Foster care odyssey : a Black girl's story / Theresa Cameron.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cameron, Theresa.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Foster children--New York (State)--Biography.

Foster children.

African American women--New York (State)--Biography.

African American women.

Foster home care--New York (State).

Foster home care.

New York (State).

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xii, 255 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2002]

Summary:

Without signing the documents that would permit adoption, young Theresa Cameron's mother placed her little daughter under the aegis of Catholic Charities and then vanished forever. During the 1960s and 1970s this abandoned, unadoptable child was shuttled through foster homes in the vicinity of Buffalo, N. Y. In her most formative and impressionable years she was wrenched through the to-and-fro mechanism of foster care. Insecure, desolate, and frightened, she was rotated through group homes and the houses of alien families, the victim of religious hypocrisy, racial prejudice, and insult. Theresa remained in this bleak, shame-imposing limbo until she was eighteen. Foster Care Odyssey is her candid story. "What little I owned," she writes, "could have fit inside my usual moving-day luggage -- a couple of shopping bags. Besides my clothing, I only had a few school supplies. Like the other girls at the group home, I attached very little sentimental value to the items I owned ... The only thing of value that could not be taken away from me were my thoughts." Theresa places her narrative against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in blue-collar Buffalo, where mixed-race foster homes were almost unknown and where she witnessed a welfare system that accorded only marginal benevolence to children, particularly black children caught in the squeeze of bureaucratic machinery. As she passed through her turbulent teenage years, she acquired both a strong will and a tough veneer to shield herself from the many hurts in a restrictive world infused with racism and institutional segregation. Her coming-of-age narrative voices plain-spoken criticism of the pernicious system which engulfed her and other helpless children of her kind.

Contents:

1. In the Beginning 5

2. On the Road: The First Foster Home I Remember 8

3. Life with the Chester Family Goes On 22

4. The Sea Widens: My New Life 39

5. Riding the Waves 50

6. Growing up with the Woodsons 67

7. Getting By However I Could 81

8. The End of the Line 104

9. Bouncing Around as an Adolescent 129

10. Life Among the Nuns 141

11. Coming of Age in the Group Home 150

12. Farewell to Flourette Hall 166

13. Around and Around I Went 178

14. Staying Afloat 195

15. Just Another Stop Along the Way 201

16. Alone in California 212

17. Back in New York 224

18. It Finally Came to an End 244.

ISBN:

1578064201

OCLC:

47894131