Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (4 page)

Crystal was introduced to her housemates—Lynn, Yolanda, Simone, Tina, and Nicole. The five, who were between sixteen and eighteen, had been told by a child-care worker that Crystal was “a goody-goody” and had been instructed, “Do not give her no reefer.”

“Do you do reefer here?” Crystal asked shortly after her arrival. She soon had Yolanda and Simone high on the supply she had brought with her. On January 11th, her fifteenth birthday, a child-care worker arranged a party for her. The worker
prepared a special dinner and served ice-cream cake. Lynn and Yolanda invited friends of their own, and Crystal invited Daquan and some of his male relatives. In a group home, the youngest often becomes a scapegoat, but Lynn, the group home's leader, took a liking to Crystal, and as a result no one tried to use her as a flunky.

Three of Crystal's housemates were black, one was Hispanic, and one was half black and half Chinese. Lynn had been in foster care since birth. She had never seen her mother—a drug addict, who died when she was five—and had never known her father's surname. When she was fourteen, her foster father took her virginity, and she had been sent to the Holy Cross campus of an agency called Pius XII Youth & Family Services. Holy Cross is a residential treatment facility situated in Rhinecliff, New York; it has a school on its premises. Eighteen months later, the staff of Pius XII had decided that Lynn's behavior warranted putting her in a “less restrictive setting”—one in which she would attend public school in an urban community—and had referred her to St. Christopher's. Tina had also come to the 104th Avenue group home by way of foster care and Pius XII; Simone had come directly from a foster-care family. Yolanda and Nicole had come from home. Their mothers had felt unable to control their behavior and had petitioned Family Court for assistance; the court had deemed them “persons in need of supervision” (PINS), and they had been put in care. Before Crystal could enter the foster-care system, Florence either had to be charged with neglect—neglect
can include letting a child of fourteen have a baby—or had to sign her into care voluntarily. Florence chose the latter. The specific reason stated for Crystal's placement was that her mother was homeless.

The cost of keeping a resident in a St. Christopher's group home in 1985 was about seventy dollars a day, or $25,500 a year, with most of the money going for staff salaries and for either rent or mortgage payments on the house. Every effort was made to stretch the money as far as possible. Most of the child-care workers liked to cook, and prepared breakfast and dinner. (The residents qualified for free lunches at school.) Crystal, a self-described “picky eater,” considered the food at 104th Avenue excellent and ample; there was always extra food in the refrigerator and on the pantry shelves.

The group home had a small activities fund: the residents were able to go to an occasional movie, roller rink, or amusement park. They also attended Mets games on tickets regularly donated to voluntary agencies. The staff lamented the low clothing allowance—twenty-five dollars a month, plus fifty dollars a year toward a winter coat—but was resourceful about making it go as far as possible and about using the petty-cash fund when a girl had a job interview and no pantyhose without runs. One woman used a connection in the Mayor's Voluntary Action Center, to which designers donated clothes, to obtain free name-brand sportswear. She also got someone to come to the group home to show the residents surplus models of the previous year's sneakers,
which they could buy for twenty-five dollars a pair instead of seventy-five dollars. Birthdays and graduations were not in the budget, but St. Christopher's workers made certain they were celebrated, because they well knew that the lives of group-home kids were lacking in celebration. (The money sometimes came out of the workers' pockets.)

To remain in the group home, each resident was required to attend school and was encouraged to work part time during the school year and full time during the summer, the better to prepare her for post-group-home life. Crystal had continued in eighth grade during her stay at Queensboro. At St. Christopher's, she was enrolled in Queens Village J.H.S. 109, the nearest junior high school. She wanted to graduate in June, so she said she had completed the eighth grade, and went into the middle of the ninth grade in January. By the time her school record caught up with her, she was doing well enough so that she was not put back. She had some difficulty with history and, later, with punctuality, and often got drunk with a girl she met in the neighborhood, but she was able to graduate in June.

At her graduation, Crystal wore a blue silk dress, high heels, and a corsage provided by St. Christopher's. Her graduation was attended by Lynn and Yolanda, several members of the staff of St. Christopher's, little and big Daquan, and Margaret and David Hargrove, the couple from Long Island who had become little Daquan's foster parents, and their daughter, Alice.

I
t was in the fall of 1982 that the Hargroves had made up their minds to become foster parents. Mrs. Hargrove's sister was a St. Christopher's foster mother, and the Hargroves submitted themselves to the agency's screening of prospective foster parents. They filled out a self-assessment form, provided copies of their marriage license and their latest income-tax return (in 1981, they had had a combined income of $38,627), agreed to permit the agency to make contact with their employers and to interview the people they furnished as references, and let an agency “homefinder” count and measure the bedrooms in their house—a five-bedroom Dutch Colonial in Mineola, which they had bought in 1964. The homefinder described it as “neat and well maintained inside and out” and “comfortably and appropriately decorated.” They were interviewed at length. Mr. Hargrove, one of eleven children, was born in St. Croix in 1937, and Mrs. Hargrove, one of eight, in Antigua in 1942. Both had moved to New York City at early ages. He had graduated from high school; she had dropped out after tenth grade to work, and didn't “regret not having completed her schooling.” They met on a basketball court in Queens in 1958, married a year later, and had two children. In 1982, their son was in the Coast Guard, and their daughter was attending college. The Hargroves' “motivation to foster children” was: “We both love children and we did so well with ours we would like to help
others.” Both of the Hargroves were in good health; they were Protestants but understood the state requirement that “foster parents respect the child's religion, even if different from their own”; they were willing to comply with the state and agency policy prohibiting physical punishment, and were prepared to “discipline foster children by grounding or depriving them of treats or privileges, or by talking to them.” They said they understood that they were “responsible for taking a foster child to visit with his/her natural parents and siblings, as needed,” and that “foster care is temporary, that the agency's goal is to reunite the family whenever possible.” They had requested four children between the ages of seven and twelve who didn't have too many problems. Mr. Hargrove worked as a car salesman, a job he loved, and he expressed contentment with his life: “The only thing missing is having children in the house.” Mrs. Hargrove had gone back to work once her children were in their teens. In 1982, she managed a diner from 8
A.M.
to 4
P.M.
and “didn't mind working but felt more fulfilled as a homemaker.”

The homefinder noted that neither of the Hargroves had had an easy childhood. David Hargrove and some of his younger siblings had been under the care of their older sister, and she had yelled, punished, and hit to control them. Margaret Hargrove's mother had died when Margaret was six, and she had gone to live with an aunt, who was mean and emotionally mistreated her and her brother. The homefinder's impression was that the Hargroves would do best fostering a group of up to four siblings without severe problems, either boys or girls,
ranging in age from seven to sixteen—children, essentially, in the category they had requested. “Acting out youngsters should be avoided,” the homefinder wrote in a report, dated March 30, 1983. On July 1, 1983, a fifteen-year-old boy named Raymond Long and his sisters Regina, fourteen, Rosa, thirteen, and Rawanda, nine, were placed in the Hargrove home. After their mother's death in a fire, they had gone to live with their grandmother, but had proved too much for her.

In October, 1984, the agency had again called the Hargroves, to offer them two-month-old twins who needed foster care. Margaret Hargrove had by then realized that the Long children were more than she felt like handling, and she was pleased at the prospect of having infants in the house. St. Christopher's had originally certified the Hargroves for four children; it now certified them for six. The twins were taken from the Hargroves on December 7, 1984, when the court awarded custody to their maternal grandmother. “I was so upset that my mind wasn't on what I was doing and I broke the VCR,” Mrs. Hargrove recalls. A few days later, St. Christopher's called again, with a two-month-old boy. Alice was home from college and answered the telephone. Mrs. Hargrove wasn't quite over the hurt of losing the twins, but Alice begged her to accept the baby, and she consented. When Crystal's S.S.C. worker brought little Daquan to the Hargroves' house, Alice opened the door. He handed the baby to her. “This is Daquan Drummond,” he said. “This is for you.”

For two months, Crystal Taylor considered having her
son removed from the Hargroves' home. The initial visits to see her son were to take place at a St. Christopher's office on Long Island; Mrs. Hargrove cancelled the first two visits, one of them because her car would not start on a snowy day. Margaret Hargrove took a special liking to little Daquan, and was soon bringing him to the St. Christopher's office in Queens for visits with Crystal and big Daquan. They withdrew their request to move Daquan, because they felt “comfortable” with the Hargroves. Before long, Margaret Hargrove invited Crystal to spend weekends at her home. Daquan, Sr., would often come out on Saturday or Sunday, and sometimes he and Crystal went to the movies. Crystal's social worker was enthusiastic about the visits to the Hargroves. “When Crystal is with her son, she doesn't have time to get into negative things,” she wrote in Crystal's record during the summer of 1985. Crystal, however, took pleasure in negative things—primarily in returning to the 104th Avenue group home “smashed.” When Mrs. Hargrove said she was eager to have Crystal placed in her home, along with little Daquan, Crystal declined, telling her, “You is terrific for my son, but you is too strict for me.”

C
rystal started tenth grade in the fall of 1985. Because the high school closest to the group home had a poor reputation and more than its fair share of violence, St. Christopher's was able to get Crystal accepted by Flushing High School
as an out-of-zone student. Flushing High was well regarded academically and had a racially and ethnically diverse student body of about five hundred per grade. When Crystal's social worker escorted her to school the first day, Crystal expressed apprehension about attending Flushing until she spotted some boys she considered good-looking standing in front of the school building. “I think you're going to like this school after all,” the social worker said.

She didn't. It was a two-bus ride to the school, the courses were challenging, and her study habits were poor. On January 11, 1986, Crystal Taylor's sixteenth birthday (shortly before she was to flunk many of her first-semester courses at Flushing), Daquan Jefferson put an engagement ring on her finger. The ring had a round fraction-of-a-carat stone in the center of a yellow-gold band, and two smaller diamonds on each side. Crystal said later that she had accompanied Daquan to a pawnshop to select it, “so's it would be satisfactory and you could see it twinkle at least a little ways off without straining your eyes or needing no magnifying glass.” The ring was a bargain: Daquan paid the pawnshop a hundred dollars for it.

Soon after her birthday-and-engagement, Crystal was arrested twice. The first time was for drugs. A New York State employment program for underachievers had helped Crystal obtain a part-time job as a cashier for a grocery store. There are many activities that Crystal prefers to working, but she had been frustrated in her efforts to find employment at fast-food shops when she was fifteen, and thought she should give work a try at
sixteen. Crystal had a Trinidadian friend who regularly treated her to marijuana. She wanted some reefer to celebrate her new job and went to her friend's place of business, a reefer house in Jamaica, Queens. Her friend and his cousin were at the house. They gave her some weed from one of two big bags they had concealed under a kitchen floorboard, and returned it to its hiding place. She rolled a joint and took two puffs. Before she could take a third, two police officers broke in, pointing guns and shouting “Hands up on the wall!” and “Freeze!” A policewoman patted Crystal down—Crystal had already dropped the joint—while a policeman searched the two men. Nothing was found on any of them, so the police began looking under a couch, ripped up the couch, and knocked holes in the walls with their sticks. More policemen arrived and looked harder: they pulled up the kitchen floorboard, and discovered the hidden bags of marijuana. The police suspected Crystal of being the supplier; they had had the house under surveillance when she strolled in. Asked her age, Crystal said sixteen. “Well, well, well, you just made it to go through the system,” the policewoman told her. (As a minor of fifteen, who had no marijuana in her possession, she would likely have been released.) She was taken to a precinct in Jamaica to be booked. She requested the one phone call to which she was legally entitled, and was told she could call after she had been photographed and fingerprinted. Once she was fingerprinted, she was told that she was supposed to have used the phone prior to the fingerprinting, and was locked up for the night. She didn't appreciate being “suckered
out” of her call. The police telephoned the group home. A child-care worker who had known Crystal since her first month at 104th Avenue drove over the following morning to take her home. She shook her head, and reminded Crystal that she had told her to stop smoking reefer countless times, and to stop hanging out with the wrong people in the wrong places. She said that she was sorry Crystal refused to use better judgment, that there could have been a shoot-out, and that, luckily, this would teach her a lesson.