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

neglect—neglectcan include letting a child of fourteen have a baby—or had to sign her into care voluntarily. Florence chose the latter. The specific reason stated for Crystal’s placement was that her mother was homeless.
    The cost of keeping a resident in a St. Christopher’s group home in 1985 was about seventy dollars a day, or $25,500 a year, with most of the money going for staff salaries and for either rent or mortgage payments on the house. Every effort was made to stretch the money as far as possible. Most of the child-care workers liked to cook, and prepared breakfast and dinner. (The residents qualified for free lunches at school.) Crystal, a self-described “picky eater,” considered the food at 104th Avenue excellent and ample; there was always extra food in the refrigerator and on the pantry shelves.
    The group home had a small activities fund: the residents were able to go to an occasional movie, roller rink, or amusement park. They also attended Mets games on tickets regularly donated to voluntary agencies. The staff lamented the low clothing allowance—twenty-five dollars a month, plus fifty dollars a year toward a winter coat—but was resourceful about making it go as far as possible and about using the petty-cash fund when a girl had a job interview and no pantyhose without runs. One woman used a connection in the Mayor’s Voluntary Action Center, to which designers donated clothes, to obtain free name-brand sportswear. She also got someone to come to the group home to show the residents surplus models of the previous year’s sneakers,which they could buy for twenty-five dollars a pair instead of seventy-five dollars. Birthdays and graduations were not in the budget, but St. Christopher’s workers made certain they were celebrated, because they well knew that the lives of group-home kids were lacking in celebration. (The money sometimes came out of the workers’ pockets.)
    To remain in the group home, each resident was required to attend school and was encouraged to work part time during the school year and full time during the summer, the better to prepare her for post-group-home life. Crystal had continued in eighth grade during her stay at Queensboro. At St. Christopher’s, she was enrolled in Queens Village J.H.S. 109, the nearest junior high school. She wanted to graduate in June, so she said she had completed the eighth grade, and went into the middle of the ninth grade in January. By the time her school record caught up with her, she was doing well enough so that she was not put back. She had some difficulty with history and, later, with punctuality, and often got drunk with a girl she met in the neighborhood, but she was able to graduate in June.
    At her graduation, Crystal wore a blue silk dress, high heels, and a corsage provided by St. Christopher’s. Her graduation was attended by Lynn and Yolanda, several members of the staff of St. Christopher’s, little and big Daquan, and Margaret and David Hargrove, the couple from Long Island who had become little Daquan’s foster parents, and their daughter, Alice.
    I t was in the fall of 1982 that the Hargroves had made up their minds to become foster parents. Mrs. Hargrove’s sister was a St. Christopher’s foster mother, and the Hargroves submitted themselves to the agency’s screening of prospective foster parents. They filled out a self-assessment form, provided copies of their marriage license and their latest income-tax return (in 1981, they had had a combined income of $38,627), agreed to permit the agency to make contact with their employers and to interview the people they furnished as references, and let an agency “homefinder” count and measure the bedrooms in their house—a five-bedroom Dutch Colonial in Mineola, which they had bought in 1964. The homefinder described it as “neat and well maintained inside and out” and “comfortably and