Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair (2 page)

I
t had never occurred to Crystal that little Daquan—let alone Crystal herself—might end up in New York City's foster-care system. She had every intention of returning to the Jeffersons' apartment after her son's birth. If little Daquan hadn't been premature, she and Daquan would already have bought a portable crib, baby clothes, and blankets—“all that nice stuff for babies.” In part because of her youth (it was hospital policy to interview all mothers below the age of eighteen), and in part because of her son's condition (he was considered a high-risk baby), a hospital social worker came to her room on Monday, October 8th. She
asked Crystal if she would be returning to her mother's residence, at 1311 Findlay Avenue—the address from which Crystal had been admitted, and the one recorded on her son's birth certificate. When Crystal told the social worker that her mother was a substance abuser, who didn't have an apartment of her own, and that she had been living with her baby's father and his family, the social worker called the Office of Special Services for Children, a section of New York City's Human Resources Administration. S.S.C. assigned her and the baby a caseworker to investigate the situation.

After listening to Crystal, the caseworker (“He was a handsome black man,” Crystal recalled later) informed her that she and her son couldn't return to the Jeffersons'. Crystal said she had readily consented to sexual relations with Daquan and regarded the Jeffersons as family. She called Florence “Mommy” and Dolores Jefferson “Ma.” The caseworker said that he believed her but that his beliefs weren't relevant to her predicament. He explained that legally Crystal was still a child and therefore was too young to consent to sex. Daquan was technically guilty of statutory rape, and might be prosecuted; his much greater age would look bad to a judge. S.S.C. was apt to take the position that Crystal had somehow been coerced into living with Daquan and his family and that she and the baby could not be allowed to live with them. In the eyes of the authorities at the time, paternal grandparents were not the equal of maternal grandparents: the baby's father's family had no legal responsibility for Crystal or her infant. S.S.C.
would
discharge Crystal and
little Daquan to her mother if Florence proved to be a suitable woman living in a suitable place.

The hospital put in a request for a visiting nurse to evaluate the apartment at 1311 Findlay Avenue. It was a filthy, overcrowded, underheated one-bedroom apartment rented by Florence's cousin Hazel, who shared it with her daughter, her latest man, and with Florence and the four children to whom Florence had given birth after Crystal. Hazel was also a substance abuser. Small-time drug dealers were in and out of the apartment storing and rebagging dope. Florence's youngest child, a boy born in February of 1984, at Bronx-Lebanon, had been a full-term baby, and Florence was in her thirties, so the hospital hadn't looked into her living arrangements then. Under the circumstances, S.S.C. would not permit a fourteen-year-old child and that child's child to live in such conditions. Squalor hadn't appealed to Crystal, either (“so many people sleeping in one room where everyone used to come trampeding”), nor had Hazel's two-facedness (“She smiled up in Mommy's face but when she was asleep or out she talked against her and hit up on my brothers like she did on her daughter”). Crystal had therefore packed some of her clothes in a plastic bag and had moved to the Jeffersons' a year earlier. She had returned to Findlay Avenue periodically. When Crystal was five months pregnant, Florence had called her to report that Hazel's daughter and one of her friends were wearing some clothes Crystal had left behind, and that Hazel had threatened Florence about meddling. Crystal had gone back and hit Hazel over the head with a rotten
two-by-four to protect her mother. (“She ain't really got injured,” Crystal recalls.)

Little Daquan would have to remain at Bronx-Lebanon until he weighed five pounds and was in good medical condition. Crystal was resilient and felt fine. Florence visited her every day and brought her marijuana. “She was bored,” Florence says. “She had nothing further to do. Smoking weed made Crystal pleasantly high.” Bronx-Lebanon needed Crystal's bed. She was discharged from the hospital on October 11th, four days after her admission, and was taken in a cab by the S.S.C. caseworker to the Queensboro Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which operated a diagnostic center where children in crisis were brought for evaluation. The caseworker said he would try to help Florence find an apartment. Until then, he would have to put Crystal in temporary care, and Queensboro had a bed available. Crystal cried on the way there and cried herself to sleep that night. As far as she was concerned, the diagnostic center, situated in a part of the borough of Queens given over to one- and two-family houses with front and back yards, was in the country. “I wasn't used to dirt ground or little buildings and trees,” she recalls. “I was used to the city—to Harlem and the South Bronx—and to concrete and projects and high rises and stores within walking distance.”

Crystal had arrived at Queensboro on a Thursday and wasn't permitted to leave the premises the first weekend. For two days, she refused to eat and kept crying. “The staffs told me
to make friends with the other kids, but I was homesick,” she says. “I didn't want to make friends with no strangers, I didn't want to eat they food, I didn't want to do
nothing
. I told them I had always gone to bed willingly with Daquan and I would go to bed with him willingly today. I thought my life that was just started was being ended. One nice lady staff said things wasn't as bad as they seemed, that my mother would get herself together and I'd go live with her, but for now I had to live there and they were just trying to help me. She knew that when you get hungry enough you eat. That's what happened. When I came to Queensboro, I was still wearing my maternity clothes. I was soon having two plates of everything. They used no seasoning when they cooked, but I put lots of salt and pepper on my food. That stuff was good. It took me a while to get rid of my stomach and fit into my jeans.”

It took Crystal less time to make friends with the other girls there—girls lived on the center's second floor—and with the boys, who roomed on the third floor and, when an alarm on the fire escape in between was set, shimmied down to the second on knotted sheets to smoke reefer and touch the girls until a counsellor caught them. “After I got to know that place, I had fun,” Crystal says.

On subsequent weekends, Crystal was allowed to go to the Bronx, purportedly to stay with her cousin Hazel. She stayed with the Jeffersons. She saw her mother outside on Findlay Avenue and went to visit her son at Bronx-Lebanon every weekend.

C
rystal had started drinking cheap wine and using drugs before she entered her teens, when she lived on Sheridan Avenue, in a sixth-floor walkup. Her mother had often kept her out of school to babysit two of the younger children. Crystal resented being cooped up in a hot apartment while her friends were outside playing. As a child, she liked going to school (“School was the only time I had some freedom, I could run and play”). She passed every grade through sixth despite her absences and the very scant help that Florence gave her with her homework. “I could only ask Mommy once how to do the times table,” Crystal says. “If I didn't get it and asked again, she'd beat me. If I said ‘Mommy, I don't think it's fair,' I got hit again. I could never express my feelings without getting a beating.” Sometimes Crystal was hit for what she considered just cause—her two younger brothers ate slowly, and if she was hungry she took food off their plates—but usually not.

Florence frequently left the house at 9
A.M.
, saying to Crystal, “I'm going to the welfare, watch the kids, I'll be right back,” and returned at 11
P.M.
“I had to feed and change my brothers,” Crystal says. “It was as if they were my kids. Mommy cooked a big dinner on Sunday to last two days. If I hadn't watched her cook, we'd have eaten cold foods as the week went by. I seen her wash the rice and clean the chicken and if we had chicken in the refrigerator I'd fix it for me and my brothers and
leave her a plateful. Or I'd make franks and frozen French fries. We got food stamps and Mommy bought groceries with them. But we had no grownups.”

When Florence was out of money, she would send Crystal to borrow food from an elderly woman who lived alone next door. The neighbor would give Crystal the two pieces of bread or the eggs she asked for, in a friendly way, but when Crystal sat outside, on a fire escape the two apartments shared, she would hear the neighbor saying to herself, “God damn it, why don't they get they own bread?” Gradually, Crystal only pretended to seek food, simulating footsteps by tapping her feet in the hall, and letting time pass until she could return to report that the neighbor had no bread. Crystal escaped the troubles of her house in various ways. She jumped from the roof of her building to the roof of the building next door and went down a flight of stairs to visit friends who lived on the fifth floor. She looked out her living-room window at the George Washington Bridge, admiring the color orange as the sun went down and night fell, and fantasized about being on a tropical island. She locked herself in the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She played with her “doll babies” and a doll house she and Florence had made out of a box.

Crystal's worst single memory of her childhood is of a time when her father, Wesley Taylor, overdosed on heroin and almost died. Her parents and their friends were often in the kitchen; the children were told to stay in their room when the grownups were getting high. One evening when Crystal was
about ten years old, she heard her mother screaming “Wesley! Wesley! Wesley!” She came out into the hall. Wesley was foaming at the mouth, and Florence was stuffing ice down his throat and into his pants. There were needles and bloody tissues on the kitchen table. That evening, no one else was there. Florence told Crystal to go to the building next door to get a friend. Crystal obeyed, all the while crying, “I want my daddy, I want my daddy.” She remembers telling the man she was sent to summon that her father was dead and to come quick. The man tried to lift Wesley and make him walk but hadn't succeeded by the time an ambulance came. “Promise me you won't do it no more,” Crystal said to her father after he returned from the hospital. “Baby girl, I ain't going to do that no more. That was a close one for me,” he told her. The next night, after Wesley left to visit his mother, Felicia Taylor, Florence used up the rest of the heroin.

“I started growing hatred,” Crystal says. “My father almost died and here she used that stuff and was so out of it. I thought, How stupid can you be? I was scared—I didn't know what to do if she overdosed. I said ‘Mommy, you O.K.?' and she said ‘I'm O.K., you go to your room.' ”

When Crystal was twelve, she ran away from home for the first time, and during the seventh grade she started having trouble in school.

“I had this seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Reynolds, who had a bald spot,” she says. “I came in drunk one morning. He
was writing on the blackboard, and everyone was copying stuff off of it. I got up. He told me to sit down. The sun was shining on the bald spot. I went to slap the shine off of his head. I tapped him teasingly on the center of his bald spot, calling out ‘Fiddle-diddle, no hair in the middle!' He chased me around the room with a pointer. I hopped over the chairs and rolled over the desks. I slapped the paperwork off of his desk, while he shouted ‘You come back here!' and ‘You get out of my classroom!' I was rolling on the floor trying to get away from him and the pointer and toward the exit. I leaves. In the hall, I seen the principal coming and ran the other way, to the girls' bathroom. They suspended me for two days. They made me shake Mr. Reynolds' hand and promise I'd never do that again. I managed to keep a straight face.” Crystal played hooky, didn't do any homework, and didn't pass a single course that year. In the spring, she took a city-wide reading test for seventh graders: she read above grade level and was promoted.

One morning before going to the eighth grade, at Community Intermediate School 147, she smoked a bag of angel dust—phencyclidine, or PCP—that she had put in Hazel's freezer the previous night to keep it fresh. When she arrived at school, she attacked her eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Sprigg, after Mrs. Sprigg asked her a question. Crystal remembers that an assistant principal and others (“ambulance people, maybe, and cops”) held her down. The next thing she remembers is waking up in Lincoln Hospital, strapped to a bed. Daquan came to the
hospital with one of his brothers and two cousins, bought her a container of milk (“Milk brings the dust down,” Crystal says), and took her home to her mother that evening.

Crystal was still so out of it that she didn't recognize Florence. Florence, for her part, didn't believe that her daughter had been in the hospital; she thought Crystal had been with Daquan, about whom she had mixed feelings. When Crystal first met Daquan, he was a drug dealer. He gave Florence drugs, because she seemed to expect them as her due. Crystal grew weary of her mother's freeloading and told Daquan he didn't have to get Florence high in order to date her. After Daquan stopped giving Florence drugs, her attitude toward him seemed to change. Once she became pregnant, Crystal persuaded Daquan to give up dealing in drugs, by swearing that he would never see his son if he went to jail. In September of 1984, Daquan Jefferson went on welfare, and was put to work as a custodian for the New York City Board of Education. When a permanent position opened up, he got off welfare; he has held the job ever since.

After attacking Mrs. Sprigg, Crystal gave up smoking dust. She had already given up sniffing cocaine (it had caused her to black out) and dissolving “mestabs,” a pill form of mescaline, on her tongue, because “I suffers from asthma and they gave me dizzy spells.” She never tried heroin (“not after seeing what it did to Mommy”), did speed, or shot cocaine (“I'm scared of needles”). Until relatively recently, she sprinkled cocaine into
cigarettes and enjoyed smoking “coolies.” To this day, she loves smoking marijuana, particularly in the evening and on weekends. It relaxes her, gives her a good appetite, helps her go to sleep, and makes it easier for her to have sex with the men in her life with whom she doesn't enjoy having sex.