But as Brooks left her kids behind on that spring afternoon, she couldn't have foreseen that just 2½ years later, a court order would end her rights as a parent, cutting her out of her children's lives entirely. Nor could she have imagined what would follow. Denied the chance to appeal the court's decision because she could not afford $2,352 for a court transcript, Brooks, who earns $2.13 an hour plus tips waiting tables at a Memphis steak house, fought the state of Mississippi all the way to the Supreme Court. Thanks to the help of civil rights attorney Robert McDuff, who worked pro bono, she can proceed with her appeal.
In December, the court ruled 6-3 that "the state may not bolt the door to equal justice" for the poor. "No ties are more precious than those binding parent and child," said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the majority, "and few decrees are so grave in their consequences as a court order permanently severing the parent-child bond." (At the time, Mississippi was one of 20 states not to waive court costs for indigents in parental rights cases.) Brooks, 29, admits that after losing her children she had started drinking and doing drugs. Now that she is free of both, she says, the court's ruling offers a second chance. Though she agrees that James should retain custody, she wants to be part-of her children's lives. "I'm going to take my case to the [Mississippi] supreme court," Brooks said. "I hope I can get my rights back."
Her ex-husband is not sympathetic. According to James, Brooks stopped being a mother years ago, after she left her children with him and rarely tried to see them. Though Brooks had agreed to pay $40 a week in child support as well as most of the children's medical costs in exchange for visitation, James, 30, says she owes more than $4,400 and had tried to see the children only infrequently. His second wife, Janet, a staunch Christian, schools Leann (who no longer uses the name Melissa), Samuel and Sylvia, the couple's 2-year-old, at the family's new four-bedroom house set on three acres in Mount Pleasant, Miss. "I would have had these two children ready every Friday whenever [Brooks] wanted to pick them up," says Janet, 26. "But it never happened."
After so much rejection, Janet argues, allowing Brooks to visit now would harm the children. "You can't treat kids like that, love them one minute, put them on hold and then love them again," Janet says. "It would be too emotionally damaging."
For her part, Brooks says she gave James more than $500 in cash and jewelry and that it was he who kept her from the children. "When I would go to see them, he would be gone," she says. "I would call, and he would hang up the phone." Once, Brooks says, she even requested the police to send an officer with her to see the children. Yet Brooks doesn't deny that her past has been checkered. Born in rural Benton County, the daughter of a father who worked in a sawmill and a mother who was a factory hand, she was 15 when she met James. Six months later, with Brooks a month pregnant, they married. As James became involved with his business, often working late into the night, Melissa began to go out with friends, occasionally leaving the children with her sister. Looking back, she says, "I got mixed up with the wrong crowd."
Eventually, Melissa left James for Junior Brooks, a childhood friend she married in 1993. But Junior, who had done time for grand larceny and assaulting a police officer, brought no stability to her tumultuous life. She, meanwhile, drifted through a series of low-paying jobs and fell behind in her support payments. For this, her unstable home life and her failure to visit her children, Benton County chancery court judge Anthony Farese found Brooks to be an unfit mother and terminated her parental rights, allowing Janet to adopt the children. Danny Lampley, Brooks's legal services attorney at the time, says the ruling was extreme and unjustified. His client, he says, "could prove she tried to have visitation."
Now Brooks—who left Junior, moved to Tennessee and recently took a second job as a McDonald's cashier—hopes that someday she will be recognized as a mother again, not only legally but by her children, who now hardly know her. Meanwhile, she offers advice to friends. "You better be thinking about the most important thing in your life, and that's your kids," she says, " 'cause once they're gone, they're gone."
ANNE-MARIE O'NEILL
JOANNE FOWLER in Memphis
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- Joanne Fowler.
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