Read Life for Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair for Free Online

her. “This is Daquan Drummond,” he said. “This is for you.”
    For two months, Crystal Taylor considered having herson removed from the Hargroves’ home. The initial visits to see her son were to take place at a St. Christopher’s office on Long Island; Mrs. Hargrove cancelled the first two visits, one of them because her car would not start on a snowy day. Margaret Hargrove took a special liking to little Daquan, and was soon bringing him to the St. Christopher’s office in Queens for visits with Crystal and big Daquan. They withdrew their request to move Daquan, because they felt “comfortable” with the Hargroves. Before long, Margaret Hargrove invited Crystal to spend weekends at her home. Daquan, Sr., would often come out on Saturday or Sunday, and sometimes he and Crystal went to the movies. Crystal’s social worker was enthusiastic about the visits to the Hargroves. “When Crystal is with her son, she doesn’t have time to get into negative things,” she wrote in Crystal’s record during the summer of 1985. Crystal, however, took pleasure in negative things—primarily in returning to the 104th Avenue group home “smashed.” When Mrs. Hargrove said she was eager to have Crystal placed in her home, along with little Daquan, Crystal declined, telling her, “You is terrific for my son, but you is too strict for me.”
    C rystal started tenth grade in the fall of 1985. Because the high school closest to the group home had a poor reputation and more than its fair share of violence, St. Christopher’s was able to get Crystal accepted by Flushing High Schoolas an out-of-zone student. Flushing High was well regarded academically and had a racially and ethnically diverse student body of about five hundred per grade. When Crystal’s social worker escorted her to school the first day, Crystal expressed apprehension about attending Flushing until she spotted some boys she considered good-looking standing in front of the school building. “I think you’re going to like this school after all,” the social worker said.
    She didn’t. It was a two-bus ride to the school, the courses were challenging, and her study habits were poor. On January 11, 1986, Crystal Taylor’s sixteenth birthday (shortly before she was to flunk many of her first-semester courses at Flushing), Daquan Jefferson put an engagement ring on her finger. The ring had a round fraction-of-a-carat stone in the center of a yellow-gold band, and two smaller diamonds on each side. Crystal said later that she had accompanied Daquan to a pawnshop to select it, “so’s it would be satisfactory and you could see it twinkle at least a little ways off without straining your eyes or needing no magnifying glass.” The ring was a bargain: Daquan paid the pawnshop a hundred dollars for it.
    Soon after her birthday-and-engagement, Crystal was arrested twice. The first time was for drugs. A New York State employment program for underachievers had helped Crystal obtain a part-time job as a cashier for a grocery store. There are many activities that Crystal prefers to working, but she had been frustrated in her efforts to find employment at fast-food shops when she was fifteen, and thought she should give work a try atsixteen. Crystal had a Trinidadian friend who regularly treated her to marijuana. She wanted some reefer to celebrate her new job and went to her friend’s place of business, a reefer house in Jamaica, Queens. Her friend and his cousin were at the house. They gave her some weed from one of two big bags they had concealed under a kitchen floorboard, and returned it to its hiding place. She rolled a joint and took two puffs. Before she could take a third, two police officers broke in, pointing guns and shouting “Hands up on the wall!” and “Freeze!” A policewoman patted Crystal down—Crystal had already dropped the joint—while a