'Something to Give'

Harlem social work administrator says she's here to care for God's children

By MAX PIZARRO

Growing up in Anniston, Ala., in the 1950s, Pauline Bostic walked to All Saints Elementary School with the other children--and from porches, windows and front yards, the elders of the town looked out for them.

Little Pauline's father, Andrew Lee Bostic, was the school janitor, and he paid special attention to his girl.

It was the George Wallace South but Anniston was a community where people, black and white together, took care of the land and took care of one another and where the children were always protected.

It's where Ms. Bostic, 56--district director of the New York City Family Preservation Program's Harlem office and a longtime parishioner at St. Mark the Evangelist--got a sense of her life's mission.

"I've always been a social worker," she said. "That goes back to my childhood, only then it was called helping people."

In central Harlem, the city's big brick office building on West 127th Street, is a long way from the dreamy streets of Anniston, and with 20 years in New York children's services behind her Ms. Bostic isn't the dreamy type. But that doesn't mean her small town, southern manners and methods have changed.

"We're not Wyatt Earp here," said Ms. Bostic, who oversees an agency aimed at identifying families at risk and offering preventive services to help avoid placing children in foster care.

"Our job is not to beat people up because they're not being good parents. Our job is to help people. Everything we get is a high-risk case. Our motto is to remove the risk and not the child. We try not to disturb their world as they know it. Our goal is to protect the safety of all children," she said.

Protecting the kids often means coming face-to-face with belligerent, deadbeat dads. But dealing with the would-be tough guys of the world isn't too tough for Ms. Bostic.

"Let's face it," she said, "when you start talking about children, you get to people. Every gun-carrying gangster is a father, grandfather or uncle. You tell him if he pulls a gun out around here and starts shooting, he's going to hit some kids. You appeal to people's better nature."

But the fact that living conditions are often substandard in Harlem isn't something Ms. Bostic is prepared to accept. As a member and former vice president of the New York City chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she has worked hard on that organization's housing committee, putting pressure on local officials to get rents reduced for the working poor. She's also put pressure on the working poor, adamantly urging them from Harlem street corners to get out and vote.

Taking care of folks--whether it's kids or the adults in her neighborhood--is something Ms. Bostic said she learned how to do back at the beginning. And several blocks away, the architecture of St. Mark the Evangelist Church rises above West 138th Street, a reminder of those roots and Ms. Bostic's essential purpose.

"The only way I can do this job," she said, "is with a whole lot of help from the Almighty."

Her late father, who held down three jobs at once to support his family of 10, converted to Catholicism and brought his family with him. He was a highly observant churchgoer and his daughter's idol, but that didn't mean Catholicism was going to hold her attention without a contest. Ms. Bostic's grandmother was a spirited, hand-clapping Southern Baptist and the rousing choir and pounding organ rhythms emanating from her church were a tantalizing antidote to the more conservative approach of the Catholic Church.

"As a little girl I thought the Catholic Church was very solemn, quiet and straight-laced," Ms. Bostic recalled. "I loved the Baptists. When I went to church with my grandmother I could sing as loud as I wanted, and no one would tell me to shush up. There was just no comparison between the two churches."

But the Daughters of the Holy Ghost nuns who taught her at All Saints and her father's deeply spiritual example kept her ensconced in the Catholic Church as a girl and coming back for keeps. She has been an active parishioner at St. Mark the Evangelist for more than 20 years, where St. Mark's Gospel Choir--of which she's a member--can sing with the best of them. She also sings second alto in the Voices of the Spirit Choir, an archdiocesan concert choir.

"The nuns were a different story from the actual Catholic Masses in Anniston," Ms. Bostic said. "I liked the nuns. I respected them. You see, my father left school in the fourth grade to help raise the younger kids. He was self-educated and, along with my mother, the wisest person I ever met. And he had this deep belief, a deep respect for the teachings of the Catholic Church. And he believed deeply in education, primarily because he had no formal education."

During the civil rights era, her father was a member of the Knights of Columbus and the NAACP. His daughter, of course, would go on to more than 20 years of service with the NAACP.

While she never married and has no children of her own, Ms. Bostic said the warmth and wisdom and training exemplified by her parents and their way of life prepared her well for the rigors of her job.

"I believe God put me on the earth to provide for his children," she said. "I tried the corporate world and it wasn't what I was meant to do. I was meant to do this."

Not that the work is always pretty.

"Understand," Ms. Bostic said, "this work is serious business. We're the last stop before kids are taken out and delivered to foster homes.

"I'd say 90 percent of the families we're working with have something to do with crack or crack addiction," she said. "Even a heroin addict will work to support her kids but a crack addict won't even remember she has kids. We train and we teach people to become independent and self-sufficient, and we have an excellent success rate here in this office. In 95 percent of our cases, the kids stay in their homes. The situation improves in their homes to the point where they are no longer an imminent risk."

But the bottom line, she said, is the kids of New York need better and they need more and they need it immediately.

They need more people looking out for their interests.

"How many places can a child go in New York and actually seize the earth?" she asked. "When you own the land there is a commitment to that land, and that extends to the marriage and to the family. People don't have that connection here and it makes it harder. In our yard we had peaches, apples, muscadine vines--a beautiful garden. The kids in the neighborhood would ask my mother, 'Miss Sallie, is it all right if we pick some?' And she'd say, 'Sure, baby, help yourself.' There was always something to give."

And usually, in Ms. Bostic's office, a one-time storage room with windows barred to the outdoors, on a central table amid plastic filing racks and stacks of paper, baskets filled with fresh fruit stand at the ready for the city's children.