Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (7 page)

On March 1st, ten days after the abortion, Diamond Madison removed a gold-link bracelet from his arm, transferred it to Crystal's, and went to jail on Riker's Island. He had been arrested twice with large sums of money on him and no way to account for how he had come by the money honestly, and was given a six-month sentence. With time off for good behavior, he served four months. Between March and July, Crystal visited him faithfully the three days a week she was permitted to visit.
She missed only two days: she was with little Daquan on Easter weekend, and with big Daquan on Mother's Day weekend.

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lmost from the day a child is placed in foster care, plans are made to discharge the child. The original plan drawn up for Crystal by St. Christopher's was “discharge to biological mother.” When Crystal was fifteen, this was not considered a realistic goal, because of Florence's drug addiction, refusal to seek help, and enduring homelessness. Throughout 1985, monthly attempts made by Crystal's social worker to reach Florence were futile: she didn't answer letters sent to her last known address, on Findlay Avenue. The social worker knew that Crystal visited her mother in the Bronx, often in a park, and talked to her on the phone fairly regularly, but Florence preferred to keep those contacts informal. Whenever a social worker asked Florence for a phone number, Florence said that Crystal knew how to get hold of her. Cousin Hazel had no telephone, but a woman in her apartment building who babysat for Crystal's younger siblings did, and there was a telephone at the nursing home where Florence's current man, Clarence, worked as a janitor.

Crystal acknowledged that some of her meetings with her mother were frustrating, because Florence was often high or intoxicated. “My mother didn't recognize me until I got right
into her face,” she said after one Saturday visit. A child-care worker who saw Florence when she came to the group home for the first time, around Thanksgiving of 1985, remembers her as “a fat bag, unkempt, unwashed, and boisterous, who talked too much, laughed too much, and made the mistake of asking for a beer.” She also remembers that Crystal, who was fastidious and was dressed “impeccable,” seemed embarrassed by her mother's behavior and determined never to look like her or sink to that level. “And yet,” the child-care worker adds, “there was an unshakable bond between them.”

Soon after Crystal turned sixteen, Special Services for Children accepted a “change of permanency goal” proposed by St. Christopher's for Crystal: discharge to independent living. In the world of foster care, there are goals within goals within goals. For the next several years, the long-term-treatment goals for Crystal included graduating from high school, securing a full-time job, and making a home for her son. Crystal was highly goal-resistant. She appeared in no hurry to get through school. Her social worker discovered when she contacted Flushing High School in May of 1986 that Crystal had been absent thirty days and late thirty-six times since January. She had little interest in employment. She had enjoyed a summer youth job in 1987 as a hospital receptionist, but a social worker noted in March of 1988 that “the only effort Crystal made to finding a job was talking about finding a job.” And she declined St. Christopher's many attempts to interest her in a mother-child program, in which she would live in a St. Christopher's house with other
young mothers and their children, attend school (day care would be provided for the mothers during their school hours), and look after Daquan evenings and weekends, thereby acquiring the “parenting skills” that the agency felt she needed. Crystal insisted that she wasn't ready for this. It suited her to have little Daquan exactly where he was—at the Hargroves', where she could be an every-other-weekend mother, and do a minimum of Pampering, feeding, and bathing him.

“I've got no parently patience,” Crystal acknowledges. She found it arduous to take Daquan on outings. “It was hard for me to carry him in one hand and his carriage and my pocketbook in the other,” she says. “The baby was heavy, and so was the carriage.” Crystal's vision of motherhood was buying Daquan expensive toys at Christmas and leather clothes (his first Easter suit, when he was six months, was custom-made), and taking him on annual or semiannual outings to the circus or to amusement parks with big Daquan, “so's when he grows up he'll remember he went with his mommy and daddy to Sesame Place.” The status quo was also acceptable to Daquan Jefferson.

Margaret Hargrove was content as well. The Long children had not suited her. A foster parent has the right to ask an agency to remove a child on short notice. Regina Long was the first to go—“due to unresolvable disruptive behavior in the Hargrove home,” according to St. Christopher-Ottilie's records—in the fall of 1985. Her brother and two sisters were freed for adoption by the Family Court in January of 1986, but one by one they left the Hargroves—to go to another relative,
another foster parent, another agency. Rawanda was the last of the Long children to leave the Hargroves', at the end of 1987.

Before little Daquan came to the Hargroves', Margaret Hargrove had given up her job at the diner to devote herself full time to foster care. In 1985, as the Long teen-agers began to depart, she took in Frances Smart, six, and Donna Smart, seven, who were the third and fourth children of a drug-addicted mother; she would never take a chance on another teen-ager. (Her sister adopted three of Ms. Smart's children, and Margaret Hargrove adopted Frances and Donna in 1989, and subsequently had Ms. Smart's twelfth and thirteenth children in foster care.)

It was financially to Margaret Hargrove's advantage to maintain six children in residence. She receives what she calls an adequate “paycheck,” which depends on the age of the child (foster parents receive more for six-to-eleven-year-olds than for infants-to-five-year-olds and still more for children twelve or over) and on ever-changing rates. In December of 1984, when two-month-old Daquan Drummond was presented to Alice Hargrove, St. Christopher's sent Alice's mother a stipend of $242 a month for him. The current rates for foster-home care in the New York metropolitan area range from $386 to $526 per month for healthy children. For “special” children (those with moderate physical and/or mental disabilities) and “exceptional” children (those with illnesses like AIDS or other extreme physical or mental handicaps), the rates are $845 and $1,281 per month, respectively. These stipends are tax-free. Each child
also receives a clothing allowance set by the state and has his or her dental and medical care covered by Medicaid (at a cost of between three and four dollars a day). An agency's administrative costs add to the yearly sum required to keep youngsters in foster care. The Hargroves receive the same amount of money for the children they adopt, because it is state policy to subsidize adoptions of foster children with handicaps or special conditions, and those who are considered hard to place: those who have been in foster care in the same home for at least eighteen months; siblings; children who have been freed for adoption for at least six months; and minority children who are over the age of eight and white children over the age of ten.

Social workers called regularly at the Hargrove home, and, because St. Christopher's has a low turnover rate, Crystal and little Daquan had only a few social workers apiece over their years in foster care. The Hargroves' house was depicted in favorable terms: it was quiet, efficient, well run; children were playing; dinner was cooking; homework was being done. The only negative observation made was that Margaret Hargrove, who was called “very directive,” had a better relationship with her younger foster children than with her older foster children, with whom there was “underlying tension.” Little Daquan's care was exemplary. A plump, adorable child, he was the “little prince” of the family, sociable, bubbling, active—a “joyous child who makes people smile” and “receives constant love and attention from foster mother, her daughter, and three teenage foster children.” (He was subsequently doted on by Frances and
Donna Smart.) Goals were set for him, too—not just drinking from a cup but also increasing his vocabulary. He met them and might have met the second one faster if everyone else in the household hadn't anticipated his needs, leaving him with little motivation to express himself verbally. A worker who saw Crystal at the Hargroves' observed that she was extremely warm and affectionate toward her son, and that he recognized Crystal as “mommy” and “understands he has two mommies.”

After Crystal turned sixteen, and Daquan had been in foster care for more than a year, it was harder for St. Christopher's to justify keeping him in foster care with Crystal as the “discharge resource,” because her own discharge was too far off. Consequently, the agency made an attempt to discharge him. He would go to live with his biological father, because Daquan Jefferson had a job and parents who expressed a willingness to help him care for his child; it would be stipulated that Daquan retain custody only until Crystal had completed high school, had an apartment, and had a job that would enable her to support her son.

A great deal of effort was expended in 1986 and 1987 on discharging little Daquan to his father, but no discharge took place. The records do not make absolutely clear why, but they do reveal that the discharge was not what Daquan Jefferson or Crystal Taylor or Margaret Hargrove wanted. Daquan was willing to take his son, but he asked Margaret Hargrove if she would care for him during the day on weekdays once he had custody, and said he would care for the boy, with his parents,
on weekends. Margaret Hargrove at first consented to this plan, but St. Christopher's did not. Crystal opposed having her son go to live in the Bronx. She felt he was receiving better care at the Hargroves' than he would at the Jeffersons', and claimed that once Daquan had custody he would try to limit her access to her son: Daquan had remained “in love with” Crystal long after she went on to date other men. When Margaret Hargrove was threatened with the departure of little Daquan—who slept with the Hargroves in their bed, and who, alone among their foster children, was taken out of town for Alice's college graduation, and to Disney World—she told Daquan Jefferson he could no longer visit his son in her home on Saturdays and Sundays. She, too, felt that little Daquan was getting better care with her than he would get in the Bronx. In 1986, she spoke of adopting Crystal, as if that would enable her to adopt little Daquan. When big Daquan's father, Elmer Jefferson, died, in May, 1987, the discharge plan foundered. Children whose goal is to be discharged to a relative are usually kept in care for only two years. St. Christopher's went to court numerous times to request extensions of placement for little Daquan; the extensions were granted.

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s soon as Diamond Madison was released from jail, in July of 1988, the romance resumed, but, except for the sex, things were never quite the same. Crystal had taken a part-time
job as a cashier at a discount store in May, and insisted on paying for their first night back together, at the Capri. Diamond didn't immediately return to drug dealing—he knew that the cops who had arrested him twice would be watching him closely—and he had little money. Crystal didn't want him dealing drugs, and encouraged him to get a job, just as she had done four years earlier with Daquan Jefferson. Diamond got an honest job for three weeks and then quit: nine-to-five didn't suit his temperament. He eventually returned to selling drugs, but on a much smaller scale. When Crystal asked him for a suede skirt, he said she would have to wait, and bought himself sneakers instead. Her friends teased her. “Daquan would buy you anything,” they said, “and still all you want is Diamond.”

Not quite all. While Diamond was in jail, Crystal had hung out with two other drug dealers (including the one “I screwed for five minutes, first time I ever regretted that”) and had started smoking coolies and “woolas” (a mixture of reefer and crack). Diamond sold crack but didn't use it. “He was afraid of me turning out to be a crackhead,” Crystal says. “He told me to stay away from the guys I had been with while he was in jail. I said I would, but I didn't, and he beat me up outside the group home several times—1988 was my year of crack. I told Diamond about Kyle, the first guy I had intercourse with after he got out of jail, because I felt guilty. He then started fooling around with other girls, and I messed around with other guys, who could show me the good life.”

That summer, the social worker Crystal had had for
two years left St. Christopher's. Her new social worker warned her that unless she showed the court that she was making progress toward achieving her goals she would eventually lose custody of her child to Daquan. Daquan had never threatened anything of the kind, but after nearly four years in the group home Crystal was ready to get on with her life for reasons of her own. The dealers who provided her with drugs hung out on Hempstead Avenue, a few blocks from the group home, where there was a cluster of small shops—bodegas, a Chinese carryout, a video store. At first, they supplied her with complimentary crack. Soon she had to buy her own, and she decided that it wasn't a good investment: the money would be better spent on clothes. She wanted to put some distance between herself and temptation.

By 1988, the five girls who had celebrated Crystal's fifteenth birthday with her were long gone. Lynn had left at the age of eighteen, in the summer of 1985, after graduating from Satellite, because she was sick of being in foster care; she went to live with a boyfriend and had a child two years later. Tina and Simone left for similar reasons, and also had babies. Yolanda turned to crack. Nicole became a prostitute. Fifteen or twenty other girls had entered and left 104th Avenue between 1985 and 1988. A roommate of Crystal's—one of the two with whom she travelled to the movies on Forty-second Street instead of to Flushing High—had a psychotic episode, smashed a number of mirrors and windows at the group home, and wound up in a psychiatric hospital. A few girls went to live with
relatives. Two or three went to college. Some were forced to leave, because they refused to go to school. Several simply left: one day they were there, the next day they weren't. They were never seen again. The staff learned what had happened to one former resident only when they read about her in a newspaper: she had been arrested for transporting guns from the South to New York City by Greyhound bus.