Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (16 page)

Natasha excelled in school. The Dunbars ordered Dr. Seuss books for her from a children's book club, bought her dictionaries, a bookcase, and a blackboard, and had the neighborhood candy store reserve a copy of a children's newspaper for her. From the bottom of the staircase they could hear Natasha in her bedroom teaching her dolls to read. Mrs. Dunbar was faithful about taking Natasha (and, later, Carlos and Matthew) to the C.W.A. office in Queens, and occasionally to the Brooklyn office to see Florence along with her other children. Once Florence had progressed enough at Odyssey House to be able to travel alone, they invited her to their home. “I never had no parents of foster kids come to the house except Florence, because I liked her,” Mrs. Dunbar says. “When she said she would come, she would come. You set the table, she would sit and eat and not hurry. She stood next to our piano and sang. She had people who had cared for her.” The Dunbars had no idea that Florence had been in foster care.

W
hen Carlos and Matthew moved to the Dunbars', it was apparent that Natasha scarcely remembered them and wasn't happy to have them join her. “They came from a place with rough boys,” Mrs. Dunbar says. The Dunbars gave Carlos and Matthew their downstairs bedroom (“The girls were upstairs
with us, and boys and girls don't mix under our roof”) and had no immediate problems with them. They were friendly, they did the yard work and other assigned chores, they were respectful. Although Matthew struck them as more intelligent, they preferred Carlos. “Carlos was neat,” Mrs. Dunbar says. “Matthew had some nasty habits. He wouldn't take a bath unless you dropped him into the tub.” Carlos was also honest, but Matthew lied and began to steal. “You couldn't lay nothing down because if you did, Matthew was gone with it,” Mrs. Dunbar says. “He took my change purse out of my bowling bag and stuffed it into his eyeglass case. I found it when he put his eyeglass case down on the dresser and I could see it looked puffed up.”

Early in November of 1989, the Dunbars were startled to learn that Carlos had been playing hooky. They were told that he had missed fifteen days of school in September and five days in October. They called Florence and suggested that she go to the school and talk to the principal. “Instead of me getting upset and fussing with my son I just politely went to the school Thursday morning to talk with the principal, the dean, and the guidance counselor,” Florence wrote in a self-evaluation note. Like Mrs. Dunbar, who went to the school several times herself, Florence “couldn't understand how a child was able to stay out of school for fifteen days and no one saying anything. The only reason the foster mother was notified was because when my son played hooky in Oct. one of the teachers saw him.”

At the end of November, the Dunbars had another shock. Carlos came home one evening with no clothes on under
his coat. He told the Dunbars that he had gone to another boy's house with some friends, while the boy's mother was at work. The other boys had made him undress—he and his friends had taken their clothes off before at such gatherings. Carlos got angry and ran out of the house. He came home trembling with cold. Mr. Dunbar took him to the police precinct and filed a complaint. All the boys involved were summoned to Family Court, but nothing came of the inquiry. The Dunbars decided that Carlos would have to go back to Children's Village. He was readmitted there on January 30, 1990.

Matthew's sneakiness and stealing increased after Carlos left, and in the spring the Dunbars told their caseworker they could no longer keep him. Their C.W.A. worker stalled. In August, Mrs. Dunbar suffered a severe stroke. Mr. Dunbar couldn't take care of foster children and his wife, who would require several months in the hospital. He called his caseworker's office and explained his predicament, and was told to go home and pack Matthew's things. On September 12, 1990, Matthew Drummond returned to Children's Village. To the Dunbars' regret, Natasha had to leave them for another foster home in Queens.

T
hat summer, Florence seemed to think it was time for her children to stop playing musical foster homes and for her to take the final steps to get them home. What she needed most
was a job. Odyssey House Level Ill's are eligible for job training (if they need it) and are permitted to work outside the program. Florence felt good when she was sent to the New York State Office of Vocational Rehabilitation for evaluation in May, 1989. A month later, she was sent from O.V.R. to a business school run by the Federation Employment and Guidance Service, or FEGS, an organization sponsored by the United Jewish Appeal Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.

Florence had excelled at clerical work and, at FEGS, was pleased that tests showed she hadn't lost her aptitude for typing, filing, reading, or math. By the time she reached Level IV, in July of 1989, she was in school all day brushing up on a few rusty skills. In October, she officially completed school. Her job-placement counsellor at FEGS began to send her out on job interviews. There were numerous applicants for each secretarial position, and Florence wasn't hired. She acknowledged that many people had more experience—and more recent experience—than she did.

In late December, shortly after reaching the “reëntry” phase of the Odyssey House program, she was overjoyed to be offered a job as a secretary at an office-supply company, at a salary of sixteen thousand dollars a year. January 2, 1990, was her first day of work. “It was exactly fourteen years since I'd been laid off from my last job and lost all those years to drugs,” she says. “It felt great to be drug-free and working.”

In the summer of 1989, Florence had met a handsome twenty-four-year-old man named Burton who was at FEGS
studying major-appliance repair. Florence and Burton were friends for six months and then became lovers. Level IV's have the privilege of dating anyone who isn't in the program. She spoke in group therapy of marrying him. Her therapist at the time thought that this was one of Florence's fantasies. Crystal hoped that the therapist was right. Once, when Burton was supposed to meet Florence and Crystal at a subway station, he showed up two and a half hours late. That December, Burton invited Florence to spend Christmas with his mother. At the last minute, he said there had been a death in the family, and the plans were cancelled.

Many Odyssey House residents who are ready to graduate are unable to find housing, since affordable housing is in woefully short supply in the city. Graduates have been permitted to stay on a month or two past their projected departure dates, because Odyssey House does not discharge its graduates to the street. It encourages some residents to seek housing in New Jersey and other outlying areas or to pool their resources and live with two or three other graduates. Florence is a city person; for her Ward's Island was “like being out in the woods,” and she has an aversion to the suburbs. The only person she fancied living with, Burton, had told her of an available apartment in Staten Island near the one he shared with his mother. He had proposed moving in with her, so she gave Odyssey House a departure date—March, 1990. The apartment fell through. She took a single room with a shared bath and no kitchen at 104th Street and Central Park West, and left Odyssey House in early
May. She didn't go to her graduation ceremony on May 19th. Her diploma is still waiting to be picked up at Odyssey House's executive offices, on lower Broadway. Florence says she took the room in haste to get out of the program—she felt that it had nothing else to offer her. She was also five months pregnant with Burton's child. Florence wasn't showing much (“I was so big anyway”), but she didn't want her favorite therapist at Odyssey House to know she was pregnant.

She did tell Crystal about her condition. Crystal was even more exasperated with Florence for being pregnant in 1990 than she had been when she learned of Michael's birth, four years earlier. “Now this lady supposed to be finally straightened out, but she still got six children in foster care spreaded all over the map and she expecting a seventh,” she commented disapprovingly to one of her social workers. “Where her head was at and what that young punk be thinking of?”

T
he original eighteen-month neglect petition, which was dated December, 1985, and stated that Florence had neglected Carlos, Matthew, Natasha, and James Drummond, had expired in June, 1987. It was then renewed twice, with Michael added to the petition. A C.W.A. worker asked Florence to sign her children into foster care voluntarily on June 2, 1989. Florence wasn't yet in a position to take her children out of foster care, but she was working toward that goal: she was doing well
in her Odyssey House program and was visiting the children regularly. The purpose of having Florence accede voluntarily was to ease the way for her to get her children back.

The judges who serve on the Foster Care Review section of New York State's Family Court in New York City review cases for the city's five boroughs. On October 4, 1989, a 358A hearing—the initial review of a voluntary-placement agreement—was held in Family Court. A 358A hearing has several objectives, among them to certify that the voluntary-placement agreement was not signed under coercion, and to set a date for the next review of the case: the date set on October 4th was December 4th. At the 358A hearing, an organization called CASA—Court Appointed Special Advocates—was assigned to monitor the case of Florence and her five younger children; CASA accepts only cases in which children were placed voluntarily in care. A Foster Care Review judge may hear sixty or more cases each day. CASA's staff and volunteers assist an overwhelmed court to facilitate the exit of children from foster care by supplying judges with relevant information, and assist parents and children adrift in the child-welfare bureaucracy in the same way, with information that their overwhelmed caseworkers often do not have.

Deborah, the CASA volunteer assigned to Florence in October, 1989, got in touch with her at Odyssey House just as she started to search for a job. Two months later, when Florence had begun working, Deborah cited housing as the main obstacle preventing Florence from regaining custody of her children. In
1987, the caseworker who helped Florence apply to Odyssey House had also helped her apply to the New York City Housing Authority for public housing and for a Section 8 housing subsidy. (Section 8 is a federal program that provides low-income people with vouchers to pay part of the cost of private housing they could not otherwise afford.)

By early 1990, neither apartment nor vouchers had materialized, and Florence's caseworker was no longer with C.W.A. The agency had, however, created a new housing-subsidy program, to reunite parents with children in foster care when the foster-care worker determined that a lack of adequate housing was the primary factor preventing discharge. The maximum amount of assistance an eligible family could receive was three hundred dollars a month for as long as three years. Deborah called Florence's latest C.W.A. caseworker to have her apply for the subsidy for Florence, but the caseworker knew nothing about it and asked Deborah to send her the information.

In June, 1990, Deborah learned that Florence had been living since May in the room on Central Park West, for which she was paying six hundred and eighty dollars a month. She also learned, later that month, because Florence had initially confided in her C.W.A. caseworker, that Florence had been pregnant and had just lost the baby, at six and a half months. In July, Florence admitted to Deborah that she was in bad financial shape. She had been out for three weeks as a consequence of the miscarriage and had lost two weeks' pay, because new employees received only one week of sick leave.

Deborah went on vacation in August, 1990. She returned in September to discover that Florence had yet another C.W.A. caseworker and that nothing had been done to assist her in finding housing. When CASA (the New York City branch is one of four hundred CASA programs nationwide) is assigned a case and believes that the client needs counsel, it seeks legal help. Deborah had already called a lawyer in the civil division of Legal Aid to ask if Florence met the criteria for him to assist her. Another tenant in the building on Central Park West had told Florence that, at six hundred and eighty dollars a month, she was being overcharged for her room. The other tenant was paying less than a hundred and fifty dollars a month for a similar room. Legal Aid was limited in what it could do for Florence. Every child in foster care in New York State has a law guardian, and Legal Aid's juvenile division represents ninety-nine percent of these children, including Florence's. To represent their mother would be a conflict of interest. Legal Aid suggested that Florence confront her landlord about her rent, and referred her to Morningside Heights Legal Services, a small clinical program run by Columbia University Law School. In September of 1990, two second-year Columbia law students and a social-work student were assigned to Florence to help her obtain financial assistance for an apartment.

On October 9th, fortified by this legal support, Florence confronted her landlord over her excessive rent and explained her need for a decent-sized apartment for herself and the children. She told him she had gone to a lawyer. The landlord
said that he couldn't read her mind about requiring larger quarters and gave her twenty dollars for carfare to look at a newly rehabilitated four-room apartment in a building he owned in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. It rented for seven hundred dollars a month.

Florence took a one-year lease for the apartment to Morningside Heights Legal Services. The students knew that Florence was also eligible for a “one shot” public-assistance grant. They told her what documentation she would need, got her an emergency appointment at a public-assistance Income Maintenance Center, and spent a whole day sitting there with her. Without the grant, Florence, with no savings, could not have afforded the apartment. Within twenty-four hours, Florence received a check for a month's security deposit and her first month's rent.