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

have stayed on drugs, and I’d probably be on welfare. I wouldn’t be working for an advertising agency. I’d never have met Diamond. The staffs at St. Christopher’s told me that if I had been fourteen in 1990 me and little Daquan would have gone home to the Jeffersons’. They say the system is getting more overloaded. My timing was right. Things happen for a reason. St. Christopher’s gave me a second chance at life.”
    C rystal enjoyed smoking reefer, drinking liquor, and entertaining her male companions in her new apartment, without social workers arriving unannounced and pointing out how many agency rules she had broken, but by January 1st she missed St. Christopher’s subsidies. She had previously been able to spend her take-home pay—about three hundred and twenty dollars every two weeks, without overtime—on additions to her stylish wardrobe. In the fall of 1990, she had cheerfully gone shopping after work, buying silk blouses, pricing Louis Vuitton wallets, putting leather jackets on layaway. After December, her earnings scarcely covered her rent, her phone bill, and her beeper bill. “I’m not shopping, that’s the sadness in my life,” she observed to a friend. “There’s nothing like having something else.”
    On January 15th, Crystal received an upsetting piece of news. Little Daquan had told his teacher that Mrs. Hargrove hit him in the face with a stick. Crystal had visited her son regularly while he was in the Bronx but had slacked off after his return to the Hargroves’, because she knew he was safe there, and because she was too busy running around with Troy and Jimbo and Star—other drug dealers she was seeing. Daquan Jefferson had not been visiting his son much, either. Crystal knew that Mrs. Hargrove might “chastise” Daquan but would never hit him. Since Mrs. Hargrove had all the foster children andadopted children she was certified to have, she felt she could not jeopardize her situation as a foster parent, so she told Crystal to please fetch little Daquan in three days. Crystal believed that her son’s lie was his way of getting his parents to pay some attention to him. In January of 1991, Daquan, six, went back to the Bronx to live with his father, his grandmother, and his teen-age cousins—the children of one of Daquan’s brothers, who had used drugs and died of pneumonia.
    I n January, a week after her birthday, Crystal was introduced to Tarrant, a thirty-nine-year-old Bahamian who owned a grocery store in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, by an acquaintance who had once worked part time for him, off the books. Tarrant was busy in his store Mondays through Saturdays from about 10 A.M. to 2 or 3 A.M. and netted about a thousand dollars a week. He sold everything—bread and condoms, cigarettes and beer, milk and envelopes (three cents apiece). He smoked reefer, but he didn’t drink much and didn’t sell drugs. “He was too scared,” Crystal says. She wasn’t taken by his looks. He had plain features and “he always needed a decent haircut and a shave.” His clothes were custom-made but unstylish; to Crystal it seemed that he could be mistaken for “a bum on a train.” She was attracted to Tarrant by what his money could buy her. He gave her a VCR two weeks after they met, as a belated twenty-first-birthday present. He bought hera heater for her dank apartment, gave her a hundred dollars here and two hundred dollars there to have her hair done, to buy a dress, to pay some of her bills. He gave her groceries.
    Crystal was not physically attracted to Tarrant, and for a few weeks she fended him off by saying she wasn’t sexually active. When she finally had to go to bed with him, she got herself “really cheebered up” on marijuana beforehand. She knew she had to spend Sundays with him, when the store was closed, and although he was considerate—on his