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

by Jonathan Kozol

  One afternoon three years ago, Christopher called Miranda while I was with her and her son, and when she told him I was there, he asked to say hello to me. He sounded elated on the phone and said he’d like to get together with me sometime soon. For Miranda’s sake, I said I’d like that too. I gave him my phone number. He said he had no number of his own but would send a message to me through Miranda.

  I asked what he was doing and he told me things were “going great” but, when I pressed him just a little, he replied that he was “late” and had to rush and offered me no further information.

  The spirited tone within his voice struck me, after I hung up, as just a bit too spirited. Miranda had already told me he was dealing drugs again after having quit his job at Equinox. She had also made it clear that he had long since gone beyond the relatively lowly stage of selling at street level. He was “into something big”—that’s the way Miranda put it. Whatever “something big” implied, it reawakened the concern I’d had more than ten years before, when he wrote to me from prison asking for my help with the parole board in reduction of his sentence. As I’ve said, I complied with his request, but not enthusiastically, because I did not know what he might do upon release. He’d attempted once to take a person’s life. Might he succeed the next time?

  Even now, as he was moving back into the zone of danger, there were people who did not give up on Christopher. A charitable agency that worked with former inmates not only kept on reaching out to him but gave him a part-time job, which Miranda said that he held on to for a while. An outreach worker from the agency, who lived in the neighborhood—“close to Cypress Ave,” she said, “right next to the Bruckner”—gave Christopher a place to stay. “He had his own bedroom there.”

  Miranda said she wasn’t sure the outreach worker recognized that Christopher was selling drugs. But, because the agency in question tended to employ men and women who had been in prison and had been through major troubles of their own and had had direct acquaintance with the life within the streets, it seems likely that the outreach worker must have known that Christopher had by no means turned his back upon that life, and had given him a room in his apartment precisely for that reason—to protect him from himself, if that still was possible.

  “This particular morning,” said Miranda, “I came back from an appointment that I had to go to at the hospital, and my phone was ringing, and it was the guy that he was staying with. I had had a talk with Christopher two nights before. He owed me forty dollars and I knew he had the money but, you know—same old thing—he didn’t want to pay me.

  “I got so mad! I told him I was short of money. I only had about two dollars in my wallet. I told him I was going to kill him if he kept me waiting.

  “Next day? He doesn’t call. Doesn’t come. No Christopher. I have to borrow from my friend to get some milk and sandwich meat and a can of macaroni. …

  “Now it’s Thursday and this guy, his counselor, is calling me, and I’m still so pissed at him. He says, ‘I need to talk with you.’ So I say, ‘What happened? Did he get himself locked up again?’ He says, ‘No, he didn’t get locked up.’ So I’m thinking: What else did he do this time? It’s like—you know, I’ve been through this for so many years with Christopher. Whatever stupid thing he’s done is not going to surprise me.

  “So he says, ‘I’m coming there to talk with you.’

  “He comes in. By this time I’m getting scared. He sits down. I’m standin’ up. He seems like he’s afraid to look at me.

  “So he says, ‘Someone called for him this morning. He was in his bedroom, so I went to wake him up. I told him there was someone on the phone for him. But he didn’t answer me. So I touched him on the arm. …’ ”

  Miranda said, “My brother’s dead.”

  “Yes,” he said. “He was cold. There was no sign of breathing.”

  “Take me there. I want to see my brother.”

  So he brought her to the house. “He was layin’ there. He had on his shorts and T-shirt. That was all he wore at night. Those were his pajamas.” She didn’t tell me if she saw the hypodermic he had used. “But that was it. That was how my brother died. He overdosed on heroin. Possibly,” she said, “it was some bad shit somebody had given him. …” She wanted to believe his death was not intentional.

  Christopher was the white boy. He did this in New York. Eric was the black guy. He did it in Montana. One with a needle. One with a shotgun. The differences are there.

  – IV –

  Miranda speaks of Christopher with torn emotions nowadays.

  “You see?” she said to me one night. “He got the bad part of the deal when we were young. For me and Ellie, even back when we were in the Martinique, we never felt we had to be so hard and cold because we had our Grandma and our Daddy to take care of us. We would never have to go into the streets. Besides, we thought, ‘Our brother does it for us.’ Like he’d bring us presents now and then—little things, nothing real expensive, but he didn’t need to do it, so that did mean something to us. He was our big brother. It was like, ‘He’ll be looking out for us. …’ ”

  She told me that he’d found “his little group of friends” at the hotel—“Shaun and Kwan, who were his age, and another boy, Segundo, and some others who were older. They were the ones who went out to the street with him. Sometimes I’d wake up when he came in. I’d hear my father scolding him.”

  She also recollected that she and her sister became curious about the man who took him off for visits on the weekends. I asked if she was jealous of the presents he was giving him. “No,” she said. “I was too young to know jealous. I was only at that age when I was beginning to ask questions to myself. Who was this guy who took my brother off alone and what was he after?”

  Later, she said, living in the Bronx, “Christopher began to do his disappearing acts.” But she said she didn’t worry too much at the start. “I guess I thought whatever scheme was going on, ‘well, that’s what he has to do.’ I didn’t even want to guess what he was up to.”

  It was only when he was arrested and sent to Rikers Island that Miranda said she understood there was “something going wrong” in Christopher—“I mean that there was something really messed-up in my brother’s head.” But even then, and even after he had been to prison and came back to stay with her and she could see how hardened he’d become—“I knew that he was not no angel, and I won’t pretend”—she never ceased to feel a bond of loyalty and love for him. “No matter what he did, I loved him still, because he was my brother.” This, she said, was “why it was so hard for me to put him out. …”

  Miranda leads a somewhat lonely life today but, living close to St. Ann’s Church, she has friends to boost her up at moments when she’s overwhelmed by memories. Since Christopher died, I’ve seen her much more often, maybe twelve or fifteen times, than in the previous ten years. Her son is doing well in school. She reads him books. She helps him with his math. She goes to school for meetings with his teacher. He has a fish tank and two cages of small animals. She goes to work while he’s at school. She’s working extra hours at the bakery this winter, in the weeks preceding Christmas, so that she can earn enough to buy him a computer.

  “I’m twenty-nine,” she told me when I spent an evening with her in November. “I don’t think I want another boyfriend. The only men I tend to see are boys I went to school with. So, you know, it wouldn’t be romantic. …”

  I’ve seen her eyes fill up with tears when she’s speaking of her father and her brother. But she has a dignified demeanor, a quiet sense of self-respect, and now and then, when she’s in an upbeat mood and tells me something funny that happened, for example, while she was at work, I see a flash of the comedic side that helped her father to get through his times of tribulation. She’s still quite thin, as when I met her in the Martinique when she was a four-year-old. Her hair is long. Her skin is pale. The pallor lends her a
n ethereal look. One of the older women at St. Ann’s tells her she’s a beautiful girl. But she does not believe this.

  CHAPTER 4

  Silvio:

  Invincible

  Vicky and Pietro were highly vulnerable people when they went into the shelters, and both of them came out of that experience with badly shaken confidence. But there were other people who went through the shelter years yet struck me at the time we met as nearly indestructible.

  One of them was Ariella Patterson, a self-possessed and level-headed woman, the mother of two boys, one almost six years old and the other nine, who had become homeless when the house where they were living had gone up in fire after an explosion in the boiler room. She had two sisters, but both of them had families of their own and could not take her into their apartments. Her mother was an alcoholic and could be of no assistance to her.

  Like others in her situation, Ariella was obliged to look to the city’s welfare system and its homeless agency for shelter and to navigate a series of perplexing rules and regulations that had been established as deterrence strategies to discourage people like herself from requesting shelter in a system that was packed to overflowing.

  The keystone of the system of deterrence was an institution—there were two of them in those days, called Emergency Assistance Units—in which a homeless family was allowed to stay initially, sleeping on the floor, or else on chairs or tables, in an undivided space with other homeless families until it was determined if they qualified for placement in one of the hotels.

  The EAUs, as they were known, were horrendous places. Homeless people, including women in their final months of pregnancy, would sometimes have to stay for weeks. Some went into labor while they waited there. Visitors were generally not allowed to enter—an even more restrictive policy than the one that was in place at most of the hotels. I got into both of them with the help of Steven Banks, the Legal Aid attorney, who, in one instance, brought me through the entryway and walked me past the guards himself. Once I was admitted, I was pretty much ignored and was able to remain within those buildings very late at night, watching mothers placing coats or other clothing on the tables or the floor for their kids to sleep on, and talking with those mothers who were too upset or scared to go to sleep at all.

  One of the city’s motives in requiring these periods of temporary insecurity for newly homeless people was, according to the Legal Aid attorney, to “test” these families in order to discern whether they were genuinely desperate in their need for shelter. If they left an EAU before the city came to a decision, this would indicate that they were not “truly homeless” and were not deserving of additional assistance.

  After this experience, people were unlikely to reject an opportunity to move into any place the city chose to put them where they would have a room of their own and beds their kids could sleep on. Thus it was that Ariella now began a long progression from one of the city’s shelters to another. “Some of them,” she said, “were not as bad as others. One of them was a Travelodge where the city put some homeless people, which was reasonably decent, but we only got to stay there for three weeks.” Another one, not so decent, was a place where rooms were rented out to prostitutes, but in which a number of rooms or sometimes an entire floor, were set aside for homeless people and their children.

  Her longest stay was at the Martinique Hotel. To this day, she still recalls a child at the Martinique, “a little girl nine years old,” whose mother hadn’t been there long and wasn’t yet familiar with the dangers that the building held. She sent her down the hallway to throw away the garbage in one of those barrels that were placed at every landing. “She was raped next to the garbage bins,” Ariella told me.

  “Another mother, a lady with two babies who lived a couple doors from me—people called her ‘Cookie,’ very young and very shy and very frightened of the building. … She started sleeping with the guards because they promised her protection.”

  It was, she said, “a cesspool, the worst place in the world that you could be with children.” People today, she added, ask her “whether it was ‘traumatizing’ to be living there. I tell them, No. ‘Traumatizing’ is too nice and too genteel. It was a nightmare. It was hell on earth.’ ”

  She had a vivid memory of details of the building that I remembered too: the row of pay phones in the back part of the lobby, the sheets of plywood that had been set up around the check-in area, maybe for protective reasons, and the elevators, some of which would work, and some would not, where mothers and their children waited in a line for the next one to arrive—which is why it was often easier and quicker to go up the stairs.

  Getting out of the shelter system, finding a real home, going through the protocols for obtaining rent assistance, could, she said, be something of a nightmare too.

  “ ‘You came on the wrong day. Come back again next Tuesday.’ ‘The form you filled out wasn’t right. It’s not the one we needed. You need to get the other form,’ even though this was the only one they’d given you. ‘Go to this address’—it would be some other office maybe forty blocks away. Long lines. Wait your turn. Go back to the first place once you’ve got the form. ‘You didn’t fill it out correctly. You were supposed to get it signed by your welfare worker. …’ ”

  But she did it, more effectively than most, and kept her cool and maintained her composure. And maybe, as a consequence, she was treated more respectfully by the people that she had to deal with than were many of the other homeless families that she knew.

  “I always dressed so carefully! I spoke to them politely. I think they may have thought that I was ‘more refined’ because of my appearance and because I’d had more education”—she had finished high school and had some credits in post-secondary classes—“than most of the people they were dealing with.” Then, too, even while she had been homeless, Ariella had been volunteering with a charitable group that provided lunches to the parents and the children in the building, and this may have worked to her advantage in the eyes of those who handled placements of the homeless population.

  In any event, when they found her an apartment, it was in the same Mott Haven neighborhood as the one where Vicky and her children would be living before long. The building itself was relatively new, dating from the early 1970s, but it was surrounded by a twenty-square-block area of indescribably depressing and decrepit buildings, known as the Diego-Beekman Houses, in which the use and sale of heroin and crack cocaine were almost as widespread and unhidden as had been the case within the Martinique.

  Subsidized by federal funds but owned and run by a private corporation, the Diego-Beekman complex encompassed nearly forty buildings in which Ariella estimated that as many as 4,000 children and their parents were residing. The buildings were routinely cited for serious infractions of the law, “immediate health and safety risks” that were termed by federal examiners “major” and “life-threatening,” gross sanitation dangers such as sewage back-up that had been accumulating on the basement floors, rats coming out of cupboards and falling through ceiling holes from one apartment to the one below.

  One of the most serious problems, Ariella said, was the failure of the company to provide the buildings at all times with secure and solid outside doors with working locks to keep intruders out—and to make appropriate repairs to doors that had been vandalized or locks that had been broken—which, she said, was perhaps the major reason why people who were selling drugs found Diego-Beekman a perfect place to operate.

  “Slip into a building anytime they liked. Sell in the hallway. Sell from a stairwell. Sell from the corridor of one of the upper floors. Sell from the apartment of somebody they terrified, who didn’t dare to throw them out. …”

  The company that owned the Diego-Beekman buildings was an out-of-state corporation that was based in Boston. Its primary investor (I remember my embarrassment when I discovered this) happened to reside in the same suburban area in which my mot
her and father lived for more than thirty years. The man, whose name was Gerald Schuster, was notorious in Massachusetts for a long-established record as a negligent and predatory owner of slum housing in the black community of Boston, as well as for anti-labor practices in a chain of nursing homes he operated. But nothing he had done in Massachusetts was even in the ballpark with the sheer dimensions of his operation in New York.

  I would later spend considerable time in a number of his buildings because so many of the children I was meeting in the Bronx were Mr. Schuster’s tenants. There was one building in that complex that I got to know particularly well because I went there several times to interview the family of a child named Bernardo after he’d been killed by falling from an upper floor through an empty elevator shaft. The elevator door wasn’t working properly and would open unpredictably even when there was no elevator there. The tenants had complained about the danger many times; but the company refused to make repairs. Bernardo’s body landed on the steel roof of the elevator unit, which had stopped four floors beneath his own. He was not found until his blood began to drip on passengers.