As Crystal backed off, toward Charissa's, Troy and the gunman exchanged words. She heard a shot. The two men drove away. Troy tried to get out of his jeep but couldn't, managed to put it in gear, and drove it into a tree. Some men came out of nearby houses and tried to extricate him from the jeep. Crystal, in a panic, ran to Troy's house to find one of his brothers. By the time they got back to the scene of the shooting, police and an ambulance were there. Troy was still talking when the police arrived. By the time Crystal got to the hospital where he had been taken, he was dead. The police asked her to go to a nearby precinct and questioned her. She told them what she had seen. The next thing she remembers is waking up, heavily sedated, in a hospital in Queens. On Monday, two staff members from St. Christopher's picked her up at the hospital and drove her to the 104th Avenue group home. They were upset that she had been overmedicated and that she was being treated like a criminal. Crystal was still groggy and distraught on Tuesday. In the child-care worker's bedroom, she and Benita and Charissa talked about avenging Troy's death. On Wednesday, Crystal left the group home with Charissa. They bought a wig for Crystal to wear, so that she wouldn't be
recognized by Troy's killers, if they were in the neighborhood, and went on to Troy's house.