The Cradle Robbers by Ayelet Waldman Read Free Book Online Page A

My mama was all set to come up and get Taniel, but the problem was, you see, she don’t drive. She was going to have to wait for my uncle Daniel, the one I named the baby for,to take off work. Up in prison they only give you a day in the hospital and there just wasn’t going to be any way for Uncle Daniel and my mama to get up to Dartmore in time. The social worker”—Sister Pauline’s lip curled—“that evil woman, she arranged for the Lambs of the Lord man to come visit me. He told me they’d send a foster mother for my baby and she’d keep her until my own mama got up to Dartmore. I was so happy I found them.” She laughed bitterly. “I was so afraid that if DSS got hold of my baby they’d never let her go. I never thought that the Lambs would take her. Never for a minute.”
    By now she was weeping freely, tears streaming down her face. She rubbed the back of her hands on her cheeks. I wanted to get up and hug her, but there was no room for me on the recliner next to her, and there was something self-contained about this young woman in her grief.
    “What happened when your mother came up to get Taniel?”
    “She never got up to Dartmore. My uncle Daniel, he fell off a roof the week before Taniel was born, and he broke his back, so he couldn’t drive her nowhere. The family that took Taniel, they kepttelling my mama when she called, ‘Oh take your time, she doing fine.’ Mama looked for someone else to drive her on up. Then
she
got sick. She lost her foot to the diabetes. Her friends on the tenants’ commission took up a collection to send her up to Dartmore, but it took almost six months before she was well enough to go get my baby. Right before she went up, I got this letter saying that there was a hearing scheduled to terminate my parental rights. My mama got herself to the hearing. She told the judge I was going be getting out in just three more months, but by then it was too late. The judge just gave my Taniel to that couple, the Lambs of the Lord people, saying that I’d abandoned her and that she’d be better off with them, that that woman was her mama now.”
    Sister Pauline’s story chilled me. Was that possible? Could a baby be signed over just like that?
    “Tell you something else,” Sister Pauline said. “I know why they wanted her; I know why they wanted my Taniel.”
    “Why?”
    “The social worker brought those people to the hospital room to pick up Taniel at the end of my day with her. I found out after that they weren’t supposedto be there, but they were there, right in my room. I had my baby girl to my breast, just to give her some little bit of milk before she had to go, and the woman, she gets this pinched look on her face when she sees that. The social worker tells the nurse to show them my baby, and then the nurse takes Taniel away from me and hands her to the foster mother. Taniel’s all wrapped up in a little striped blanket with her little pink hat on her head and the lady says to her husband, ‘Oh look! She so fair! She looks just like a little white baby.’ Those people stole my Taniel because she came out with my light skin. If only her daddy been dark, like Dericia’s daddy, I’d still have my little Taniel. I know I would.”
    At that moment Dericia ran into the room, squealing a line from her TV show, “Swiper no swiping!” at the top of her lungs.
    Sister Pauline leaned down to scoop her daughter into her lap and I stared at the pair. Taken separately, her story and Sandra’s could have, if not a benign explanation, then at least an understandable one. In Taniel’s case, if you closed your eyes to the chilling racism of the foster mother, you might argue that the family had simply fallen in love withtheir foster child, and after six months no longer wanted to turn her over. In Sandra’s case, if there even were a case, and not just a series of missed phone calls, the argument could be made that the foster parents were worried about the well-being of a