Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair Read Online Free PDF Page A

second from Wednesday afternoon to Saturday morning, a third from then until Monday morning. This arrangement, which requires two full-time workers and one part-time worker, each of them paid hourly rates during the day and evening and a flat rate for sleeping, is the least expensive way of maintaining round-the-clock coverage. The child-care worker on duty sleeps in the fourth bedroom, which doubles as an office.
    The worker who welcomed Crystal to the house immediately began to explain its regulations. No men were permitted in the bedrooms, no alcohol or drugs anywhere. Each resident was responsible for keeping her half of the bedroom tidy, for doing her laundry (there was a washer and a dryer on the premises), and for doing a rotating list of chores—cleaningthe living room/dining room, the bathrooms, the kitchen, and the storage-and-laundry-room area, and taking out the garbage. A resident was given carfare, an allowance, and an opportunity to earn an extra ten dollars when it came her turn to do one of the tough jobs, like defrosting the refrigerator or scouring the stove. There were curfews—9 P.M. on week nights, and midnight or 1 A.M. on weekends, depending on age and conduct. The residents were entitled to a limited number of outgoing local phone calls a day. They were required to attend an hour-long group meeting every Tuesday evening with a psychologist, and every second Tuesday each met individually with the psychologist for twenty or thirty minutes. At Queensboro, Crystal had been given a diagnosis of “Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Disturbance of Conduct and Emotions”—a catchall diagnosis given to most youngsters seen briefly in such settings. The social worker, with whom each resident had to meet twice a month, also came to the house on Tuesdays.
    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.”
    â€œDo 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 workerprepared 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