Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (11 page)

W
hen Florence Drummond gave birth to her first child, a daughter she named Crystal, on January 11, 1970, one month before her nineteenth birthday, she was living in an elegant gray stone mansion in Manhattan's East Seventies that had been converted into a home for unwed mothers. Crystal was born in New York Hospital. “It was lovely,” Florence says. “And the next day you couldn't tell I just had a baby. I walked around that hospital hallway like someone who had never been pregnant. I was ready to go home.” A few days later, Florence returned (with Crystal) to what had been her home until the sixth month of her pregnancy—the apartment of a friend in a housing project in Harlem.

Florence had met Crystal's father, Wesley Taylor, in the summer of 1968. She was walking from her friend's building to a store to buy cigarettes. When she passed him on the street, he said hello, “nicely.” She ignored him. When she passed him on the return walk, he asked her name and whether she lived in the project. She answered. He kept coming around—he lived nearby, with his mother, Felicia Taylor; his father, Roderick Jenkins; and his younger brothers—and eventually they started dating. “Crystal's father was a real charmer,” Florence says. “He swept you off your feet.” She had been brought up in a strict manner, and Wesley was her first man. Wesley had spent most of his childhood in his mother's home town, Birmingham,
Alabama; had come North for his last year of high school; and had graduated in 1968—an A student, a part-time messenger, and a fairly heavy drinker. He worked as a full-time messenger until early 1969, when he enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War. While he was still in basic training, Florence realized she was pregnant. She wrote to him about her pregnancy and hoped that he would marry her in August, when he was due home on leave before going to Korea, but he told her then that he didn't have enough money and that the Air Force might not approve of such a marriage. Florence knew that Wesley already had a daughter, Melanie, born in September, 1968, who lived with her mother in Delaware. What she didn't know was that Wesley was hoping to eventually marry Melanie's mother. Melanie's mother married someone else. “After that, his philosophy became to do unto others as they do unto him but let him do it first,” his brother Nelson Taylor says. Wesley got another woman, Carol, pregnant while he was on a subsequent home leave; his son by her, Howard Taylor, was born in the fall of 1972. Florence claims she was “mad at first” about Howard's birth but got over it.

After Crystal's birth, Florence applied for welfare. Before her application was granted, she obtained the first of a series of jobs as a clerk-typist for lawyers and insurance agencies; she paid a Hispanic babysitter to care for Crystal during the week. She cashed the welfare checks she was sent without notifying the Department of Welfare that she was gainfully
employed. When Staff Sergeant Wesley Taylor was discharged from the Air Force, in 1973, after a second tour in Korea and a few months in Vietnam, he and Florence and Crystal stayed at Felicia's for a while, then moved to a one-bedroom walkup on West 128th Street. There was a church nearby, where Crystal attended a Head Start program. There was also a small restaurant nearby, where Wesley took up with a woman named Barbara while continuing to see Carol—and others. Florence's next apartment with Wesley was on West 100th Street. Supposedly renovated, it was filled with rats “the size of cats,” she says.

Wesley had become seriously addicted to drugs while he was serving overseas; his drug habit became even worse once he was back in New York City, and he never kicked it. He received unemployment insurance, and when that ran out he went on welfare. “Wesley led me into drugs,” Florence says. “Heroin and cocaine.” In January, 1976, she was laid off from her job; she supplemented her welfare checks by shoplifting. In August, 1976, Wesley and Florence's second child, a son they named Carlos, was born—gravely addicted to drugs. He developed pneumonia, spent a few months in the hospital, and went directly into foster care in the Bronx. Crystal remembers accompanying Florence to visit him. Carlos appeared frightened of Florence, whose skin is dark. He was less frightened of Crystal, who describes her complexion as “high yellow,” perhaps (Crystal speculates) because the daughter of Carlos's foster mother
had light skin. After Carlos's birth, Wesley, Florence, and Crystal moved to a two-bedroom sixth-floor walkup on Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx.

Florence was pregnant again a month after Carlos was born. In the spring of 1977, she was arrested for shoplifting, and it was discovered that there was a warrant out for her arrest on charges of welfare fraud in excess of five thousand dollars. In early June, she was sentenced to serve seven days on Riker's Island. As a pregnant woman, she probably wouldn't have had to do jail time for a first shoplifting arrest, but the welfare fraud was grand larceny. The week in jail covered both offenses. She returned to her apartment from Riker's Island, found women's underwear in her bed, tracked Wesley to a bar on 126th Street, and caught him kissing Barbara at the bar door. On June 30, 1977, Florence and Wesley's second son, Matthew, was born. “Call it a guardian angel, but Matthew was born free of drugs,” Florence says.

As a veteran, Wesley Taylor was entitled to education benefits. While Florence was in jail, he enrolled in a community college, and spent some tuition and book money getting high with Barbara. After Matthew's birth, Florence stopped using drugs briefly and went to a business school, studying to become an executive secretary. She dropped out of school, because in order to get Carlos out of foster care she had to be home full time. Wesley's contribution to Carlos's release was to hold a job. He worked at a parking lot until Carlos came home, in 1978,
and for a while afterward; it was the only job he ever had after leaving the service. Wesley had a second son with Carol as well—Roy, born in 1978.

D
rug users and drug dealers frequented the apartments on West 128th Street and West 100th Street, but life took a turn for the worse at Sheridan Avenue. Of Florence's children, only Crystal can remember her as a sober working woman “before my father hooked her on drugs,” and only Crystal has a few happy memories of Wesley. His terms of endearment for her were “baby girl” and “bugaloo.” If her room was messy, he would say, “Damn, you is a dirty little heifer,” but not without affection. When she was about five, he took her to her first circus, with Melanie—that was the only time she ever met her half-sister. He hit her just once, because she ran into the street and narrowly missed being struck by a car. Crystal also remembers that she had “all types of toys, dolls, and, after Mommy swindled a man she met in a bar out of some money he had stashed in his apartment, a new pink bicycle.”

Crystal's childhood ended on Sheridan Avenue in 1977, after Matthew's birth. By then, Wesley was here today and gone tomorrow; he spent two or three nights out at a time, either at Felicia's apartment or at Barbara's, on West 129th Street. Florence resented Barbara for buying him away from her. Whereas
Florence received only a welfare check for herself and the children, Barbara also received a salary for working in a restaurant her family owned.

Florence often kept Crystal out of school to babysit—first for Matthew and then, after Carlos's release from foster care, for both boys. Crystal resented her mother's 9
A.M.
to 11
P.M.
absences. When Florence was home, Crystal was sometimes terrified that she might overdose. At the same time, she recalls, “I was usually glad she was high, because she enjoyed the high and left me alone. When she got her fix, she was the beautifulest mother in the world. We could do things that we couldn't do two hours ago. There was no doubt when she was high. She'd get into the middle of the street and start wiggling her butt and embarrass me. I'd rather see her like that than in the other mood. If she needed a fix, she'd get edgy and agitated, and when I said ‘Mommy' she'd go
pow
, and hit me on the side of the head.” Crystal eventually began drinking and using drugs—cocaine, PCP, mescaline—herself.

One evening when Crystal was about ten, Wesley and Florence had what Florence calls “a stupid argument that grew.” Wesley started hitting Florence. He hit her until her eyes were swollen and her body was black and blue from head to toe. Florence remembers that he stopped hitting her only when Crystal jumped on his back and hollered his name. When she woke up, he was gone. He came back a few weeks later and apologized. “He said he didn't mean to do it and was sorry for how bad he had hurted me,” Florence says. “I told him it was
over.” For the next ten years, Wesley lived with Barbara. Carlos and Matthew scarcely saw their father after that; when they did, they called him Wesley, not Daddy.

Florence had other men coming and going even while she was still taking Wesley Taylor's clothes out of or putting them into plastic bags on his comings and goings. In 1980, before Wesley left for the last time, Florence, approaching thirty, was seeing Clarence, a man in his late fifties. She had also taken up with a twenty-one-year-old named Leonard and, although she was using an intrauterine device, soon became pregnant with Leonard's child. She broke up with him, because she had good reason to believe he was sexually involved with Crystal. In the summer of 1982, Florence and her children were evicted from Sheridan Avenue for nonpayment of rent. Her furniture was taken by marshals. Florence promised Crystal she would get it back, but she was unable to make good on the promise. For a month, she and the children lived in a nearby basement apartment without electricity. From there Florence moved the children to Findlay Avenue to live with Hazel, a cousin of Florence's. Clarence had a room and a shared bathroom on nearby Grant Avenue. Florence moved in with him, returning most mornings to check on the children and most evenings to make sure they ate before they went to bed. Natasha, Leonard's daughter, was born in October, 1982. Florence's next child, James, whose father was Clarence, was born in February, 1984.

Clarence worked as a janitor in a nursing home on the
East Side. He was the best of the fathers of Florence's children: he drove them in an aged Cadillac to a bakery in Queens for day-old cake, treated them to fast food, and took them to the zoo. He bought Pampers for Natasha and, later, for James. He also bought drugs for Florence, although he used no drugs himself.

I
n the spring of 1985, not long after Crystal and little Daquan went into foster care, Florence checked herself into a hospital detoxification program. She told Clarence where she was—he promised her he would check on Carlos, Matthew, Natasha, and James every day after work—but she didn't tell Hazel. When Florence hadn't turned up for several days, Hazel called the police: she didn't want to be bothered looking after the children. The police came and took the Drummond children to the precinct and then to a hospital, where they were examined for signs of physical abuse. There were none, so the children were returned to Hazel's apartment. A couple of days later, Crystal's S.S.C. worker showed up there. He proposed giving Hazel temporary custody of Florence's children. Hazel's own daughter, who was twelve, had recently gone to school with bruises and had told her teacher that Hazel had beaten her up. When Crystal's S.S.C. worker returned to his office, he learned about the pending charges against Hazel. Until the child-abuse
charges were disposed of, Hazel could not be given custody of anyone else's children.

Clarence let Florence know what had happened. She had been planning to have a hernia operation after completing the detoxification program, but the excitement caused her hernia to flare up. She was taken from the detox floor to the surgical floor to be operated on the following day. After a couple of shots of Demerol the pain subsided. The hernia was no longer a medical emergency, so Florence agreed to postpone the operation for two weeks. She telephoned the S.S.C. worker. He told her to come to his office. She showed him that she was still wearing a hospital band around her wrist, and explained what had happened. He said that because of Florence's situation—including her prospective return to the hospital—he would have to put her children into foster care. She signed them into placement voluntarily and asked the worker to keep the four children together.

In April, 1985, Carlos, eight, Matthew, seven, Natasha, two, and James, one, went to live with Mrs. Evelyn Peoples, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Mrs. Peoples, who was fifty, was separated from her husband. She was licensed for foster care directly by S.S.C. Mrs. Peoples had three children of her own—two daughters, who were in their twenties, and a fifteen-year-old son—living at home. When the four Drummond children arrived, she found them extremely undersocialized, lacking in self-control and manners,
destructive with toys and her household belongings, and competitive with each other. In March, 1986, a month when her S.S.C. worker wrote that “all children have made an excellent adjustment to their foster care placement,” Mrs. Peoples concluded that she could no longer keep Carlos; she wanted him removed from her home. For a year, he had been stealing money, comic books, and toys from the Peoples family, and had been disobedient at home and in school. There were two final straws for Mrs. Peoples: he had stolen two hundred dollars—the savings of one of her daughters—and Mrs. Peoples had learned from Matthew that Carlos had gone off at least twice with older men and received money in return for sexual favors. Carlos admitted that this was true.

Carlos was evaluated by a caseworker, a psychologist, and a psychiatrist. He was described in the evaluation reports as a tiny, bright-eyed, cute nine-year-old, who looked no more than seven. Carlos said that his mother had often taken him along when she bought and sold drugs and had had him perform sexual acts with her junkie friends in return for money or drugs. He foresaw an early death for himself from drugs from a needle. He thought his siblings might fare better, because they had not been with Florence so much. He had been beaten from an early age—with sticks and extension cords—and when Florence started to beat him she couldn't stop; Matthew had been beaten less. Carlos said that he had been left back in the second grade, and that neither he nor his mother had cared.