Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair by Susan Sheehan Page B

willing to adopt babies and small children than to adopt older ones, so adoption becomes the permanency plan if return to the family is not possible or advisable. Foster parents are usually given the first chance to adopt children who have been in their care. Margaret Hargrove proposed an “open adoption” to Crystal and Daquan, in which the biological parents would retain certain rights of access, but although neither of them wanted to have their son on a full-time basis, neither of them had any intention of forfeiting any parental rights. Daquan Jefferson agreed to take his son until Crystal was out of foster care herself and was financially on her feet. Margaret Hargrove had other small children in foster care in 1989, but little Daquan was still her favorite. When he went to the Bronx for pre-discharge trial weekends at the Jeffersons’, she expressed her displeasure over his imminent departure. She told her social worker that little Daquan was not supervised properly during the weekend visits, and returned to “the foster home in an obstinate manner.” She also reported his reaction to her social worker: “This is myhouse and you’re going to put me out of my goddam house,” he had said. “The Bronx is dirty.” Little Daquan moved to the Jeffersons’ in September, 1989.
    â€œOne reason Daquan wanted the baby was he knew he’d see me more,” Crystal says, and he did: she visited every weekend or two. Margaret Hargrove gave little Daquan a party for his fifth birthday—she invited his parents and other members of Crystal’s family—and telephoned the Jefferson household frequently throughout the following months.
    F or his fifth birthday, Crystal gave her son a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar gold bracelet with his name in diamonds. It was one of the rare moments after Diamond’s release from jail when he had money to spare, and he contributed a hundred dollars toward the bracelet. Around that time, he asked Crystal for a hundred and fifty dollars, so that he could go job-hunting. She took the money out of her bank account. He spent it, along with money borrowed from other friends, on a secondhand Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle. Crystal was not pleased. Diamond and a friend made some money hauling dirt to construction sites with a dump truck and sold a little crack, but he wouldn’t get an honest job and earn real money. “You started off doing for me. How are you going to end it like this?” Crystal asked him. Diamond came every now and again to what Crystal referred to as “the independent house” or invited her tohis mother’s apartment. After they had been in bed an hour or two, one of his friends inevitably paged him on a beeper and he left in a hurry. “His friends said ‘Jump’ and he answered ‘How high?’ ” Crystal recalls. “He put them in front of me to hang out. I always said they would be the death of him.”
    By 1990, Crystal had a beeper herself, and was hanging out with an assortment of young drug dealers. They kept her in reefer and had plenty of money to buy her a pair of sneakers or a leather jacket and to take her to restaurants, parties, and clubs. She liked being wined and dined and riding around in their jeeps, BMWs, and “Benzes.” She was having fun.
    Her social worker was not pleased. The original plan for the independent-living apartments was that they were to be used by the residents for a year and a half at the most. The social worker wanted to “trial-discharge” Crystal in the summer of 1990, so that if she ran into trouble afterward St. Christopher’s could again help her—though only for six months, until she reached twenty-one, the day the money stopped. In the spring of 1990, Crystal ducked many of her required weekly appointments with the social worker, didn’t see the St. Christopher’s psychologist (although he was one of her favorite