“I remember that we had a house, but I don’t remember where it was,” Cheryl Green says of her earliest years. (Like many of the names in this article, Cheryl Green is a pseudonym.) She remembers three rabbits her family kept in the basement; a side yard, with a tire swing her dad built; the frogs she and her brother would catch nearby and sell to kids in the neighborhood a dollar a frog.
The foster parents–call them the Johnsons–thrashed Cheryl regularly, particularly Mrs. Johnson. “She would hit you not in one place and not with one thing. She had a hollow pole. She used switches–long ones, the kind that wrapped around your body. Shoe heel, extension cords, ironing cords–whatever was in range. Sometimes she would get three or four things and whup us with this for a while, then whup us with that for a while.” Mrs. Johnson would tie Cheryl to a basement pole, or command her to stick her head in the slot between the seat and back of a chair, and then whup her. The many foster children the Johnsons took in sometimes were required to beat each other. For one punishment they had to eat hot peppers with nothing to wash them down. “You’d feel like sending them back up, but you knew–she already told you–if you send it back up, you gonna have to eat it back down again.” Mr. Johnson wasn’t as bent on whuppings as his wife, but when she insisted he knock some sense into the kids, he did as he was told. “And he was a big ol’ tall man, and he had some heavy hands, and that would not feel good.”
After five months in the shelter, she moved in with a woman she met there who had taken an apartment on the west side. Cheryl and the woman “had confusions,” and shortly after her baby was born, in March 1987, Cheryl moved to a foster sister’s place. From there she went to her brother’s girlfriend’s, and from there to her aunt’s. The aunt helped buy her a bus ticket to Arkansas, where she stayed first with a former boyfriend’s relatives, then in a pair of shelters. She took a bus back to Chicago and moved in again with the aunt; then with a cousin; then with her brother. The people she stayed with were barely scraping by themselves; their imminent eviction was sometimes what forced her to move on–that, or “confusions” she had with them. She couldn’t afford an apartment of her own on her public-aid check.
Debra was the second youngest of the seven kids in the family. Her siblings often made her fight the sister a year older than her on the living room floor. “I hated it–I was so puny, and I used to get beat up all the time.”
When word got out she was expecting, everyone–including her father–“agreed with my mother that I was no good,” she says. She asked her 16-year-old boyfriend whether she should have the baby or get an abortion, and he urged her to have the baby. After she did he moved to Louisville with his folks.
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November 1988: Varon tells Cheryl about a kitchenette apartment on Drexel in a well-maintained courtyard building. Rent is $240. Cheryl talks it over with Edward, who is still living with his folks. Between his $154 a month from General Assistance and her $250 from Aid to Families with Depdendent Children (AFDC), they feel they can afford the place.
