Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

choosing

153 choosing Gaynell Gavin I used to think this story was about Laura, the child, but I was wrong. It’s about the woman who saved her. It’s about Ruth. Ruth was Laura’s maternal aunt. Laura’s mother had a fairly long rap sheet in a file buried among twenty other “priority” files stacked on my desk—theft, welfare fraud, bad checks, prostitution, probation violations, other misdemeanors over a twenty-year period. Having been cared for by Ruth for much of her life, three-year-old Laura had returned to her mother shortly before a babysitter called Social Services to say she’d had the child for days and didn’t know if or when the mother would return. A conversational child, Laura told the intake worker and examining doctor that her mother didn’t love her and wasn’t coming back. “She’s gone away. I don’t know where.” Laura said a man had hurt her. Her physical exam showed vaginal tearing, enlargement, and adhesions. I visited and first met Ruth in the spring after she had gotten temporary custody, and Laura’s case had been handed over to me. A slender, attractive black woman in her early thirties, Ruth was home from her job as a hotel maid by mid-afternoon. She led me to a bedroom with Disney character curtains and bedspread where Laura was sleeping, her round face a shade lighter than Ruth’s, and framed by braids. “She’s had strep, and the doctor told me to keep her home at least a couple more days. The medicine makes her sleep a lot.” Ruth’s voice was quiet. We went back to the living room. I liked the way Ruth kept it uncluttered, just a sofa, a couple of end tables, an armchair. Mostly I liked the way light came through the sheer curtain at the front picture window, and I liked the way Ruth talked about Laura. “She’s very intelligent. I’m going to get her in preschool.” It was the usual story with the public preschool programs—all full. “I’m going to look for a second job so I can put her in a good private one. I want Kindercare, but it’s eighty dollars a week.” Ruth was afraid. Afraid that her sister—who was again incarcerated—would be released, show up, and snatch Laura; that nothing would be done to investigate the sexual abuse Laura had suffered or to get therapy for her. 154 Risk, Courage, and Women Back at the office, among my hours of afternoon phone calls, I left a message for the social worker, telling him to move immediately to set up supervised visits at the department upon the mother’s release and a sex abuse consultation to see if Laura could name a perpetrator, to call me regarding the problems getting Laura into therapy, and to discuss licensing Ruth’s as a child-specific foster home. I’d been trying to reach him for weeks, and it was about my tenth message, so I made no attempt to get rid of the terse, stopscrewing -around note which I could hear in my own voice. I followed up the message with a letter. I wanted to believe that the department placed children with relatives when possible solely due to what’s best for the children, but I couldn’t help noticing that it’s much less expensive to place a child with relatives who typically receive an afdc payment, while foster parents receive twice the afdc amount. If Ruth was licensed specifically to foster parent Laura—a possibility for someone who had the right advocates, say for example, the right social worker and the right judge, or the right attorney and the right judge—she would get two hundred instead of ninety-nine dollars each month for Laura. I also did not want to believe that black children received less care and attention from the department than other children, but how could I know? How could I know, for instance, if the delay in Laura’s sex abuse consultation was due to overwork, honest skepticism about her ability to give information, racism, laziness, or other reasons that hadn’t occurred to me? I couldn’t know for sure, but I did know I had to find some way to keep my inability to know from making me completely crazy. So I tried not to think too much, but then I’d find myself...