To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531)
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Russell looked confused. “A little after two?”
“And where should you be?”
Russell turned to leave again. “Downtown.”
Both Bruce and Allyson still knew where all the kids should be at every hour of the day, and everyone’s schedules were still full of extra classes and tutoring and enrichment programs and counseling. But with the teenagers, Bruce had recently surrendered the strict curfew rules. Everybody was over eighteen, save for Tonya’s younger brother, William, who had moved in and was always home by eight anyway. Technically, Bruce knew he couldn’t enforce anything anymore.
“They know when they’re supposed to be in, that you’ve got to get to bed for a school night,” he said, patiently stroking on varnish. He figured they were old enough now to experience their own consequences. “If you’re getting home at midnight, how are you going to do school? If you start failing classes, everything spirals out from there.”
And this led us to talking about what had happened to the Green family dream of difficult teenagers settling, and then excelling, within the walls of the house on DeKalb. According to Bruce, it was the Internet that “started everything downhill,” with the foster girls variously breaking rules—moving out, running away, getting arrested. He wished he’d never bought the kids their laptops; he traced all the troubles back to his one big splurge at the computer store. “Did they do their homework on there?” he asked me, rhetorically. “No. It was all MySpace, YourSpace, TheySpace, EverybodySpace. As a father, you don’t want to see the kinds of things these kids look at.”
Bruce could control, to some extent, where his kids went and how late they stayed out, as long as he held the keys to the front door. But with the Internet, his authority faded; the outside world permeated his heavily guarded walls, and his kids latched on to the temptations available to them. He had once preached that his kids didn’t need friends because the family was enough. With the Internet, the girls could stay up all night, friending hundreds of strangers, creating flimsy, flashy personas, and hatching virtual plans for new and impossible lives.
Fatimah took some personal responsibility for her part in the partial dissolution of the Green family. “Before I got adopted, I felt like I had something to fight for,” she said. For as long as she could remember, Fatimah had wanted to break free from the hell of foster care; it’s why she did well in school, why she tried to please her foster parents, why she kept herself healthy and fit—as though she were a prize someone would want if only she were perfect enough. “Getting adopted messed up everything. It messed up my train of thought. It messed up my goal. It was like, ‘This is it? This is what I got adopted for?’ This is not the dream I thought I had.”
But Fatimah also said it was the Greens’ particular style—their strictness—that made her and the other teenagers want to get out of there. “What made the family fall apart is that everyone was waiting to get to the age to be able to run. I mean, if you cage a bird up it’s gonna come out crazy,” she said. “Like, for instance, our dog. Before we got the dog, it was caged up for eight months. So now, even when you tell her to come out of the cage, she’ll stay in there ’cause that’s what she’s used to. But when she does come out, she’s vicious.”
Allyson placed the blame somewhere else. “When they have contact with their birth parents—that’s where the problems start,” she told me, even though she had once strongly advocated for these connections. She listed a few examples: Fatimah didn’t go to school when she lived with her mom in Queens. Tonya had spiraled downhill by first running to her mom’s place in the Bronx, and then hooking up with old friends who led her to that shoplifting charge in Pennsylvania. “When they have contact with their birth parents, they start believing they have options. Chanel never behaved that kind of way, because her mother passed when she was five years old.”
Just like people discussing the problems in foster care as a whole, everyone at the Greens’ was touching a different part of the elephant. And just like their counterparts in the bigger picture, everybody’s intentions were perfectly good.
This is why child welfare experts try to fix the myriad problems in child welfare and fail: the problems are rooted in a society that cares little for its children, for its poor, its mentally ill, undereducated, incarcerated, addicted, and isolated. Child welfare is but a thimbleful of water on a raging social fire; the house on DeKalb couldn’t begin to contain its flames.
Bruce watched Russell walk away until he turned the corner. He was finished painting and suggested we go inside to heat up the leftover king crab legs from dinner the night before. Bruce knew that the problems he’d experienced stemmed from something much deeper than the Internet, his family dynamics, or even foster care at large. “You know who’s responsible for this?” he asked, slathering butter on the crab. “The government.”
Bruce went back outside to eat and gestured toward the public elementary school on the corner of their block. It’s a brick bunker of a place that had been put on the state’s list of failing schools in 2004. Most of the enrolled students came from the Eleanor Roosevelt projects across the street or from nearby homeless shelters, and none of the Green children had ever attended. “Who’s teaching our kids? Did they go to the best teaching colleges? Or did they go to some rinky-dink school?” Bruce asked. “And then you’ve got children having children. Children who went to these schools, who aren’t prepared beyond the fifth grade. They’re not prepared to have children, so they get their children taken away and the government pays $7,000 a year to someone else to raise that child, and even more to an agency.” Bruce paused to watch Anthony trying to climb a plastic chair. He was walking already, and his brother, baby Allen, was almost ready to start kindergarten. “What if they gave that money to the parents directly and didn’t take away the child—or to the schools so you wouldn’t have this process to begin with? It’s a business.”
For Bruce, the financial motivations in this business were rooted in historical racism. “What was one of the biggest crimes during slavery?” he asked, wiping his hands on a napkin, not waiting for an answer. “Teaching a slave to read. It pays to keep people stupid.”
The pattern looked like this: The government created failing schools, which created failing child-parents whose children were taken away. These children were then failed again in foster care, so they could end up in jail, or else feeding the system with more kids. “Jails are a business too,” Bruce said sadly. “You’ve got women in prison making Victoria’s Secret bras. You’ve got to keep people stupid, so you can put them in jail and get them to do your work.”
In 2010, New York’s public advocate proposed legislation to track, for the first time, what happens to foster kids once they leave the system. If it passes, the bill will require ACS to coordinate with the Department of Housing and provide public quarterly reports about the kids who receive Medicaid, public housing, food stamps, and welfare within six months of emancipation. It calls for collaboration with the police and Department of Homeless Services to calculate how many end up homeless or in jail. The bill does not require collaboration with local colleges or employment programs to track enrollment, maybe because these figures are too small to matter, or because the main concern is with the youth who continue to drag on public resources. But the bill does not require any direct follow-up with the eight hundred foster kids who leave care each year at all. If the bill passes as it’s designed, it will provide only a more precise picture of the worst-case results—indicating the city’s expectation from the start.
And still. As Kecia Pittman lamented from prison, the most important thing a family can do for a foster child is “stay.” That’s what the Greens were doing—with Tonya, with Fatimah, and when she wants it, with Chanel.
Several months after I met with Fatimah to pick up the art, Fatimah’s mom relapsed. Fatimah’s sister, whom Fatimah had tried so valiantly to protect, was sent into foster care. So Fatimah reluctantly moved back to the Greens’; she had nowhere else t
o go.
“The way I see it now, I’m a major breadwinner there,” Fatimah told me, proudly jutting out her chin. We were walking around Times Square in the sticky summer heat, searching for some lotion; she was wearing jean shorts and wedge heels, and she worried that her calves looked ashy. “I just go there to sleep. I don’t talk to anyone; I don’t even eat their food. And they’re getting money for me until I’m twenty-one.”
Unlike Dominique, Fatimah knew that if she needed it, she’d always have a place to sleep even after her twenty-first birthday—even if she didn’t particularly like it. The house on DeKalb, if not a haven, had become a reset button. It was a familiar, steady place where one could still the chaos from the outside world a bit, and then move on.
That’s the way Tonya saw it too. When Tonya was released from the jail in Pennsylvania, she called the Greens.
“I only got to make one call from jail, and I got the voice mail,” Tonya said. “I didn’t know if they’d take me back, but I had no one else to call.”
I met Tonya outside of Mercy College on 35th Street where she was taking classes; remarkably, once Tonya had readjusted to life on DeKalb after her release, she finished up her final credits in high school and enrolled in college. The eleven universities that had accepted her the prior year (including the two that had dangled scholarships) had rescinded their offers when she didn’t complete high school on time. So Tonya was restricted to a more local, and less prestigious, school.
Like Fatimah, Tonya now viewed the Greens’ place as somewhere to rest her head; she said she went there now only to study and to sleep, and she planned to get out as soon as she could. She was waiting for her agency to set her up with Section 8 housing.
“I’ll be like my mom,” she told me, her eyes sparkling. “My mom’s lived in the Bronx for twenty, thirty years and she only pays $150 a month for a two-bedroom; welfare pays the rest. The same thing will happen to me because I’m a foster kid and I’m at the top of the waiting list.”
Tonya said she was thankful she was never granted the free SILP apartment that she had once wanted so desperately. In retrospect, she felt such freedom would have provided her with even more poor choices than those she made from the Greens’. “I’m glad I didn’t go to SILP because that totally messed Chanel up,” Tonya said. “She’s twenty-one and she doesn’t have a high school diploma. She doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t have nothing.”
I talked with Chanel on the phone early in 2010; she was living in a studio apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and working full-time stocking clothes in the basement of an H&M. She said she moved out of SILP because the place was too hectic; her roommates were always partying and bringing in strangers. She felt safer on her own without any agency supervision. As for the Greens, Chanel would only say, “I don’t talk to them anymore.” We made a few plans to meet up, but one time she was too hung-over, and once she simply didn’t show. Eventually, she stopped returning my calls.
Tonya held up her right hand to show me the chipped nail on her forefinger. “That’s from me slamming Chanel’s head to the wall,” Tonya said, grinning. Apparently, Chanel had been coming by the Greens’ every now and then, when she got lonely at her studio apartment. And, according to Tonya, she was “borrowing” clothes. So Tonya beat her up.
I was startled; I remembered Tonya talking about her addiction to fighting, and about how she never felt remorse. But she and Chanel had been so close; her Facebook page was crammed with pictures of the two of them at parties, riding in cars, hamming it up in front of the bathroom mirror.
Not anymore, Tonya said. She hated Chanel. She hated Fatimah too. The sisters may have been floating back into each other’s physical orbit, but they were intentionally spinning out of sync. Four thousand square feet wasn’t enough space to absorb all the resentment and rage; they looked at one another and saw themselves. The reflection that was once a comfort was now too predictive and frightening.
“Fatimah’s not in college,” Tonya said with disdain. “She’s nineteen and she didn’t even finish high school.”
She and Fatimah had gotten into an argument some months back, Tonya said, about a lie and a boy, and they hadn’t spoken since. Tonya didn’t care about Fatimah anymore, and that was it. We had left the college and were strolling around Times Square at night, where Fatimah also liked to hang out. Tonya’s bravado seemed thin to me, so I asked her what, if anything, she was afraid of.
“That I’ll backslide,” she answered, her silver eye shadow glittering from the bright lights overhead. Tourists with backpacks and cameras shoved past us but Tonya stood still. “That I’ll stop doing what I have to do. That I’ll just decide one day to stop going to school.”
Fatimah planned to go back to school, but like Tonya and Chanel and even Dominique, she had downsized her dreams. Part of this was the slow creep of realism that came with growing up, but depression played a role too. Fatimah acknowledged that living with the Greens made returning to school seem more attainable, but living there was also hard: the place represented so many hopes gone wrong. Fatimah had given up on writing her book. She had also decided to abandon the idea of journalism, and her magazine about families all over the world.
“I used to want to be a journalist, but why, what’s the point? What’s the point now of anything? I just want to get out of here,” Fatimah said, gesturing around at the rush-hour taxis and crowded sidewalk. “Maybe I’ll move to Philly. Besides, why do something where I can leave my mark on the world? That used to be important to me. But now, if I can just get some kind of job, take care of me, take care of my kid, then die, that’s enough.”
Only Tonya, who had had her college circumscribed but not her vision, held tight to her original plan of becoming a psychiatrist. But there was a parallel reality living alongside the girl with the Dora the Explorer pillows and the college schedule and the house she could live in even past her graduation from foster care. There was still a girl who lived online, who went by the name of “Chocolate Princess.” This Tonya was tough: she posted clip after clip of people beating each other up at parties and in parks, followed by her own LMAOs and biting remarks. I asked Tonya if she’d ever go back to jail, and she wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Not right away,” she said. “Who knows what the future holds?”
15
Last Call
ONLY DOMINIQUE, THE GREEN girl who had stayed the shortest and severed her ties most acutely, couldn’t go back. Dominique believed her biological mother was dead, she had crossed adoption off her list of goals, and she had turned twenty years old in 2010. Dominique had one year left of free meals, a weekly allowance, and a social worker to call upon before she would be set free to her dreams of a Connecticut wedding on the beach with no husband. She had her part-time job at the Walk Shop, which would never cover rent and living expenses in New York City, and she had a few very good friends—mostly kids like her, in similar predicaments. That summer, Dominique had added a new tattoo to her wrist, opposite the butterfly. It read, simply, “Have faith.”
I was waiting for Dominique at an iHop in Queens when I heard the sirens. We had planned to have a late breakfast on a hot summer day; Dominique had been craving pancakes. She was still living with the elderly foster mom, and her house was on the last stop on the F line, where apartment buildings give way to single-family homes. The iHop is on a busy boulevard across the street from Trinidad Rotis and Disha Fashion, where you can buy saris and bridal lenghas, but inside the pancake chain where Dominique kept me waiting, I could have been in Detroit or Oakland or any city anywhere. All iHops look the same.
Some of the diners had rushed out the front door when the sirens got louder, and since Dominique still hadn’t shown up, I followed them outside. A crowd had gathered in the middle of Hillside Avenue, where a silver Toyota was angled in the wrong direction. A woman was lying still in the street, and paramedics were pushing people aside to get to her. A brown moccasin was flung about a hundred feet away. I recognized that moccasin.
Apparently, the driver of the Toyota had made an illegal left turn across a double yellow line, when she hit Dominique crossing the street. A few pedestrians had seen the accident and were eagerly explaining the details to a cop, who was also trying to extract Dominique’s age and address from her at the back of the ambulance. Dominique could only whisper, and her voice was muffled by an oxygen mask. She reached for my hand with her good arm, the one with the faith tattoo.
“I got hit from the side, my hip,” she mumbled, the clear plastic mask fogging up with her breath. I squatted next to her and repeated her words for the cop. “I fell against the car, then on the ground, on my arm. My arm really hurts.”
Nobody asked who I was, but the medics assumed I was along for the ride, as one gently pressed me back into a seat in the ambulance and snapped a seat belt across my chest. The doors slammed shut and the sirens were surprisingly quiet from inside the cabin. I smiled at Dominique, who suddenly let out a loud scream and yanked the oxygen mask from her face. She saw the scissors before I did.
“We have to do this, ma’am,” the paramedic said, calmly snipping the seam to Dominique’s jean shorts. “We’re just looking to see if you’re hurt.”
If Dominique hadn’t been strapped down, she would have jumped right off the gurney. Another medic had replaced the mask to cover her mouth and nose, but Dominique’s eyes were bulging and wild.
“It’s OK, they’re not going to hurt you,” I murmured, squeezing her hand as Dominique thrashed back and forth.
The medic with the scissors told her to stay calm as he sliced her T-shirt and cut through the center of her bra. My fingers buckled in Dominique’s panicked grip, but she was quiet as both men palpated her belly, listened to her heart, and checked her skin for abrasions. “That was a $40 bra,” she finally whispered when it was over.