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

by Jonathan Kozol

  “What does he look like?”

  “He’s a tall man, healthy-looking. Loves to do things with the kids outdoors. He’s got gray hair.”

  “Is he a religious man?”

  “Oh yes. I’d say he must be a religious man. He don’t talk religion but I know that he’s religious.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You know it by the way somebody acts.”

  At the start of August, Martha sent me a reminder that I’d said I’d transfer money to Vicky, which we promised we would do to help her out with buying school clothes for the fall. I had a small private fund that I’d established for this purpose and for other relatively minor needs that families faced. Sometimes only a couple hundred dollars, at the moment it was needed, could help a family catch up with their rent before they got an order of eviction. For most of the families I knew in the Bronx, few of whom had bank accounts, I had grown accustomed to making wire transfers. I asked Vicky whether she would like the money sent by Western Union or if she’d prefer I send a check to Dr. Edwards, who would cash it for her.

  She said I didn’t need to send her money but, when I said it was a promise we had made, she said I could send the check directly to her home.

  “How will you cash it?”

  “I don’t need to cash it yet. I’ll put it in the bank.”

  “You opened up a bank account?”

  “Checking,” she replied.

  “How long is it since you had a bank account?”

  “I never had a bank account in my entire life before. Jonathan, I’m tellin’ you! This is the first time. …”

  End of summer: Vicky called to tell me that Lisette had had an accident.

  “She was with her girlfriend out at someone’s ranch that Dr. Edwards knows. They was runnin’ with the horses and she wasn’t lookin’ and she ran into a hole or something that was full of water. Hurt her ankle. She’s on crutches. Hoppin’ around from room to room. I’ll be relieved when she goes back to school.

  “Oh, did I tell you? Eric’s got a girlfriend. Actually, he’s had a lot of different girlfriends since we got here to this town. He doesn’t stick with them too long. He goes through them awful fast. We came here eight months ago? I think he’s had a different girl for every month since we arrived. …

  “Oh yes! Dr. Edwards had us to his house for dinner Sunday night. He invited a friend of his, a high school principal from another town. A black school principal. There you go! He says he wants to talk with Eric more. He says that Eric needs to do a lot of work if he wants to keep up with his class.”

  Her voice was strong and energized. She said that she was working hard—“doin’ forty hours now.” Between her job, her meetings at the church, getting the children set for school, and keeping on top of them to clean their rooms (“Eric’s room is an embarrassment,” she said. “He throws his things all over the floor”), it sounded as if she didn’t have a lot of time to dwell upon the past.

  “Do you ever miss New York?”

  “No,” she said. “I do not. But I miss some people there.

  “I was thinkin’—once I feel more settled here, I might go back to St. Ann’s. Maybe I won’t tell them. Just walk in the door one day and say, ‘Well, here I am!’ If I do, I’d like to go by bus this time, and not by plane, because I’d like to see what’s down there on the ground.

  “Oh yeah! I forgot to tell you that I found my knitting needles. My friend Diane? She took me to the mall in Bozeman and I got some beautiful blue yarn. I’m using a pattern that my other girlfriend gave me.”

  “What are you making?”

  “Makin’ a sweater—for Lisette. Finished with one sleeve. Workin’ on the other now. This pattern’s not too hard. If I have the time, I’m goin’ to make a couple more of them by Christmas.”

  Shy voice: “Jonathan?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “If I made one for you, would you wear it?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “There you go!”

  – III –

  Christmas Eve.

  Vicky called to tell me that she had another job. “It’s in a home for the elderly. I’m a dietary aide. It’s my third job, and I hope the last one.

  “I started Monday. I had to learn about the job. Then, on Tuesday, I did a double shift. Started at six-thirty, went to two o’clock. Then went back at four and worked until ten-thirty. I like old people! Some are disabled. Some have lost their memories. When I have a break, I like to sit and talk with them. …

  “Lisette?” she said. “She’s at the skating rink. They call it ‘The Skating Palace’ here. My friend Diane? She likes Lisette. She gave her ice skates as a present.

  “The church gave us a Christmas tree. Members of the church came over and they helped me decorate it. Oh yeah! It’s for Lisette. Not for me. I’m forty-nine years old!”

  She said they still were taking rides with Dr. Edwards. “There’s a town here in Montana which is called Big Timber. Smoky skies. It’s by an Indian reserve. … I love to go on rides with him. Lisette too. I told him that he takes the place of my father for me. I never seen my Daddy since I was in junior high.

  “I think he’s up in Billings now to see one of his patients. He has patients all over Montana. …

  “Did I tell you that we have a woodstove in the living room? Oh yes! When it’s cold, we heat with wood, because the gas bill gets so high. Now my friend Yolanda, who lives down the street, has been bringin’ wood to us, because her mother’s got a truck. It’s piled out there in the porch so we can keep it dry.”

  Lisette was fourteen by now and continued to do well in school. Dr. Edwards’s granddaughters were her closest friends. In the spring, however, Dr. Edwards told me that the three of them had gotten into trouble. “They were apprehended at the mall in Bozeman. Shoplifting,” he reported. “In fairness, I do not condemn Lisette as harshly as the others.” It had been his granddaughter, the oldest of the two, who had been “the instigator,” he believed. “They were given public service to perform. Lisette will do her service at an animal reserve.

  “I’m confident that she’ll come out of this okay. She’s a loving girl, so boisterous and warm! And she accepts affection easily. My wife and I take her out to dinner when we can. We took her out a week ago after the court hearing. My wife is very fond of her. She hugs us both a lot.”

  Eric, on the other hand, was a source of more and more concern to him. “When I told him what had happened to Lisette, his response was awful cold. To quote him: ‘I don’t see why I should care.’ I’ve spent more time with him than with Lisette. His grades at school are really bad. I’m taking him to Bozeman with me once a week for a tutorial in reading that a friend of mine arranged. So we have a chance to talk, to the degree that he will open up to me at all.

  “I told him that I have to make a trip out to Seattle in the summer and I said that I’d enjoy it very much if he’d like to come with me. We could camp out on the way, on the Columbia River. I told him we could do some rafting. But he was not responsive.”

  During the summer, Lisette managed to get into minor troubles once again, “nothing bad,” Dr. Edwards said, “but I talked about this with her principal and we struck on an idea.”

  There was, he said, “an excellent program” for students of her age—“takes place in Yellowstone. … Three months long. Counseling and leadership, and learning to mark trails. Learning about conservation right there in the wild. They don’t indulge them. There’s a firmness that is always ready to exert itself if a student pushes things too far.”

  His hope, he said, was to “catch” Lisette before the minor troubles she’d been getting into grew into much bigger ones. He said he believed, as did her principal and teachers, that she was a gifted child and could do honors work in high school and go on to college, b
ut only if she gained a stronger sense of self-control—and, he added, “of self-understanding.” He said that she did not object to his suggestion. “In fact,” he added, “she became excited at the thought of going out there in the wilderness.”

  It proved to be a good idea, as I gathered from a letter Lisette wrote to me from Yellowstone, maybe six weeks later.

  “Dear Jonathan,

  “Hi! Hello! It’s Lisette here. I am in the woods right now. I’m here for three months. Clearing trails. … Cool, huh?”

  It was a short note. She didn’t give me many details. “I hope that everything is going good for you,” she ended in her neat and curly schoolgirl printing. “Please write back. Love, Lisette.”

  Two weeks later, I got another optimistic note from Dr. Edwards. “The big news: Lisette has been doing extremely well at Yellowstone.” He and Vicky and his wife, he said, had had “the great experience” of going out to see her when the students’ parents were allowed to visit after they had been there in the wilderness two months. “I’d have given a hundred bucks for you to be there with us.”

  At the end of the day, he said, “we all sat in a circle. Lisette and the other kids talked about the parts of the experience that mattered most to them. Lots of tears and hugs among the kids and counselors. She comes home in one more month. Here’s some pictures of her that I know you’ll like.”

  In one of the pictures, Lisette was running with a bunch of other kids across a grove of trees. The branches, covered with thick foliage, were hanging almost to the ground. In another, a close-up, she was wearing something like an army jacket and a woolen hat that was pulled down to her forehead and was smiling brightly, with a look of mischief, right into the camera. On the back of the picture Dr. Edwards wrote, “When they came back from the woods, Lisette told us, ‘I feel like one dirty bird.’ They wash themselves and their clothes in cold lakes and streams—no soap! But she’s a happy camper.”

  The news continued to be good after she returned to school. “She’s really blossoming,” Dr. Edwards told me. “Doing honors, getting A’s, and the school by reputation is one of the best ones in the area. She’s popular among the other students, does cheerleading, sings in the choir. But she’s careful about boys. …”

  The news about her brother was less cheerful. “I’m sad to tell you he dropped out of school last week because the school will not allow a student to continue to play sports if he has failing grades, and that was just about the only thing he really seemed to care about. The school was willing to work with him and give him extra help. His teachers didn’t want him to drop out. The truth is that he never gave it a real try.

  “He’s repeated once already. Now he’s over eighteen and has no degree and no longer has a job. He doesn’t stay at home a lot. He seems to stay with different girls, until they’ve had enough of him. Then he crashes with Victoria. Then he’s gone again.

  “When I try to talk with him, he turns away his eyes. He tells me that he’d like to join the military. But they won’t accept him. They insist on a diploma. My friend, who is a principal in another district”—this was the black principal that Vicky had described—“has talked with Eric several times. He tells me that he ‘closes down’ and gives him almost no replies.

  “So Vicky has her hands full. When Eric’s home, the house becomes a hangout for a whole group of his friends and, to be quite blunt about it, not the kinds of friends I’d like to see him with. Vicky works ’til late at night, so she can’t control this. And, when she’s there, the boys are pretty rude to her.”

  The news continued to be worrisome through the fall and winter of the year. By the beginning of their third year in Montana, Vicky started falling into the depressive moods from which she used to suffer in New York. “She’s deeply troubled about Eric,” Dr. Edwards said. “I’ve put her on some mild medication and it seems to make a difference. She’s been successful in her job. She tells me that she loves it. I hope that she’ll keep on. …”

  He wrote me six months later, in June of 1999, with another mixed report: “Lisette remains a spot of brightness in a zone of growing darkness. Eric’s a loose cannon. His most recent girlfriend, with whom he’s been living now for nearly half a year—the very attractive daughter of a very white truck-driver who happens to be a Christian fundamentalist—is now very pregnant.” Her father, he said, “is in a frantic state and is known here as a man that you don’t want to mess with. So Eric’s in some danger, which I’ve cautioned him about. I’ve also spoken with the father.”

  Two months later: “The police have put a warrant out for Eric. It seems he’s been involved in robberies with one of his problematic friends. I gather they’ve been doing this repeatedly. Amazingly, his girlfriend sticks it out with him, although it’s been real stormy. ‘Hurricane force’ is how I would describe it. I’m surprised her father hasn’t popped him.”

  The racial factor, he surmised, was always in the background and, with Eric out of school, out of work, living off a girl he had made pregnant, Dr. Edwards speculated that her father “may well look at Eric as a prime example of the racial nightmare—‘irresponsible and dangerous young black man’—appearing in real life.” Still, no father, he observed, even one without the slightest bit of bigotry, could be expected to be empathetic and forgiving toward a boy who put his daughter in this situation. All the father knew was that his daughter, who was Eric’s age but was a student at the university by now, was living with a man who had given ample evidence that he was unprepared to be a husband that his daughter could rely upon. When he heard that Eric was arrested, he had yet another reason for concern.

  Throughout this time, Vicky and I remained in contact with each other, but her letters and her phone calls had become less candid and informative than they’d been before. On a few occasions she confirmed what Dr. Edwards had been telling me, but not in full and, most often, long after the fact.

  “Eric?” she said. “He’s with his girlfriend quite a lot, but he keeps on comin’ back. I cannot put him out.” She said that she could not forget how hard it was for Eric when they had been homeless and before they even got into the shelters. “We were sleeping in a friend’s house. If we got there and the door was locked, we slept out in the hallway. Lisette was just a baby then. He was the one that went and asked for food at the White Castle. So I sometimes ask myself: Am I the one to blame for all the troubles that he’s had? But he makes it very hard. …”

  She didn’t tell me yet that he’d dropped out of school. She didn’t speak about his girlfriend’s pregnancy. She didn’t say he’d been arrested. She didn’t speak about the medication Dr. Edwards gave her. She did say, “I been prayin’ for my son. I’m askin’ God to help me.”

  When we spoke the next time, she said that she had finally made a trip back to New York but had somehow lost the will to go back to St. Ann’s and had come back quickly. While she was gone, Lisette had been staying with the Edwardses. Eric, meanwhile, had been fighting with his girlfriend so, in Vicky’s absence, he went back into her house and, because he had no key—“I told him that I didn’t want him goin’ there while I was in New York”—he’d broken in with several of his friends, “messed up the place, rang up a huge bill on my phone, and robbed me of some money I had left there.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s back with his girlfriend, but he comes here when he wants. If I’m at work he pries the window open.”

  She said that Eric’s girlfriend had come to the house alone after Eric robbed her. “Yeah! She knew. She found out that he done it. So she came and told me she was sorry, and she stayed and talked with me while he was gone off somewhere with his friends. She’s a sweet girl and I know she likes me and I found out quite a lot. She told me Eric isn’t treatin’ her the way he should. He yells at her. She says he’s raised his hand to her.”

  This information, Vicky said, had saddened her
tremendously. The thought that he had been abusive to this girl, who trusted him and was in love with him, “made me disappointed in my son.”

  It was a while after that before I heard from her again. Her telephone was disconnected for a time because she never caught up with the bills that Eric left her. She wrote me a few letters, and in one of them she opened up more fully than before about the troubles Eric had been going through. “Got three weeks for stealing gas. It was for his girlfriend’s car. He uses it whenever he likes. He goes out riding with his friends.” His girlfriend was afraid of saying no to him, she said.

  She also told me that the break-ins Eric made into her house and the wildness of the friends he brought with him were causing problems with her neighbors, and she said her landlord spoke with her about this. I was glad she was confiding in me once again, but I was worried by the growing time-lag between the news that I received from Dr. Edwards and the news that Vicky felt prepared to share with me.

  The letter ended on a slightly upbeat note. “Lisette still goes to church with me. Church members taking turns to pick us up on Sundays. I’m trying to think positive.

  “I’m ending this letter now.

  “God bless you.

  “Victoria.”

  – IV –

  Vicky had said that she was trying to “think positive.” But positive thinking, as highly recommended as it is, can be overrated as a salutary and sufficient answer to calamitous conditions that are far beyond the power of an individual to alter or control in more than small degrees. For all the efforts she had made, for all the help her neighbors gave her, for all the love and loyalty Dr. Edwards never ceased to demonstrate to her and to her children, Vicky found herself unable to escape the shadow of her history.

  It was Eric’s uncontrollable behavior that finally brought her down. In April of 2000, after Eric once again had broken into Vicky’s house with a number of his friends while she was at her job and Lisette was working late at school, the police were called by people in the neighborhood—“music blasting and loud voices,” Dr. Edwards said—and Vicky was at last evicted from her home.