‘I Never Dreamed I Would See 16’

In the classrooms, outside the cafeteria, on the quadrangle, inside the teachers’ lunchroom, everyone on this first day of school is asking the same question: Where is Toya Perkins? * Toya is one of the most promising students in Crenshaw High School’s Gifted and High Ability Magnet program. Despite a Dickensian childhood, she survived the rigorous academic criteria. Now she is a senior, and her teachers had hoped she could hang on for one more year, continue her record of excellence and obtain a college scholarship.

Until today, her teachers at the South-Central Los Angeles school were confident that Toya was on track. Last week, she registered for classes and assured Scott Braxton, the head of the gifted magnet program, that despite the panoply of problems she had faced during the past six months, she would be in class on the first day of school.

But Toya did not show up, and she couldn’t be reached at home.

Braxton is distressed because Toya had overcome such steep odds. To falter now would be a crushing defeat, not just for Toya but also, Braxton feels, for himself. Because he spent so much time counseling her. Because he cares for her. Because she experienced so much cruelty in her young life, she deserves a break, she deserves to succeed. Toya’s failure, Braxton believes, would also be a defeat for the gifted magnet program, which has a reputation for salvaging the futures of bright students with troubled family backgrounds.

The vast majority of gifted programs in public schools across the country are predominantly white; blacks and Latinos are dramatically underrepresented. These programs are often criticized as, essentially, a bargaining chip, a way to persuade middle-class white parents to keep their children in public schools. At Crenshaw, however, all the students--who are classified as gifted as a result of their IQ or standardized test scores--are minorities; most are black.

Since its inception in 1989, the program has been based at Crenshaw High School, located near 50th Street and Crenshaw Boulevard.

The school is a typically overcrowded, underfunded, inner-city campus where two Los Angeles Unified School District police officers armed with 9-millimeter pistols patrol the grounds, where the dropout rate is almost 50% and where only 5% of the seniors score above average on college aptitude tests. The gifted magnet program, however, is a high school within a high school--completely autonomous. The students, about 98% of whom go on to college, share the hallways and the lunchroom with the students in the regular school but they have separate classes and teachers and more demanding course work. On a recent standardized exam, the 10th-graders in Crenshaw’s gifted program had the seventh-highest score in reading out of more than 100 high school programs in the district, and the eighth highest in math.

At the end of this first day of school, when the bell rings at 3 p.m. and 2,800 boisterous students pour into the streets, Braxton is in his office, rifling through Toya’s file, searching for her phone number.

“She’s got to get herself to school--and soon. There’s not a lot of margin for error here.” Braxton massages the bridge of his nose, sighs wearily and says, “I had big plans for that girl.”

Toya is one of Braxton’s favorite seniors in the gifted program, not just because she has endured so much and not just because she is one of the school’s most conscientious students. Braxton appreciates her great enthusiasm for school, how she embraced the challenges of her classes, particularly honors chemistry and physics. While many bright students at Crenshaw cannot imagine a world outside South-Central, Toya is ambitious. By her junior year, she had mapped out her academic goals: Cornell University’s summer program for high school students; after high school, Harvard, with a major in chemistry; after Harvard, medical school and a career as an oncologist.

During the spring of her junior year, Toya achieved her first goal: Cornell offered her a full scholarship for its summer program. In late March and early April, however, she missed a few weeks of school--highly unusual for Toya. Her teachers didn’t know where she was. Her friends had not heard from her. Braxton called her home and left messages, but no one returned his calls.

On a morning in mid-April, the mystery surrounding Toya’s absence was solved. I was talking to Braxton in his office when a secretary interrupted us.

“There’s something you should see,” she told Braxton. We followed her to the conference room.

Toya was sitting there. With her 10-day-old baby.

Braxton emitted a long, slow sigh that sounded like a hinge creaking. He collapsed in a chair, closed his eyes and cradled his head in his hands. During the past few months, Toya had worn increasingly baggy clothes to school but Braxton and her teachers thought she had just gained weight. “I’ve seen plenty of students have babies,” he told her, “but at least I knew they were pregnant.”

When Braxton regained his composure, he asked, “What are you going to do about school?”

“I want to take home study,” Toya said evenly.

“‘How about Cornell?” he asked.

“That’s out,” she said. “But I’m coming back to school in the fall. I will graduate. And I will go on to college.”

Toya was not cowed, unlike many teenage mothers who stop by Crenshaw with their babies. She lifted her chin, looked Braxton in the eye and said, “Can you help me get home study?”

“Of course,” he said. “Just do your work and get back here next fall.”

He walked Toya to the hallway. A teacher saw her, pointed to the baby and asked, incredulously, “Is that yours?”

“Yes, he is,” Toya said, enunciating each word clearly. “This is my little boy.”

Toya lugged her baby to the bus stop and boarded the next bus back to Watts. Braxton returned to his office and shook his head disconsolately. He perused her file and report cards--mostly A’s, with a few B’s. He studied her teachers’ comments, listed below her grades: “Exceptional student.” “Outstanding in every respect.” “A pleasure to have in class.”

Braxton picked up the phone and called several schools, trying to find a home study program for Toya. A few of the programs Braxton contacted would not enroll new students--it was too late in the year. But the following week he found a program that would accept Toya. She enrolled and, for the last few months of her junior year--between changing diapers, nursing her baby and visiting the pediatrician--she completed homework and wrote papers. In June she assured Braxton that she would return to Crenshaw in the fall to begin her senior year.

On the first day of class, however, Toya did not show up. Braxton called her aunt, her legal guardian, who told him that Toya and her baby had moved out and she did not know where they were. Braxton was dejected. Other girls in the gifted program had become pregnant but had stayed in school. Braxton had thought Toya, too, was disciplined and ambitious enough to juggle motherhood, high school and, eventually, college. But when she was absent on the first day of school--and did not call--he feared she would not return.

*

Toya traces the events that forever changed her life to a bitterly cold January night in the small south Georgia town where she was raised. Her stepfather, a burly power plant worker, was on another drinking binge, arguing again with Toya’s mother. Toya, 9 at the time, had seen dozens of these arguments, which usually ended with her stepfather pummeling her mother. Then he would grab an extension cord, or yank a loose board off a wall, and beat Toya.

On this night, he threatened to kill Toya’s mother, and the set of his jaw and the narrowing of his eyes made her believe him. When he finally passed out, Toya’s mother quietly hustled her two daughters out of the house and checked into a nearby shelter for battered women.

After about a week, Toya’s mother decided to leave the shelter. It was too far from her job and she could not afford the $10-a-night fee. She and her two daughters temporarily moved in with a friend. On the morning of Jan. 29, 1990, she told Toya, “I’m going to pack up all our clothes. When you get out of school, come straight to the house. We’ll get our things and move out for good.”

Toya returned to the house after school and found her mother sprawled on the bedroom floor. Toya shook her. Her mother didn’t move. She shook her again. Finally, she crouched beside her mother and looked into her eyes. Then she knew. She ran out of the house screaming, “She’s dead! She’s dead. My mommy’s dead!”

Toya’s stepfather had strangled her mother.

Toya had never met her biological father, had no idea who he was or where he lived. So she and her 5-year-old sister were sent to live in a foster home with three other children. At the home, whenever she thought about her mother and started to cry, her little sister would sob, too. Although she was only a fifth-grader, Toya felt she had to be strong for her sister, to present herself as a steadying maternal figure. It was only late at night, when her sister was sleeping soundly, that Toya allowed herself to mourn her mother. She tugged the covers over her head and muffled her cries with a pillow.

Later, Toya wrote a poem that chronicled her childhood, her stepfather’s cruelty and her mother’s death:

Was I such a bad child

That I deserved to get hit

With boards

And extension cords. . . .

He hit me, abused me

Abuse of every kind.

He conquered my hope. . . .

You’re my mother.

Why must I feel your pain?

Why must I live your grief?

He took you away from me.

He stole my pride.

He left me--no, us--high and dry

I knew, I just knew I was going to die.

I never dreamed I would see sixteen. . . .

During these years of abuse, home had been a terrifying prison. The drunken fights had awakened her at night and her stepfather had often punched her for no reason. Elementary school had been her only sanctuary. She was a bright child who learned effortlessly and, in the fifth grade, was one of the few black children placed in the school’s gifted classes.

After Toya and her sister had spent about three months in foster care, their mother’s sister agreed to take them in. Her stepfather would subsequently be convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

Toya’s aunt lived in Watts, down the street from the dilapidated Jordan Downs housing project. Toya was from a small country town and she was frightened by her new neighborhood, where drug dealing and drive-by shootings and gangbanging were pervasive. Toya avoided the perils of her neighborhood by leaving the house only to ride the bus to and from school. When she returned home, she stayed inside and did her homework on the kitchen table, where she could hear the occasional staccato of semiautomatic gunfire outside the window. In junior high school, she was placed in a gifted program, and in the ninth grade enrolled at Crenshaw’s gifted magnet.

*

In the second week of September, during her senior year, Toya finally stops by Crenshaw and visits Braxton. She’s had a falling out with her aunt and has moved into a Watts apartment with her cousin. She tells Braxton she doesn’t know if she can afford to return to Crenshaw for her senior year because child-care centers are too expensive. She is considering enrolling at Jordan High School in Watts, which provides free child care for teenage mothers. Toya, however, is accustomed to excelling in honors and Advanced Placement classes, and she knows the Jordan program won’t provide the same academic challenge. She dabs at her eyes with a tissue.

“Don’t give up yet,” Braxton says. “Let me see if I can find some child care around here that you can afford.”

“‘OK,” Toya says, nodding. Then she says, more to herself than to Braxton, “I’ve been through a lot tougher times than this. If I could survive them, I can get through this.”

Braxton spends the next few days calling numerous child-care centers, but anything within her price range is far from Crenshaw, and the centers that are close to Crenshaw are expensive. He finally finds a center for $265 a month only two blocks from the high school and reserves a spot for Toya’s baby.

Braxton officially enrolls Toya in her classes. Now he has to coax her to school. He calls and tells her about the child-care center. Toya, however, says she doesn’t know if she can afford $265 a month. Time is running out, Braxton tells her. There is only a week and a half left in September. If she is going to return to the gifted program, she had better do it now. If she delays any longer, she’ll be too far behind to catch up.

Toya tells him she will let him know soon.

She’s living in a dilapidated apartment in a blighted industrial section of Watts, across the street from a furniture manufacturing plant and surrounded by cabinet factories, auto repair shops and other run-down apartment buildings. The tan stucco is crumbling off her building, the paint is peeling off the front doors, trash is scattered along the entrance and the address is spray-painted on the front.

To reach her apartment, Toya walks through the security gate, past a long strip of stained asphalt that reeks of Lysol, past a rusting abandoned stove, past apartments blaring--alternately--salsa and rap, past a parking lot where discarded auto parts are strewn about, past a corrugated metal fence covered by huge swirls of savage graffiti. Her front door faces a box factory that churns and thrums all day.

Toya and her cousin share the apartment’s single tiny bedroom. They both sleep on narrow cots that flank the baby’s crib. By the front door, there is a small kitchen with a chipped linoleum floor. The living room walls are bare, save for pictures of Toya’s son, who is now about 6 months old, and her late mother.

As Toya bounces her son, Kaelen, on her knee, she talks--above the din of the trucks rumbling by--about her life during the past few weeks, since school started. When she is stuck at home and Kaelen naps, she often reads the dictionary. She leafs through the pages and searches for words she doesn’t know, desperate for some intellectual stimulation. On other days, she and Kaelen spend the afternoon at the public library in Watts and, after reading to him, she rifles through books about science, anatomy or grammar, books that serve as simulacrum for the rigor of the classroom.

Despite the upheaval in her life, despite her difficult circumstances, Toya has maintained her equanimity. And her dignity. Her apartment is immaculate. She takes good care of Kaelen, who is a bright, happy baby. And while she currently is in academic limbo, she has not abandoned her dream of college.

Toya hopes to return to Crenshaw, hopes to put Kaelen in the child-care center Braxton found for her. But the center charges $265 a month, and the most she can afford right now is $215. She is trying to figure out a way to obtain another $50 a month. She knows she does not have much time.

On a Thursday morning in late September, Braxton slumps in his office chair, looking dazed and disappointed. Toya had just called him. She thanked him for all his efforts. She thanked him for not giving up on her. But she told him she simply cannot afford to pay for child care. She has decided to enroll at Jordan High School.

“There was so much that girl could have. . . .” Braxton says, breaking off in mid-sentence. He stares mournfully out his office door and thinks about the scholarship to Cornell that Toya had to give up over the summer; the scholarships she surely would have been offered this year but now will be ineligible for; the opportunities that would have transported her far from Watts; the tremendous promise she showed during her first three years of high school; the uncertain future that now awaits her.

*

During the next few months, Braxton does not have time to brood. He has to shift his attention to other troubled students with imperiled futures.

Then, on a drizzly February morning a few days into the second semester, Braxton receives a phone call from Toya.

His last conversation with her, in the fall, left him profoundly discouraged. She seemed destined to be another casualty of South-Central--a teenage girl with a baby and without a high school diploma. Now he discovers she will return to Crenshaw this week to enroll for the second semester.

When Toya left Crenshaw, she had attempted to enroll at Jordan but her aunt lived in one school district and the program was in another. Toya could never negotiate the bureaucratic maze to obtain permission to attend the school.

By the end of November, she was despondent. And destitute. She could not pay the rent, which was due in a few days. She could not buy food for Kaelen. Down to her last five dollars, Toya knew that within a few days, she and Kaelen would be homeless.

On Thanksgiving morning, she appealed to the one person she believed might be able to help her: Alta Ray, her best friend’s mother. “I’ve always been independent and a little proud,” Toya told Ray. “But I’ve got to swallow my pride now. For Kaelen. I’ve got to make sure I can properly take care of him. I’ve hit rock bottom. I need a place to stay.”

Ray, whose daughter Kemit is also a student in Crenshaw’s gifted program, has known Toya since she was a seventh- grader. Ray always respected Toya because she knew how difficult her life was. She was amazed that Toya remained motivated in school and focused on her future. When Toya became pregnant and dropped out of high school, Ray was enormously saddened.

Ray and her husband and their four children live in a modest two-bedroom, one-bathroom Watts bungalow that was already cramped. But when Toya asked for a place to stay, Ray immediately said yes. She knew Toya had no place else to go. Toya had Thanksgiving dinner with the Ray family and moved in two days later. Ray then helped Toya research and apply to a number of academic programs for teenage mothers. Finally, in early February, Toya was accepted to a program sponsored by a nonprofit social service agency that pays for child care and allows her to attend any high school in Los Angeles.

During Toya’s first week back, her daunting schedule does not faze her. She is too excited about her return to school. She arises at 5:30 a.m., dresses and feeds Kaelen and packs his day care bag. Kemit drops Kaelen off at day care and drives Toya to school. After school, Toya takes several late-afternoon classes at Crenshaw’s night school to make up for the last semester she missed. Then she walks a half mile to the day-care center, picks up Kaelen and walks another half mile to the bus stop.

When she arrives home at about 7 p.m., she feeds Kaelen, reads to him and puts him to bed. Then Toya squeezes in a few hours of homework. By midnight she has slipped into the living room, which is cluttered with the belongings of seven people and a baby. She opens up the convertible sofa and falls asleep next to Kaelen’s portable crib.

When Toya was holed up in her grim Watts apartment, she was always worried about money and frightened about her future. Now, during school hours, she can be a 17-year-old girl again. During lunch, she is ebullient as she gambols across the quad with Kemit, greeting old friends, laughing, gossiping, talking about the upcoming senior prom.

During her months away from school, what she missed most was the intellectual stimulation. Now Toya--who is enrolled in honors English, chemistry, economics and physics--is excited to be in a classroom again. At the end of the week, when the 3 p.m. bell rings, she dashes into the quadrangle, falls out of breath onto a cement bench and grins.

“Man, it was great today. I missed school sooooo much,” she says. “The whole beauty of learning was incredible. I forgot how much I missed just being in class. In chemistry today, we did an experiment to determine the acidity in vinegar. It was such an exciting adventure. The thrill of discovery was wonderful.” She pauses, eyes shining at the memory.

“I look around and I see so many students who don’t want to be here. They don’t appreciate learning. I can’t relate to that. Because I was forced to drop out, I appreciate every day I’m here.”

She stands up, scans the weathered buildings framing the quadrangle and extends both arms. “Wow,” she says, shaking her head in wonderment. “I’m really here.”

*

Epilogue: Toya needed to attend summer school to graduate from Crenshaw because of the classes she had missed after the birth of her baby. But the demands of an infant overwhelmed her. She did not attend summer school and did not graduate from high school. The next fall, she completed a church program that provided child care for teenage mothers so they could earn their high school equivalency certificates.

Toya then enrolled in a county program for teenage mothers at a community college that provided tuition, child care and bus fare. She attended class twice a week and studied computer programming. After almost a year of study, however, she was forced to drop out when she ran out of money. She worked at a supermarket but was laid off a few weeks ago. She now lives in a small apartment with her son and is searching for a job. Toya still hopes to eventually attend community college part time, transfer to a four-year school and graduate from college.

*

Excerpted from “And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner City High School Students,” published this month by William Morrow. Corwin is a Times staff writer. His last piece for the magazine was a tribute to the late writer Nieson Himmel.

*

Copyright 2000 by Miles Corwin. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow & Co.