Melissa was relieved to be back until she saw how much had changed while she’d been away. With two thousand dollars left on the mortgage, Elmer and Linda had sold the house in Kensington-Bailey to a single mother, African-American, who installed bars on all the doors and windows the second she moved in. Melissa’s grandparents bought a new place in a suburb of Buffalo called Alden—basically farmland, a world away from Kensington-Bailey. Lynn and Amanda had moved there with them. For Melissa, Alden was almost Dallas all over again. “It’s so boring here!” she’d moan. Her new school didn’t change her mind. Alden was more white than the schools she’d attended in Buffalo.
She was a senior, with one more year to go, when she announced she was moving out. There was a fight, but Lynn had very little leverage. Melissa was almost eighteen, and Lynn had Amanda to think about as well. Little by little, Lynn started to ease up. Lynn’s sister, Melissa’s aunt Dawn, lived in the same part of South Buffalo where Melissa wanted to move. They were close in age and becoming confidantes. Maybe Melissa could get what she wanted and the family could keep her close. Not that she ever stopped worrying. She was convinced Melissa would never finish school. “You’re not going to get a job without a degree,” Lynn said. What went unsaid was what kind of future Melissa could expect in Buffalo even if she did graduate.
Melissa surprised Lynn. She found a roommate and got a job working at a pizzeria to make her half of the rent. She re-enrolled at South Park High, the school she most likely would have attended if her family had stayed in Kensington-Bailey. After a few months of not speaking, she and Lynn started going out to dinner. Melissa seemed upbeat to Lynn, trying to get her life together. She kept in contact with Jordan, but not all the time. She seemed to be outgrowing him, or so Lynn thought. She kept little notebooks, jotting down how much it would cost to have her own apartment, how much she would have to make, how much she could save.
She graduated with A’s. Lynn came to the ceremony with Elmer, Linda, and Amanda. Lynn felt like a weight had lifted—her daughter was back on track; she would be the person Lynn knew she could be. Not long after graduating, Melissa decided she wanted to go to beauty school. She grabbed a financial aid form from Continental and filled it out. She needed Lynn to cosign the eight-thousand-dollar loan. They went to the bank together; half the debt was in Lynn’s name and half was in Melissa’s. Melissa went to school every day. If she missed a class during the week, she made it up on Saturday. She thought maybe she could own her own business someday—just like Lynn’s new boyfriend, Jeff Martina, who was opening a diner on Bailey Avenue, not far from the beauty school.
Melissa quit the pizzeria and worked a few shifts for Jeff after classes. Since she still didn’t have her driver’s license, Lynn would pick her up at the apartment she was sharing on the West Side and drive her to classes, and Jeff would drive her home at the end of her shift at the diner. Practically every day, her hairstyle changed. She even dyed it red for a time. Melissa still kept mostly to herself; Lynn never met her roommate. But Melissa and Lynn had spent enough time away that they were ready to feel comfortable with each other again. Each day in the car, Lynn would listen to Melissa make plans from the passenger seat, doodling in her notebooks, figuring out how much it would cost to open her own hair salon. She seemed scared straight—maybe, Lynn thought, after seeing how little she made at the diner and pizza place. On one of those drives, Melissa talked about watching Lynn work so hard as a single mom and how that had affected her. She said she didn’t plan on getting married or having kids until she was thirty-five. Lynn had seen enough of the inside of a nursing home, Melissa said. She didn’t want her mother to end up in one herself. “I want to take care of you and give you things you never had,” Melissa told her. “I want to walk into a store and not worry about a price tag. If I like it, I want to buy it.”
Melissa was the only white face at the Continental graduation ceremony. She was beaming. But when the time came for her to cash in on all her work, the best job she could find was at Supercuts. At the location in Williamsville, a northeast suburb of Buffalo, she had to sit at a mall for two hours every night after closing just to catch a bus home. After a year, she moved to a Supercuts in a yuppie neighborhood near the zoo. Her customers at both locations were mostly white. Melissa tried to stay diverted with dye jobs and French braids. She was losing patience.
She hooked up with Jordan again and got mad at Jeff and Lynn when they disapproved. “We hope you’re not going out with that monkey!” Jeff would shout as Melissa was on her way out the door. The race thing was a peculiar subject for all of them. Everyone in the family would toss epithets around with perverse familiarity. Even Andre, Amanda’s father, in touch from time to time with both Amanda and Melissa, went out of his way to warn her: “You’re just this little pretty white girl, and they want to use you.”
Jeff would say it a little more crassly: “You’re their trophy.”
Melissa would only smile and say, “They’re nice to me.”
In 2006 Melissa and Jordan took a trip to New York together. “Jordan’s uncle owns a recording studio,” Melissa told Lynn and Jeff. They came back a few days later, then turned around and went to New York a few weeks after that. Upon her return, she announced that she and Jordan were going to move there.
“I met this guy,” Melissa said. His name was Johnny Terry. He had offered her a job, she said, cutting hair.
Lynn tried to talk her out of it, but she’d been in this place with Melissa before and had less influence on her now. Part of Lynn felt defeated, as if everything she’d done to stop this from happening had been in vain. She felt like she had seen this moment coming all along. So her protests were perfunctory, thin. “Are you sure? It’s not as easy as you think. The rent is high. It’s so far away.”
The conversation was over before it started. “I can handle it,” Melissa said. “The guy has a place set up for me.”
SHANNAN
Someday I’ll step on their freckles
Some night I’ll straighten their curls. . .
When she was in eighth grade, Shannan Gilbert took the stage in her middle school’s production of Annie. She had hoped to play the little orphan herself—for the past six years, she had more or less been living the part, shuttling through several foster homes—and she was crestfallen when she was told she was too tall. Still, the teachers could tell that Shannan had a beautiful voice—booming and R&B-ready—not to mention a lush, round face with wide doe eyes. So they offered her the part of Miss Hannigan, the boozing, scheming head of the orphanage.
It took a little while for Shannan to see that this was the flashier role—the only truly funny grown-up character, the one part with any hint of sexuality, ideal for a teenage ham. Nerves carried Shannan through the rehearsals, but on opening night, she killed. Vamping her way through Miss Hannigan’s solo number, “Little Girls,” Shannan ranted, merrily and nastily, about how Annie and the other orphans were all that stood between her and the life of her dreams.
Little cheeks, little teeth
Everything around me is . . . little
If I wring little necks
Surely I will get an acquittal. . .
Shannan had never been in front of so many people, and the applause had a profound effect on her. One person in the audience mattered more than everyone else—a woman whose undivided attention Shannan had been fighting to capture almost her entire life. Onstage that night, as Shannan browbeat each of the little orphans into offering up fealty—one by one, saying, “I love you, Miss Hannigan!”—anyone who knew her mother, Mari, wouldn’t have found it hard to guess whom Shannan was channeling. From then on, performing would be all that she would want to do.
From on high, the village of Ellenville, New York, seems preserved in time, the steeple of a church poking up above the trees, with glimpses of what once must have been a cozy main street nestled in the foothills of the Shawangunk Ridge in the Catskills. When Mari Gilbert and her family arrived there in 1991, the vi
llage was emptying into a ghost town, down to a ShopRite, a few banks, and some dollar stores. A nearby state prison was turning Ellenville into a village of transients: Relatives of inmates would come to town, rent an apartment for a few years, then turn around and leave. Many of Shannan’s old friends from Ellenville say that half of their classmates are dead, in jail, or on drugs.
Mari had the same bright eyes as her oldest daughter, Shannan, only with long, wild blond hair and a raspy, lived-in voice. She’d grown up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the youngest of five children. Mari’s father was a brickmaker who drank hard on the weekends. Her mother was a restless woman of faith, changing churches constantly. If religion was Mari’s mother’s response to a chaotic world, Mari came up with one all her own. In her view, life was combat, and no savior would change the fact that the next fight was looming just around the corner. She never saw a point in pretending that wasn’t the case. “I can’t be plastic,” Mari often said, and she warned her daughters to be real, too, or deal with the consequences. “If you run your mouth about something, be ready,” she’d tell them with a steady glare. “You’re gonna have to fight the person, because they’re either going to be mad you told the truth or mad you lied. So watch what you say. If you can’t defend yourself, either you’re gonna get your butt kicked, or you better get ready to kick somebody’s butt.”
About two years before coming to Ellenville, Mari left her husband and moved away from her hometown to upstate New York, bringing their three daughters with her. Shannan was five, Sherre four, and Sarra three. When they were older, Mari told the girls that she’d left him because he was using heroin. Though none would see their father again, all three girls had inherited his caramel complexion. After she left, Mari and the girls stayed briefly with Mari’s mother, who had left her husband and moved to Rockland County, before heading off on their own. Mari worked as a manager at Sears and Dunkin’ Donuts and an assistant teacher at an after-school program, then later on at an Ames gardening-supply warehouse and, for many years, a Walmart in Middletown. She was determined to raise her daughters alone—without her family, without the government, and without friends. “I didn’t need anybody else coming into the house telling me this, saying this, giving me advice. I had enough to deal with. I had work, I had the kids, I had my life, I had my troubles.”
Her troubles started with a man named David, who fathered Mari’s fourth daughter, Stevie. Shannan’s sister Sherre, about five years old at the time, remembered huge fights after Stevie was born; she and Shannan cowered under the kitchen table as plates of spaghetti crashed against the wall. When Mari’s mother found out what was happening, she called the police. David went to jail, and all four of Mari’s girls were placed in foster care. Mari was furious at her mother for involving the state. Mari didn’t get her girls back for close to two years. Soon after they were reunited, Mari settled them all in Ellenville, hoping for a new start.
Mari called Ellenville “a very small town where there’s more rumors than people who live there.” The rumor mill about Mari wasn’t very complimentary. People spoke of her as a gruff, checked-out mother who never seemed that attentive to her children. “Shannan and I, we kind of ran the streets together,” said an old friend of Shannan’s, Erica Hill. “It didn’t seem to matter to Mari what happened to Shannan. When Shannan would run away, I never saw anyone say, ‘Hey, has anybody seen Shannan?’ And her mother never came looking for her.”
She might not have known, because Shannan wasn’t always living at home. Shortly after they arrived in Ellenville, Shannan, then about seven, entered the foster-care system again. For six years, until the year she appeared in Annie, she lived nearby in a series of foster homes, by all accounts decent places run by well-intentioned, caring women. Every day at school, Shannan walked the same halls as her sisters, ate the same food, and hung out with a lot of the same people—she just didn’t sleep under the same roof. Not a lot of people knew about the arrangement, though those friends who did said that Shannan was devastated by it. More than once, she ran away to home, back to Mari and Sherre and Sarra and Stevie. She rarely stayed long. To outsiders, Mari never explained why Shannan couldn’t live at home. Only years later, after the world learned Shannan’s name, would Mari say that the problem had been Shannan herself—that she was not only independent-minded and willful but unstable—“a lot of mood swings, a lot of overeating, a lot of binge-and-purge.” When she was twelve, Shannan would be diagnosed as bipolar, though she never took her medicine, complaining about its side effects.
As Mari would tell it, foster care was the best option for a daughter she had trouble controlling. She took pains to explain that Shannan went back and forth on whether she wanted to be at home, sometimes asking to live apart. A blowup with Mari would cause her to call the state for placement in another foster home. Just as quickly, Shannan would change her mind. “She’d say, ‘I want to come home.’ I’d say, ‘Well, call your case worker and say you changed your mind and want to come home.’ The grass is always greener on the other side.”
The story was different when others told it. While Shannan was deliberately vague, telling friends that her mother cared more about her boyfriends than she did about her children, Sherre was more specific, saying that Shannan’s exile from the family had to do with a certain boyfriend who moved in when Shannan was seven. According to Sherre, Shannan and the boyfriend didn’t get along, and Shannan was sent away because of him. The irony was that living elsewhere spared Shannan further exposure to the boyfriend, who Sherre said went on not just to clash with Shannan’s sisters but to physically abuse them. Sherre said that Mari was oblivious to the abuse and learned of it only when the girls spoke up years later. Mari supported the girls when they accused him, and the boyfriend went to jail, dying a few years after that. Mari, for her part, has refused to discuss him. “I told my kids what happens in the house stays in the house,” Mari said. “That’s, like, a basic given rule.”
It was possible that both accounts were true. Maybe Shannan and the boyfriend did clash, and maybe Mari found herself ill equipped to parent a daughter like Shannan. But if Mari described Shannan as a smart but troubled girl, plagued by emotional problems, her friends never knew that girl. Their Shannan was popular, bright, energetic, talented, and beautiful. To those who were closest to her during her teenage years, Shannan’s biggest problem—maybe her only problem—was that, from a young age, she felt locked out of her own family.
The year Shannan appeared in Annie—her eighth-grade year—was supposed to be her big homecoming. Mari and the state had agreed that she could come home, and she lasted longer than she had before. It would turn out to be her only year as a teenager when she would live full-time with her mother and sisters. Sherre said the problems began when Shannan, still oblivious to the abuse, tried to play peacemaker between Mari’s boyfriend and the other girls, and both the boyfriend and her sisters pushed her away. Shannan was crushed. She thought that too much time had passed with her out of the house; that her sisters didn’t seem like sisters anymore. What she couldn’t have understood was how much her sisters envied her: At least Shannan had a way out, a way not to live there. The closest Sherre came to talking about the abuse was to say that Shannan was the lucky one—that she was better off living anywhere but in that house.
Shannan wouldn’t accept that. “Yeah, but you don’t understand,” she said. “I want to be here. This is where I want to be.”
After eighth grade, Shannan knew she couldn’t stay any longer. The state found a placement for her with a foster parent in New Paltz, a more affluent town about a half hour from Ellenville that had much better schools. Jennifer Pottinger was relatively young for a foster mother, and Shannan liked her. When Shannan talked about wanting to be on her own one day, Jennifer encouraged her to dive into classes with enough dedication to graduate a year early. Shannan was thriving, or seemed to be.
It was Mari’s turn to feel rejected. As a mother, she might have been distant, but she co
uld also be possessive and easily threatened. As Shannan moved swiftly toward graduation, Mari made noises about how her daughter was being exploited, made to work for Jennifer at the day-care center she ran. Mari would never get over how drawn Shannan was to the things at Jennifer’s house—name brands like Tommy Hilfiger—that obviously hadn’t come from Walmart. “She was born wanting to be beautiful, wanting to have the latest, wanting to have everything that she felt that my income, at the time, I could not give her,” Mari said. “Something was in her that she wanted nice things in life.”
Through performing, Shannan found a way to deal with whatever dissatisfactions and sadness she buried within. During high school, she developed a soulful voice that gave some of her friends chills and made others cry. They could feel every note, every riff, every ripple. Her poetry and essays seemed to tap into a deep well of pain, too—sharp and emotional, accessing the same damaged part: I take on armor every time I walk out the door / But that’s just what life’s all about, right? / I immerse myself in the moment, and I will enjoy it.
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