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

by Jonathan Kozol

  When Christopher returned on Sunday night, he acted rather secretive to Grandma and his father and, in his conversations with Pietro in the months to come, I noticed that he spoke to him in tones of thinly veiled contempt, as if he felt that, by Pietro’s inability to give him things that other people could afford to buy him, he had lost the right to exercise authority and no longer held the status of a father in his eyes.

  His sisters, meanwhile, being the young children that they were, had not lost the sweetness and the trusting qualities of childhood. The girls were thin and had pale complexions, like their brother, but they were playful and affectionate to me when I was there and would chatter gaily with each other and with me and Grandma. And, to their father, they never showed a hint of the hostility that Christopher displayed when he was in the room—although, increasingly (he was nearly eleven now) he was seldom in the room on the evenings I was there. There were times when I would stay as late as midnight talking with Pietro and, when I left, the boy had not returned.

  I had no reason, at this stage of things, to recognize a pattern in the way that Christopher behaved, in distinction from the way the little girls behaved and the trust that they invested in their father and grandmother. I did not know Vicky yet, or Eric, or Lisette. It was a long time after that before I met them at St. Ann’s. And, even then, although I could not fail to notice parallels between the boys’ behavior, I was not inclined to put things into patterns. I thought about the kids and families I was meeting exactly as I saw them: different families, different kids, with the sole exception that all of them had undergone a time of destitution and all had lived for periods of years in places as unwholesome as the Martinique Hotel. Whether or not the consequence of that experience, in each and every case, would be enduring, or injuriously so—or what form that injury might take in kids of different ages and different dispositions—still remained unclear to me, as it does to some degree even today.

  – II –

  Three years after I had met him in the Martinique, Pietro and his family were resettled by the city in a section of the Bronx, known as the East Tremont area, that was only slightly less impoverished and drug-ridden than the area around St. Ann’s.

  The first time I went to see them was a warm and sunny August afternoon in 1990. Pietro was at the local grocery, where he was packing bags. He did this in the afternoons to make a little money which, like many people in the poorest sections of the Bronx, he did not report for fear of being cut from food stamps and the other welfare benefits that he depended on. Christopher was not at home. Ellie was out visiting a friend. Grandma and Miranda were sitting in the living room with a little boy, a five-year-old, whose mother lived nearby.

  The boy, whose name was Bruno, had white scars around his eyes. He’d been burned in a household fire, one of many that had leveled buildings in the area. Headlines about fires in the South Bronx were familiar in those days: “fiery tomb for two bronx kids,” “trapped tot killed in apartment blaze,” “apartment fire kills bronx boy.” Bruno had been fortunate to get away with nothing worse than two white scars.

  Miranda was sitting on the sofa, holding a black kitten on her lap, one of three stray kittens they had found on the landing just outside the door. Bruno, meanwhile, was sitting on the floor playing with a big white duck—not a toy duck, but a real one—that began to quack at me when I came in the door. The kittens didn’t chase the duck, Miranda said, because his quacking frightened them. The duck, she told me, had been given to her by a man who lived downstairs. She had named him Oscar.

  Pietro wouldn’t be returning from his job for at least another hour. So, when Miranda asked me, I agreed to go out for a walk with her and Bruno to a nearby park. Once we got out on the street I took them by their hands, but Bruno fairly flew along East Tremont Avenue, tugging us both after him. We passed a block where heaps of trash—refrigerators with their doors torn off, tattered sofas, pieces of linoleum, and green plastic bags of garbage—had been piled high. But, at the park, the flowers were in bloom: tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils, and white and yellow daisies. The children knelt down on the grass and Miranda spelled the flowers’ names except for one, “hyacinth,” which she said she couldn’t spell because she’d never heard the word before.

  At a food stand in the park we bought a box of popcorn, which we ate on the way home. Walking back along a street we didn’t take before, we passed another vacant lot, surrounded by a wire fence, in which another patch of flowers was in bloom. The children tried in vain to reach them through the spaces in the fence. Bruno settled for a dandelion, which he said he’d bring home to his mother.

  Pietro had come back from work by the time that we returned. He scooped up the smallest of the kittens and held it on his lap while we sat down to talk. Miranda and the little boy took the duck into the bedroom with them while her father talked to me about a problem he was having with his welfare worker, who had told him that she thought it was extravagant for them to keep so many cats.

  “ ‘You haven’t got enough to feed yourself,’ she said. ‘That’s why we give you food stamps. Do you think your food stamps are supposed to feed your cats?’ ”

  He said that they had put the duck into a closet in the bedroom when the welfare worker came. “What would she have said if Oscar had got out and walked into the living room?

  “I know,” he said, “it seems a little crazy for us to keep a duck in the apartment. But the children love him, and the neighborhood is so depressing and they have so little. I just want them to remember that they’re children. …

  “We feed the cats a little milk. I bought some cornmeal for the duck. It only cost three dollars and it lasts about two months. We don’t have a TV. So it’s something to distract them.”

  A month later, he told me on the phone: “The welfare worker came by without notice. She saw the duck. He went right up and quacked at her.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She says we ought to put him in a pot and cook him.”

  “Were the kids there?”

  “Yes,” he said. “She said it right in front of them. She says she won’t report me if we want to keep the cats. But she says that Oscar has to be evicted.”

  The girls, he said, were crying when she left.

  “From a certain point of view, I guess it’s understandable. She figures that we have so little money and we’re asking them for something—for the food stamps, for the rent. So I guess she’s thinking, ‘This is something they can do without.’ And that’s correct. But my children have to do without so much. Having animals to play with is a little thing, I guess. It’s a little ‘extra.’ I guess they figure it’s too much. It’s hard to know the answer: What’s too much? What’s enough? Kids need clothing. They need food. They need a roof above their heads. Do they also need to have a pet?”

  I asked him what he planned to do with Oscar.

  “He’s still here. No eviction papers yet!”

  Pietro was arrested once while he was in the Martinique. He stole an Easter basket for the children from a Woolworth’s store. He had to make a court appearance but the judge, it seems, was understanding of the situation. He let him off with a token punishment, something like a couple months’ probation, or maybe just a warning. His sins, such as I knew of them, struck me as pretty trivial. He loved his kids. He did the very best he could to make up for the poverty in which they had to live and whatever they remembered from the time within the Martinique, which was not, after all, a matter of an Easter basket or three kittens and a duck but was a real offense, and one for which nobody had to pay a punishment except for those who were its victims. This brings us back to Christopher.

  In the background of the children’s lives, beyond the quacking of the duck and the battle that Pietro waged (and which I thought that he enjoyed to some degree) against the wishes of a somewhat uptight social worker who was doing only what she had been
trained to do, there was a cloud forming. Christopher was absent from his home every time I went there. He was close to fifteen now and Pietro told me that he had no power to control him. Grandma, he said, was the one that Christopher confided in. But Grandma’s bond to Christopher did not strike me as a wholly healthy one. She made up lies in his defense when I asked her where he was at night or if she knew what he was doing. There was something worrisome and puzzling, I thought, about the blindness of her loyalty to Christopher.

  Miranda later told me he had pretty much dropped out of school, if he’d ever shown up at his school at all since the time they’d been resettled in the neighborhood. It appeared the public school, whichever one it was to which he’d been assigned, made only the most cursory attempts to find him.

  He was already several years below the level of an average student of his age, because he’d lost so many years of education when the family had been homeless. Although the children in the Martinique, officially at least, had been assigned to public schools, many never got there, or, because of bureaucratic chaos or the failure of the schools to communicate with parents, there would be a long delay before they were enrolled. It often took four months or more before the city noticed that some of these kids were sitting in their rooms at the hotel all day without a school to go to.

  By the time the family got out of the Martinique, in any case, Christopher’s rebellious attitude and defiance of adult authority would have posed a challenge for attendance officers at almost any middle school, even if they gave it a real try. It would have required an inordinate degree of compassionate attention, not only in the schools but in a broad array of public institutions, to have had the slightest chance of turning back this very angry adolescent from the way that he was heading.

  By his fifteenth birthday, he had been in juvenile detention twice for stealing cars and stripping them. From that point on, he was in and out of court and, within another three years, he would serve the first of several sentences at New York City’s sprawling prison out at Rikers Island.

  Miranda was nearly twelve years old at the time when Christopher first went to Rikers Island. She and her sister were going to a Catholic school, which they had attended since they moved into the Bronx. The small foundation I’d established, which was supported by readers of my books, was indirectly paying for tuition. My assistant sent the money to Pietro, rather than the school, because I thought that it was better for the children to enable him to make these payments on his own.

  The children went to school in clean clothes every day. When Pietro didn’t have the money for the laundromat, he or Grandma washed their clothes at home. He couldn’t afford to buy the kind of clothing for the girls I know he would have liked, but what he did buy was in proper taste—no short skirts or tight revealing blouses, which many of the adolescent girls they knew were wearing.

  “The other teenage girls we knew were hanging out with boys,” Miranda said when we talked about her childhood ten or twelve years later. “A lot of them got pregnant and had children by the time they were fifteen. But Ellie and I did not turn out that way. I was playing with dolls still when I was in junior high. Daddy and Grandma wouldn’t let us out at night. If they did, they’d call us in by eight. People in the neighborhood treated us as if they knew we were protected, that we were a close family.”

  Those who knew the family well enough to be aware of what was going on with Christopher, or had observed his rough behavior for themselves, did their best not to give Pietro the impression that they thought he was responsible. They knew he had a sense of guilt, which also came across in letters that he wrote to me. They tried not to compound it.

  Pietro hoped that Christopher’s experience at Rikers Island might have left him scared enough to stay away from dangerous activities. He hoped that it had chastened him. But Christopher’s trajectory over the next years continued on its downward slide, and, far from being sobered by the time he spent in jail, he seemed to have become more hardened, more emboldened.

  The culmination came in 1995 before he was twenty, when he and three other young men grabbed a boy they did not know in the subway in the Bronx and threw him on the train tracks. The boy would very likely have been crushed beneath the train that was approaching if bystanders had not climbed into the pit beside the tracks to rescue him. Christopher was convicted of attempted homicide, and served the next seven years in prison—“upstate,” as most families that I knew euphemistically described the penitentiaries where inmates served long sentences.

  The prison where he served the longest portion of his sentence was seven hours from New York. The girls went once a month to visit him with Grandma and Pietro—fourteen hours on the bus, leaving the Bronx at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday nights, returning home at 10:00 p.m. on Sundays. “There was something that I couldn’t figure out about his attitude,” Miranda said. “He didn’t act the way you’d think someone would act in prison. It was like ‘no big deal.’ Like he didn’t want to think that he was up there in that prison for a reason.”

  After I had had no contact with him for so many years, he now began to write me letters that were postmarked in the town of Alden, which, I found by looking at a map, was roughly equidistant between Buffalo and Attica, the latter of which was the site of yet another penitentiary, historically notorious because of a prisoner revolt and resultant massacre of prisoners that had taken place there thirty years before. Both prisons, like most of the large state prisons in New York, were sited in white areas—and highly valued by the local residents and politicians for the jobs that they supplied—while the vast majority of inmates in these institutions were black or Hispanic. Thousands of incarcerated men of color from the streets of the South Bronx and other poor and segregated sections of New York underpinned the economic life of these upstate communities. Christopher, with his clear blue eyes and pale white skin and white-blond hair, inevitably attracted the attention of his fellow inmates.

  His letters began in a polite and friendly tone, telling me for instance that he hoped that I was in “The Very Best of Health” and sending his best wishes to my research aide who, however, did not know him other than from having forwarded a message now and then that his father, for some reason, asked her to convey to him. I wanted to believe that the good-natured feelings in these letters were sincere; but since I hadn’t seen him or spoken even briefly with him since the years in which he used to glare distrustfully at me while he was in the Martinique, the familiarity with which he addressed me now had an unconvincing sound. He spoke of his father with no softening of feelings and said that it was Grandma who had always taken care of him.

  Sooner or later, he would come around to asking me to send him money, or, in two instances—attributing to me more power than I had—asking me to intervene in efforts he was making to obtain a hearing to reduce his sentence. I agreed to do this once, at his father’s pleading, and wrote a letter that alluded to the damage Christopher had undergone from his association with the older adolescent boys who had been his mentors in deception and some minor forms of criminality while he was in the Martinique. I cited Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor, who came away with horror from a visit to the Martinique and likened it to “a scene out of Dickens.”

  But, as hard as I tried, I knew that there was something unpersuasive in my letter. The truth is that I’d written it reluctantly because there was nothing in his correspondence with me, or in the things his father and Miranda had passed on to me after having visited the prison, that even hinted at a feeling of repentance for the crime that he’d committed.

  A year later, he thanked me for that letter but asked me for another. Again, there was no indication that he felt remorseful or responsible for what he’d done. And he remained belittling in reference to his father, although Pietro was the only person who consistently attempted to assist him while he was in prison, sending money orders, for example, so Christopher could purchase clothes for win
ter.

  “This Jail thing is Real Rough,” he said in that second letter. “A lot of cutting’s, a lot of stabbing’s. I want to get out.” He enclosed a photo of himself. His hair was gone. His head was shaven to the skull. He looked very muscular.

  He told me he was known as “White Boy” to the men with whom he was imprisoned, and gave me the impression that he felt he was at greater risk of danger for this reason. But I worried more about the harm that he might do if he were released with no apparent alteration in his values or his temperament. This time, despite the pressure that his letter placed on me, I did not reply to him.

  Meanwhile, on East Tremont Avenue, the efforts that Pietro had been making for so long to provide the children with as much stability as possible were thwarted unexpectedly when they were evicted from their home. The federal housing subsidy, known as Section 8, which he, like other homeless people, had been given when he moved out of the Martinique, had been withheld for no apparent reason other than the bureaucratic workings of a system that was famous for its arbitrary and erratic operation and its seeming lack of rationality. As a result, his landlord was not getting rental payments other than the small subsidiary funds that tenants had to pay and which Pietro scraped together on his own.

  Miranda was seventeen, her sister eighteen, when they were evicted. All at once, the household in which they’d been living in the decade since they left the Martinique, and where they had known at least a fair degree of continuity and safety, was ripped apart by forces that Pietro never really understood and could not control.

  “Daddy and Grandma moved into a single room in somebody’s apartment near where we’d been living,” said Miranda. She and her sister moved in for a while with a friend who lived in the same neighborhood. Ellie, who was married a year later when she was nineteen—she had a baby by that time—would be taken in and treated kindly by her husband’s family before they saved enough to rent their own apartment.