Reclamation by Kristin W. Davis
1.
How many brothers do you have? I did not always hesitate.
Two, I claimed as a child. And as a young adult. And as an adult with children of my own, until, I can’t say exactly when. As I gained a stepfamily, and lost a stepsister, I fumbled even more with the sibling count. It is usually a casual inquiry, polite conversation.
2.
Fresh Kills seems a grim name for a park, maybe better fitting for a landfill. In Dutch, kill means creek or tidal inlet. One spring morning in 1948, a scow motors into the dredged estuary called Fresh Kills and discards its first load of New York’s City’s garbage, christening Staten Island’s new temporary, sanitary landfill—twenty-two hundred acres of worthless marshland on a tidal river that flows into New York Bay. By 1955 (the year Michael was born), Fresh Kills is the largest landfill in the world. It will grow to twelve square miles of waste, taller than the Statue of Liberty.
3.
That same year on Staten Island, five miles from Fresh Kills, fifty children move into the squat brick dormitories at Willowbrook, a state school for mental hygiene. By 1965 (the year I was born) six thousand children and adults live there, the largest institution in the world for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Sleeping quarters = a sea of white sheets, interrupted by metal frames.
Mealtimes = an aide, a large spoon, an assembly line of open mouths.
4.
My first day of school is a sunless day, no shadow. I carry unmarked books, a sharpened pencil, a crisp-edged eraser.
Introductions! our teacher says.
Tell the story of another student’s name. Choose partners.
My story rambles—I tell my classmate about my big brother with spina bifida and cerebral palsy. That he died. That my mom had read Karen, a popular book about a girl with cerebral palsy.
I’m named after that girl’s little sister, .
My classmate’s face blanches. He does not want to explain, to expose my family’s scar.
This is Kristin Lea, he says when it is his turn,
She has a pretty name.
And now, a secret.
5.
Is a landfill sanitary because it leaves the streets clean? Why, until recently, was the care of the developmentally disabled called mental hygiene?
6.
The first time I used a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser I was impressed—a quick swipe along the wall and the unwanted scuff mark disappeared. But I learned to pay closer attention. Each time I rubbed away a stain, some powdery color came loose, drywall and paint, a tiny erosion. I might not even have noticed the dust falling from my fingers.
7.
Salt marshes are sometimes called the nurseries of the sea, nutrient-rich feeding grounds for young fish and crustaceans. The wetlands at Fresh Kills turn to a stagnant stew, rubbish heaps the province of feral dogs and rats—and the predators, hawks and falcons, that hunt them. Birders bring their binoculars, claim it as a sanctuary. The current washes medical waste—a syringe tide—up onto the Jersey beaches.
8.
At some point in the 1960s, the waitlist at Willowbrook is a thousand names long. But researchers are conducting experiments, and a syringeful of hepatitis virus jumps an applicant ahead in line, gets them into the 16-bed unit with family-style meals and street clothes instead of state clothes. The unit that is clean enough and well-staffed enough that visitors are allowed. I’m fairly sure Michael was not on that ward, but I think of him when I roll up my sleeve for a Hep B vaccine.
9.
My therapist when I was a college sophomore wasn’t all that much older than me, probably a graduate intern. I’m sure I told her I had two brothers. Until our final session, at the end of the semester, when I told her about Michael.
Wait, what? And then more gently, Why didn’t you tell me that?
As if I’d been withholding.
Oh, I was five when he died. It didn’t really affect me.
10.
A whistleblower slips a key to a shaggy-haired, rookie reporter for Channel 7 Eyewitness News. The 29-year-old Geraldo Rivera bursts into Building Six, stands in front of the camera with an oversized mic:
Lying on the floor naked and smeared with their own feces
they were making a pitiful sound, a kind of mournful wail
that it’s impossible for me to forget.
This is what it looked like, this is what it sounded like,
but how can I tell you about the way it smelled?
It smelled of filth, it smelled of disease, and it smelled of death.
The 1972 exposé begins the unravelling: A class-action lawsuit, a consent decree. Willowbrook residents are moved to community-based homes with adequate staffing, programming, sanitation, privacy, and medical care. Activists press for humane conditions, protection from harm, and win passage of the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. Willowbrook discharges its last resident in 1987.
11.
As the last barge of garbage docks at Fresh Kills in 2001, Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki stand before a banner: A Promise Made, A Promise Kept.
A few months later, disaster reneges. Men in Kevlar sort the Ground Zero rubble, try to match names to fragments of remains. Fifty acres of Fresh Kills is a forensics lab, then an unmarked grave.
12.
Today, the College of Staten Island sprawls on what were once Willowbrook’s grassy lawns. One spring afternoon, I make a pilgrimage to the campus. My family waits for me while I try to find all the reflection stations on the Willowbrook Mile, a commemorative trail that chronicles the history of the institution. I start at the library (Station 7, the Willowbrook Archives) and walk the path to a bronze plaque set in granite. Raised lettering heralds the closing of the institution and the state’s commitment to provide extensive and comprehensive community living. The heading is an echo: A Promise Fulfilled. I run my hand over the stone.
13.
In our mother’s house there are twenty photos of me, at least one in every room. At my first communion, at my wedding, with my husband and children. Just one photo in our mother’s house includes Michael—a portrait in black and white of three small boys, leaning on one another. He is buried fourteen miles from our mother’s house, but Mom doesn’t know which cemetery. When we go to find it, we guess at the exact location using a sketch of the plot—the grave is unmarked, the ground is rock hard. We must disturb the earth to install a headstone.
14.
When it is finished, FreshKills Park will be three times the size of Central Park. The trash heaps have been capped and sealed, planted with native grasses that draw grasshopper sparrows, bobolink and sedge wrens. Slowly, they will open soccer fields, kayak launches, hiking trails, picnic areas. By 2030, on the crest of the West Mound, will stand a September 11 memorial, an earthwork monument to honor lives lost. Staten Islanders worry about living near the park, about exposure to the methane, asbestos, lead, and pesticides trapped beneath.
15.
As I continue on the Willowbrook Mile, I eventually realize I have started in the middle and am walking the trail backward. At the road that separates the campus from the old Willowbrook buildings, I lose my way. I can see the one-story dorms that sit vacant behind rusted chain-link, some of them stuffed with stacked chairs and boxes that are visible through the windows. But I miss the remaining markers on the other side of the road:
the Crossover Gate (Station 2)
where my parents would have entered;
the Baby Unit (Station 1),
where Michael would have been placed when he arrived.
16.
Reclamation takes time. First you drain the swamp of standing water, get a good look at the land. Then you begin the fill: dirt, condos, office parks, green space where children can run and play.
17.
Three brothers. I have three brothers.
Kristin W. Davis holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast. Her recent work includes a collection of documentary poems and essays that centers on Willowbrook State School, a defunct institution for people with intellectual and other disabilities. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, the Banyan Review, Arts and Letters, and the Maine Sunday Telegram, and on the Split this Rock blog and Maine Public radio. Her work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, is a 2023 finalist for the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and earned the International Human Rights Arts Festival’s Creators of Justice Award. She lives in Washington, DC.
20 June 2024
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