September 23, 1994
LEON DASH, reporter
and LUCIAN PERKINS, photographer
Part 6: DAUGHTER TRAVELS THE SAME TROUBLED PATH AS ROSA LEE
AN EMBRACE: Patty Cunningham, who has spent much of her adulthood living with her mother, Rosa Lee, gives her a hug.
Patty Cunningham is sitting up in her mother's bed, dressed in her mother's white nightgown and surrounded by her mother's belongings. At 34, she is very much Rosa Lee Cunningham's little girl. Rosa Lee bustles around the bedroom, straightening this and dusting that, although the room is as clean as ever.
Patty's feeling much better today than she did yesterday, when she ran out of money and went into heroin withdrawal. Yesterday was a day to forget, a day of sweating, watery eyes and a runny nose. When Patty awoke this mild morning, June 16, 1992, she was ready to face the world again. Later on, she hopes, her friend Steve Priester will give her money that she can use to buy drugs.
Priester is lounging in a chair, listening as I interview Patty. He is one of Patty's three "boyfriends," as she calls them. They've known each other for about nine months, ever since he moved into an apartment on the ground floor. When Priester's roommate kicked him out in December 1991, Patty invited him to stay with her for several weeks in Rosa Lee's one-bedroom apartment.
Patty knows little about him, except that he is 57 and comes from West Virginia. He receives some sort of monthly check, which he is eager to spend on her. In some ways, their relationship is simple enough: She sleeps with him, he gives her money. That is Patty's relationship with many of the men she brings to Rosa Lee's apartment.
But Priester wants more than sex. He tells Rosa Lee that he loves her daughter and that he intends to break Patty of her drug habit. His declarations seem odd because he knows that his money ends up financing Patty's drug use. Still, his concern for her seems genuine.
More than once, Rosa Lee has complained to Patty about her prostitution. She can't understand why Patty, who is carrying the AIDS virus, makes no attempt to protect herself or anyone else. Patty doesn't tell anyone that she is HIV-positive, and it angers Rosa Lee that Priester and one of Patty's other boyfriends don't know.
Rosa Lee engaged in prostitution herself when she was younger, before anyone ever heard of AIDS. She did it, she said, primarily to feed her children, not her drug habit. There is a difference, she said. Now, at 56, it kills her to see her daughter travel this road.
"Patty makes me so shamed," Rosa Lee said one day. "I tell her, 'When you go outside, Patty, don't you feel those people talking about you? Don't you feel it?' "
And what does Patty say? I asked.
Rosa Lee's lower lip trembled, the way it always does when she is upset. "She says, 'Momma, don't get mad at me. Ain't that the way you did it?' "
CHAPTER ONE: Meeting Patty
"You're going to have to take off that damn tie and jacket before we go in there," Rosa Lee said as I parked my car outside the three tan brick buildings that make up Clifton Terrace, the federally subsidized housing complex.
That was fine with me. It was a hot, humid Sunday afternoon in May 1988, and my shirt was already soaked. We had come to Clifton Terrace to look for Patty; Rosa Lee had offered to introduce her to me.
I had known Rosa Lee for five months at that point. Our relationship consisted of several lengthy interviews at the D.C. jail, where she told me in detail about her family. She was serving seven months for possession of heroin; I was interviewing the jail's officers and inmates about drug trafficking inside the jail. She was eager to share her story, and I was interested in learning how her life had affected the lives of her eight children. We agreed to get together after her release from jail.
Rosa Lee wasn't sure of Patty's whereabouts. She had heard through the prison grapevine that Patty had turned over her Clifton Terrace apartment to several New York crack dealers, who were using it as a base of operation. In return, they were paying her $ 50 a day in cash, and $50 worth of crack.
Rosa Lee hoped that her son Ducky, who lived on the top floor of one of the Clifton Terrace buildings, could tell us where Patty was staying. The last time Rosa Lee had seen Ducky, he had been working for the same New York dealers.
Ducky answered our knock. His slight frame was swimming in a badly wrinkled pin-striped, three-piece suit. It was light green. The collar of his tan shirt was open and darkly soiled. The sag in his shoulders, the weary look in his eyes, the way he moved, all made it hard to believe he was 28 years old.
He listened warily as Rosa Lee explained that I was interested in writing about the family. He said he had just returned from church. "I'm very religious," he said. "I've been born again." As he talked about his renewed commitment to Christ, Rosa Lee shook her head as a warning to me not to believe him.
Finally, I interrupted. "Your mother has told me that you cook powdered cocaine into crack for New York City dealers operating out of your sister Patty's apartment in this building and that you have been addicted to crack for some time now."
Ducky shot his mother a questioning, alarmed look.
"I told him everything, Ducky," Rosa Lee said, "so you can stop all that 'born again' shit."
Ducky's religious cloak fell away. He said that he and the New Yorkers had split. They had accused him of stealing some of the cocaine and beat him. Now he was trying to sell crack on his own.
Rosa Lee asked if he knew where Patty was staying.
"Pussycat's," he said.
Rosa Lee scowled. Pussycat ran an "oilin' joint" in an apartment one floor below, a place heroin users could gather in privacy and relative safety. Pussycat charged $3 for entry. She also rented "works" -- a syringe and a hypodermic needle -- for $3.
I asked Pussycat's real name. "I don't know her real name," she said brusquely. "I wish you'd stop asking me about last names and real names. People don't want you to know that. You might be setting them up to be arrested by the police or something."
Rosa Lee rapped hard on Pussycat's door. Someone opened it a crack. "Hello, Mama Rose," a man's voice said.
The door swung open. When the man saw me, he quickly began to close it. Rosa Lee stopped him.
"He's with me, Bernard," she said with quiet authority.
Bernard stood aside. Behind him, two women lay on stained, sheetless mattresses on the living room floor, their bodies limp. We had found Patty and Pussycat.
It was so hot it was hard to breathe.
"You can go into the back!" Rosa Lee commanded Bernard.
She bent down over Patty, who wore black slacks, a red shirt and no shoes. "Wake up, Patty, wake up," Rosa Lee said, slapping her face. "I want you to meet someone." Each time Rosa Lee slapped her, Patty's eyelids opened for a few seconds.
"This isn't going to work," Rosa Lee said. "You'll have to meet Patty another day."
CHAPTER TWO: A Conversation in Jail
Two months later, I finally talked with Patty. I met her at the D.C. jail, where she was being held on a drug charge. Jail meant a forced withdrawal from heroin, so I didn't know what to expect. But she seemed to be bearing up well. She had gained weight and looked nothing like the emaciated woman I had seen on that mattress.
She spoke rapidly, looking down at the chewed fingernails of her right hand as she described some painful or embarrassing incident. I was not prepared for her candor: Within the first hour, she told me that a male relative had raped her when she was 8. He threatened to hurt her if she told anyone, and the assaults continued over the years. I later confirmed her account with the relative, who agreed to discuss it as long as he was not identified.
When Patty was a teenager, several of her brothers found out about the relative's behavior and beat him soundly, they said.
The first rape happened in 1966, while Rosa Lee was in jail. When Rosa Lee was released a few months later, Patty tried to tell her about it, but she didn't know how. Looking back, she said she believes her mother should have known something was wrong, should have wondered why the man was hanging around her room. "I feel like she could have done something to stop it," Patty said.
CHAPTER THREE: The Unbreakable Bond
By the time Patty was born in January 1958, Rosa Lee already had five children, all boys. Rosa Lee named her Donna, but no one has ever called her that. When she was little, she was known as "Papoose," because Rosa Lee thought the shape of her eyes resembled those of an American Indian baby. Over time, Papoose became Patty.
When she was young, Patty had long, straight hair that Rosa Lee liked to twist into a single braid down her back. She had her mother's dark skin and her father's round, cherubic face. Otherwise, her father didn't have much of a role in her life; when he died in 1982, Patty didn't even consider attending his funeral.
Things might have turned out differently. Rosa Lee met Patty's father, David Wright, in the mid-1950s. They had a long relationship that lasted until the early 1960s, and he fathered three of Rosa Lee's children. But he never lived with the family. "Back in them days, the welfare didn't permit no man to live with you," Rosa Lee said. "That's how I lost him. We were going to try to live together, but the welfare wouldn't let us."
The man had a job, but Rosa Lee didn't see how they could make it without welfare. Eventually, the man married someone else. Occasionally, when Rosa Lee needed money, she would gather up the children and march them over to his house. If he was there -- and his wife was not -- he would give her $15 or $20.
Home during the 1960s was a succession of row houses and apartments that never had enough beds for all the children to sleep alone. The boys shared mattresses, while Patty often slept in her mother's room and, at times, the same bed. At bedtime, Patty usually had the room to herself because Rosa Lee worked nights as a waitress at the Cocoa Club and as a dancer at the 821 Club, two popular spots on H Street NE.
On many nights, Rosa Lee brought home some of the customers, who paid her for sex. Rosa Lee didn't try to hide her prostitution from the older children. Afraid that some of her customers might rob her, she enlisted the help of her oldest son, Bobby. He was 11 when she started bringing men home. She remembers telling him, "You're Momma's little man. You have to help me. I'm doing this to feed y'all!"
She would telephone ahead and instruct Bobby to meet her at the door. As soon as she entered the apartment, she demanded that the man pay the $20 in advance. Bobby took the money and hid it. "I didn't want one of these 'tricks' trying to take the money back or something like that," she told me. "That was a rough crowd that came to those H Street clubs. It was just me and my kids in that house!"
Bobby didn't challenge his mother's explanation. "I didn't see it as having anything to do with sex," he told me. "It was all about making money to feed us. It was all about us surviving as a family."
Survival is a word that Rosa Lee often uses to explain her actions, a battle-hardened shield that she puts up to fend off further discussion. "You keep talking about prostitution," she said heatedly one day. "I saw it as survival."
Rosa Lee had sex with the men in the same room where Patty often slept; from a young age, Patty learned the art of pretending to be asleep. It could have driven a wedge between mother and daughter, but those nights in the dark seemed to forge an unbreakable bond.
In 1969, when Patty was 11, one of her mother's customers made an unusual request: He asked Rosa Lee if he could have sex with Patty.
There's no way to recapture exactly what went through Rosa Lee's mind as she considered this request. It is not something that she wanted to remember or talk about. After Patty told me about it, I waited a long time before broaching the subject with Rosa Lee. When I did, she angrily denied that it ever happened and accused Patty of lying. She was sure that if I asked Patty again in her presence, Patty would admit that it was a lie.
Several months later, I gingerly raised the issue while the three of us were eating lunch.
Rosa Lee turned to Patty and waited in silence for her daughter to answer.
Patty looked her mother in the eye and named the man.
Rosa Lee began questioning Patty, as if getting more facts might help jog her memory. "How old was you, Patty?" and "Was I on drugs then?" and "Did he approach me, or did he approach you?"
"He approached you about it," Patty said calmly. "Cause I was a little girl. You asked me about it, and I said, 'Yeah, I want to help you.' Remember that? You were feeding everybody and doing it all on your own."
Rosa Lee turned toward me. There was pain in her eyes. "Okay," she said. "I just feel so shamed."
Piece by piece, the story came out. Patty said her mother asked her to have sex with the man, who was then in his mid-forties. Patty agreed. Rosa Lee told the man it would cost $40 -- twice as much as she had been charging him. The man then drove Patty to his Capitol Heights home. When Patty returned, she put two $20 bills in Rosa Lee's hand.
There were other men after that, perhaps as many as a dozen. The men offered to pay much more than Rosa Lee's usual rate, $100 or more, amounts that made Patty's head swim. Patty said her mother always asked her if she was willing. Patty never turned her mother down. "I went with 'tricks' for my mother," she said. "I saw how hard it was for her to take care of all of us. I love my mother, so I would do it all over again. ... At times I wanted to hate her, but I couldn't see myself doing that 'cause my mother's too sweet for that."
CHAPTER FOUR: Trouble at School
As a third-grader at Shadd Elementary School in the fall of 1969, Patty stood out for all the wrong reasons. At 11, she was three years older than most of her classmates. She couldn't read. Her attendance was spotty. She was headed for trouble, and her teachers didn't know what to do about it.
Nancy H. McAllister, a social worker who had an office at Shadd that year, tried to intervene. McAllister already knew the family. She had been assigned to work with Patty's older brother, Richard, 15; he had just returned home after serving time in a juvenile detention facility for burglary. McAllister established relationships with four of Rosa Lee's children. Eric, who was 13 when he met McAllister, credits her with helping him to make something of his life and avoid drug use and criminal behavior.
McAllister made frequent visits to Rosa Lee's apartment during the day, and she often found Patty there. Rosa Lee would tell her that Patty was sick, but McAllister didn't believe it. "I'd see her just laying around in bed," she said. "I would get her to go to school."
But what concerned McAllister most was the way Patty dressed on Fridays. "I remember being so amazed at this girl," McAllister said. "She used to come to my office in a wig. ... She always wore tight, short skirts. At 11, she was very shapely."
McAllister asked Patty why she dressed the way she did.
"Oh, this is my evening to do my thing," McAllister remembers Patty saying.
"What thing?" McAllister asked.
"Oh, you know," is all Patty would say.
"She was really beyond her years," she said. "The kinds of things that she would talk about were not kid things." McAllister suspected something was wrong, but she had no conclusive evidence that she could report to authorities. Besides, Patty wasn't the only student whose home life seemed troubled. "The teachers probably had 10 to 12 other kids with the same kind of background. It was just overwhelming."