1“Every Time I See You, You Take Me Away”
It was a mild December day in Houston, and Dontay Davis had started a fight at school again. His cousin Boogie found him in the halls of the Gregory-Lincoln Education Center, the Fourth Ward school both boys attended. It was 2006 and Dontay was in fifth grade. Boogie was a couple of years older, but he’d flunked a grade and so was just one year ahead.
Dontay had always been a fighter. Sometimes fights started when a kid would say something to him he didn’t like, but other times he’d pick them himself. He wanted to show the others in his school that he wasn’t a punk, and he told himself that’s why he did it, but really, deep down, he liked the way it felt to exchange punches, even when he lost. It released something in him he was always carrying; for a moment, he felt clear and light. The fight that day, he remembers, had been with another boy over a girl in class. So when Dontay met up with Boogie in the hallways at school, he expected his cousin to talk about that. Instead, Boogie asked him if he knew what was going on at his house.
The lightness vanished and a pit landed in Dontay’s stomach as he heard the words come out of his cousin’s mouth. Before Boogie had even told him what was happening, he knew that it was Child Protective Services, and he knew he was going to have to leave.
During class later, Dontay got called to the office. His CPS caseworker, Tamika Lipsey, was waiting for him. He asked her point-blank if she was going to take him away.
“Why do you always ask me that?” she said.
He didn’t trust her, because he knew what happened when the caseworker showed up. “Every time I see you, you take me away,” he told her.
Tamika assured him that she was only there to visit with him and make sure he was okay. He relaxed a bit, but she still asked him the same questions she always asked, questions he felt uncomfortable answering because he was always afraid of saying the wrong thing and he didn’t want to get his family in trouble. He knew what would happen if they got in trouble—he’d have to leave again, and maybe get split up from his brothers and baby sister again, and if he ended up back at the shelter he’d have to fight the big kids again to prove to the others that they shouldn’t fuck with him, and those kids were not like the kids at Gregory-Lincoln. They were meaner, and they were bigger. And worse, he knew he wouldn’t be able to see his mom, Sherry, anymore, and the family had only just got back to some sort of normal.
Tamika asked him how he liked living at his aunt’s house, where he’d been staying with his siblings for close to six months. He told her he liked it—he got to play with his brothers Devonte and Jeremiah, with his cousins in the Fourth Ward neighborhood where his mother grew up, and on the computer at his aunt’s house. She asked him if there was anything he didn’t like, and he was careful to say no. She asked him what happened when he got in trouble. He told her he got spankings on his butt from his aunt; he hoped that was the right thing to say. He told his caseworker that on some weekends, they’d go back to Nathaniel Davis’s house, where they last lived before they were taken into foster care, and Nathaniel, whom Dontay referred to as his dad, would cook for them and they’d sleep over.
Tamika left Dontay there at school and went back to the CPS office. She didn’t tell him this, but she had been disconcerted by her visit earlier that day to the apartment where Dontay lived with his two younger brothers and baby sister. Before she had gone to see Dontay at his school, she’d gone to check in with his aunt Priscilla Celestine. Priscilla’s brother Clarence was the father of Dontay’s two youngest siblings, Jeremiah and Ciera, and he had asked her to take the children in when they were removed from their home.
Priscilla was a churchgoing woman, unlike her brother, who was in prison for drugs, and her brother’s girlfriend, Sherry, Dontay’s mom, who had a well-known cocaine problem that had caused her to lose her children. Priscilla worked as a receptionist at a hospital and kept her nose clean—Dontay had told his caseworker, when she asked if they went to church, “That’s the only place we ever go.”
But Priscilla had been struggling with the new family setup, which had formed abruptly months after the kids were taken away from their home. The children had been in foster care at separate placements before they moved in with her. She was growing to love the children, especially her brother’s two, who were the youngest. And she wanted to keep all the siblings together—but four more children in her home, when it used to be just her and her daughter and granddaughter, strained her patience at times.
More than that, it strained her resources. This was 2006, more than a decade before Texas’s Department of Family and Protective Services began issuing a monthly payment of $350 for each child who was placed with relatives. Foster parents had long been given monthly stipends on a sliding scale to care for children, with high-needs children drawing the most money. But kinship placements, in which children were placed with relatives, didn’t qualify for those payments; instead, caregivers received a one-time $1,000 payment for the first child and $495 for each sibling, along with $500 a year for approved expenses.
For Priscilla’s family of seven, it just wasn’t enough, between new beds for the four children, increased grocery bills, clothes and shoes, school supplies, and diapers. The financial strain was exacerbated by the fact that Priscilla, whose two-bedroom apartment did not pass a home inspection because it was too small to accommodate the entire family, had needed to upgrade to a larger, four-bedroom unit in order for the children to be able to stay with her for the long term.
She needed her full-time job more than ever, but there was also the matter of finding people to care for the children when she was at work. Dontay, ten years old, was in school, but the younger ones weren’t—Devonte was four, Jeremiah was two, and Ciera had just turned a year old when they moved in. She enlisted her daughter as the chief caretaker when she was away, but sometimes her daughter was busy. And Dontay’s school had been repeatedly calling her to come in, since he was always picking fights and getting into trouble. She needed to keep her job to have a chance in hell of paying for the kids, but she wasn’t sure she would be able to handle the new situation without help.
She’d regularly send the kids to their father figure, Nathaniel Davis—he wasn’t the biological dad of any of the kids, but he had given his last name to all of them. Nathaniel was the much-older partner of Sherry, the kids’ mom. They’d been together for a long time, and even though she was in and out of relationships with other men, he thought of her as his wife and thought of her children as his own. In fact, he’d been the primary parent caring for them since they were born. When Priscilla called, Nathaniel was over the moon to help. He had missed his children terribly since they’d been taken from his home the year before, after Sherry failed a drug test for the second time upon the birth of Ciera. He was hopeful that one day, after all the drama had quieted down, the kids would return to live with him.
And that wasn’t the only support Priscilla had. Sherry was keen to stay involved in her children’s lives. Priscilla had had to call and bother the caseworker multiple times about a clothing stipend for the children, who had badly needed winter clothes. But when Sherry came to visit she brought them the coolest new Nike sneakers and Polo shirts and Tommy Hilfiger jeans, even for the babies, as well as bags full of McDonald’s to fill the kids’ bellies. Sherry told Priscilla that if she ever needed her to watch the kids, she was only a call away. She missed her children, and although she wasn’t able to stay clean, she wanted nothing more than to be in their lives.
The problem was, Sherry had terminated her parental rights—her lawyer had said it was necessary to do so in order for Priscilla to be able to adopt them. This meant that she was no longer supposed to have contact with them at all. It was a condition of the children living with Priscilla that Sherry never be left alone with them. And Priscilla knew she shouldn’t risk it.
But there were times when there really were no better options. And one of those times was the very day Tamika Lipsey visited Dontay at Gregory-Lincoln and told him she wasn’t going to take him away. Before she went to Dontay’s school, Tamika had stopped by Priscilla’s apartment unannounced and found a strange woman in pajamas at the door.
She said her name was Sherry, and that she was a “family friend.” Concerned, Tamika asked Sherry if she lived there. She said no, she just spent the night because Priscilla had to be at work early. The kids looked like they had just woken up, and when Tamika went to check their rooms she noticed none of them had any furniture. Sherry explained that the family had only moved into the apartment a couple of weeks before, and showed her which rooms were for which children.
Tamika called her supervisor once she’d arrived back at the office after checking on Dontay at school. Her supervisor told her to remove the kids, based on the potential risk of harm.
* * *
Sherry Davis was a Black woman from the Fourth Ward in Houston, Texas. Historically the center of Black life in Houston, the neighborhood was once known as the Mother Ward; before that, it was called Freedmen’s Town. It was where formerly enslaved people from the plantations along the Brazos River settled after news of the Confederacy’s defeat finally reached Galveston and the enslaved people in Texas came to know that they were free.
These newly freed people had settled on the marshy, flood-prone banks of Buffalo Bayou, along the same sludgy river that the brothers Augustus and John Allen had traversed in 1836 when they founded what would become Houston. At the time the freedmen settled the Fourth Ward in the late 1860s, the city didn’t exist much beyond downtown, and the banks of the bayou were considered undesirable property. It was here that the freedmen made and laid their own redbrick roads, carving symbols of hope on each one, and set to building homes and churches for the free Black families.
The Fourth Ward’s story is similar to that of many other freedmen’s towns around the country: In 1950, as cars became widely accessible, the government constructed an interstate highway, ramming it through the ward, and the community, cut in half, began to atrophy. Integration meant that well-to-do Black families, of which there were many in the Fourth Ward, began to settle in suburbs outside the city’s core. The Black community shrank, and those who remained were very poor. In the 1980s, crack cocaine took a firm hold. Then, after decades when the local real estate held barely any monetary value, the neighborhood, next door to downtown, suddenly became hot. Developers bought much of the land, sometimes by force, and renamed a good chunk of it Midtown, redefining its identity and erecting manicured retail centers filled with smoothie shops and chain pizzerias.
Sherry was born in 1970, by which time the Fourth Ward was already in decline. She and her younger siblings, Joshua and Alisia, lived with their mother in a white shotgun house with a gabled roof on the corner of Ruthven and Matthews, three blocks down from Mount Carmel Missionary Baptist Church. Sherry’s mother, Rose Mary Harlan, had herself grown up in the Fourth Ward, and Rose’s sister Doris lived across the street.
Rose lived with her boyfriend, Lonnie Ray Curtis. Lonnie used to hit Rose in front of her children. He brandished his pistol, the children remembered, pointing it at her at least once and beating her so hard with it another time that she ended up in the hospital. One night, when Sherry was twelve, she was sleeping in a bedroom of the little shack with her younger siblings, who were eleven and eight, and Lonnie’s five-year-old, when Lonnie came home drunk. Sherry and her sister, Alisia, were awake, and heard their mother arguing with Lonnie about where he had been.
Rose pointed out Lonnie’s messed-up hair, accused him of philandering, and told him to sleep on the couch. That’s when Sherry and Alisia heard Lonnie rummaging around in the cabinet in their mother’s room. Shortly after that, they heard a gunshot.
The girls fled their room and found their mother stumbling out of her bedroom with blood spurting out of her neck.
“Rose, please don’t die,” Lonnie pleaded with her. “Come lay down on the bed.”
Sherry saw her mother hit the floor, collapsing in the doorway with her head twisted at an unnatural angle, framed by the edge of the doorframe. Lonnie grabbed the .22, put it in his pocket, and fled across the street to wake up Rose’s sister Doris.
Rose was dead by the time the ambulance arrived, and Lonnie, at twenty-four, was charged with her murder. Sherry and her siblings went at first to live with their aunt but often moved around, even, at times, sleeping in cars. It was while on the street that Sherry was introduced to crack cocaine, which would come to shape her life.
At fifteen years old, just three years after her mother’s murder, Sherry became mother to a son, DeMarcus. Her second son, DeAndre, came shortly after. She dropped out of high school and took up with an abusive boyfriend, who controlled her movements. She left DeMarcus and DeAndre with a friend, and after the friend didn’t hear from her for a couple weeks, they called CPS. Sherry said her boyfriend had kidnapped her and wouldn’t let her leave his house; she lost the boys, who were adopted out of foster care.
Sherry was pregnant with her third son when she reconnected with Nathaniel Davis. She’d known him for most of her life; he went by Joe Boy, and he grew up across the street from her mom and aunts back in the day. He was much older—when they reconnected, Sherry was nineteen and Nathaniel was forty-seven; he had been married and divorced, and had grown children. He was steady, though. He did yard work and was staying with his mom while he got his disability benefits together, and once he did that, he was going to get a place of his own.
Sherry moved into that place with him, along with her new son, baby DeQuince. The nature of their relationship was unusual: Nathaniel and Sherry had a partnership that would last decades, but she repeatedly had dalliances and sometimes serious relationships outside of their pairing. Nathaniel never fathered any of Sherry’s children. He did raise and nurture them all, though. He knew that he hadn’t done it right with his own kids the first time—he wasn’t around enough for them, and his one grown biological son wouldn’t talk to him because of it—and he wanted to do right by Sherry’s children. He wanted to be a good father.
When DeQuince was three months old, his biological dad stopped by and asked Nathaniel if he could take him out. When he returned, DeQuince’s arm was sore and swollen. His biological father told Sherry he’d fallen out of his stroller at the park. But when Nathaniel took him into Ben Taub, the public hospital downtown, they told him DeQuince had multiple broken bones. Crazed, Sherry came to the hospital and took DeQuince home, terrified that CPS workers would take him as they had taken her other children.
And, of course, they did. Nathaniel wanted to fight CPS to get DeQuince back, but Sherry wouldn’t do it. Instead, she began to use more crack cocaine, tipping her cigarettes with the white powder before smoking them. Shortly after DeQuince went to live with a woman in Sunnyside, another poor Black Houston neighborhood, he was adopted, too.
When Dontay was born to a man Sherry was not in a serious relationship with, she gave the newborn Nathaniel’s last name, Davis, and the family left the Fourth Ward and settled down near Sunnyside. Sherry worked as a home health aide, leaving for several days at a time to stay in the home of the elderly patients she cared for, and she prided herself on not needing welfare checks to get by.
Dontay was five years old when Devonte was born, and Dontay loved being a big brother. Nathaniel would cook for the boys and clean up after them, and take Devonte to the hospital when his asthma got bad. By all accounts Sherry loved her kids—she kept her boys fed and clothed in fresh new sneakers. But she still had her cocaine habit. She’d get stressed and reach for her pack of cigarettes, slap them against her hand to pack them down, and sprinkle the white powder in the space left at the top. Lighting her primos, as she called them, made her feel good and helped her forget about the drama of the day.
Sherry took up with a new man, Clarence, but the kids stayed with Nathaniel, whom they considered their father. Nathaniel told people he and Sherry were still together, and they were, in a way—whenever she came to stay, she cooked for her children and cleaned up around the house, and he raised the children when she was out. She’d stay out for days, sometimes for her job but other times for other reasons.
When Jeremiah was born in 2004, Sherry and the baby tested positive for cocaine, and Nathaniel got custody of the children, which really just solidified the relationship they already had in place. The boys got a bunk bed, and Jeremiah’s new crib was rolled in. Nathaniel’s grown daughter Carmenel came most days to help with the baby, and the boys slept in Nathaniel’s bed, all piled in together, while the new bunk bed sat empty in the boys’ room.
Dontay, Devonte, and baby Jeremiah were Nathaniel’s whole life, and he told the CPS caseworker that if he had to choose between Sherry and the children, he’d keep his kids in a heartbeat.
The situation was stable but still tenuous, with the threat of removal always hanging over the family. Because of Sherry’s history with the agency, and especially because of the abuse of DeQuince, caseworkers kept a close eye on the Davis family.
In 2005, Sherry gave birth to a baby girl she named Ciera. Sherry was still with Clarence Celestine, who was also Jeremiah’s father. In the hospital, Sherry again tested positive for cocaine, although the baby tested negative. She pleaded with the caseworkers, asking them to give her another chance. But her child welfare case was moved from the “reunification” track to the “termination” track, and the kids were taken from Nathaniel’s house, in part because he told them he didn’t know Sherry was using again. He had meant that she was never high around the kids, which is when he spent time with her, but they had seen his response as “enabling” her drug use.
The four kids were first sent to Nathaniel’s brother’s house, but after a caseworker stopped by and found the brother and his wife drunk, baby Ciera was sent to one foster family and the boys were moved to another. Eight-year-old Dontay lasted less than two weeks at the home, where he noticed there was a dog gate erected in the living room, separating the foster children from the foster parents’ biological children. The boys’ meals were strictly portioned, while the couple’s children got to eat what they liked. Dontay became enraged—he was old enough to understand they’d taken him from his family but not old enough to understand why.
The foster mother reported to his caseworker that when he would get angry, his eyes would roll back in his head and he would threaten his siblings and the other children in the home. The caseworker dropped him off at the CPS offices, and as she left, Dontay told her he was going to set her on fire for taking him there.
Dontay was sent to Intracare, one of Houston’s few psychiatric hospitals that accepted Medicaid patients. Intracare was at one time the second-largest psychiatric hospital in Harris County, before it was shut down in 2012 after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid terminated its contract with the hospital for improper use of restraints and seclusion, a practice that posed a danger to patient health. Twice, the hospital was cited for chemically restraining patients without an updated treatment plan. Here, Dontay received a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder. Later, he’d be diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar disorder as well.
Dontay spent three weeks at Intracare in 2005, and he saw children there who were like him, children whose emotions were too much for them to handle. It was scary—there was the constant threat of a sedative shot, administered into the flesh of the butt, that would make you fall unconscious. He saw others get the shot, which they called “booty juice,” and he got it, too—more times than he could count.
But people were real in there, he thought. They didn’t pretend that everything was okay, that strangers were family, or that they cared and wanted to help. For the first time since he’d left his family, he felt like people were being honest.
Copyright © 2023 by Roxanna Asgarian DeBenedetto