Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (17 page)

C.W.A., having been educated by Deborah about its own three-hundred-dollar-per-month, up-to-three-years housing-subsidy program, put through a grant for Florence. Morningside Heights found an agency near her new apartment, the Center for Family Life, to supply continuing support services. Florence and her children would eventually go there for therapy.

Morningside Heights Legal Services also encouraged Florence to apply for Medicaid and food stamps (for which, because she had several children, she would be eligible despite her salary), and other subsidies, of which she had been unaware, including an allowance for furnishings and supplies required to establish a new household, which provided her with a few
hundred dollars. Each child released from foster care was also entitled to a five-hundred-dollar discharge grant from C.W.A. for furniture and other items deemed necessary to make the child comfortable.

The Columbia students take on only two or three cases a year, so that they can devote sufficient time to each. Because Florence said she was determined to continue working full time, they helped her obtain services she would need once her children came home, including after-school care for James (a first grader) and Natasha (a third grader) and day care for four-year-old Michael. The five hundred dollars for each of Florence's children was disbursed by C.W.A. in a timely fashion. The agency had learned that with CASA advocating for a client, it would be taken to court for failure to fulfill its obligations. Florence moved into her new four-room apartment on October 20, 1990. All the subsidies paid out to her by C.W.A. and the other agencies involved were far less than the cost to the city of keeping her children in foster care—a minimum of twenty thousand dollars per child per year.

C
arlos had settled down quickly after his return to Children's Village from the Dunbars'. His social worker, his mother, and Deborah all expected him to be the first of the children to be “trial-discharged”: children coming out of foster care are returned home provisionally, and if after three months
they seem to have adjusted well they are given a final discharge. The social worker believed that Carlos was ready to return home in the fall of 1990, but, to her surprise, he told her he did not want to go. He chose instead to enter a group home that Children's Village had recently opened near Dobbs Ferry. His social worker believed that it would be destructive to attempt to discharge him to Florence against his will. Florence, who was taken completely off guard, was stunned and hurt, but had to accept his decision.

Natasha was anxious to be with her mother. It was decided that she would be the first discharged: one child had to be discharged within sixty days of the mother's receiving the C.W.A. rent subsidy; James and Michael would follow. Carlos and Matthew came down from Children's Village most weekends and holidays. When Florence yelled “Hammer time!” or “Work time!” they nailed down linoleum or put up curtains. Florence was chosen to receive a Children's Village Thanksgiving food basket, and cooked a hearty turkey dinner that included stuffing, greens, and sweet-potato pie. All the children were there for Christmas Day. Florence had saved up to buy nice presents. She bought a small plastic tree and decorated it with ornaments and tinsel.

O
n December 5, 1990, sixteen days before Florence's younger daughter, Natasha Drummond, eight, went to live with her, Florence's older daughter, Crystal Taylor, twenty,
was discharged from foster care by St. Christopher-Ottilie, and moved into a basement apartment in Queens. Crystal was peeved with Florence, who told her she was pregnant yet again, and with Burton, who was seldom around, “except to whisper sweet nothings in Mommy's ear.” Florence later learned that she was not pregnant after all, but had an enlarged uterus.

Crystal's father called her on January 11, 1991, her twenty-first birthday. A few months earlier, Wesley Taylor had left the apartment in Harlem that he had shared with Barbara for ten years, because Barbara's income had plunged. The restaurant where she worked had been closed for selling drugs. She could no longer afford to keep Wesley high enough. He had moved into his mother's one-bedroom apartment in a project in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Two of his brothers also lived there, with Felicia Taylor: her son Nelson, who was in a drug-rehabilitation program, and her son Lloyd, who was not. Lloyd or one of Wesley's other brothers supplied Wesley with drugs. He told Crystal to come by the apartment and he would give her some birthday money.

On Sunday, January 29th, Crystal rented a car and drove Carlos and Matthew (who were visiting from Children's Village), Natasha, and James (who had just been trial-discharged from foster care) to her grandmother's apartment. Wesley Taylor looked awful. “Old and drugged out” was the way Crystal saw him. She asked him for her birthday money and was disgusted when he told her he had spent it, and how: “I needed a hit.” Crystal had always loved her grandmother but had had
only contempt for Felicia's sons. “Ain't none of them was no role models for me to look up to,” she said that night. “They was no doctors, lawyers, no sheriffs, no people to keep me out of foster care.”

Crystal had been upset in January by little Daquan's having lied to his teacher about Mrs. Hargrove, which had led to his return to the Bronx to live with big Daquan.

Florence had also received upsetting news in January. Because of the recession, her employer had reduced her hours from thirty-five to twenty a week. That meant she would have to reapply for welfare to make ends meet.

As Florence's children were being discharged from foster care, she made it clear that her idea of motherhood was similar to Crystal's: let the former foster parents keep the children as often as possible. For Easter Week in 1991, she sent Natasha to the Dunbars', and James to the home of Jacqueline and Lamont Charles. The Charleses had become James Drummond's foster parents in November, 1989, when Florence had him removed from the home of the woman who would not bring him to Brooklyn for visits.

The Charleses, a retired couple in their sixties, whose two children were grown, lived in a well-kept town house on a quiet street. Mrs. Charles became a foster parent in 1988. The Charleses had a thirteen-year-old grandson, Norman, who had been with them much of his life, and they decided that they would keep two boys as company for him. When James arrived, the Charleses had Melvin there and after Melvin left to return
to his family they took in Timothy; James and Timothy especially liked playing in the Charleses' finished basement, which they called their apartment. Mrs. Charles enjoyed being a foster mother. “It's not something you do for money,” she says. “Who would want to take care of a child seven days a week for a hundred dollars, which is what it comes to when C.W.A. gives you four or five hundred dollars a month?”

The foster boys called Mrs. Charles Grandma and Mr. Charles Grandpa, because their grandson did. “Sometimes you get so attached to them you do more for them than for your own,” she says. “You're supposed to. I was working when my son and daughter grew up, so my mother-in-law took care of them. Therefore, I'm going to take good care of these children.”

After James returned to Florence, the Charleses sent him “a little piece of money” for Valentine's Day and another little piece for his birthday. When Florence called to ask if James could stay with them for Easter Week, they agreed. Carlos took him partway to the Bronx by subway; the Charleses met him and took him the rest of the way. They were disappointed that Florence had sent him without an Easter basket and without a haircut. They bought him an Easter basket—“to make his Easter”—and had his hair cut: it had been cut every two or three weeks while he was with them.

Mrs. Charles found in James's notebook a list of things that he was supposed to ask the Charleses for. The list that Florence had given him read “I want a haircut, I need sneakers, I need a book bag, underwear, and clothes.” When Mrs. Charles
discovered the list, she had already bought James a book bag and “a two-piece underwear, because I wanted him to have that.” She didn't buy him sneakers or any other clothes. The Charleses had subscribed to
Highlights
magazine for James, and at Easter they gave him the copies that had come since his January departure. Timothy cried when James left after Easter, so Mrs. Charles took in another foster child, Marlon. When Florence telephoned in June to ask if James could visit for a few weeks in the summer, Mrs. Charles told her that Timothy and Marlon had left and she had given up foster care. “You should have heard Florence in 1989 at the meetings with the people from C.W.A. and the court-appointed ones saying how bad she wanted the children,” Mrs. Charles says. “I'm sure she's a good mother, but she still wants to have a good time. If she can get the children off her hands, that's fine, but I didn't like the way she went about it.”

Michael came home after Easter. Sitting at the dinette table one Sunday afternoon eating peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with his sister and brothers, he repeated to himself, “Mommy Florence Drummond, Mommy Florence Drummond.” He appeared happy playing and watching TV with James and Natasha but told one of his older siblings that he didn't like Mommy and wanted to be with Ganny, which was what he had called Geraldine Kent for the four years he was with her.

At the suggestion of her sister-in-law, Mrs. Kent had become a foster mother in 1968, after Jeffrey, the second of her
two children, had some serious asthma attacks when he was eight, which required her to take a leave of absence from her job in a pickle factory. (She had separated from her husband soon after Jeffrey's birth.) Mrs. Kent has had numerous foster children since. She adopted Thomas, the second child placed with her; he is now twenty-two years old and still lives with her. In 1982, she took in a baby boy, Otis, who is mildly retarded. When Otis was four and became eligible for adoption (his mother had disappeared), Mrs. Kent adopted him. Michael and Otis had been playmates since Michael came to Mrs. Kent's apartment—a two-bedroom one in a project—in early 1987, as a baby. Mrs. Kent's divorced daughter and her two children, who are twelve and eighteen, visit often. When Michael is with Florence, he recites the names of the children and young adults who make up his world at Mrs. Kent's.

“It was hard for me to let Michael go,” Mrs. Kent said recently. “When he went home, I told him, ‘Mike, you be a good boy,' and turned away, so he wouldn't see me crying.' I told Florence, ‘You better not let anything happen to my baby.' ”

As it turned out, Mrs. Kent did not have to let Michael go. He is the only one of Florence's children who has two homes. For the past year and a half, Geraldine Kent has kept him two or three weeks in summer and for a week or two over other school holidays. Mrs. Kent's welfare check covers her rent, which is low; her phone bill; and the gas and repairs for her 1980 car. Florence has never been to Mrs. Kent's apartment and
has never offered to keep Otis, but Mrs. Kent doesn't mind. She is grateful to have Michael whenever he is able to come. He strikes her as a little more spoiled and a little readier to cry than when she had him, but if she asks him to do something and he refuses she threatens to send him home, and he says, “I'll be good.” When it is time to leave Ganny, he asks “Why do I have to go home?” but, once home, he is soon playing with his older siblings.

I
n mid-August, 1991, a couple of weeks before Tarrant had shot Crystal, she happened to run into her uncle Nelson Taylor on the subway. He told her that her father was in the Veterans' Administration Hospital in Manhattan. Crystal, Carlos, and Nelson went to visit Wesley Taylor in late August. Wesley told Crystal that he had AIDS. It was his illness rather than his drug use that had made him appear so wan when Crystal saw him in January. Wesley Taylor died on Thursday, September 12th. It had been his custom to telephone Crystal every once in a while to “talk trap.” One evening that summer, he had called her, had assumed or pretended to assume that she was with a man, and had said, “Tell that nigger to roll off you, this is your daddy.” His parting words to her when she said goodbye to him at the V.A. Hospital were “Go on, little ho, and bust one for me.”

Wesley Taylor's wake was held in a storefront funeral home in Harlem on the evening of Sunday, September 16, 1991. The open coffin was at the front of a plain room filled with chairs. Florence and the children filed past. Crystal was fashionably dressed in a black silk tank top, white culottes, a black plaid jacket, and a black-and-white hat, but she looked worn out from the combined trauma of the shooting and her father's death. Inside the cast, her hand throbbed with pain. Crystal burst out sobbing. “Daddy, Daddy, I never thought I'd see you like this,” she wailed at the gaunt figure in the casket, a shadow of the nice-looking Don Juan she remembered from her childhood. “How could you leave me this way?” Matthew Drummond was quiet. Carlos confided to a male friend of the family who attended the wake that he felt sad he had never had a father. “Wesley kept saying he was going to come around and see us, and he never did,” Carlos said, in an uncustomarily plaintive tone. There was a single basket of white flowers in the room, between the coffin and the visitors' book. It had a card that read “From your sons Howard and Roy.”

About fifty people attended the funeral, which was held the next morning in the same room. A second floral tribute, this one of red flowers, stood next to the first. Some neighbors of Wesley and Barbara's from 129th Street had taken up a collection to buy it. The person who sobbed the loudest was Barbara. She sat in the back, a homely woman who was much heavier than Florence.

The most surprising person in attendance at the funeral
home on that heat-heavy mid-September day was Lavinia Wilson. Lavinia had learned of Wesley's death that morning. She later told Florence she had made the journey from Astoria because she had known him. A soft-voiced minister the family had never seen before spoke briefly. “Life is not a round trip,” he said. “It's a one-way street to death. Wesley Taylor has now gone from life to life everlasting.”