I Beat the Odds (6 page)

A lot of new people were brought in to help straighten things out and to get them running in a better way to actually meet the needs of the kids in the state instead of just shuffling papers—and kids—around. Now, the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services has some great people in charge, and I think it will make a huge difference in the kind of care the kids in the system receive. In fact, Tennessee is now one of only six states in the nation that has special accreditation for how it handles children in state custody. Back when Ms. Spivey was handling my family’s case, she was also in charge of about twenty others—not twenty other kids, but twenty other families. That was the normal workload for someone in her position. Now, with the new system, a social worker usually has fewer than ten family cases to manage at once. Obviously, that is a huge improvement and makes a big difference in the amount of time and energy they can give to helping each child under their care.

But sometimes a system has to hit rock-bottom before it can be replaced with something better. Sadly, I was a part of the system right before the lawsuit brought all the problems to light, so a lot of the information and records about my life have been lost. What I have been able to find, though, has been amazing to study and jogged a lot of memories I’d thought were gone forever. I’ve also learned some new things I never knew before about my family and what all was really going on around me when I was too little to really understand it.

 

 

CARLOS AND I WERE TAKEN from Coleman Elementary in the afternoon and brought to the home of a woman named Velma Jones, not too far away. It was a cream-colored house with burgundy shutters and a wide front porch. It wasn’t very big, but it was clearly the meeting place for the entire Jones family.

Velma, or “Twin,” as everyone called both her and her sister, Thelma, was—and still is—one of the most energetic and involved ladies I know. Even though she is older now and has to use a motorized scooter to get around, she is still constantly on the go, doing some kind of community work anywhere that needs her.

Each twin had several foster kids at her home. At Velma’s, besides just Carlos and me, there were four boys who I remember specifically, but I can’t use their names because of privacy laws. One had bad asthma and it was always a challenge for him to keep up if we were playing outside. Twin also had a biological son about my age named Aaron, as well as a biological daughter, who was quite a bit older than us. Aside from the grown-ups, I was probably the tallest kid of the bunch already, even though a couple of them were several years older than me. In all, there were nine people—seven of whom were little boys—living in one tiny house. In that way, it kind of felt like being at home. But Twin managed to keep everything and everyone in line in a way that was definitely different from anything I’d encountered before.

We had a strict bedtime and chores to do, like washing the dishes and making sure our beds were made and our rooms were clean before we left for school. My new school was Shannon Elementary, just a few blocks away from Twin’s house, so we could walk there each morning. It was a redbrick building and looked like pretty much every other school I’d ever attended, but it felt bigger because it was all on one floor. It was kept neater-looking than most of my other schools, but it had kind of a saggy look to it, almost as if it was tired from years of serving the neighborhood.

Twin was strict about making sure that we always went to school. She taught GED classes at the community center, and she was very focused on education because she saw what people had to go through as adults if they dropped out of school when they were younger.

That was tough to get used to at first—getting ready for school every morning. Carlos and I had never had anyone stay on top of us like that to make sure that we were out of bed, finished with homework, and on our way to school in time for the first bell. When we lived at home, school was much more optional and homework wasn’t even a consideration.

Every day after school, we would have to catch a bus to day care, where we would stay until Twin was finished with work. That was a big challenge for me because even though I was only seven years old, I had been spending time out on the streets, fending for myself and learning how to handle myself around the older kids. It felt like an insult that I was suddenly expected to spend time in after-school day care, when I already kind of viewed myself as an adult. I think Carlos felt the same way. That arrangement continued the whole time I lived at Twin’s house, and I don’t think we ever really got used to it.

School and supervision after school weren’t the only things she was strict about, either. Every Sunday morning, Twin loaded all of us boys up and we headed off to church. “You might be foster children, but you are God’s children, too,” she told us. And I guess she wanted to make sure that God had no grounds to complain that He didn’t get visitation rights, because we started with the seven a.m. service, then Sunday School, and then stayed through the eleven o’clock service. It was a long morning. Sometimes, one or more of us boys was even roped into working as an usher, handing out church programs and opening doors for people as they came in.

We sang in the choir for a while, too. As part of the music program, you could learn to play the recorder or the triangle and then everyone would perform in church. We all wore robes, which was good because even then I was bigger than most of the other boys in the house and definitely all the other kids my age. The robes were very forgiving in terms of fit, so I was able to blend in with everyone else. We sang all the time with Twin, even when we weren’t in church. She and Thelma were always teaching us church songs, spirituals, Gospel music. They also taught us folk songs, like “If I Had a Hammer” and music from Up with People, that super-positive group of college kids that tours all over the country.

On weekends, sometimes we would sell newspapers on corners and at stoplights on busy roads, which is a popular thing in Memphis, and other weekends we’d go camping. The Twins would load up all of their foster kids into an old trailer that was parked in Velma’s backyard, and we’d drive out to somewhere just outside of Memphis and enjoy the outdoors. They had some old bikes that we took along and we’d ride those around. Those trips were a fun treat because they gave us a chance to see something other than the city. I think they were a treat for the Twins, too, because we’d always play so hard we’d completely wear ourselves out and be pretty calm for a day or two after getting back.

The rules and discipline that Twin had in her house were important for me to see because I had never lived with that kind of structure before and it definitely took some getting used to. The first few nights I lived with her were very tough because I was so mixed up about how fast my life had been turned upside down. I wasn’t just in a new house and away from most of my family, but I had a whole new way of thinking to get used to, with chores and schedules and discipline and rules even about things like bedtime. I’m glad to say that she told me I never got in much trouble at her house or in school, but I didn’t obey because I was happy about the way she ran her house. I followed the rules because I was afraid that if I didn’t, something terrible would happen. Back in the old neighborhood, I’d seen kids get smacked around and screamed at, so even though my mother took the other extreme of no rules and no real emotional response to anything at all, I knew that physical abuse was real and it was common.

Now I understand, of course, that Twin definitely wasn’t the kind of woman who would beat a child. But back then, she was a stranger to me and I sure didn’t think that she loved me. After all, who could love a bunch of kids they don’t even know who get dumped on their doorstep? That was what I believed at the time, anyway, and I think a lot of kids in my situation feel the same way.

 

 

IN MY CASE, I FELT LIKE EVERYONE who was involved with my care was part of a bigger plan to keep me away from my family, and that hurt. It seemed that they didn’t like me—otherwise, why wouldn’t they let me be with the people I loved? I felt betrayed, and I had a hard time trusting people because it seemed like all of the adults, the authority figures, just did what they thought was best without ever asking me what I wanted or what felt right for me. I saw that Twin had two biological children of her own who lived with her all the time, and I didn’t understand why they got to stay with their mom while I didn’t. The difference between the way she looked at them and at us foster kids was tough for me to deal with. I felt like I would always be several notches below in her mind, when all I really wanted was to have an adult love me completely.

Twin did her best to make us feel welcome in her home. She would allow my mother to come over and visit with Carlos and me whenever she felt like it. (My mother went to rehab for a while, and once she got out she moved back to the same neighborhood.) Our old house was only a few blocks away, so the first afternoon we were at Velma’s I ran home to my mom, but she took me right back to Velma’s house. Some of my brothers were staying in foster houses nearby, too, and we’d all meet up on Velma’s driveway to play basketball or just hang out. Apparently, we weren’t supposed to have any contact with family members in between our supervised visits, but Velma told me she couldn’t keep my brothers away, or my mother either. And she could tell by watching us when we were all together outside that we all truly loved one another, so she didn’t see the harm in it, as long as she kept an eye on everyone.

I loved our family time in Velma’s yard, but the real supervised visits could be a challenge for me. Twice a month, we were allowed an official visit with our mother at the DCS office building on North Main Street. I got to know that building well. All of the foster parents of my brothers and sisters would drive us over to the building, where our mother would be waiting with snacks for us. It was like a big family reunion. We had two hours to run around and play together—and with the nine kids who were there at that point, plus a baby our mother may have had around that same time, it was a pretty noisy time.

My mother did a good job of showing up to almost every visit over the couple of years that we were in state custody. Right at the beginning there were one or two that she didn’t make and never gave a reason for, but I think it was probably because she was mad at Ms. Spivey for one reason or another. When our foster families couldn’t take us to the meetings, the department would arrange to pick us up. It took three or four cars to transport all of us to the building and it was really a pretty huge undertaking. I know it caused Ms. Spivey a lot of headaches, and I think my mother knew that, too. After those first few absences, she was almost always there and did her best to make sure that we all had a great two hours together.

As much as I loved those visits, they were hard for me afterward. I would hang back and not say a whole lot as I watched everyone else laughing and running around. I preferred to just watch everyone and lock those images into my mind. In some ways, I think it was harder for me to have just a little bit of family time and then have it jerked away again. It felt like I was getting teased twice a month, being reminded of what had been taken away from me. Every night after one of the visitations, as I lay in bed back at Velma’s, I would cry myself to sleep, trying to understand why we couldn’t just be together like that all the time.

What I didn’t know at the time was that across town, Ms. Spivey would be crying after each visit, too. When I asked her about what she thought of my family, all those years before when we were still kids, she told me that it just broke her heart to see how much we all loved one another and how obvious it was that we wanted to stay together. She said it hurt her so much to think that she couldn’t get through to me, to show me that people truly cared about my best interests and wanted me to feel happy and hopeful about life. I guess she could see on my face how badly I wanted my family back together again.

In the meantime, though, the court system was making certain I would never get my wish. My grandmother was offered custody of all of us, but she said she only wanted Marcus. After about six months, though, she decided that was too much, too, and Marcus was sent to live in a group home until he “aged out” of the system. That meant he would turn eighteen, become a legal adult, and the state would no longer have to worry about him. One by one, the same decision was made about each of my older brothers. It was ruled that the goal would be for each one to age out of the system by staying put in the stable place they’d been placed by the state rather than returning home to live with our mother and the kind of life that they would have there.

Things were different for the girls, though. We learned that there was an effort to make my little sisters eligible for adoption. That meant that the courts had no hope that my mother would even get her act together long enough to make a safe home that they could be returned to, and thought that it would be best if she just gave up her parental rights for the little ones so they could have a chance to find homes with permanent families. There was another baby or two that had come along by then and been taken away by the state, and I know at least one of my little sisters was adopted by a family member on her dad’s side.

With my big brothers aging out and my younger siblings possibly joining other families, I found myself right in the middle of those two groups.

The legal term that everyone kept using was that custody would be “awarded” to one person or another, but as a kid that always struck me as strange. As far as I could tell, there was no “award” involved; it felt more like a punishment than a celebration. And I was stuck wondering what was going to happen to me.

It was a strange place to be, mentally. I wished every night that things would go back to being how they used to be, with my whole family living together. But at the same time, now that I had gotten a chance to see that not everyone lived the way I had thought was normal, I knew that there was something broken about life as I had known it. Pretty soon, I got used to living with strict rules, but even quicker than that, I got used to regular meals and having a bed to sleep in. It may not have been a fancy mattress, but it was better than the floor. I started to feel pride when I would bring my finished schoolwork in to class the next day and when I started earning better grades on assignments and tests. I might never get used to having to go to day care after school, but the rest of the new things in my life were good, and I knew that I wanted a life more like this and less like the one I had known before.