THE LOST CHILDREN OF WILDER: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care
By Nina Bernstein
Pantheon, 482 pages, $27.50
As President Bush calls on religious groups to shoulder a greater part of the nation’s social-services burden, Nina Bernstein offers a disquieting reminder of the legal and moral quagmires that can beset well-intentioned faith-based agencies.
Bernstein is a muckraking reporter, first with Newsday and now with The New York Times, who has repeatedly exposed wretched foster-care conditions. With this book she chronicles a class-action lawsuit that alleged discrimination by New York City’s government-funded, religious foster-care agencies, which handled about 85 percent of the city’s foster children.
The lead plaintiff in the case, which stretched on for 26 years, was Shirley Wilder, a 13-year-old ward of the state when the lawsuit began in 1973. The issue at stake was whether the foster-care agencies, which were primarily Catholic and Jewish, favored children of their own creeds and as a result tended to exclude black Protestant children like Wilder.
The case was fueled by a blaze of outrage over alleged preference given to children based on their creed and color. One nun testified for the plaintiffs that during the 1960s, whenever there was doubt about the racial origins of a baby in a Catholic institution’s nursery, nuns would take the child to the Museum of Natural History to be examined and classified by its resident anthropologist. When the Wilder lawsuit was filed, black Protestants accounted for about 53 percent of the children in the city’s public and private foster-care network, but in Catholic agencies only 25 percent were black, and in Jewish agencies just 23 percent.
It is easy to see what drew Bernstein to the Wilder case in the first place. She was researching a story on foster care when she found that as a teenager, Wilder had given birth to a son and placed him in foster care. Her discovery sparked the obsession that led to this book, which aspires to blend courtroom drama with gritty family history. Bernstein tracked down Wilder and tells her story and the story of years of courtroom wrangling.
As the narrative trudges along, the patient reader will come to recognize that Wilder is not typical of the half-million American children who are state wards because their parents abandoned or abused them.
Diagnosed with childhood mental illnesses, Wilder hears the voice of her dead grandmother. She would have confounded any agency that accepted her, religious or not, and she died of complications stemming from AIDS in 1999. Bernstein also locates Wilder’s son, Lamont, and traces his journey through the foster-care system that sent him through a series of homes and institutions in Minnesota and then back to New York.
Bernstein is a terrific, dogged reporter. In the state reformatory in Hudson, N.Y., where Wilder was briefly housed, Bernstein discovered oversize, 19th Century parole ledgers stacked in the dingy basement. Using these and other records, she effectively evokes the lives of the children who resided there.
At times, the profusion of detail lifts Bernstein’s writing to a kind of poetry. In one of Wilder’s many attempts to run away from Hudson, she stumbles through a shaded cedar grove and into a disheveled graveyard where the dead infants born to Hudson’s young inmates were buried alongside the girls who did not make it out:
“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.”
At times, however, the book’s narrative falters amid pointless facts about the lawsuit and its muddy resolution, and clumsy descriptions of its champions. Marcia Lowry, the New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer who leads the battle — and whose ascent in legal circles serves as a narrative counterweight to Wilder’s descent — is introduced as a “strong-featured young woman with long, dark hair that perpetually rebelled against a would-be Joan Baez look.”
While Bernstein can tell us what the lawyers ate while they discussed their case, she never gets close enough to Wilder to recount the brutal choices of her life with the honesty they deserve. In the end, we never understand what drove this reckless child to the streets, where she bartered sex, smoked crack and endured so many beatings.
And despite the profusion of detail Bernstein gives us, the Wilder lawsuit does not turn out to be an apt prism through which to view the last three decades of America’s “epic struggle to change foster care,” which is what the book’s subtitle promises. The lawsuit’s allegations of discrimination diminished in relevance as the case dragged on into the 1990s because the sectarian agencies reformed their race-based practices. Even as the total number of children in New York’s foster-care system grew, the percentage of whites in it dwindled to almost nothing, so that, “Agencies that wanted to stay in business had little choice but to fill their foster homes and beds with black Protestant children.” As one assistant city attorney declared in 1993, ” ‘Time has passed this case by.’ “
During the 26 years of courtroom squabbling, foster care nationally was beset by more daunting problems: the spread of crack cocaine and AIDS, which ravaged a generation of poor black parents and dramatically increased the number of children needing foster care, and chronic mistreatment of children in religious, secular and state-run facilities.
Bernstein should be saluted for tackling a complex and controversial topic, and for shedding additional light on the history of filth and brutality that riddles our child-welfare system. But in the end, “The Lost Children of Wilder” lacks the literary grace, historical sweep and unflinching personal honesty that would make it an epic. Like the system it seeks to depict, the book can best be called a noble failure.
Some of the nation’s smallest citizens own its most powerful stories, and their battered lives deserve to be written about with uncompromising honesty and precision. To understand Shirley Wilder’s story, you need to stare into her eyes, and in the end, this well-meaning book doesn’t take you there.
