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policeman searched the two men. Nothing was found on any of them, so the police began looking under a couch, ripped up the couch, and knocked holes in the walls with their sticks. More policemen arrived and looked harder: they pulled up the kitchen floorboard, and discovered the hidden bags of marijuana. The police suspected Crystal of being the supplier; they had had the house under surveillance when she strolled in. Asked her age, Crystal said sixteen. “Well, well, well, you just made it to go through the system,” the policewoman told her. (As a minor of fifteen, who had no marijuana in her possession, she would likely have been released.) She was taken to a precinct in Jamaica to be booked. She requested the one phone call to which she was legally entitled, and was told she could call after she had been photographed and fingerprinted. Once she was fingerprinted, she was told that she was supposed to have used the phone prior to the fingerprinting, and was locked up for the night. She didn’t appreciate being “suckeredout” of her call. The police telephoned the group home. A child-care worker who had known Crystal since her first month at 104th Avenue drove over the following morning to take her home. She shook her head, and reminded Crystal that she had told her to stop smoking reefer countless times, and to stop hanging out with the wrong people in the wrong places. She said that she was sorry Crystal refused to use better judgment, that there could have been a shoot-out, and that, luckily, this would teach her a lesson.
    Crystal went to court and refused to plead guilty. “I wasn’t a carrier, I was one of the innocents,” she says. “I just came to visit my friend, no harm in that, and they had no proof of wrongdoing on me.” While the case was being adjourned—Crystal’s Legal Aid lawyer wasn’t always there to represent her—she was arrested again, for a different offense.
    C rystal had continued to do poorly at Flushing High. Most days, she missed her first class. Some days, instead of going to school she and two friends from the group home travelled to Manhattan by bus and subway and went to the movies on Forty-second Street; the journey was only slightly longer than the one to school (she had complained about that journey to the group-home psychologist), and from Crystal’s point of view there was more to look forward to when she reached her destination. The girls were careful not to return tothe group home before the end of the school day plus an hour and a half. Crystal didn’t do her homework, but once, when she was assigned by an English teacher to read a play of Shakespeare’s (“That language was too much of a drag, there was too many complications,” she says), she went to a movie theatre to see
Macbeth
instead. “I remember witches and a witch killed a man or a man killed a witch,” she says. “It was O.K., but it was corny. It was nothing like as good as
The Wizard of Oz
.” Crystal is unfamiliar with the names of most renowned poets—Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Countee Cullen, for example—but “one day at Flushing when I decided to play student out of the many days I cut” she was exposed to a Langston Hughes poem she admired and still half remembers: “Something about an old lady looking back and telling a little boy never to give up on hisself. She said something like ‘Life for me ain’t been no crystal stairs, it had many boards torn up.’ Because her life was not laid out on a red carpet, it made her want to do more, to get more better. It was saying to the boy even if he have to live in an apartment with no electricity, only candles, don’t give up, you can always find something good at the end. I understood that poem.”
    One day when Crystal had attended most of her tenth-grade classes, she and two friends, Tiffany and Stacey, went to Stern’s, a department