Lost Children of Wilder (eBook)

Nina Bernstein (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2011 | 1. Auflage
496 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-78774-3 (ISBN)

Infos

In 1973 Marcia Lowry, a young civil liberties attorney, filed a controversial class-action suit that would come to be known as Wilder, which challenged New York City's operation of its foster-care system. Lowry's contention was that the system failed the children it was meant to help because it placed them according to creed and convenience, not according to need. The plaintiff was thirteen-year-old Shirley Wilder, an abused runaway whose childhood had been shaped by the system's inequities. Within a year Shirley would give birth to a son and relinquish him to the same failing system.

Seventeen years later, with Wilder still controversial and still in court, Nina Bernstein tried to find out what had happened to Shirley and her baby. She was told by child-welfare officials that Shirley had disappeared and that her son was one of thousands of anonymous children whose circumstances are concealed by the veil of confidentiality that hides foster care from public scrutiny. But Bernstein persevered.

The Lost Children of Wilder gives us, in galvanizing and compulsively readable detail, the full history of a case that reveals the racial, religious, and political fault lines in our child-welfare system, and lays bare the fundamental contradiction at the heart of our well-intended efforts to sever the destiny of needy children from the fate of their parents. Bernstein takes us behind the scenes of far-reaching legal and legislative battles, at the same time as she traces, in heartbreaking counterpoint, the consequences as they are played out in the life of Shirley's son, Lamont. His terrifying journey through the system has produced a man with deep emotional wounds, a stifled yearning for family, and a son growing up in the system's shadow.

In recounting the failure of the promise of benevolence, The Lost Children of Wilder makes clear how welfare reform can also damage its
intended beneficiaries. A landmark achievement of investigative reporting and a tour de force of social observation, this book will haunt every reader who cares about the needs of children.

From the Hardcover edition.

Textauszug

There was still snow on the ground the day Shirley Wilder and another girl followed a dirt road at the upper end of the grounds into the woods, hunting for a way out. The road soon vanished among the drifts and wet black tree trunks. Moving through the shadows of a grove of cedars, they suddenly found themselves in a clearing at the edge of a steep, wooded ravine. It was a small cemetery. The old gravestones had been so tilted by spring frosts and winter thaws that they looked almost scattered. There were no dates on the weathered markers, and no epitaphs--only girls' names, fading from bare limestone. Lizzie French. Nellie McGovern. Anna Schabesberger. Julia Coon. Mary O'Brien. Louella Roarack. Lydia Althouser. Jennie Fuller. Barbara Decker. Anne Withey. Helen Peer. Shirley remembered the stories she had heard from a housemother and some of the girls. They said a secret graveyard lay hidden in the woods on the Hudson grounds. Years ago, dead babies born to inmates were buried there, and bad girls, too--girls caught trying to escape who later died inside the institution. Other bodies were sent home to their folks for burial, but even after death, runaways were punished. This was their solitary confinement: a cold, dark grave lost in the woods forever. Shirley began to tremble, and the other girl cried out in fright. They turned and ran away as fast as they could. At the other end of the Hudson grounds they climbed over the fence together and slid down a slope into a stubble of cattails and frozen loosestrife. For hours they stumbled through the big swamp that bordered the institution, looking for a road out. Pockets of ice cracked underfoot and gave way to marshy ground. They fell and scrambled upright again, foul-smelling muck soaking their shoes and clothes. Running, trudging, running again, they couldn't escape the icy wind that whipped in off the river. They clutched at stiff weeds with raw fingers to keep from slipping. Shirley's feet swelled, and her ears went numb with cold. They were lost, lost in the vast wetland that had once been the South Bay. Whaling ships were moored here in another century. The first ones carried the town's founders, prosperous whalers from Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard who came seeking a safer harbor in the revolutionary world of 1783. The Proprieters, as later generations would call them, sailed up the Hudson with all their goods lashed to the decks of their ships, even their disassembled houses. In later years, tugboats idled in the South Bay after guiding great shipping vessels to the deep-water wharves on Hudson's Front Street. In the 1840s, when impoverished tenant farmers rebelled against their vassalage under Hudson Valley landowners, troopships sailed here, too, bringing soldiers to crush the revolt. Then the railroad arrived. The New York-to-Albany line was laid on causeways right across the mouth of the South Bay, cutting it off from the river in 1851. An iron factory spewed its wastes into the stranded bay. The bay became a putrid swamp. And on a promontory above this swamp, the House of Refuge for Women was built. The word Refuge was misleading: from the moment the stone and wrought iron gates of the institution first swung open on May 7, 1887, solitary confinement was the preferred mode of treatment. 'Though I have been very much impeded by the newness of the institution in my desire to enforce rigorous discipline,' Sarah V. Coon, the first superintendent, reported in November 1888, 'still so far as it has been possible in our overcrowded prison, I have tried to isolate each girl, upon her arrival, from the older inmates. . . . Sometimes, upon detecting a developing...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.3.2011
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie
• ISBN-10: 0-307-78774-5 / 0307787745
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-78774-3 / 9780307787743