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

short-stay rates near the group home. Diamond, a high-school graduate, lived with his mother, his grandmother, and his sister. Crystal and Diamond later made love, with his mother’s tacit consent, in his room. “He was the best in bed, before or since, and for the year and a half before we split I was unfaithful to him only once, for five minutes,” she says. Crystal becomes wistful and teary when shetalks about Diamond. “No one never took me horseback riding before Diamond,” she says. “It was the first time I was close to a horse. I had never gone to the beach with anyone, never looked at no moon. The water, the waves, and the sand—we raced from one lifeguard chair to the next. We put a blanket on the back of his bike and he kissed me—that man showed me some romantic times. People said, ‘All them girls in the group home is ho’s, let’s get one of them girls and stick them.’ Diamond never caught that attitude. I would go to the movies with my girlfriend, and Diamond would have a cab pick us up to take us there. He’d be busy selling drugs but he’d stop to call a cab to take us home from the movies. He made me feel good about myself.”
    T he acid-washed blouse and jeans that Crystal had paid for at Macy’s were part of her wardrobe for Satellite Academy, a school to which she would be transferring in the fall of 1987. Flushing High School had proved too “scholastic” for Crystal; her haphazard junior-high-school years hadn’t prepared her for subjects like social studies, and she acknowledges that she had “a bad attitude.” One day, she and two friends hung out in the corridor outside her Flushing High math classroom after the bell rang. She then knocked on the classroom door. “A classmate made an attempt to open the door, but the teacher said to sit back down,” Crystal says. “So I banged on a glasspane in the classroom door and it broke. After that, the teacher hurried up and opened the door. I asked her why she ain’t let me in, because I felt she had dissed me. She told me not to worry, she wasn’t going to write me up this time, just take a seat. The bitch was scared. At the end of the class, she wrote out a memo for maintenance to sweep up the glass and replace the pane. I turned myself in to the dean after that incident, and she said ‘Don’t worry about it.’ That was only because she couldn’t put nothing in my record, because the teacher didn’t write me up. Usually, I got written up for every little thing—like cutting some guy with a pocket knife after gym class—and the dean was unreasonable. She told me to drop out and go get my G.E.D., like I was a dog.” (The G.E.D. is the General Equivalency Diploma for high school.)
    The other residents of the 104th Avenue group home didn’t fare any better at Flushing. Like Crystal, they lacked educational skills, motivation, and discipline, felt overwhelmed by the size of the school, and fell through the cracks. St. Christopher’s educational coordinator had a reason for sending them there. Among the common characteristics of students at Satellite Academy, a public city Alternative High School, with four campuses—two in Manhattan, one in the Bronx, and one in Jamaica, Queens—are that they have between ten and twenty credits and that they have attended ninth grade but have fallen behind their grade level; mostly students aged sixteen and older are accepted. To date, none of the group-home residents have stayed the course at Flushing, but going there at least exposedthem to Langston Hughes and made them eligible to transfer to Satellite.
    Satellite is a small, no-frills school, with a high faculty-to-student ratio. Its Jamaica campus has a hundred and ninety students, in the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades, and a staff of fourteen. About seventy percent of the students are black; most of the remainder