Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (15 page)

Florence is a guarded person. When she is questioned about her life, she finds it easiest to say “I don't remember,” although she has an excellent selective memory. She tends to dismiss many questions with “I don't know” when she knows the answer but does not like it. In therapy groups, Florence was a good listener but a poor talker. Although her primary reason for entering Odyssey House was to get her children out of foster care as quickly as possible, it was many months before she was able to open up to others and deal with her feelings about herself, her family, and other people who had played a significant part in her past. Most Odyssey House residents who don't fall by the wayside during the first three months graduate from Odyssey House after a stay of between eighteen and twenty-four months. It took Florence two and a half years to graduate.

It became apparent early on that the main issue troubling Florence was the anger she still felt toward her mother for letting her be raised in foster care, and the anger and guilt she felt toward herself for having followed in her mother's footsteps. She was required to submit weekly self-evaluation notes
to her therapist at every level. In a note in May, 1988, in regard to Lavinia, she wrote, “I'm angry at the way she abuse me and now just like she did me I did to my children with the drugs.” In mid-July, she wrote that she hoped “to see mother, sister, brothers soon and to let her know I still love her but was hurt by fact I had to be raised in foster home,” and added, “I also want to let her know how it played a big part in me using drugs and how it is affecting my children now.”

Florence reached Level I in February of 1988, and Level II in April. All program residents have jobs. Her Level I job was in the laundry. The staff believed she was isolating herself there; she was described until graduation as someone not given to socializing. Her Level II job was in the Admissions Department, which was in two four-story attached brownstones on East Sixth Street that housed the Odyssey House adolescent program. She remained on East Sixth Street, a site she preferred, until she completed the program.

Florence had not been permitted to bring her telephone-and-address book to Odyssey House. In the summer of 1988 she no longer had her mother's or her brothers' addresses or phone numbers, but she knew how to find her mother when she was ready to do so. On a Sunday in late August, together with a peer and an escort, Florence went up to the fundamentalist church in Harlem. She had no trouble finding her mother at the front of the church, where she always sat and sometimes stood, moving rhythmically to the music, punctuating the preachers' sermons with “Amen”s, and putting bills in the collection
plates, which were usually passed five times during the Sunday service.

A week later, Lavinia, Clifford, Samuel, and Cynthia came to visit Florence on East Sixth Street. Florence's Level II therapist had told her just to discuss her uncles, aunts, nieces, and cousins, but Florence lost no time in confronting her mother about the past, and told her that on the next visit she wanted to see her alone. When Florence reproached Lavinia for letting her be raised in other people's houses, Lavinia told her that she hadn't chosen to put Florence in foster care and that she had sent Clifford and Samuel away because she couldn't bear raising them alone, without Florence. After four or five visits in the summer of 1988, Lavinia Wilson stopped visiting Odyssey House: Florence believes that Lavinia didn't care for her lines of inquiry. Florence reached Level III in November of 1988.

Lavinia's rejection continued to haunt her, and by April of 1989 Florence's commitment to therapy and her quest for the truth had deepened. One Sunday in April, she went up to Lavinia's church again. “My mother didn't greet me with open arms which I kind of knew she wouldn't,” Florence wrote in a self-evaluation note. “And just by her actions toward me I now realize that she is not going to be the mother I want her to be. I felt like an outcast, someone she just had and that's it. I don't know why it meant so much to me to have my mother's love and to be accepted by her. Now … I know it's never going to happen.”

Florence confronted Lavinia about her refusal to take
her in even for a night after she left the Pattens'. Lavinia said the agency had never asked her to do that. Florence was sure she was lying, because her caseworker at Sheltering Arms had told her what really happened on July 29th and August 2nd of 1968.

When Lavinia came to see Florence at Odyssey House in 1988, Florence had asked her to bring her some homemade chicken and some macaroni salad. Instead, Lavinia brought her Kentucky Fried Chicken she had bought. “I asked her why,” Clifford says. “I asked her, ‘Don't you love Florence? Isn't she your daughter?' She changed the subject real quick.”

Lavinia maintains that the judge who removed Florence from her care wanted her raised in a home with a mother and a father. There is no evidence in Florence's record at Sheltering Arms that this is true, but Lavinia often says, “Look how much better the two I raised are than the one that was raised with a father and mother.”

In 1988, Lavinia informed Florence and Clifford of Sylvester Drummond's death. Clifford concluded that she had known his father's whereabouts all along and had simply chosen not to reveal them. In 1989, Florence no longer remembered living in Memphis, but in 1961 she had told a caseworker at Sheltering Arms that she called her grandmother Grandma, that there were many people in her grandma's house, and that it was a very happy home. She said she had enjoyed eating a rice dish called mulattos, that she had entered kindergarten in the South, and that her father, Mr. Drummond—who was called Syl by others but Daddy by her—used to take her out while she was
on the farm. In 1961, Lavinia Wilson also told the caseworker that when Florence lived on the farm she lived with her father, and that Sylvester Drummond was Lavinia's stepsister's husband. It was the worker's impression that Clifford and Florence were born while he was married to the stepsister. As a caseworker had noted on another occasion, Miss Wilson presents herself in the manner “of a child who holds a very big secret.”

Samuel Wilson has never seen his father and knows nothing about him except his name. “You just don't want me to have a father,” Samuel once said to Lavinia, in anger. His mother's answer was “I don't want anything less than going to church.” Cynthia Wilson saw her father every now and then until she was nine, when she and Lavinia moved to Astoria. She hasn't seen him since. “I thank God that my children have stopped asking me about their fathers,” Lavinia Wilson says. “I like being the mother
and
the father. All men are dogs.”

I
n therapy at Odyssey House, Florence had to resolve another substantive issue in her life—the relationships with the three fathers of her children. She readily acknowledged that two of the relationships were not good. Wesley Taylor, the father of Crystal, Carlos, and Matthew, was her Pied Piper to drugs. “He didn't make me start using, but when I wanted to get off drugs he was the one pushing me further and further on drugs,” she wrote. “Now he is strung out real bad.” She had next to nothing
to say about Leonard, Natasha's father. In the spring of 1982, when she was thirty-one, she had caught the twenty-one-year-old Leonard in Crystal's bedroom one day upon returning home unexpectedly. She was furious. At the same time that she believed Leonard was sexually involved with Crystal, who was then twelve, Florence was pregnant with Leonard's child; she felt betrayed by both Leonard and Crystal.

She felt differently about Clarence, the father of James and Michael. During the February after she came to Ward's Island, she said she missed getting her annual Valentine's Day card from him. That May, she reminisced that “this time last year he brought me a whole outfit for Mother's Day and I had dinner.” Florence came to regret her treatment of Clarence, with whom she believed she had had a good relationship but one she had exploited. “I stole from him, lied to him, I did whatever it took just for drugs,” she wrote. “The more he gave the more I wasn't satisfy.” At first, Florence wondered if the feelings she and Clarence had formerly had for each other were still there. She subsequently said she learned in group that Clarence, whom she had considered “a father figure” (Clarence is twenty-eight years older than Florence), was nothing but “an enabler” for her drug habit. That wasn't the type of relationship she wanted with a man when she left the program.

Florence admitted in therapy at Odyssey House that she had been a “very sick mother”—the same words she used there to describe Lavinia. She resolved to make up for the years her children had spent in foster care as a consequence of her
neglect, and for her failure to visit them after they were placed. “I knew the minimum I had to do to prevent the kids from being permanently taken away and being put out for adoption,” she says. “And I did just the minimum.”

From the time Florence started Pre-Treatment on Ward's Island, her first Odyssey House counsellor had agreed that she could continue to go to Children's Village for weekly family-therapy sessions with Carlos and Matthew. Crystal saw Florence every now and then, depending on her school or work schedule and the amount of time she was devoting to her boyfriends. Florence has never confronted her about Leonard, and though they have their ups and downs, Crystal and Florence remain fond of each other.

Florence was more concerned about the three younger children, especially the two boys—James, who had gone into foster care at the age of one, and Michael, who had gone into care directly from the hospital. “My last two sons I never even saw them grow up, or start walking or even cutting their first teeths,” she wrote in a self-evaluation note in May, 1988.

Before foster parents are certified, they must agree to let birth parents see the children in their care regularly—usually once a week. The Child Welfare Administration's caseworkers for the children are supposed to arrange these visits. In the case of Florence's children, visits took place either in the Brooklyn office (Michael's foster mother, Geraldine Kent, lived in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn) or in the Queens office (Natasha's foster parents, Grace and Herbert Dunbar, lived in Springfield
Gardens, Queens). Although James had been placed in the Bronx in 1986, his case was never transferred there from Brooklyn, so visits with him were also supposed to take place in Brooklyn but seldom did, because his foster mother found the long subway trip difficult. Toward the end of 1989, Florence prevailed upon C.W.A. to transfer James to a family in the Bronx that was amenable to bringing him on visits.

The children's C.W.A. workers changed rapidly. Whenever a worker left and a new one was assigned, weeks often passed before a visiting schedule was again established, despite the willingness of the foster parents to adhere to the visiting rules. Florence was troubled that Michael didn't recognize her and that neither of the younger boys was warm to her at first, although she acknowledged that she had no one to blame for the situation but herself.

W
hen Carlos first came to Children's Village, in July, 1986, he had often been described as sneaky, moody, and depressed. By January of 1988, he had made significant progress. His social workers noted that he regressed only when Florence failed to keep appointments. He occasionally lied or was manipulative, but he was one of the most popular boys in his cottage. Matthew, although he was only ten months younger than Carlos, was babyish: he wet his bed, had frequent temper tantrums, and was afraid of the dark. Carlos, who tended to
protect Matthew, was more accessible: he talked openly about his emotions, and he acknowledged Florence's drug addiction. Matthew was closemouthed about his problems and his mother's, and most reluctant to talk to adults. It was difficult for him to verbalize his feelings, but, unlike Carlos, who had been found to be learning-disabled and was behind grade level, Matthew was able to go to a public school in Dobbs Ferry and was never left back.

By early 1988, the behavior of both boys had improved so much since their arrival at Children's Village that the agency was prepared to discharge them. Carlos and Matthew realized that Florence's drug rehabilitation might take a long time or might not work out. They said they wanted to live with their sister Natasha's foster parents, Grace and Herbert Dunbar, who had offered them a home. It took many months for C.W.A. to approve the transfer—the agency tends to act slowly—but on February 28, 1989, Carlos and Matthew moved to the Dunbars'.

The Dunbars were then in their early sixties, and had been foster parents for twenty years. Mr. Dunbar, who worked for the Department of Corrections, is an old-fashioned man who prides himself on the fact that his wife has never had to work outside the house. They had raised Mrs. Dunbar's two sons, who are now in their forties, and a daughter. The Dunbars were eager to adopt one child who had been placed with them, but he was given to his grandmother—a placement that Mr. Dunbar did not approve of, because the woman lived in an
untidy three-room apartment and “already had three other grands.” Mr. Dunbar had been abandoned by his parents and placed in an orphanage at the age of five. “I was foster,” he says. “I really missed a mother and a father, and I miss that to this day. Several people were good to me when I was coming up. I see foster care as a way of helping my people.”

In 1969, four sisters, ranging in age from three to nine, came to the Dunbars from another foster home. In 1980, after the death of Mrs. Dunbar's daughter, the couple took in their eight-year-old granddaughter. She is now a college student. Three of the four sisters stayed for a number of years (the other didn't behave, and moved out), and Mrs. Dunbar is still in contact with them. “I get my cards on Mother's Day, they send, they bring, they come,” she says.

When Natasha was transferred to the Dunbars' from Mrs. Peoples' home in Crown Heights, in 1986, Mrs. Dunbar unpacked her clothes in the back yard and shook them out, a procedure she followed with all new foster children. “I didn't have roaches and I didn't want roaches,” she says. “Natasha had been in a typical foster home. Her clothes were ridiculous. The whites hadn't been washed with the whites, and the colors with the colors, so everything had run in together. She was a typical toddler. I couldn't keep a fan on the floor or flowers in a vase without her upsetting them, but toddlers are always touching and feeling—that's how they learn. It was up to me to see that her fingers didn't get tied up in a fan or her hands burned on the stove. That's a parent's job. Natasha wasn't well behaved
when we got her, but she was a bright little girl and she wasn't no real trouble, and soon she was very good.”