A Decade of Turbulence, Family Love and Basketball
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Version 0 of 1. Some mornings, when Charon Francis-Hartley hears a knock at her door, she thinks, “This is the day.” This is the day someone is bringing an eviction notice. More often than not, it’s just a U.P.S. delivery. But it’s still enough to keep her up at night. “I’m up, constantly thinking,” Ms. Francis-Hartley, 46, said in a recent interview. “I’m mopping my floors at 2 in the morning because I’m trying to figure out ‘What’s going to happen today?’” After separating from her partner in 2007, Ms. Francis-Hartley became the head of household for herself and her children, now 15 and 19. As the daughter of a single mother, Ms. Francis-Hartley had witnessed the sacrifice that road demands. And for her, the separation from her partner meant financial insecurity, which she was familiar with as well. “When I walked out, it was like, ‘no regrets,’” she said. “I struggled. Every day is hard, but no regrets.” After the split, Ms. Francis-Hartley, who has a bachelor’s in psychology, found work through temp agencies to make ends meet during the Great Recession. She bounced around among the likes of Foot Locker, Rite Aid and Kmart, working double shifts and long hours, and often traveling from her home in the Bronx to jobs as far away as Staten Island or Brooklyn. She would return drained. In 2015, she found her calling after starting as a paraprofessional at a Citizens of the World charter school in Brooklyn. She wanted to do more, so she scraped together $100 to take the test to earn further certification. She and her children ate Ramen noodles for the rest of the week, but the move paid off; she passed and was able to work her way up, eventually becoming dean. “I knew that no matter what was going on in my world — still struggling, thinking ‘How is this bill going to get paid?’ — I knew that I was doing something in somebody’s life,” she said. “I knew that I was telling a kid that it’s going to be all right, and they trusted me, and they believed in me.” But in 2018, the school closed after failing to meet expectations, leaving Ms. Francis-Hartley heartbroken and out of a job. “It still hurts so much because it’s like they snatched a whole family and just broke us up,” she said. Amid the turbulence in their lives over the last decade, Ms. Francis-Hartley and her children, Chardonnay and D.J., found a haven at the Children’s Aid-operated Dunlevy Milbank Center, the same Harlem community center where she’d spent her youth. After Ms. Francis-Hartley lost her job at the school, she received two $50 gift cards to Marshalls from Children’s Aid, one of the seven organizations that The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund supports. The money, received in August, went toward buying her children clothes for school. Ms. Francis-Hartley’s love for basketball was born at the center when she was a child. With the guidance of Kelsey Stevens, the director of sports recreation and fitness for Children’s Aid, that passion led her to Mercy College, where she had a basketball scholarship and earned her degree. Her children caught the bug, too. D.J. Hartley plays basketball at York College in Queens, where he’s a freshman studying accounting. And Chardonnay, also coached by Mr. Stevens, plays at Long Island Lutheran High School, which she attends on a scholarship. “Basketball is definitely a tool for her to stay focused and to climb that ladder of success,” Mr. Stevens said of Chardonnay. Away from bills, commutes and sleepless nights, the basketball court became the family’s oasis. Recently, though, it was the site of a major setback. While participating in a tournament in Kentucky in July, and with college coaches watching her play, Chardonnay tore an anterior cruciate ligament. The family had to choose between a surgical repair of her knee that would require months of rehabilitation, or skipping the operation, which could jeopardize her dream of playing at a Division 1 college. The operation in September set the family back financially and emotionally. Ms. Francis-Hartley decided to quit working her daily temp jobs to become Chardonnay’s full-time caretaker, driving her to and from school, 40 minutes each way, and picking her son up from college each night. She also began spending her days with her mother, who recently learned she has Alzheimer’s. The duties left Ms. Francis-Hartley little time to find new work, and watching her daughter suffer after the injury also took a toll. “She went through so much, mentally,” Ms. Francis-Hartley said, her voice cracking. “And I had to be strong. I had to go in the car sometimes and just cry.” Her son works on weekends to support the family, and although they receive some child support and roughly $219 a month in food stamps, they struggle to stay afloat. When she can find the time, Ms. Francis-Hartley takes odd jobs through a temp agency, but she is still looking for something that matches her skills while being flexible enough for her schedule. She does temporary work in classrooms occasionally and would like to find a full-time position at a school, she said, but all she truly wants is to feel stable. “I just want to sleep at night,” she said. “I want to be financially O.K., stable, where I can make sure my kids get through school.” Donations to The Neediest Cases Fund may be made online, or with a check or over the phone. |