But I was afraid if I told them all of that, they’d stop letting me go to the visits.
I know I used to get worked up sometimes, but it was more out of frustration than anger. Some expert might say that these emotions were the same, but to me they felt very different. I never wanted to lash out; I just felt a build-up of intense sadness that I didn’t know how to express. I never felt like an angry kid, but I did feel upset because the situation seemed so hopeless, so I think that is what they were observing.
Whatever the case, Carlos was always good at calming me down. We shared a tight bond and I felt like he understood the confusion and sadness I was feeling. He was always a polite kid—when I talked to Velma recently, that was something she brought up: “You were both very well behaved and never got into any trouble.” It was true. We really were good kids who weren’t rude and didn’t back-talk to adults like a lot of other kids at school. Ms. Spivey remarked on that, too. She said we were a pretty polite family, especially given the circumstances.
But the caseworkers seemed to worry that all that politeness was hiding something else within me. They thought that it was coming out in a physical way even if I wasn’t putting the anger into words. I used to bump into things and pound my fists a lot, which the people at DCS felt was a sure sign of anger that I didn’t know how to express. I can see how they could think that, but I don’t think it was anger at all—I’m pretty sure it had to do with having man-sized hands as an eight-year-old. I had a huge body that was growing way too fast for me to figure out how to move with it. I wasn’t hitting things because I was letting out rage; I was running into things because I wasn’t sure yet how to handle my size. I was an elementary school kid trapped in a middle schooler’s frame.
Because of their concern about my emotional situation, when I was ten I was moved to St. Joseph’s Hospital on Danny Thomas Boulevard, near the famous St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. At the time, I thought I was just being kept in a ward for kids who didn’t have anywhere else to go. It wasn’t until much later that I realized I had been placed there to be observed and treated for anger issues.
It’s funny, now that I know better what all is there in Memphis, to realize how close we were to St. Jude’s, one of the best places in the country for sick children to receive top-notch care. But our hospital was just the opposite; at least on our floor, it was filled with kids who no one seemed to care about at all. I also learned later that St. Joseph’s was the hospital where Martin Luther King, Jr., was declared dead after he was shot. But I didn’t know that at the time, and I don’t think it would have mattered anyway. I wasn’t impressed with historical stuff; I just wanted out.
The adolescent unit felt like an institution, with nurses and quiet voices and fluorescent lighting. At the ends of the hallways were keypads that required passwords and card scans. It just felt very impersonal and a little dehumanizing. At least in foster care I was living in a house. There, it felt like I was getting locked up in prison and no one would tell me what my crime was. The whole atmosphere made me even unhappier and very uncomfortable. I wanted to be home—even if that was just an old car or a tiny room. I wanted to see my mother again, even if she was going to go off on her own. I kept hoping that if my brothers were allowed home, maybe she would be happy enough to stop doing drugs.
It’s interesting now to learn that I was sent to St. Joseph’s for emotional monitoring because one of the things that bothered me most at the time was that I thought that no one realized I had any legitimate feelings about the situation. It felt like they thought I was just angry, or else a robot who didn’t care about what happened to me. But I knew I had very serious and strong feelings: I wanted a normal life like I saw on TV. I wanted my family together in a steady place where we wouldn’t have to wander around to bum a sandwich or a place to sleep at night. I had started to see that there was another way to live, and I wanted to bring that way of living to my own family.
While I had hated foster care, I also knew, even then, that it was doing something good for me. There were rules that kept me off the streets. There were regular checkups to make sure I was going to school. Despite my sadness, I had started to see what was missing from my life.
I stayed at St. Joseph’s for about two weeks and adjusted to the new routine. We weren’t in school; instead, we would have to talk about our feelings with adults (who I realize now probably were psychiatrists and counselors). Then when we weren’t in those evaluations, we could watch television.
A funny side note from my stay there: I think that’s where I got my love for movies. I am a huge fan of films, and I think it first started when I got to choose whatever videos I wanted to watch from St. Joseph’s collection. I’d never had videos before, and definitely not dozens of them to choose from to watch on my own. It might not sound like much, but it is actually empowering to get to make your own decision about what movie to watch, and for a kid who felt like all decision making had been taken away, that was a big deal. I slept in a little hospital room, with my own TV with a VCR on the bottom. It felt so grown-up, so exciting to return to my own room with a video I’d picked out from the movie shelf.
As much as I loved the access to movies, though, I found myself getting bored and a little irritated with life there. I didn’t understand why I was there, why I had to have endless discussions about how I was feeling and do the silly little exercises I had to do. The plan, I found out later, was to keep me for a full month and then make recommendations for my future care based on what they learned from observing me. However, I decided that two weeks was long enough. I was tired of the inaction. I wanted something to happen, to feel like some kind of progress was happening in my life.
So I started studying my surroundings again, the way I like to do, and I noticed that all of the adults seemed to be coming and going from the double doors at each end of the hallway. One afternoon, while no one was watching, I wandered down there and studied the door. Even though there were those computerized locks on the doors, it seemed to me they weren’t quite shutting right. So I folded up a sheet of paper and worked it past the heavy bolt—and the door opened right up! I looked around, and no one else seemed to have noticed anything; there were no alarms going off or people running to see where the security breach had happened. Breathing heavily, I made myself walk slowly and calmly back to my room so I could come up with a plan.
I knew if I ran off then, they’d miss me within just an hour or two, since we were getting ready for dinner and then bedtime, when they did room check. Instead, I figured I would wait until the morning and slip out then. Not only would I be able to make my way home in daylight, which would be a lot easier, but I also figured that they wouldn’t notice as quickly that I was missing. If I wasn’t in my room, whoever was looking for me would assume I was off talking to a counselor or taking another test.
So that night I remember very clearly taking that little folded piece of paper, kissing it good night, and putting it under my pillow before falling asleep with a huge grin on my face.
The next morning, I crept past the nurses’ station, ducking down so they wouldn’t notice me passing by, and tried my lucky paper again. Sure enough, as soon as I slid it past the blot the door popped open and I slipped out the door, into the stairwell, and then headed for the first exit I could find. I was free, and I was heading home.
AS FAR AS I WAS CONCERNED, I was done with the DCS. As much as I knew the meals and the structure were good, overall the experience was bad. I was almost eleven years old and every bit as unhappy and unsettled as I had been when they first collected me almost three years before. I made up my mind that I was finished with them and their “fixes” for my life. If anything was going to get better, it was going to be up to me to make it happen.
As an adult, I now understand more about what was going on within the system at that time, and how broken it really was. The caseworkers were really overloaded, there was almost no accountability, and there were a lot of out-of-date rules kept in place by out-of-touch people that benefited no one—especially not the kids whose lives were being steered by them. Not to mention that there was a terrible breakdown in record-keeping, which is clear from the fact that almost all my files have just disappeared. All of Tennessee was in bad shape, but Shelby County, where Memphis is located, seems to have been the worst place by far.
I don’t want to sound as if I am ripping on everyone who was involved with my custody. Obviously there were a lot of people who genuinely cared and wanted to make a difference. The problem is that there always seem to be more children who need help than people who are able and willing to help them. Even with the huge improvements that Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services has put into place by totally rebuilding itself, life in the slums hasn’t improved much. Just the fact that a state has to have a department dedicated to the welfare of its children—the fact that something like that has to exist at all—means that the problems are still there and kids are still suffering in foster care, even good foster care. That’s the worst part of it to me. As long as the cycle of poverty continues, there are always going to be kids who think there is no way out and just get trapped in their parents’ way of thinking and living.
Parents who have spent time in foster care have almost twice as high a rate of having their own children taken away and placed in foster care, or see their children become homeless, than parents who didn’t spend time in the system. The sad truth is that even though children are being removed from bad situations, they are sometimes placed into situations that aren’t much better. Or, if they are fostered with a loving and supportive family, their stay often isn’t long enough to make a lasting impression that will help them learn how to make better choices with their own futures.
What happens is that the kids learn to imitate the behavior they see as normal, and as a result, they end up making the same mistakes their parents did. You would think that someone who was abused as a child would know how much it hurts and do everything they could to not do that to someone else. But instead, when they get angry as an adult they react the only way that they know how, in the way that has become natural to them. With neglect, sexual abuse, substance abuse, gang membership, with all of the ugly things that exist in the world, kids tend to go back to what they know. It’s certainly not something unique to the projects, of course, but it sure is common there. That’s why I ran away from St. Joseph’s, just like I’d run away from Velma’s—I wanted to get back to what was familiar, what I knew.
For the kids who are assigned to caring, helpful families for longer than just a few months, their lives can be completely turned around. They get a chance to see what responsible adults look like. They understand what it is like to live with rules and discipline. They learn that there is a different way of living from what gets you trapped in the ghetto. They find out that you can trust and love people who are trying to help you become whatever you want to be. It can be a long road to break down the walls of distrust, anger, or sadness that a lot of children have put up as a survival mechanism, the only way they know to protect themselves from the hurt. Loving homes that offer support and encouragement are so important because they can help reprogram what the child views as normal and okay.
Unfortunately, not everyone gets placed in that kind of home.
Just because I was able to understand some things better, though, doesn’t mean I was able to make the best choices. I still don’t know how my mother could treat her kids the way my siblings and I were treated. I still don’t know how she could think that living with the drugs and neglect and filthiness and irresponsibility was okay. I still don’t know how she thought that if she kept living like that, things would get better. I heard a quote one time from S. Truett Cathy, the man who founded Chickfil-A. He said: “It’s better to build boys than mend men.” I thought that was a good statement and very true. Helping kids see a better way of thinking and living when they are young is so much easier than trying to re-teach them a whole new way of life when they are adults and end up making the same mistakes their parents made.
But it’s not up to us kids to fix the world’s problems. There are a huge number of kids in America who feel helpless and need stable homes right now. You can take action by choosing to help just one child. The ripple effect of that action can end up touching many lives and even generations.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Home” Again
A
fter all of my attempts to run and hide, when I was either brought back by my mother or the authorities, I finally got my wish to stay at home. After my escape from St. Joseph’s, I was finally released from the system back into my mother’s care.
Well, technically, I wasn’t really released to her so much as no one came after me again to haul me away after I left the hospital. I don’t know what changed my mother’s status so that I was allowed to stay with her at that point, but they eventually decided it was okay and left us alone for a while. I just know that the goal of foster care is to return children to their birth families whenever possible, so that might have been what made them decide we were okay.
Judging from the last document I know of before I ended up back at home, though—a ruling filed in July of 1996—the Juvenile Court of Memphis and Shelby County had something very different in mind for Carlos and me. In that document, it says that they wanted to change my status to “permanent” in the foster care system. It seems that Carlos was targeted to just age out of it. He was almost thirteen at the time, and I guess whoever makes the decisions thought that nothing was going to improve with my mother in the next five years and that Carlos would be better off turning eighteen and then getting released without ever returning home.