Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair

Susan Sheehan, a staff writer for
The New Yorker
, is the author of six previous books.
A Welfare Mother
won a Sidney Hillman Foundation Award and
Is There No Place on Earth For Me?
won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1983. She lives with her husband, the writer Neil Sheehan, in Washington, D.C. The Sheehans have two daughters, Maria and Catherine.

Ten Vietnamese
A Welfare Mother
A Prison and a Prisoner
Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
Kate Quinton's Days
A Missing Plane

I
am grateful, not for the first time, to my friends Elizabeth L. Sturz and Herbert Sturz, whom I telephoned shortly after I woke up one morning in the summer of 1990 with the idea of writing about foster care. They referred me to William J. Grinker, the commissioner of New York City's Human Resources Administration from 1986 to 1989. Bill Grinker introduced me to Poul Jensen, the assistant executive director of St. Christopher-Ottilie, the largest private foster-care agency in New York State. “If you're willing to take a ten-hour van ride from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania and back tomorrow, I promise you a subject,” Poul said to me on September 17, 1990. Previous searches for book subjects had taken many months. Those words sounded auspicious. Before a van filled with St. Christopher-Ottilie child-care and social workers had even passed through New Jersey, en route to a school for delinquent boys in Pennsylvania, two of my van mates, Charlotte Bowman and Ron Underwood, convinced me that Crystal Taylor would be a perfect subject. They said she was articulate, would enjoy being written about, and would stay the course: I had told them the story I proposed to write would take a year. I had dinner with Lisa Lombardi, director of group homes for St. Christopher's, Karlaye Rafindadi, Crystal's current social worker, and Crystal on October 4th. Crystal and I liked each other from the first pina coladas we ordered. She agreed to work with me—
“It'd probably kinda help me learn my roots,” she said—and did indeed stay the course, a two-and-a-half-year one, with unfailing veracity and high spirits.

In addition to those mentioned above, I am thankful to Robert J. McMahon, Nora S. Schaaf, Barbara Atkinson, Jean Canale, Connie Cantatore, Lee Cappadoro, Moneick Hancock, and Cecilia Rutledge of St. Christopher's. I am indebted to Nan Dale, Yvonne Bridges, Wendy Fieldman, Sam Turnbull, Louise Weldon, and Karen Wulf of The Children's Village; to Madelon Kendricks of Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center; to Beverly Brooks and Dr. Merrith H. Hockmeyer of The Center for Children & Families; to Joel L. Friedman of Flushing High School; to Douglas Aymong and Joe Cullen of Satellite Academy; to Henry Ackermann of Pius XII Youth & Family Services; to Detective Joseph Gallagher of the New York City Police Department; to Dick Piperno of the Queens District Attorney's office; to David Liederman of the Child Welfare League of America; to Anne Reiniger of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; to Marilyn Del Vescovo and Salvatore Costagliola of Sheltering Arms Childrens Service; to Benjamin Walker, Fred Blount, and Rochelle Wyner of Odyssey House; to Alice Boles Ott, Betsy Alterman, Muriel Leconte, and Maxine Reiss of CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates); to Jane M. Spinak of Morningside Heights Legal Services; to Emily Stutz, formerly of The Center For Family Life; and to Jamie Greenberg, Keith Kelly, and James Smith of the New York State Department of Social Services.

Because I had the consent of Crystal, her brothers, her mother, her maternal grandmother, her son's father, and her son's foster parents, I was given access to their records at St. Christopher-Ottilie, The Children's Village, CASA, Odyssey House, and Sheltering Arms.

This book began as a two-part article for
The New Yorker
. It is a joy to have a page on which to thank some of my colleagues: Bruce J. Diones, Nicholas Parker, and Owen Phillips; Alice Mulconry, Edwin Rosario, and Stanley Ledbetter; Anne Neglia Calderera, Patricia Goering, and Felix Santos; Nancy Boensch, Patrick J. Keogh, and Christopher Shay; Judy Callender, Eleanor Gould and Joy Weiner; Ann Goldstein, Daniel Hurewitz, Louisa Kamps, and Elizabeth Macklin. Robert Gottlieb was the magazine's editor when I embarked on this odyssey. Tina Brown, its editor when the articles came in, published them with enthusiasm and (to anyone who has been on the staff of
The New Yorker
for thirty years) unprecedented and welcome alacrity. It has been my good fortune to have had John Bennet as an editor since 1981. John was the first person I called at the magazine when I decided to write about foster care and the last person to whom I talked—on a starry night from a ship that was plying its way from Hong Kong to Haiphong on the South China Sea—before going to press. He gave me the benefit of his encouragement from beginning to end.

Sonny Mehta, president of the Knopf Publishing Group, gave me the gift of a new publisher and a fine editor,
Daniel Frank of Pantheon Books. I am also indebted to Alan Turkus and to Marjorie Anderson of Pantheon.

My husband, Neil Sheehan, reads and edits everything I write before anyone else does. Every writer should be lucky enough to fall in love with and marry someone who happens to be a better writer.

My chief debt is to Crystal Taylor, her family and friends, and to the foster parents I have written about. The names of all the people in this book, including Crystal Taylor, have been changed, and identifying details have been altered. They know who they are and they have my profound thanks.

Well, son, I'll tell you:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair
.

It's had tacks in it
,

And splinters
,

And boards torn up
,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare
.

But all the time

I'se been a-climbin' on
,

And reachin' landin's
,

And turnin' corners
,

And sometimes goin' in the dark

Where there ain't been no light
.

So boy, don't you turn back
.

Don't you set down on the steps

'Cause you finds it's kinder hard
.

Don't you fall now—

For I'se still goin', honey
,

I'se still climbin'
,

And life for me ain't been no crystal stair
.

–
LANGSTON HUGHES

C
rystal Taylor woke up early on Sunday morning, October 7, 1984, went to the bathroom, and noticed she was bleeding lightly. She was expecting a baby, but it wasn't due until mid-December, so she lay back down on the bed she shared with her boyfriend, Daquan Jefferson, in his parents' apartment in a Bronx housing project. Daquan's mother, Dolores Jefferson, took a look at Crystal and said, “You're getting ready to have that baby.” Mrs. Jefferson couldn't bear the sight of blood. She told Crystal she didn't want her to give birth “on the outside,” and, as she was leaving for church, advised Crystal and Daquan to get dressed and go to the hospital. Crystal telephoned her own mother and asked her to meet them there.

Daquan and Crystal found a taxi near the Jeffersons' building. They rode for a block while Daquan negotiated the fare with the driver. “Four-fifty,” the driver said. The customary fare to Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center was two-fifty—the amount Daquan was willing to spend. Crystal figured that the driver was asking for extra money because of her condition (“They be taking a risk that the velvet-type material they got on they seats be stained,” she said later), and told Daquan, “Pay the money, pay the money.” But Daquan said to the driver “Why you be charging me so much?” and then, to her, “Come on,
Crystal, I ain't letting him rob me. We got to walk and catch us another cab.”

No cabs were cruising on Webster Avenue, where they got out. As they walked, Crystal kept getting contractions, and thought, I could have a baby right on a corner and this nigger beefing for two dollars. “I wanted to take him by his bony neck and strangle him,” she said afterward, “but I was paining too much to be fighting.” They walked about two blocks. The driver of a second taxi quoted them a fare of two dollars, and they got in. Crystal recalls that the driver drove fast and ran red lights like crazy, and that Daquan didn't even give him a tip. (“That cheap miser saved hisself fifty cents.”) Her mother was waiting for her at the hospital. Florence Drummond, Crystal's mother, was on welfare. Crystal was covered by Florence's Medicaid. Crystal had been to Bronx-Lebanon once or twice for prenatal care, and was admitted as Crystal Drummond, although normally she used Taylor, her father's surname.

Crystal's mother was a heroin and cocaine addict, whose helter-skelter life her daughter often held in contempt. On that Sunday, Florence Drummond looked as if she needed a fix, but Crystal was glad to see her: Crystal, fourteen, was Florence's oldest child, and the two had usually been close. She had her mother accompany her to a labor room, and told Daquan to wait outside, because he was getting on her nerves. Each time she had a contraction, Florence told her to squeeze her hand when it hurt. The medication she was given to inhibit the contractions had no effect. Crystal was wheeled into the delivery room.
Florence held her head and told her to push. The second time Crystal pushed, Florence told her to look at the mirror on the ceiling and watch her baby as it emerged. The baby—a boy—was two months premature and had a heart murmur and slight difficulty breathing. He weighed three pounds six ounces. He was put in an incubator in the neonatal-intensive-care unit. Crystal was wheeled into a room for four.

In midafternoon, Florence went to the waiting room, where Daquan was sleeping on three chairs, shook him awake, and congratulated him on the birth of his first child. After being taken to see his tiny son, Daquan, Jr., the father, a short, dark man of twenty-three, called his own mother and ran home, still wearing a yellow hospital gown.