Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

by Jonathan Kozol

  It also left me with a visceral reminder of the terror mothers and their children would experience when the guards or, more frequently, the manager would hammer at their doors early in the morning if, for example, the rental check paid by the city, through no fault of their own, had not arrived on time. “Six a.m.,” one of the mothers told me. “He bangs on the door. You open up. There he is in the hallway with his gun. ‘Where’s your rent?’ ”

  This is the way that one of the richest cities in the world treated the most vulnerable children in its midst a quarter century ago. When these hotels were finally closed in 1988 and 1989, not for reasons of compassion but because of the enormous damage the visibility of so much desperation was doing to the image of the city and its elected leaders, most of the several dozen families I had come to know, all but two of whom were black or Latino, were shipped en masse into several of the most impoverished and profoundly segregated sections of the Bronx, far from the sight of tourists and the media. These were communities that already had the city’s highest rates of HIV infection, the greatest concentration of drug-addicted people, of people who had serious psychiatric illnesses, women with diabetes, women with undiagnosed malignancies, and among the highest rates of pediatric asthma in the nation.

  The misérables, although they were no longer homeless, would continue nonetheless to live under conditions of physical and psychological adversity that were only incrementally less harmful than the ones they had endured in the preceding years. In one of the neighborhoods in which the largest numbers of the homeless were resettled, the only medical facility was a city-run institution known as Lincoln Hospital, which underwent the loss of its accreditation more than once because of errors by the staff that led to the deaths of at least a dozen patients, two of whom were infants. For the mentally unwell, psychiatric care of the thoroughgoing kind lavishly available six subway stops away in the costly and exclusive Upper East Side of Manhattan was all but impossible to find. Children, meanwhile, many of whom had had their education interrupted or repeatedly disrupted during their homeless years, found themselves consigned to public schools that, in the absoluteness of their racial isolation, resembled those of Mississippi fifty or one hundred years before.

  So this is where they sent them. And this is where I followed them, invited by their parents to visit them on weekend afternoons or in the evenings during a school holiday, to keep alive the friendships we had formed when they were in the shelters. I went to their schools. I got to know their teachers. I went to their churches. I got to know their pastors. I went to their hospitals, sometimes at their own request when they were ill because they thought that it might win them more attention. So I became acquainted with a number of their doctors, many of whom were selfless and devoted individuals who did everything they could to compensate for scarcities in the basic services that doctors elsewhere know they can depend upon.

  I did this, off and on, for more than fifteen years. Then, beginning in 2005, I lost track of some families for a time when my father, who’d been ill for several years, entered an acute phase of his illness, and, within the same two years, both he and my mother passed away. It took another year before I could regain my sense of equilibrium. At that point I began returning to those neighborhoods again and meeting once more with the families I had known. Some of the children were still in their teenage years. Those whom I had met when they were in the Martinique were already in their twenties. We had long talks. We took long walks. Sometimes we would spend an evening having dinner in the neighborhood. When I was home we kept in touch by phone and mail, and by e-mail in the case of those who had computers. In these ways we rebuilt our friendships.

  What happened to these children? What happened to their families? Some prevailed, a few triumphantly. Most survived, even at a rather modest level of survival. Others did not. This will be their story.

  CHAPTER 2

  Eric and His Sister

  One of the nicest but most fragile people that I knew who was in the shelter system at the time when I was visiting the Martinique was a shy and gentle woman whose name was Victoria.

  Vicky had been shunted through a number of the shelters from 1984 until the end of 1989. Her longest stay was in a place known as the Prince George Hotel on West 28th Street, four blocks from the Martinique.

  When she came into the shelters, Vicky had been suffering from clinical depression and periodic seizures, for which she had been treated at a hospital on Roosevelt Island, which is in the midst of the East River. Her husband, who was caring for their children at the time, had not been well for many years, the consequence of a degenerative illness that, as best I understood, he had contracted as a young man growing up in Georgia. He passed away a short time after Vicky came out of the hospital.

  At this juncture in her life, with no money in her pocket, and no prospects of a job, and with two young children who had no one else to care for them, she began to make her way into the less-than-friendly channels of the shelter apparatus, moving at first, as was the case with all homeless families, from one so-called “short-term shelter” to the next. The psychological and physical exhaustion families underwent when they were moving constantly tended to have a predictable effect. It undermined whatever capability for good clear-headed thinking might still exist within the spirits of the stronger women while, in the case of those like Vicky who were not strong at all, it simply added to their pre-existent instability.

  Vicky, as she told me later, fell into a “zombie-like” condition—she felt, she said, “like I was walkin’ in my sleep”—a condition that continued when she was living on a “permanent placement,” as the city termed it, in a room at the Prince George.

  The building, which was owned at the time that Vicky moved there by one of the two owners of the Martinique—it was later taken over by another owner with a record of illegal operations who subsequently served a lengthy term in prison for defrauding creditors of $100 million—was less depressing physically, at least on the lobby floor, than was the Martinique, but it made its claim to notoriety for other reasons of its own. Although the manager of the Martinique had some degree of governance over the Prince George as well, the day-to-day administrator was a man who’d been convicted of abusing his own daughter, beating her and leaving her locked up at home, “alone and without food,” according to the New York Daily News. His daughter had been taken from him by the city to protect her from additional endangerment.

  The city, wrote the columnist Bob Herbert, who was then a writer for the Daily News, “takes one child out of [his] care and then hands him over 1,000 more.” There were at least 1,200 children in the Prince George at the time.

  Children were endangered in other ways as well. Fires kept on breaking out—at one point, four or five times in a week. A three-year-old was burned to death while Vicky’s family lived there. The fires were alleged to have been caused by arson, but tenants told me some of them resulted from the carelessness of drug abusers who were cooking crack cocaine right there in their bedrooms—a not-uncommon practice in those days when crack was just emerging as a drug of choice among the very poor.

  This, then, is the setting in which Vicky and her children found themselves at a time when Vicky was already ill and loaded with anxiety. Her daughter, who was named Lisette and was only seven when all of this began, suffered less than did her brother, Eric, who was four years older. As in the case of many of the other children in the building who were nearing adolescence, he was very much aware of the sordidness of his surroundings, the unscrupulous behavior of the governing officials, the open market for narcotics, as well as the various semi-legal or illegal strategies other children of his age had inventively developed in order to pick up a little money that they sometimes, but not always, used to help their families. It would be another four years from the time that Vicky’s family came into this building until the day when they got out.

  When I met Vicky and her children
in the Bronx in 1993, they were living in Mott Haven, which was then, and remains today, the single poorest neighborhood in the poorest borough of New York.

  Vicky’s home, although it was on a street that was a well-known center for the sale of drugs—heroin, specifically—was two blocks from a church on St. Ann’s Avenue, an Episcopal church called St. Ann’s, that was a place of safety for children in the neighborhood. The church, a beautiful old stone building with a tall white spire at the top of its bell tower, had a large expanse of lawn on a pleasant hillside where there were swings and slides and a sprinkler for the younger children, and a court where older kids played basketball.

  I spent a good part of the 1990s visiting St. Ann’s because it ran an excellent and innovative afterschool, in which I was able to talk at length with children and was sometimes asked to help with their tutorials. Naturally, it wasn’t long before I also grew acquainted with some of their parents and with other adults who gravitated to the church for the sense of solace that they found in the inviting and informal atmosphere the pastor had created.

  The priest of the church, an extraordinary woman whose name is Martha Overall, came to St. Ann’s with a deep commitment to the children of the neighborhood. She was also well equipped to help the parents of the children deal with the legal problems and bureaucratic obstacles that people who depended upon welfare inevitably faced. A graduate of Radcliffe College, where she had studied economics, she also drew upon the adversarial and strategic skills she had acquired as a lawyer who had been a protégé of a famous litigator by the name of Louis Nizer.

  Even while she practiced law, Martha had been working as a volunteer and advocate for families in Mott Haven, so when she turned her back upon the law and chose a life of service in the ministry, she already had a thorough understanding of the sense of helplessness that people in the area frequently experienced in dealing with their landlords or with government officials. She was masterful, and she could be very tough, in her confrontations with people in positions of authority. But she was warm and gentle with people in the parish who came to her in need.

  Vicky quickly grew attached to Martha, and she and the children soon began to come to church almost every Sunday. On the weekdays, Eric sometimes came there on his own, mostly to play basketball. Now and then, he brought his sister with him.

  Eric struck me as a complicated boy. In spite of all he had been through, he had an element of likability and even of good humor. But he found it difficult to be transparent in his conversations and relationships with older people at the church who took an interest in him. As I watched him in the next few years, I could not help noticing the frequently evasive—maybe self-protective—way that he would speak to grown-ups when they questioned him. It was a hint, but only that, that he was concealing things that might stir up worries for his mother if she knew of them.

  But she worried anyway. She told me she had seen this tendency—“not always bein’ straight with me” is the way she put it—starting in the period when they were still at the Prince George. But she said she’d noticed this more frequently since they’d been resettled in the Bronx. She said she never knew what he was holding back, but she was watching him uneasily. …

  One day in the fall of 1995, Vicky came into the church while I was helping at the afterschool. She came right up behind me and leaned down and whispered “Hi!” before I knew that she was there. She seemed in such a pleasant mood that it surprised me when, a moment later, she asked with a slight tremble in her voice if I had the time to go outside and talk with her.

  As soon as we had left the church, she began to cry. She didn’t tell me what was wrong, and I didn’t ask. She was wearing sneakers, baggy slacks, a loose-fitting sweater, and a floppy-looking hat. Her clothes were clean but her appearance was disheveled.

  We went out for a walk.

  Sometimes when a person that I know appears to be distraught, I have a tendency to think there has to be an explanation that I can discover if I ask exactly the right questions. I feel embarrassed later when I realize that there isn’t any simple answer to my questions. Usually I know this in advance but, because of something in my personality or education, I often fall into this trap of thinking that the answer lies in talkative solutions. Walking around without a destination sometimes leaves an open space that isn’t filled already with my own predictive suppositions.

  Vicky never told me exactly what it was that made her cry that afternoon. I knew, of course, she was concerned about her children. Eric, who was sixteen now, was not doing well in school. The high school he attended was one of those places, misleadingly referred to as “academies,” familiar in the Bronx and other inner-city neighborhoods, where the course of study had been stripped of programs that might stimulate a student academically and instead was geared to practical and terminal instruction. Having lost so many years of education while he had been homeless—most of the children in the shelters, as I’ve noted, had seen their schooling interrupted frequently—his basic skills were already very low. His attendance was, in any case, haphazard.

  Vicky couldn’t help him much because she’d had so little education of her own. Her mother had died when she was five and, for some reason she did not explain, she was taken from her father and given to a guardian who, however, seemed to have abandoned the customary obligations of a guardian. She had had to leave school during junior high, which she said was not unusual in the rural part of Georgia where she had been born, and went to work “cleanin’ houses, doin’ laundry for white people” for most of the next four years. By the time her son was born and she was married and her husband brought her to New York, schooling was no longer in her mind. Although her writing skills were good (she had learned a kind of slanted printing in her grade-school years), she had little understanding of the work that Eric was supposed to do at his alleged “academy.”

  Lisette was in the seventh grade and was a better student but had also been assigned to a bottom-rated school, which was called a “school for medical careers” but did not offer courses that would likely lead to any kind of medical career beyond, perhaps, a low-paid job within a nursing home, and pretty much precluded any opportunity to move on to the kind of high school that would open up the possibilities for college.

  The apartment where the city had resettled them consisted of three tiny rooms on the fourth floor of a six-story building where there was no elevator, no bell, and no intercom. To visit with Vicky you had to yell up from the street and she or Eric or Lisette would lean out of their window and throw down the key to the front door.

  Vicky and her children were living on a welfare stipend which, including food stamps and some other benefits, amounted to approximately $7,000 yearly. (According to Martha, this was even less than the average income for a family in the area, which she pegged at $8,000 for a year’s subsistence.) She supplemented this by getting up at 5:00 a.m. two days a week to go to a food pantry at one of the housing projects, where she had to be assigned a ticket with a number to establish her priority but then was forced to wait for an hour and a half, or else go home and then return, before she actually received a bag of groceries.

  The only job she’d had since moving to the Bronx was cleaning houses or apartments in Manhattan, which, she said, was something she was glad to do, but was also forced to do as part of her welfare obligation in New York. “One lady, Mrs. Jacobs, lived on Second Avenue. The other one lived—let me see, on 14th Street, somewhere around Greenwich Village.” Both were elderly; one was home-bound. “They were nice to me,” she said but for some reason she could not explain, this heavily promoted “work experience program” lasted only six months and did not lead to permanent employment.

  She was candid with me, and herself, in her recognition that at least some of the suffering she had undergone had been of her own making. While she had been homeless, she had grown attached to a kindly-seeming man who was good to her at first but w
ho was subject to depressive swings of mood and soon began abusing her. Once she had her own apartment, she took out an order of protection, but her boyfriend kept on coming back, she said, when he was depressed or hungry. Sometimes when he showed up at the door, she told me that she lacked the will to keep him out. On more than one occasion, he had beaten her severely.

  I asked her if she prayed.

  “I do pray—but not out loud.” She said, “I pray inside.”

  Amidst the sadness of the conversation, she kept reaching out for gaiety. A nervous laugh would precede the revelation of a longing or a memory that brought an evanescent sense of satisfaction to her mind. “I pray,” she said, “for something that I haven’t done for thirteen years.”

  I asked her what it was.

  “To pick up my knitting needles,” she replied.

  A soft smile lighted up her eyes. “I used to make a sweater in three weeks if I had nothin’ to upset me. I’d start when it was summertime and I’d have six sweaters made for Christmas. … If you ever see me get my needles out again, you’ll know I’m feelin’ happy.”

  At the corner of Brook Avenue, she stopped next to the stairs that led down to the subway station, looking in a vague, distracted way at a woman in a long skirt who was selling bunches of chrysanthemums and roses. She reached out her hand in the direction of the roses but it seemed she didn’t dare to touch them.

  “Would you like them?”

  “One rose,” she replied.

  Tiny drops of water sparkled on the petals. She held the flower in her hand against her chest as we were walking back in the direction of St. Ann’s. At the corner, she looked left and right. Then, with relief, she told me, “There you go!” and waved across the street.